Magna Carta

The document that emerged from the negotiations at Runnymede, later named the Magna Carta, or "Great Charter," to distinguish it from a smaller forestry charter, was highly specific, thoroughly medieval, and decidedly unrevolutionary. It did not advocate for the overthrow of the monarchy or the establishment of a republic. Instead, it focused on the practical grievances of free men—most notably the barons themselves—with brief concessions to the rights of merchants, the liberties of the Church, and minor protections for serfs. It restricted the King’s ability to demand feudal payments without baronial consent, promised that justice would not be sold or delayed, and declared that free men would be protected from illegal imprisonment. To ensure the King kept his word, the charter included "clause 61," a radical "security clause" establishing a council of twenty-five barons empowered to seize the King's castles and lands if he violated the agreement. It was a crude, destabilizing mechanism that practically guaranteed further conflict, legalizing collective coercion against the sovereign.

Predictably, the peace of Runnymede lasted barely a few weeks. Neither side had any intention of honoring the treaty. John wrote to his protector, Pope Innocent III, who promptly declared the charter null, void, and entirely unjust, freeing the King from his oath. The First Barons’ War erupted before the ink on the parchment was dry. It was only after John’s death in late 1216 that the charter survived its infant mortality. The regency government of John’s young son, Henry III, reissued a stripped-down version of the document, removing the radical security clause and other inflammatory terms, in a bid to win over moderate rebels. It was reissued again in 1217 as part of the peace treaty of Lambeth, and once more in 1225 in exchange for a vital grant of new taxes. By the time Henry’s son, Edward I, confirmed the charter in 1297, it was formally inscribed into England’s statute law. It became a regular feature of medieval political life, routinely confirmed by successive monarchs as a symbolic gesture of good faith.

For centuries, the charter lay relatively dormant, a relic of medieval estate management that grew increasingly obsolete as a developing Parliament passed modern laws. But at the end of the sixteenth century, the document underwent a spectacular resurrection. Faced with the absolutist ambitions of the Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, legal antiquarians and politicians led by the jurist Sir Edward Coke reinvented the Magna Carta. They constructed a sweeping historical myth: that there existed an "ancient constitution" dating back to the Anglo-Saxons which protected individual English freedoms; that the Norman Conquest of 1066 had unlawfully suppressed these rights; and that the Magna Carta was a heroic, popular restoration of this lost golden age. Though this narrative was historically groundless—the barons of 1215 had been defending their own feudal privileges, not the universal rights of the common Englishman—it became a potent weapon against the divine right of kings. Coke and his allies used the charter to justify the primacy of Parliament and to anchor the concept of habeas corpus.

This romanticized, mythic version of the Magna Carta crossed the Atlantic with the early English colonists. It deeply influenced the intellectual framework of the American Revolution and helped shape the United States Constitution, transforming a medieval treaty between a king and his barons into a universal symbol of constitutional liberty. By the nineteenth century, when Victorian historians finally began to dissect the original 1215 text, they revealed that almost none of its sixty-three clauses had any direct relevance to modern democracy. Yet, even as the British Parliament systematically repealed nearly all of its archaic clauses from the statute books in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the document's symbolic power only grew.

Today, only three clauses of the 1297 reissue remain law in England and Wales, yet the Magna Carta is widely revered as the foundational cornerstone of Western civil liberties. The physical remnants of that June week in 1215—four surviving original exemplifications, written in cramped Latin script on sheepskin parchment, now preserved at the British Library, Salisbury Cathedral, and Lincoln Castle—are treated as sacred artifacts of human progress. The charter's true legacy lies not in the specific feudal anxieties of the men who met at Runnymede, but in the enduring principle they inadvertently set in motion: the radical, simple idea that the ruler is subject to the law, and that power, no matter how absolute it claims to be, has limits.