Magna Carta

Summary

Magna Carta, the "Great Charter," is the grant of liberties that King John of England sealed in the meadow of Runnymede, on the Thames between Windsor and Staines, on 15 June 1215. It was written in Latin and issued as a royal charter, but it was really a peace treaty: a large group of barons, angered by John's heavy taxation, his arbitrary fines and seizures, and his costly failed wars in France, had renounced their allegiance and taken London in May 1215. Archbishop Stephen Langton helped mediate the settlement. The text runs as one continuous document; the familiar division into 63 clauses was added by later editors. The charter opens with John's greeting to his officials and a list of the bishops and lords who advised him. Clause 1 grants that the English church shall be free, including freedom of church elections. Many of the following clauses regulate the feudal dues a lord could demand: the relief an heir paid to inherit (2-3), the conduct of guardians of underage heirs (4-6), and the rights of widows, who are not to be forced to remarry (7-8). Clause 12 forbids scutage or aid without the common counsel of the kingdom, except in three customary cases, and clause 14 explains how that counsel is to be summoned. Other clauses protect the liberties of London and other towns (13), require fines to fit the offence (20-22), limit the king's purveyors and sheriffs (23-33), set one standard of weights and measures (35), and allow merchants to travel safely (41). The best-remembered clauses are 39 and 40. No freeman is to be imprisoned, deprived of his lands, exiled or destroyed except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land, and the king promises not to sell, deny or delay justice. Clause 45 requires royal officers who know the law. Clauses 47-53 deal with the royal forests and with wrongs done by John and his brother Richard. Clause 61, the security clause, sets up a council of twenty-five barons empowered to seize the king's castles and lands if he breaks the charter; clauses 62-63 pardon the quarrel and bind both sides by oath. The peace failed within weeks. At John's request Pope Innocent III declared the charter void on 24 August 1215, and the First Barons' War followed. After John died in October 1216, the regents of the boy-king Henry III reissued a revised charter in 1216 and 1217, and Henry issued the definitive text in 1225; Edward I confirmed it in 1297. Seventeenth-century lawyers such as Sir Edward Coke appealed to it against the Stuart kings, and American revolutionaries and constitution-makers treated it as an ancestor of due process and trial by jury. The library text is the English translation by Albert Beebe White and Wallace Notestein, published in Source Problems in English History (1915).

Top Lessons

• The king under the law

  Clauses 39 and 40 bind the king himself: he may not move against a freeman except by lawful judgment or the law of the land, and he may not sell or delay justice. The charter's lasting fame rests on this idea that even the highest ruler acts within settled law.

• Consent to taxation

  Clause 12 limits the king's power to raise scutage and aids to three customary cases unless the common counsel of the kingdom agrees, and clause 14 says who must be summoned. The barons were protecting their own purses, but later generations read these clauses as an early form of the principle that taxes need consent.

• A charter as a peace treaty

  Many clauses fix particular grievances, from fishweirs on the Thames to named foreign officers, and clause 61 gives twenty-five barons power to enforce the terms. Reading these clauses shows that the charter was a practical settlement made in a crisis, not an abstract declaration of rights.

• Liberty in layers

  The charter grants liberties to the church, to freemen, to London and the towns, to merchants and to widows, and clause 60 asks lords to treat their own men by the same customs. Medieval liberty was a set of particular rights belonging to particular people and bodies.

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Medical Lens

The charter is a legal and political settlement with no medical content. Its guarantees concern property, courts, taxation and the church.