Magna Carta

The Magna Carta (“Great Charter”) is a document guaranteeing English political liberties that was drafted at Runnymede, a meadow by the River Thames, and signed by King John on June 15, 1215, under pressure from his rebellious barons. By declaring the sovereign to be subject to the rule of law and documenting the liberties held by “free men,” it provided the foundation for individual rights in Anglo-American jurisprudence.

Among the Magna Carta’s provisions were clauses providing for a free church, reforming law and justice, and controlling the behavior of royal officials. One of the charter’s 63 clauses tasked the barons with choosing 25 representatives to serve as a “form of security” ensuring the preservation of the rights and liberties that had been enumerated. Above all, the Magna Carta guaranteed that government, royal or otherwise, would be limited by the written law of the land.

King John’s successor, Henry III, reissued the Magna Carta on November 12, 1216, in the hope of recalling the allegiance of rebellious barons who were supporting French King Louis VIII’s efforts to win control of England. It was reissued again in 1217, when the council reconsidered it clause by clause. In 1223 Pope Honorius III declared that the young King Henry III was old enough to make valid grants, and Henry reissued the charter in 1225.

The enduring influence of the Magna Carta comes not from its detailed expression of the feudal relationship between lord and subject but from its more-general clauses in which every generation can see its own protection. The right to petition and habeas corpus and the concept of due process are derived from language in the Magna Carta, which also was a forerunner of Parliament, the Declaration of independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the U.S. Bill of Rights.

There are four extant original copies of the Magna Carta of 1215. Two of them are held by the cathedral churches in which they were originally deposited—Lincoln and Salisbury—and the other two are in the British Library in London. The four “originals” were assembled in one place for the first time in February 2015 as part of a British Library commemoration of the 800th anniversary of the charter’s issue.