An English king, defeated and broke, meets his rebel barons at Runnymede in June 1215 and seals a charter forced on him by their swords. Two of its sixty-three clauses would found the Anglo-American constitutional tradition.
Magna Carta — the Great Charter — is the document that King John of England, defeated by his own barons, sealed at Runnymede beside the Thames on 15 June 1215. Sixty-three clauses, written in dog-Latin, settle a generation of baronial complaints: inheritance fees fixed at predictable levels, wardships and marriages regulated, debts to Jewish creditors governed, fishing weirs on the Thames and Medway addressed, forest rights circumscribed. Almost everything in the document is the granular settlement of feudal grievances by men whose customary rights had been violated and who wanted them put in writing. The charter as a working document lasted about ten weeks before Pope Innocent III annulled it and civil war resumed. John was dead by October 1216.
And then something remarkable happened. The regents of John's nine-year-old heir Henry III reissued a revised version of the charter as a peace measure within weeks of John's death. It was reissued again in 1217, again in 1225. Every subsequent medieval king of England confirmed it at coronation. Through those reissues it shed the most radical clause — the security clause empowering a baronial council to levy war on the king — and acquired the status of a freely granted compact rather than a document sealed under duress. Slowly, through two centuries of confirmation and citation, it transformed from an emergency settlement into one of the foundations of the English legal order. By the seventeenth century it was available to Edward Coke as the founding text of English liberties against royal absolutism — a reading that required considerable creative interpretation of the medieval original, and that the document has been bearing ever since.
Two clauses carry the constitutional weight. Clause 39: 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. Clause 40: to no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice. In 1215, "free man" meant roughly a man holding land freely rather than as a serf — perhaps a fifth of the adult male population. In Coke's reading, it meant any Englishman. In the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution it became due process of law for everyone. The 1215 document and the document it became are not the same document. Both are worth reading, carefully and in order.
Click through the 1 chapters like a tour. Each card picks up where the last left off — a quick way to read Magna Carta in five minutes. Open any book in depth, or jump straight into the reader.
A Feudal Grievance Document, Read in Its Time
The historian's first task with Magna Carta is to recover what most of it actually says. What it says is largely the rules of feudal land tenure as the great barons had learned to expect them — not philosophy, but the granular settlement of a generation of complaints.
Clauses 39 and 40 — Due Process
The two short clauses on which the constitutional afterlife of Magna Carta has chiefly rested are buried in the middle of the document. In 1215 they would not have looked like the most important provisions on the page.
The Security Clause
Clause 61, the longest and most extraordinary clause of the charter, has no parallel in any earlier or later legal document in the medieval tradition. It is a legal warrant for armed rebellion against the very king who is sealing it.
The Coke Revival
Magna Carta as a working political document fades through the late middle ages. The transformation that turned it into the constitutional myth that later centuries inherited is largely the work of one man: Sir Edward Coke.
The American Inheritance
By the time the English colonies in North America were being chartered in the seventeenth century, Coke's Magna Carta was already standard authority. That authority crossed the Atlantic and became the Fifth Amendment.