Magna Carta

By the spring of 1215, King John of England has lost almost everything that mattered to him. He has lost Normandy and most of the Angevin continental empire to Philip Augustus of France, in a series of military disasters culminating at the battle of Bouvines in July 1214. He has lost the political contest with Pope Innocent III over the appointment of Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, ended only by his humiliating submission of England as a papal fief in 1213. He has lost the loyalty of large sections of the English baronage, who blame him for the lost lands, the ruinous taxation imposed to fund the failed wars, the arbitrary use of feudal incidents — wardships, marriages, reliefs — to crush enemies and enrich the crown, the personal cruelties (the death of Matilda de Briouze and her son in his prison), the sustained pattern of contempt for the customary obligations a king owed his great men. In May 1215 the rebel barons formally renounce their homage. They take London on 17 May. Negotiations open. On 15 June, in the meadow of Runnymede between Windsor and Staines, the king sets his seal to the document the barons have prepared.

The text, sixty-three clauses in dog-Latin, is mostly a feudal-grievance document. It opens with the freedom of the English Church and the famous concession that the church shall be free, beginning with the freedom of elections. It runs through clauses on the relief due from a baron's heir on entering his inheritance (clause 2), on wardships and marriages (clauses 3-8), on debts to the king and to Jewish creditors (clauses 10-11), on scutage and aid (clause 12, the no-taxation-without-the-common-counsel-of-the-realm clause), on standard measures of wine and corn (clause 35), on fishing weirs on the Thames and Medway (clause 33), on the regulation of the royal forests (clauses 47-48), on knight service, on jury composition, on the rights of widows. Clauses 39 and 40, almost lost in the middle of the document, are the two that the centuries would single out. No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice. The charter ends with clause 61, the security clause, by which a council of twenty-five barons is empowered to enforce its terms by levying war on the king if he should violate them.

The 1215 charter as a working document lasted about ten weeks. John appealed to Pope Innocent III, who annulled it on 24 August as shameful and demeaning, and renewed civil war broke out almost immediately. John died of dysentery in October 1216, and the regents of the boy king Henry III reissued a revised version of the charter as a peace measure within weeks. Reissued again in 1217, in 1225 (this time as a freely granted charter rather than one extracted under duress), and confirmed by every subsequent medieval king as a condition of his coronation, the charter slowly transformed from an emergency settlement of a baronial revolt into one of the foundation documents of the English legal order. The constitutional reading — that Magna Carta established the rule of law, due process, and limits on arbitrary monarchy — was largely the work of Sir Edward Coke and the parliamentary lawyers of the early seventeenth century, who deployed it against the Stuart kings as the great precedent for their own resistance. From Coke it passed into the English common-law tradition, the American colonial charters, the Petition of Right of 1628, the Bill of Rights of 1689, the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The 1215 document and the document it became are not the same document. Both deserve reading.