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Magna Carta Causes and Effects

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Magna Carta: History & Legacy

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Introduction

            National Archives 1297 Magna Carta

Getting Started

In this 800th Anniversary year there are numerous websites devoted to celebrating Magna Carta that include useful introductory essays, translations, timelines, and other resources. One of the best is that of the British Library ; another excellent anniversary themed site is that of Magna Carta 800th . NARA's site  about their permanent exhibit of a 1297 copy is also quite good.

While there are now many available books to choose from, the works of J.C. Holt remain an invaluable starting point.  His 1965 750th anniversary essay The Making of Magna Carta provides an excellent short introduction to the historical context, people and events of 1215.  The 1972 edited collection of excerpts from significant contemporaneous and later works discussing Magna Carta together with essays by leading 20th century historians titled Magna Carta and the Idea of Liberty provides a concise introduction to the issues and questions raised by the long history of Magna Carta's influence.  Magna Carta and Medieval Government from 1985 became the late 20th century's leading treatise on the origins of Magna Carta; it was significantly revised and expanded in a 1992 2nd ed. titled simply Magna Carta  that also includes 14 appendices of supplementary essays, transcriptions of original texts of Magna Carta and related documents, and a collated translation of the original text from the four surviving 1215 copies.

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Magna Carta: Muse and Mentor Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitution

Proposed Articles of Amendment to the Federal Constitution [Bill of Rights], September 14, 1789. [James Madison’s personal copy of printed broadside]. New York: Thomas Greenleaf, 1789. Rare Book and Special Collections Division , Library of Congress (035)

Magna Carta exercised a strong influence both on the United States Constitution and on the constitutions of the various states. However, its influence was shaped by what eighteenth-century Americans believed Magna Carta to signify. Magna Carta was widely held to be the people’s reassertion of rights against an oppressive ruler, a legacy that captured American distrust of concentrated political power. In part because of this tradition, most of the state constitutions included declarations of rights intended to guarantee individual citizens a list of protections and immunities from the state government. The United States also adopted the Bill of Rights, in part, due to this political conviction.

Both the state declarations of rights and the United States Bill of Rights incorporated several guarantees that were understood at the time of their ratification to descend from rights protected by Magna Carta. Among these are freedom from unlawful searches and seizures, a right to a speedy trial, a right to a jury trial in both a criminal and a civil case, and protection from loss of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

Many broader American constitutional principles have their roots in an eighteenth-century understanding of Magna Carta, such as the theory of representative government, the idea of a supreme law, and judicial review.

Journal of the Continental Congress

When the first Continental Congress met in September and October 1774, it drafted a Declaration of Rights and Grievances claiming for the colonists the liberties guaranteed to them under “the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts.” The colonists sought the preservation of their self-government, freedom from taxation without representation, the right to a trial by a jury of one’s countrymen, and their enjoyment of “life, liberty and property” free from arbitrary interference from the crown. On this title page is a symbol of unity adopted by the congress: twelve arms reaching out to grasp a column that is topped by a liberty cap. The base of the column reads “Magna Carta.”

Journal of the Proceedings of the Congress, Held at Philadelphia, September 5, 1774 . Philadelphia: William and Thomas Bradford, 1774. Rare Book and Special Collections Division , Library of Congress (031)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/magna-carta-muse-and-mentor/magna-carta-and-the-us-constitution.html#obj031

State Constitutions

In May 1776, the Continental Congress recommended that the assembly of each colony create a new state constitution “sufficient to the exigencies of affairs.” Every constitution created by these newly independent states included provisions that protected individual rights from actions by the state. Most of them articulated explicit declarations of these rights, including freedom of religion, freedom of the press, prohibition of excessive bail or fines, right to a jury trial, and protection from loss of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Frequently the last of these rights is expressed in the language of Magna Carta’s Chapter 29, for example, line twelve in North Carolina’s constitution.

“North-Carolina” in The Constitutions of the Several Independent States of America, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation between the Said States. . . . London: J. Stockdale, 1782. Law Library , Library of Congress (032)

The Constitutions of the Several Independent States of America, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation between the Said States. . . . London: J. Stockdale, 1782. Law Library , Library of Congress (032)

Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/magna-carta-muse-and-mentor/magna-carta-and-the-us-constitution.html#obj032

Pennsylvania’s Constitution

Drafted by Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), George Bryan (1731–1791), James Cannon (1740–1782) and others during the summer of 1776, Pennsylvania’s constitution borrowed language from the Stamp Act Congress, the First Continental Congress, and the Declaration of Independence. Its framers sought to reverse the disproportionate power that a small minority of Pennsylvania landowners held by creating what has often been described as the most democratic constitution in the United States. The Pennsylvania constitution established a unicameral legislature without a senate, an executive assembly without a governor, and voting rights for all free men who paid taxes.

Independent Chronicle and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), November 7, 1776 [with reprint of Pennsylvania Constitution from the Pennsylvania Journal , October 9, 1776]. Serial and Government Publications Division , Library of Congress (033)

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Jefferson’s Copy of the Federalist Papers

The Federalist Papers were a series of eighty-five articles that James Madison (1751–1836), John Jay (1745–1829), and Alexander Hamilton published anonymously in order to build support in New York for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Despite the widespread adoption of declarations of rights for state constitutions, the members of the Constitutional Convention generally opposed adding a bill of rights to the federal Constitution. In Federalist No. 84, Hamilton argued against the inclusion of a bill of rights, stating: “Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing; and as they retain everything they have no need of particular reservations.”

[Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804)]. No. 84 in The Federalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favour of the New Constitution, As Agreed upon by the Federal Convention, September 17, 1787 , Vol. 2. New York: J. and A. M’Lean, 1788. Thomas Jefferson’s Library, Rare Book and Special Collections Division , Library of Congress (034)

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Madison's Copy of the Proposed “Bill of Rights”

The amendments to the Constitution that Congress proposed in 1791 were strongly influenced by state declarations of rights, particularly the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, which incorporated a number of the protections of the 1689 English Bill of Rights and Magna Carta. The fifth through tenth articles of the proposed amendments, which correspond to the fourth through eighth amendments to the U.S. Constitution as ratified, embody this tradition most directly, guaranteeing speedy justice, a jury trial, proportionate punishment, and due process of law.

Proposed Articles of Amendment to the Federal Constitution [Bill of Rights]. [James Madison’s personal copy of printed broadside]. New York: Thomas Greenleaf, September 14, 1789. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/magna-carta-muse-and-mentor/images/mc0035p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . Rare Book and Special Collections Division , Library of Congress (035)

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George Washington’s Draft of the United States Constitution

William Samuel Johnson chaired the Committee of Style, which included James Madison, Rufus King (1755–1827), Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris (1752–1816), a delegate from Pennsylvania, who is credited with providing the preamble phrase “We the people of the United States”—a simple phrase that anchored the new national government in the consent of the people rather than a confederation of states. Shown here is Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which details the powers that are delegated to the executive branch of the government.

Draft United States Constitution: Report of the Committee of Style, September 8–12, 1787. Printed document with annotations by George Washington and Convention Secretary William Jackson. George Washington Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (068, //www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/Constitution/Ratification/Assets/us0062_2_enlarge_725.Jpeg ">068.00.01 )

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How Did Magna Carta Influence the U.S. Constitution?

By: Dave Roos

Updated: May 10, 2023 | Original: September 30, 2019

In 1215, a band of rebellious medieval barons forced King John of England to agree to a laundry list of concessions later called the Great Charter, or in Latin, Magna Carta . Centuries later, America’s Founding Fathers took great inspiration from this medieval pact as they forged the nation’s founding documents—including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights .

For 18th-century political thinkers like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson , Magna Carta was a potent symbol of liberty and the natural rights of man against an oppressive or unjust government. The Founding Fathers’ reverence for Magna Carta had less to do with the actual text of the document , which is mired in medieval law and outdated customs, than what it represented—an ancient pact safeguarding individual liberty.

“For early Americans, Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence were verbal representations of what liberty was and what government should be—protecting people rather than oppressing them,” says John Kaminski, director of the Center for the Study of the American Constitution at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Much in the same way that for the past 100 years the Statue of Liberty has been a visual representation of freedom, liberty, prosperity and welcoming.”

When the First Continental Congress met in 1774 to draft a Declaration of Rights and Grievances against King George III, they asserted that the rights of the English colonists to life, liberty and property were guaranteed by “the principles of the English constitution,” a.k.a. Magna Carta. On the title page of the 1774 Journal of The Proceedings of The Continental Congress is an image of 12 arms grasping a column on whose base is written “Magna Carta.”

Rights of Life, Liberty and Property

Of the 60-plus clauses contained in Magna Carta, only a handful are relevant to the 18th-century American experience. Those include passages that guarantee the right to a trial by a jury, protection against excessive fines and punishments, safeguarding of individual liberty and property, and, perhaps most importantly, the forbidding of taxation without representation.

The two most-cited clauses of Magna Carta for defenders of liberty and the rule of law are 39 and 40:

39. No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

40. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.

The Founding Fathers credited the 39th clause as the origin of the idea that no government can unjustly deprive any individual of “life, liberty or property” and that no legal action can be taken against any person without the “lawful judgement of his equals,” what would later become the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers.

The last phrase of clause 39, “by the law of the land,” set the standard for what is now known as due process of law.

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“Magna Carta’s dominance was so great that its phraseology, ‘by the law of the land,’ was used in all American documents prior to the Constitution,” says Kaminski. “Not until James Madison introduced ‘due process’ at the national level in 1789 was it included in the 5th Amendment and later in the 14th Amendment.”

Writing in The Federalist Papers , James Madison explicitly referenced the 40th clause of Magna Carta when he wrote, “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.”

No Taxation Without Representation

Other rights and protections enshrined by Magna Carta are less explicit. The protection against taxation without representation, it’s argued, comes from clause 12 of Magna Carta, which reads:

12. No scutage nor aid shall be imposed on our kingdom, unless by common counsel of our kingdom, except for ransoming our person, for making our eldest son a knight, and for once marrying our eldest daughter; and for these there shall not be levied more than a reasonable aid. In like manner it shall be done concerning aids from the city of London.

At the time of Magna Carta’s writing, barons were chafing against specific fees levied by the crown and feudal lords. The text doesn’t explicitly call out taxation or elected representatives, because those concepts didn’t exist in the 13th century. But the Founding Fathers drew symbolic spirit from Magna Carta through 18th-century eyes.

That spirit is clearly present in the Declaration of Independence , which used Magna Carta as a model for free men petitioning a despotic government for their God-given rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The Founding Fathers were reacting to decades of abuses by the British Parliament, which colonists believed had betrayed the “higher law” of Magna Carta.

“The Americans saw themselves as very conservative rebels,” Kaminski says. “They were trying to preserve their constitutional rights, not to overthrow a government.”

The influence of Magna Carta was surely felt at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787, when the principles of due process and individual liberty fought for in the Revolutionary War were enshrined into law.

Magna Carta's Legacy in the Bill of Rights

There are some clear echoes of Magna Carta in the body of the Constitution itself. Article III, Section 2 guarantees a jury trial in all criminal trials (except impeachment). And Article 1, Section 9 forbids the suspension of habeas corpus , which essentially means that no one can be held or imprisoned without legal cause.

But Magna Carta’s legacy is reflected most clearly in the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution ratified by the states in 1791. In particular, amendments five through seven set ground rules for a speedy and fair jury trial, and the Eighth Amendment prohibits excessive bail and fines. That last prohibition can be traced directly back to the 20th clause of Magna Carta:

20. For a trivial offence, a free man shall be fined only in proportion to the degree of his offence, and for a serious offence correspondingly, but not so heavily as to deprive him of his livelihood.

But perhaps the greatest influence of Magna Carta on the Founding Fathers was their collective understanding that in drafting the U.S. Constitution they were attempting to create a Magna Carta for a new era.

“They knew exactly what they were doing,” says Kaminski. “They didn’t know if it would succeed or if it would last for centuries, but they were doing the best they could.” 

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The Magna Carta and Its Legacy

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This year marks the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, the medieval English historic legal document that is seen as the origin of many modern-day legal rights and constitutional principles.

By June 1215, England was in civil war as disaffected barons took up arms against King John (reigned 1199-1216). John’s reign had been marked by a seven-year conflict with  the papacy  that led to an interdict (ecclesiastical censure) in England and to his own excommunication, the troubling loss of his French possessions, and deep distrust between him and his barons, who thought he was abusing royal power.

When the rebel barons seized London, King John was forced to capitulate to their demands. Meeting on a field at Runnymede, the king and barons agreed on June 15 to a set of provisions that would become known as the Magna Carta , or Great Charter, of England.

Essentially a peace treaty, the Magna Carta protected the traditional feudal rights of the barons and attempted to curb the abuses of John’s government. In that sense, it was a failure: it was quickly annulled by the pope, and England plunged further into civil war. Yet today it is considered one of the most important documents in Anglo-American legal history as the foundation of concepts such as due process and limited sovereignty.

Modern scholars debate whether the Magna Carta is a conservative document that sought to restore traditional feudal rights or a revolutionary social contract that asserted new individual rights and limited the powers of the sovereign. Although many of its 63 clauses condemn specific aspects of John’s rule, others are more clearly reactions to twelfth-century advances in royal administration that threatened baronial power.

What is clear is that some clauses had a lasting effect on the development of English law and government. For example, clauses 12 and 14 impose limitations on the king’s ability to demand feudal aids without consent, which contributed to the development of parliamentary control over taxation.

Perhaps the most important clause, however, is clause 39 : “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.”

This clause establishes the concept of due process of law. By stating that the government could not act against the people outside of the legal system, it also asserts that the sovereign is not above the law, an important idea in the gradual development of constitutional monarchy and limited sovereignty.

Although it was regularly confirmed by English kings during the medieval period and was entered into statutory law in 1297, over time Magna Carta became more important for what it symbolized than for what it contained.

After being mostly ignored for several centuries,  it was resurrected by seventeenth-century jurists , who read in it a guarantee of individual freedoms and limited monarchy in the struggles against the absolutist kings of the  royal house of Stuart . During this period, it came to represent the idea that a government could not arbitrarily alienate the rights of its citizens and to guarantee the rights of trial by jury, habeas corpus, and no taxation without representation.

It is this understanding of the Magna Carta that was exported to the American colonies , where it was seen as the embodiment of colonists’ rights as English citizens. It served as a precedent for the Declaration of Independence and the source of many of the rights and principles enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Later, it would also influence the constitutions of many Commonwealth nations, as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the European Convention on Human Rights (1950).

Today, we tend to take the rights symbolized by the Magna Carta for granted, yet many inform ongoing debates about our civil liberties. Eight hundred years later, we are still debating and defining the rights that originated on the field at Runnymede.

Importance of the Magna Carta to the US Constitution

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Key Document in U.S. Political Foundations

The american bill of rights, journal of the continental congress, the federalist papers, the bill of rights as proposed, history of the magna carta, key provisions of the magna carta, location of documents today.

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The Magna Carta, meaning “Great Charter,” is one of the most influential political documents ever written: it is seen by many modern political scientists as the fundamental document for many of the governing laws of the west, including the United States. Originally issued in 1215 by King John of England as a way of dealing with his own political crisis, the Magna Carta was the first governmental decree establishing the principle that all people—including the king—were equally subject to the law. 

In particular, the Magna Carta had a significant impact on the American Declaration of Independence , the U.S. Constitution , and the constitutions of various U.S. states. Its influence is also reflected in the beliefs held by eighteenth-century Americans that the Magna Carta affirmed their rights against oppressive rulers.

In keeping with colonial Americans ' general distrust of sovereign authority, most early state constitutions included declarations of rights retained by individual citizens and lists of protections of those citizens from the powers of the state government. Due in part to this conviction to individual liberty first embodied in the Magna Carta, the newly-formed United States also adopted the Bill of Rights .

Several of the natural rights and legal protections enumerated in both the state declarations of rights and the United States Bill of Rights descend from rights protected by Magna Carta. A few of these include:

• Freedom from unlawful searches and seizures
• The right to a speedy trial
• A right to a jury trial in both criminal and civil cases
• Protection from loss of life, liberty, or property without due process of law

The exact phrase from the 1215 Magna Carta referring to “due process of law” is in Latin, but there are various translations. The British Library translation reads:

“No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.”

In addition, many broader constitutional principles and doctrines have their roots in America’s eighteenth-century interpretation of the Magna Carta, such as the theory of representative government, the idea of a supreme law, a government based on a clear separation of powers, and the doctrine of judicial review of legislative and executive acts.

Evidence of the influence of the Magna Carta on the American system of government can be found in several key documents, including the Journal of the Continental Congress , which is the official record kept of the Congress's deliberations between May 10, 1775, and March 2, 1789. In September and October 1774, the delegates to the first Continental Congress drafted a Declaration of Rights and Grievances , in which the colonists demanded the same liberties guaranteed to them under “the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts.”

They demanded self-government, freedom from taxation without representation, the right to a trial by a jury of their own countrymen, and their enjoyment of “life, liberty, and property” free from interference from the English crown.

Written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay , and published anonymously between October 1787 and May 1788, the Federalist Papers were a series of eighty-five articles intended to build support for the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Despite the widespread adoption of declarations of individual rights in state constitutions, several members of the Constitutional Convention generally opposed adding a bill of rights to the federal Constitution.

In Federalist No. 84 , published during the summer of 1788, Hamilton argued against the inclusion of a bill of rights, stating: “Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing; and as they retain everything they have no need of particular reservations.” In the end, however, the Anti-Federalists prevailed and the Bill of Rights—based largely on the Magna Carta—was appended to the Constitution in order to secure its final ratification by the states.

As originally proposed to Congress in 1791, there were twelve amendments to the constitution. These were strongly influenced by the state of Virginia’s Declaration of Rights of 1776, which in turn incorporated a number of the protections of the Magna Carta.

As a ratified document, the Bill of Rights included five articles directly reflecting these protections:

• Protection from unreasonable searches and seizures (4th), 
• Protection of rights to life, liberty, and property (5th), 
• Rights of accused persons in criminal cases (6th), 
• Rights in civil cases (7th), and 
• Other rights kept by the people (8th). 

King John I (also known as John Lackland, 1166–1216) ruled England, Ireland and sometimes Wales and Scotland between 1177–1216. His predecessor and brother Richard I had spent much of the kingdom's wealth on the crusades: and in 1200, John himself had lost lands in Normandy, ending the Andevin Empire. In 1209, after an argument with Pope Innocent III over who should be the archbishop of Canterbury, John was excommunicated from the church.

John needed to pay money to get back in Pope's good graces, and he wanted to wage war and get back his lands in Normandy, so as sovereigns were wont to do, he increased already-heavy taxes on his subjects. The English barons fought back, forcing a meeting with the king at Runnymede near Windsor on June 15, 1215. At this meeting, King John was coerced into signing the Great Charter which protected some of their basic rights against royal actions.

After some modifications, the charter known as the magna carta libertatum ("great charter of liberties") became part of the law of the land of England in 1297 under the reign of Edward I.  

Following are some of the key items that were included in the 1215 version of the Magna Carta:

• Habeas corpus , known as the right to due process, said that free men could only be imprisoned and punished after lawful judgment by a jury of their peers.
• Justice could not be sold, denied, or delayed.
• Civil lawsuits did not have to be held in the king's court.
• The Common Council had to approve the amount of money that vassals had to pay instead of having to serve in the military (called scutage) along with any aid that could be requested from them with only three exceptions, but in all cases, the aid had to be reasonable. This basically meant that John could no longer tax without the agreement of his Council.
• If the King wanted to call the Common Council, he had to give the barons, church officials, landowners, sheriffs, and bailiffs 40 days notice that included a stated purpose for why it was being called.
• For commoners, all fines had to be reasonable so that their livelihood could not be taken away. Further, any offense that a commoner was said to have committed had to be sworn to by "good men from the neighborhood."
• Bailiffs and constables could not appropriate people's possessions.
• London and other cities were given the right to collect customs.
• The king could not have a mercenary army. In feudalism, the barons were the army. If the king had his own army, he would have the power to do what he wanted against the barons.
• Inheritances were guaranteed to individuals with the amount of what today we would call inheritance tax being set in advance.
• As stated previously, the king himself had to follow the law of the land.

Up until the Magna Carta’s creation, British monarchs enjoyed supreme rule. With the Magna Carta, the king, for the first time, was not allowed to be above the law. Instead, he had to respect the rule of law and not abuse his position of power.

There are four known copies of the Magna Carta in existence today. In 2009, all four copies were granted UN World Heritage status. Of these, two are located at the British Library, one is at Lincoln Cathedral, and the last is at Salisbury Cathedral.

Official copies of the Magna Carta were reissued in later years. Four were issued in 1297 which King Edward I of England affixed with a wax seal. One of these is currently located in the United States. Conservation efforts were recently completed to help preserve this key document. It can be seen at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., along with the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. 

Updated by Robert Longley

Resources and Further Reading

• " Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, 1774 to 1789 ." Digital Collections. Library of Congress.
• The Federalist Papers . Congress.gov. 
• Howard, A. E. Dick. "Magna Carta: Text and Commentary," 2nd ed. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.
• Linebaugh, Peter. "The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All." Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009
• " Magna Carta 1215: Transcript in English and Latin ." The British Library. 
• Hamilton, Alexander. " Certain General and Miscellaneous Objections to the Constitution Considered and Answered ." Federalist Papers 84. New York: McLean's, July 16–August 9, 1788
• Vincent, Nicholas. " The clauses of Magna Carta ." The British Library , March 13, 2015. 
• " The Virginia Declaration of Rights ." National Archives. 
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The Magna Carta Project

J.c. holt undergraduate essay prize.

In memory of Professor Sir James Holt, who died 9 April 2014 ( obituary at The Times ), the Magna Carta Project held a competition to find the best undergraduate essay on Magna Carta. The J.C. Holt Undergraduate Essay Prize was awarded jointly to Daniel Armstrong (Cambridge) and Ian McDonald (Birkbeck). The prize of £250 was awarded by Melvyn Bragg at the reception for the Magna Carta Conference, 17 June 2015. Ian McDonald, who was unable to attend the reception due to illness, received his prize on 3 June.

The third edition of Holt’s Magna Carta , edited by Professors George Garnett and John Hudson, was launched at the reception by Cambridge University Press.

Daniel Armstrong, joint winner of the J.C. Holt Undergrduate Essay Prize

Ian McDonald, joint winner of the J.C. Holt Undergraduate Essay Prize

Professor Daniel Power opened the prizegiving with a eulogy for Sir James Holt

Professor George Garnett (left) and Professor John Hudson (right), editors of the third edition of Holt's Magna Carta, launched at the reception

Daniel Armstrong (right) received his prize from Melvyn Bragg (centre) at the reception. Also pictured Sophie Ambler of the Magna Carta Project

Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Magna Carta — Comparing and Contrasting Magna Carta Vs Bill of Rights

Comparing and Contrasting Magna Carta Vs Bill of Rights

• Categories: Bill Of Rights Magna Carta

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Published: Mar 22, 2021

Words: 3719 | Pages: 2 | 19 min read

The essay explores the historical significance and similarities between the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights. It discusses how both documents were responses to public discontent and aimed to limit the power of the monarchy, ultimately granting more rights and power to the people. While the Magna Carta was created in 1215 during King John's reign to address barons' grievances, the English Bill of Rights was established in 1689 following the Glorious Revolution to curb the power of King James II.

Both documents share common principles, such as the idea that all individuals have certain rights that should be protected by law. They also emphasize the importance of limiting the monarch's powers and ensuring that the government respects the rights of the people. The Magna Carta laid the foundation for these concepts, while the English Bill of Rights further expanded on them, demanding freedom of speech, religion, and other key freedoms.

The essay also mentions the American Declaration of Independence, which was influenced by these earlier documents. It highlights the role of various individuals in shaping these historical documents and their lasting impact on the formation of modern democratic societies. Overall, the essay underscores the enduring importance of these documents in shaping the principles of freedom, democracy, and individual rights in the United States and beyond.

Prompt Examples for Bill of Rights Essay

• Historical Context: Examine the historical circumstances and political contexts in which the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights were created and their impact on their respective societies.
• Key Principles: Compare and contrast the key principles and rights outlined in the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, and discuss their significance in the development of constitutional law.
• Legal Protections: Analyze how the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights provide legal protections to individuals and limit the powers of the government, and discuss any similarities or differences in their approaches.
• Influence on Modern Legal Systems: Discuss the lasting influence of both documents on modern legal systems and the protection of civil liberties in contemporary society.
• Evolution of Constitutional Rights: Examine how the ideas and principles established in the Magna Carta have evolved and been incorporated into the Bill of Rights and subsequent legal documents.

Bill of Rights Essay Example

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The Rule of History

The reign of King John was in all ways unlikely and, in most, dreadful. He was born in 1166 or 1167, the youngest of Henry II’s five sons, his ascension to the throne being, by the fingers on one hand, so implausible that he was not named after a king and, as a matter of history, suffers both the indignity of the possibility that he may have been named after his sister Joan and the certain fate of having proved so unredeemable a ruler that no king of England has ever taken his name. He was spiteful and he was weak, although, frankly, so were the medieval historians who chronicled his reign, which can make it hard to know quite how horrible it really was. In any case, the worst king of England is best remembered for an act of capitulation: in 1215, he pledged to his barons that he would obey “the law of the land” when he affixed his seal to a charter that came to be called Magna Carta. He then promptly asked the Pope to nullify the agreement; the Pope obliged. The King died not long afterward, of dysentery. “Hell itself is made fouler by the presence of John,” it was said. This year, Magna Carta is eight hundred years old, and King John is seven hundred and ninety-nine years dead. Few men have been less mourned, few legal documents more adored.

Magna Carta has been taken as foundational to the rule of law, chiefly because in it King John promised that he would stop throwing people into dungeons whenever he wished, a provision that lies behind what is now known as due process of law and is understood not as a promise made by a king but as a right possessed by the people. Due process is a bulwark against injustice, but it wasn’t put in place in 1215; it is a wall built stone by stone, defended, and attacked, year after year. Much of the rest of Magna Carta, weathered by time and for centuries forgotten, has long since crumbled, an abandoned castle, a romantic ruin.

Magna Carta is written in Latin. The King and the barons spoke French. “ Par les denz Dieu! ” the King liked to swear, invoking the teeth of God. The peasants, who were illiterate, spoke English. Most of the charter concerns feudal financial arrangements (socage, burgage, and scutage), obsolete measures and descriptions of land and of husbandry (wapentakes and wainages), and obscure instruments for the seizure and inheritance of estates (disseisin and mort d’ancestor). “Men who live outside the forest are not henceforth to come before our justices of the forest through the common summonses, unless they are in a plea,” one article begins.

Magna Carta’s importance has often been overstated, and its meaning distorted. “The significance of King John’s promise has been anything but constant,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens aptly wrote, in 1992. It also has a very different legacy in the United States than it does in the United Kingdom, where only four of its original sixty-some provisions are still on the books. In 2012, three New Hampshire Republicans introduced into the state legislature a bill that required that “all members of the general court proposing bills and resolutions addressing individual rights or liberties shall include a direct quote from the Magna Carta which sets forth the article from which the individual right or liberty is derived.” For American originalists, in particular, Magna Carta has a special lastingness. “It is with us every day,” Justice Antonin Scalia said in a speech at a Federalist Society gathering last fall.

Much has been written of the rule of law, less of the rule of history. Magna Carta, an agreement between the King and his barons, was also meant to bind the past to the present, though perhaps not in quite the way it’s turned out. That’s how history always turns out: not the way it was meant to. In preparation for its anniversary, Magna Carta acquired a Twitter username: @MagnaCarta800th. There are Magna Carta exhibits at the British Library, in London, at the National Archives, in Washington, and at other museums, too, where medieval manuscript Magna Cartas written in Latin are displayed behind thick glass, like tropical fish or crown jewels. There is also, of course, swag. Much of it makes a fetish of ink and parchment, the written word as relic. The gift shop at the British Library is selling Magna Carta T-shirts and tea towels, inkwells, quills, and King John pillows. The Library of Congress sells a Magna Carta mug; the National Archives Museum stocks a kids’ book called “The Magna Carta: Cornerstone of the Constitution.” Online, by God’s teeth, you can buy an “ ORIGINAL 1215 Magna Carta British Library Baby Pacifier,” with the full Latin text, all thirty-five hundred or so words, on a silicone orthodontic nipple.

The reign of King John could not have been foreseen in 1169, when Henry II divided his lands among his surviving older sons: to Henry, his namesake and heir, he gave England, Normandy, and Anjou; to Richard, Aquitaine; to Geoffrey, Brittany. To his youngest son, he gave only a name: Lackland. In a new biography, “King John and the Road to Magna Carta” (Basic), Stephen Church suggests that the King might have been preparing his youngest son for the life of a scholar. In 1179, he placed him under the tutelage of Ranulf de Glanville, who wrote or oversaw one of the first commentaries on English law, “Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England.”

“English laws are unwritten,” the treatise explained, and it is “utterly impossible for the laws and rules of the realm to be reduced to writing.” All the same, Glanville argued, custom and precedent together constitute a knowable common law, a delicate handling of what, during the reign of Henry II, had become a vexing question: Can a law be a law if it’s not written down? Glanville’s answer was yes, but that led to another question: If the law isn’t written down, and even if it is, by what argument or force can a king be constrained to obey it?

Meanwhile, the sons of Henry II were toppled, one by one. John’s brother Henry, the so-called Young King, died in 1183. John became a knight and went on an expedition in Ireland. Some of his troops deserted him. He acquired a new name: John Softsword. After his brother Geoffrey died, in 1186, John allied with Richard against their father. In 1189, John married his cousin Isabella of Gloucester. (When she had no children, he had their marriage ended, locked her in his castle, and then sold her.) Upon the death of Henry II, Richard, the lionhearted, became king, went on crusade, and was thrown into prison in Germany on his way home, whereupon John, allying with Philip Augustus of France, attempted a rebellion against him, but Richard both fended it off and forgave him. “He is a mere boy,” he said. (John was almost thirty.) And lo, in 1199, after Richard’s death by crossbow, John, no longer lacking in land or soft of sword, was crowned king of England.

Many times he went to battle. He lost more castles than he gained. He lost Anjou, and much of Aquitaine. He lost Normandy. In 1200, he married another Isabella, who may have been eight or nine; he referred to her as a “thing.” He also had a passel of illegitimate children, and allegedly tried to rape the daughter of one of his barons (the first was common, the second not), although, as Church reminds readers, not all reports about John ought to be believed, since nearly all the historians who chronicled his reign hated him. Bearing that in mind, he is nevertheless known to have levied steep taxes, higher than any king ever had before, and to have carried so much coin outside his realm and then kept so much coin in his castle treasuries that it was difficult for anyone to pay him with money. When his noblemen fell into his debt, he took their sons hostage. He had a noblewoman and her son starved to death in a dungeon. It is said that he had one of his clerks crushed to death, on suspicion of disloyalty. He opposed the election of the new Archbishop of Canterbury. For this, he was eventually excommunicated by the Pope. He began planning to retake Normandy only to face a rebellion in Wales and invasion from France. Cannily, he surrendered England and Ireland to the Pope, by way of regaining his favor, and then pledged to go on crusade, for the same reason. In May of 1215, barons rebelling against the King’s tyrannical rule captured London. That spring, he agreed to meet with them to negotiate a peace. They met at Runnymede, a meadow by the Thames.

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The barons presented the King with a number of demands, the Articles of the Barons, which included, as Article 29, this provision: “The body of a free man is not to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way ruined, nor is the king to go against him or send forcibly against him, except by judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” John’s reply: “Why do not the barons, with these unjust exactions, ask my kingdom?” But in June, 1215, the King, his royal back against the wall, affixed his beeswax seal to a treaty, or charter, written by his scribes in iron-gall ink on a single sheet of parchment. Under the terms of the charter, the King, his plural self, granted “to all the free men of our kingdom, for us and our heirs in perpetuity” certain “written liberties, to be had and held by them and their heirs by us and our heirs.” (Essentially, a “free man” was a nobleman.) One of those liberties is the one that had been demanded by the barons in Article 29: “No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned . . . save by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”

Magna Carta is very old, but even when it was written it was not especially new. Kings have insisted on their right to rule, in writing, at least since the sixth century B.C., as Nicholas Vincent points out in “Magna Carta: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford). Vincent, a professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia, is also the editor of and chief contributor to a new collection of illustrated essays, “Magna Carta: The Foundation of Freedom, 1215-2015” (Third Millennium). The practice of kings swearing coronation oaths in which they bound themselves to the administration of justice began in 877, in France. Magna Carta borrows from many earlier agreements; most of its ideas, including many of its particular provisions, are centuries old, as David Carpenter, a professor of medieval history at King’s College, London, explains in “Magna Carta” (Penguin Classics), an invaluable new commentary that answers, but does not supplant, the remarkable and authoritative commentary by J. C. Holt, who died last year. In eleventh-century Germany, for instance, King Conrad II promised his knights that he wouldn’t take their lands “save according to the constitution of our ancestors and the judgment of their peers.” In 1100, after his coronation, Henry I, the son of William the Conqueror, issued a decree known as the Charter of Liberties, in which he promised to “abolish all the evil customs by which the Kingdom of England has been unjustly oppressed,” a list of customs that appear, all over again, in Magna Carta. The Charter of Liberties hardly stopped either Henry I or his successors from plundering the realm, butchering their enemies, subjugating the Church, and flouting the laws. But it did chronicle complaints that made their way into the Articles of the Barons a century later. Meanwhile, Henry II and his sons demanded that their subjects obey, and promised that they were protected by the law of the land, which, as Glanville had established, was unwritten. “We do not wish that you should be treated henceforth save by law and judgment, nor that anyone shall take anything from you by will,” King John proclaimed. As Carpenter writes, “Essentially, what happened in 1215 was that the kingdom turned around and told the king to obey his own rules.”

King John affixed his seal to the charter in June, 1215. In fact, he affixed his seal to many charters (there is no original), so that they could be distributed and made known. But then, in July, he appealed to the Pope, asking him to annul it. In a papal bull issued in August, the Pope declared the charter “null, and void of all validity forever.” King John’s realm quickly descended into civil war. The King died in October, 1216. He was buried in Worcester, in part because, as Church writes, “so much of his kingdom was in enemy hands.” Before his death, he had named his nine-year-old son, Henry, heir to the throne. In an attempt to end the war, the regent who ruled during Henry’s minority restored much of the charter issued at Runnymede, in the first of many revisions. In 1217, provisions having to do with the woods were separated into “the charters of the forests”; by 1225, what was left—nearly a third of the 1215 charter had been cut or revised—had become known as Magna Carta. It granted liberties not to free men but to everyone, free and unfree. It also divided its provisions into chapters. It entered the statute books in 1297, and was first publicly proclaimed in English in 1300.

“Did Magna Carta make a difference?” Carpenter asks. Most people, apparently, knew about it. In 1300, even peasants complaining against the lord’s bailiff in Essex cited it. But did it work? There’s debate on this point, but Carpenter comes down mostly on the side of the charter’s inadequacy, unenforceability, and irrelevance. It was confirmed nearly fifty times, but only because it was hardly ever honored. An English translation, a rather bad one, was printed for the first time in 1534, by which time Magna Carta was little more than a curiosity.

Then, strangely, in the seventeenth century Magna Carta became a rallying cry during a parliamentary struggle against arbitrary power, even though by then the various versions of the charter had become hopelessly muddled and its history obscured. Many colonial American charters were influenced by Magna Carta, partly because citing it was a way to drum up settlers. Edward Coke, the person most responsible for reviving interest in Magna Carta in England, described it as his country’s “ancient constitution.” He was rumored to be writing a book about Magna Carta; Charles I forbade its publication. Eventually, the House of Commons ordered the publication of Coke’s work. (That Oliver Cromwell supposedly called it “Magna Farta” might well be, understandably, the single thing about Magna Carta that most Americans remember from their high-school history class. While we’re at it, he also called the Petition of Right the “Petition of Shite.”) American lawyers see Magna Carta through Coke’s spectacles, as the legal scholar Roscoe Pound once pointed out. Nevertheless, Magna Carta’s significance during the founding of the American colonies is almost always wildly overstated. As cherished and important as Magna Carta became, it didn’t cross the Atlantic in “the hip pocket of Captain John Smith,” as the legal historian A. E. Dick Howard once put it. Claiming a French-speaking king’s short-lived promise to his noblemen as the foundation of English liberty and, later, of American democracy, took a lot of work.

“On the 15th of this month, anno 1215, was Magna Charta sign’d by King John, for declaring and establishing English Liberty ,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” in 1749, on the page for June, urging his readers to remember it, and mark the day.

Magna Carta was revived in seventeenth-century England and celebrated in eighteenth-century America because of the specific authority it wielded as an artifact—the historical document as an instrument of political protest—but, as Vincent points out, “the fact that Magna Carta itself had undergone a series of transformations between 1215 and 1225 was, to say the least, inconvenient to any argument that the constitution was of its nature unchanging and unalterable.”

The myth that Magna Carta had essentially been written in stone was forged in the colonies. By the seventeen-sixties, colonists opposed to taxes levied by Parliament in the wake of the Seven Years’ War began citing Magna Carta as the authority for their argument, mainly because it was more ancient than any arrangement between a particular colony and a particular king or a particular legislature. In 1766, when Franklin was brought to the House of Commons to explain the colonists’ refusal to pay the stamp tax, he was asked, “How then could the assembly of Pennsylvania assert, that laying a tax on them by the stamp-act was an infringement of their rights?” It was true, Franklin admitted, that there was nothing specifically to that effect in the colony’s charter. He cited, instead, their understanding of “the common rights of Englishmen, as declared by Magna Charta.”

In 1770, when the Massachusetts House of Representatives sent instructions to Franklin, acting as its envoy in Great Britain, he was told to advance the claim that taxes levied by Parliament “were designed to exclude us from the least Share in that Clause of Magna Charta, which has for many Centuries been the noblest Bulwark of the English Liberties, and which cannot be too often repeated. ‘No Freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or deprived of his Freehold or Liberties or free Customs, or be outlaw’d or exiled or any otherwise destroyed nor will we pass upon him nor condemn him but by the Judgment of his Peers or the Law of the Land.’ ” The Sons of Liberty imagined themselves the heirs of the barons, despite the fact that the charter enshrines not liberties granted by the King to certain noblemen but liberties granted to all men by nature.

In 1775, Massachusetts adopted a new seal, which pictured a man holding a sword in one hand and Magna Carta in the other. In 1776, Thomas Paine argued that “the charter which secures this freedom in England, was formed, not in the senate, but in the field; and insisted on by the people, not granted by the crown.” In “Common Sense,” he urged Americans to write their own Magna Carta.

Magna Carta’s unusual legacy in the United States is a matter of political history. But it also has to do with the difference between written and unwritten laws, and between promises and rights. At the Constitutional Convention, Magna Carta was barely mentioned, and only in passing. Invoked in a struggle against the King as a means of protesting his power as arbitrary, Magna Carta seemed irrelevant once independence had been declared: the United States had no king in need of restraining. Toward the end of the Constitutional Convention, when George Mason, of Virginia, raised the question of whether the new frame of government ought to include a declaration or a Bill of Rights, the idea was quickly squashed, as Carol Berkin recounts in her new short history, “The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America’s Liberties” (Simon & Schuster). In Federalist No. 84, urging the ratification of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton explained that a Bill of Rights was a good thing to have, as a defense against a monarch, but that it was altogether unnecessary in a republic. “Bills of rights are, in their origin, stipulations between kings and their subjects, abridgements of prerogative in favor of privilege, reservations of rights not surrendered to the prince,” Hamilton explained:

Such was MAGNA CHARTA, obtained by the barons, sword in hand, from King John. Such were the subsequent confirmations of that charter by succeeding princes. Such was the Petition of Right assented to by Charles I., in the beginning of his reign. Such, also, was the Declaration of Right presented by the Lords and Commons to the Prince of Orange in 1688, and afterwards thrown into the form of an act of parliament called the Bill of Rights. It is evident, therefore, that, according to their primitive signification, they have no application to constitutions professedly founded upon the power of the people, and executed by their immediate representatives and servants. Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing; and as they retain every thing they have no need of particular reservations. “We*, THE PEOPLE*{: .small} of the United States, to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Here is a better recognition of popular rights, than volumes of those aphorisms which make the principal figure in several of our State bills of rights, and which would sound much better in a treatise of ethics than in a constitution of government.

Madison eventually decided in favor of a Bill of Rights for two reasons, Berkin argues. First, the Constitution would not have been ratified without the concession to Anti-Federalists that the adopting of a Bill of Rights represented. Second, Madison came to believe that, while a Bill of Rights wasn’t necessary to abridge the powers of a government that was itself the manifestation of popular sovereignty, it might be useful in checking the tyranny of a political majority against a minority. “Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression,” Madison wrote to Jefferson in 1788. “In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is cheifly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.”

The Bill of Rights drafted by Madison and ultimately adopted as twenty-seven provisions bundled into ten amendments to the Constitution does not, on the whole, have much to do with King John. Only four of the Bill of Rights’ twenty-seven provisions, according to the political scientist Donald S. Lutz, can be traced to Magna Carta. Madison himself complained that, as for “trial by jury, freedom of the press, or liberty of conscience . . . Magna Charta does not contain any one provision for the security of those rights.” Instead, the provisions of the Bill of Rights derive largely from bills of rights adopted by the states between 1776 and 1787, which themselves derive from charters of liberties adopted by the colonies, including the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, in 1641, documents in which the colonists stated their fundamental political principles and created their own political order. The Bill of Rights, a set of amendments to the Constitution, is itself a revision. History is nothing so much as that act of emendation—amendment upon amendment upon amendment.

It would not be quite right to say that Magna Carta has withstood the ravages of time. It would be fairer to say that, like much else that is very old, it is on occasion taken out of the closet, dusted off, and put on display to answer a need. Such needs are generally political. They are very often profound.

In the United States in the nineteenth century, the myth of Magna Carta as a single, stable, unchanged document contributed to the veneration of the Constitution as unalterable, despite the fact that Paine, among many other Founders, believed a chief virtue of a written constitution lay in the ability to amend it. Between 1836 and 1943, sixteen American states incorporated the full text of Magna Carta into their statute books, and twenty-five more incorporated, in one form or another, a revision of the twenty-ninth Article of the Barons: “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868; it came to be interpreted as making the Bill of Rights apply to the states. In the past century, the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been the subject of some of the most heated contests of constitutional interpretation in American history; it lies at the heart of, for instance, both Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas.

Meanwhile, Magna Carta became an American icon. In 1935, King John affixing his wax seal to the charter appeared on the door of the United States Supreme Court Building. During the Second World War, Magna Carta served as a symbol of the shared political values of the United States and the United Kingdom. In 1939, a Magna Carta owned by the Lincoln Cathedral was displayed in New York, at the World’s Fair, behind bulletproof glass, in a shrine built for the occasion, called Magna Carta Hall. As Winston Churchill was vigorously urging America’s entrance into the war, he contemplated offering it to the United States, as the “only really adequate gesture which it is in our power to make in return for the means to preserve our country.” It wasn’t his to give, and the request that the British Library send the Lincoln Cathedral one of its Magna Cartas, to replace the one he intended to give to the United States, was not well received. Instead, the cathedral’s Magna Carta was deposited in the Library of Congress—“in the safe hands of the barons and the commoners,” as F.D.R. joked in a letter to Archibald MacLeish, the Librarian of Congress—where it was displayed next to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with which, once the war began, it was evacuated to Fort Knox. It was returned to the Lincoln Cathedral in 1946.

Magna Carta was conscripted to fight in the human-rights movement, and in the Cold War, too. “This Universal Declaration of Human Rights . . . reflects the composite views of the many men and governments who have contributed to its formulation,” Eleanor Roosevelt said in 1948, urging its adoption in a speech at the United Nations—she had chaired the committee that drafted the declaration—but she insisted, too, on its particular genealogy: “This Universal Declaration of Human Rights may well become the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere.” (Its ninth article reads, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.”) In 1957, the American Bar Association erected a memorial at Runnymede. In a speech given that day, the association’s past president argued that in the United States Magna Carta had at last been constitutionalized: “We sought in the written word a measure of certainty.”

Magna Carta cuts one way, and, then again, another. “Magna Carta decreed that no man would be imprisoned contrary to the law of the land,” Justice Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion in Boumediene v. Bush, in 2008, finding that the Guantánamo prisoner Lakhdar Boumediene and other detainees had been deprived of an ancient right. But on the eight-hundredth anniversary of the agreement made at Runnymede, one in every hundred and ten people in the United States is behind bars. #MagnaCartaUSA?

The rule of history is as old as the rule of law. Magna Carta has been sealed and nullified, revised and flouted, elevated and venerated. The past has a hold: writing is the casting of a line over the edge of time. But there are no certainties in history. There are only struggles for justice, and wars interrupted by peace. ♦

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Justin Champion, “Magna Carta after 800 Years: From liber homo to modern freedom” (May 2015)

By: Justin Champion May 1, 2015

• Lead Essay Justin Champion, “Magna Carta after 800 Years: From liber homo to modern freedom” (May 2015)
• Response Essay Magna Carta Is No Anachronism
• Response Essay Comment on Justin Champion
• Response Essay Magna Carta in 2015
• Conversation Comments A Comment on My Commentators
• Conversation Comments Opinion and Truth
• Conversation Comments The Myths of Magna Carta and Freedom
• Conversation Comments How Can This Artifact Exercise Such Power?
• Conversation Comments A Blend of Fact and Make-believe
• Conversation Comments Magna Carta: An Additional Thought and a Further Example
• Conversation Comments Magna Carta’s Resonance
• Conversation Comments The Risks involved in Disseminating Magna Carta
• Conversation Comments Duplicate of Justin Champion, “Magna Carta after 800 Years: From liber homo to modern freedom.” (May 2015)

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• Liberty Matters - Magna Carta after 800 Years: From liber homo to modern freedom

‘Here are the title deeds of freedom which should lie in every cottage home ... we must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence’. Winston Churchill, Fulton, Missouri. 5th March 1946.

‘The inscription covers the four surviving copies of the version of Magna Carta forced on King John by the Barons of England at Runnymede in June 1215. Magna Carta is a charter which, for the first time, detailed written constraints on royal authority in the fields of church rights, taxation, feudal rights and justice. It has become an icon for freedom and democracy throughout the world’.

The view has been expressed over several decades that there ought to be a more diverse judiciary, that is, a judiciary which is more diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. No one suggests that the judiciary should be precisely representative of the population but people are bound to have more confidence that their concerns have been properly and fully considered if the judiciary includes people from their section of society among its own members and the judiciary’s own composition reflects the fact that those groups too play an important role in society. [17]

Richard H. Helmholz May 4, 2015

Nicholas Vincent May 5, 2015

David Womersely May 6, 2015

Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you?  Did she die in vain? That brave Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and close the boozers at half past ten!  Is all this to be forgotten? --Tony Hancock

We wished at the period of the Revolution , and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers .  Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant. [30]

In the very act, in which for a time, and in a single case , parliament departed from the strict order of inheritance, in favour of a prince, who, though not next, was however very near in the line of succession, it is curious to observe how Lord Somers, who drew the bill called the Declaration of Right, has comported himself on that delicate occasion.  It is curious to observe with what address this temporary solution of continuity is kept from the eye; whilst all that could be found in this act of necessity to countenance the idea of an hereditary succession is brought forward, and fostered, and made the most of, by this great man, and by the legislature who followed him. [31]

Justin Champion May 8, 2015

David Womersely May 15, 2015

Justin Champion May 21, 2015

• 8.16. Anon., Briefe Collections OUT OF Magna Charta: OR, The Knowne good old LAWES OF ENGLAND (19 May, 1643) (not yet online);
• 3.21. John Lilburne, Vox Plebis, or The Peoples Out-cry Against Oppression, Injustice, and Tyranny. Wherein the Liberty of the Subjects is asserted, Magna Charta briefly but pithily expounded (19 November, 1646) < /titles/2596#lf1542-03_head_053 >;
• 3.22. John Lilburne, The Charters of London: or, The second Part of Londons Liberty in Chaines discovered (18 December 1646) < /titles/2596#lf1542-03_head_062 >
• 5.1. William Prynne, A New Magna Charta (1 January, 1648) < /pages/leveller-tracts-5#5.1 >;
• 5.2. William Prynne, The Petition of Right of the Free-holders and Free-men (8 January, 1648) < /pages/leveller-tracts-5#5.2 >.
• 5.8. John Lilburne, The Peoples Prerogative and Priviledges, asserted and vindicated, (against all Tyranny whatsoever.) By Law and Reason. Being A Collection of the Marrow and Soule of Magna Charta (17 February, 1648) < /pages/leveller-tracts-5#5.8 >

Justin Champion May 22, 2015

Nicholas Vincent May 26, 2015

Richard H. Helmholz May 26, 2015

Justin Champion May 28, 2015

Thou, who the verdant plain dost traverse here While Thames among his willows from thy view Retires; O stranger, stay thee, and the scene Around contemplate well. This is the place Where England's ancient barons, clad in arms And stern with conquest, from their tyrant king (Then rendered tame) did challenge and secure The charter of thy freedom. Pass not on Till thou hast blest their memory, and paid Those thanks which God appointed the reward Of public virtue. And if chance thy home Salute thee with a father's honour'd name, Go, call thy sons: instruct them what a debt They owe their ancestors; and make them swear To pay it, by transmitting down entire Those sacred rights to which themselves were born.

An agreement on paper is worth nothing to anybody unless it has taken place in their minds as well: and that if we want liberty we have to make sure that (a) we know what sort of liberty we are fighting for, (b) our methods of fighting are not such as to render that liberty invalid before we even retain it, (c) we understand that we are in more danger of losing it once we have attained it than if we had never had it (xi-xii).

Nicholas Vincent May 29, 2015

In some colonies where ill-disposed politicians are ever on the lookout for opportunities to misinterpret our good intentions, its celebration might well cause embarrassment, and in general there is a danger that the Colonial peoples might be led into an uncritical enthusiasm for a document which they had not read but which they presumed to contain guarantees of every so-called “right” they might be interested at the moment in claiming. [65]

David Womersely May 29, 2015

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