Magna Carta — The Great Charter and the Origins of Constitutional Law
The royal charter sealed by King John of England at Runnymede in 1215, drafted to make peace between the crown and a group of rebel barons. Its clauses on justice and the limits of royal power were repudiated within weeks, then reissued across the thirteenth century, and were later invoked by parliamentarians, American colonists, and legal reformers as the foundation of the rule of law, even as historians showed that the original document regulated feudal obligations rather than universal liberties.
Events
The Charter Is Sealed at Runnymede
King John sealed the charter at Runnymede, near Windsor, in an agreement drafted under Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, to end a rebellion by discontented barons. Its 63 clauses protected church rights, limited feudal payments to the crown, and promised swift and impartial justice, to be enforced by a council of twenty-five barons. The famous promise that "to no free man will we sell or deny right or justice" applied to free men, who were a minority of England's population.
Location: Runnymede, England
The Pope Annuls the Charter
Both John and the barons appealed to Pope Innocent III, and within weeks the pope annulled the charter, which he described as extorted under duress; John, a papal vassal, then repudiated his commitments. Neither side held to the agreement, the security clause of twenty-five barons collapsed, and the First Barons' War broke out, with the rebels inviting a French prince to take the English throne.
Location: Rome, Papal States
Reissued for Henry III
After John's death in October 1216, the regency government of his nine-year-old son Henry III reissued the charter at Bristol, stripped of its most radical provisions, including the security clause that had armed barons against the king. The reissue was a bid to build support for the royalist cause in the civil war and set the pattern by which later monarchs confirmed the charter.
Location: Bristol, England
The Charter of the Forest and the Name "Magna Carta"
The First Barons' War ended with the Treaty of Lambeth, and the charter was reissued alongside a smaller companion, the Charter of the Forest, which granted rights over royal forest land. To distinguish the two, the larger document acquired the name "Magna Carta", the Great Charter.
Location: Lambeth, England
The Definitive Reissue
Short of funds, Henry III reissued the charter in 1225 in exchange for a grant of new taxes from the realm, and this version became the definitive text of the charter. The exchange established a principle of consent to taxation that later generations of English parliamentarians would press far beyond its original setting.
Location: England
Confirmatio Cartarum
Edward I confirmed the charter in the Confirmatio Cartarum, entering it into England's statute law and requiring it to be read twice a year in county courts. The 1297 confirmation is the version with legal force in England and Wales to this day: three of its clauses remain in force, while the rest of the original has been repealed over the centuries.
Location: England
The Petition of Right
Charles I accepted the Petition of Right, in which Parliament, drawing on Sir Edward Coke's reading of Magna Carta, denied the king's power to imprison without cause, to tax without parliamentary consent, or to quarter soldiers on subjects. Coke's claim that the charter restored ancient English liberties was historically mistaken, but it made Magna Carta the central weapon of parliamentary argument against the Stuart kings.
Location: London, England
Due Process in the American Constitution
The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified with the Bill of Rights, required that no person be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law", language descending from clause 39 of Magna Carta. American colonists had invoked the charter against Parliament in the Stamp Act crisis, and the document has been cited in United States courtrooms ever since.
Location: Virginia, United States
The Charter Reassessed
Victorian and later scholarship, including Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law, established that the 1215 charter had regulated the feudal relationship between the king and his barons rather than proclaiming universal liberties, and that its reputation as an ancient constitution was a much later construction. The reassessment did not diminish the charter's symbolic standing: in 1956 the judge Lord Denning described it as "the greatest constitutional document of all times", and a memorial to the charter was established at Runnymede in 1957.
Location: England
The 800th Anniversary
For the first time, all four surviving 1215 exemplifications of Magna Carta were displayed together at the British Library as part of the 800th anniversary commemorations. Two of the originals are held by the British Library, one by Lincoln Castle and one by Salisbury Cathedral, and the 1215 charter is recognized on UNESCO's Memory of the World register as a document of universal significance.
Location: London, England