Overview

In June 1215 a group of English barons forced King John of England to accept the sixty-three provisions of the Magna Carta (“Great Charter”) at Runnymede, England. The Magna Carta was not originally intended to secure rights for all English citizens. Rather, it was meant to assert the feudal rights of England’s barons, who had become disenchanted with King John’s rule. Soon after it was signed, John ignored the tenets of the charter and began warring with his barons again. Despite the motivations of the authors and signers, the document contains political principles that remain important today. After its original issuance in 1215, the charter was revised and reissued. The 1297 version of the charter, which is the version used here, was renewed under King Edward I and remains on the statute books to this day, although numerous provisions have been repealed by specific legislation.

Magna Carta

(AP/Wide World Photos)

The Magna Carta has gained significance as the centuries have passed and has come to symbolize the very foundation of civil liberties. It limited royal power and asserted that monarchs also were subject to the rule of law. During the Tudor period (1485-1603), the Magna Carta faded into the background. In the later seventeenth century, it was revived by lawyers and parliamentarians. By that point, it had taken on a different level of meaning and had been transformed into a symbol. This new significance was not lost on British colonists in North America, who drew upon the Magna Carta as they came into conflict with King George III over rights and taxation.

Context

On October 14, 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, also known as William the Conqueror, defeated the recently crowned King Harold II of England at the Battle of Hastings. On Christmas Day, 1066, he was crowned King William I of England. The Norman Conquest ushered in many changes in England, particularly with respect to government. The Normans brought a more centralized style of rule than had previously existed in England. William set up the Great Council, which would eventually become Parliament. The Anglo-Saxon nobles were dispossessed of their lands, which were then given to a much smaller group of Norman barons. This concentrated a degree of power and wealth among these barons, and they were thus often emboldened to resist royal authority.

In the century that followed the Norman Conquest, power had become more centralized in the hands of the monarch, oftentimes at the expense of baronial authority. Taxes continually increased to finance numerous endeavors. The issues that led to the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 grew in importance during the rule of King John’s predecessor, King Richard I, who was his brother. Richard ruled England from 1189 to 1199, but he spent much of his reign in Aquitaine, a region in western France where he had grown up with his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. He also spent time outside his realm as a crusader. For fourteen months beginning in December 1192, he was the prisoner of Duke Leopold V of Austria, who held him for ransom after his capture by pirates while returning home from the Third Crusade. Since Richard was mostly an absentee monarch, he put ministers in charge of the day-to-day administration of his kingdom. These ministers had to raise taxes continually to support Richard’s endeavors overseas, including money for the ransom, which nearly bankrupted England. After his return from captivity, Richard spent most of the remainder of his life in combat in France. The barons and ministers who ran the country in his stead became very comfortable with this arrangement, but it would cause considerable trouble for the next king, John, who ascended the throne after Richard died on April 6, 1199. John’s rule was often heavy-handed and despotic, and the barons were naturally resentful. In many regards, John was set up to fail, since he was always compared with his iconic brother, who was nicknamed “Richard the Lion-Hearted.”

Trouble had begun in 1190, when Richard I had named as his successor Duke Arthur of Brittany, a nephew. Upon Richard’s death, John acted quickly and declared himself king. After years of fighting to resolve the succession issue, he captured his teenage nephew and imprisoned him. The story goes that in 1203 John murdered his captive nephew in cold blood. This act of cowardice was not lost on his barons and cost John a great deal of political capital. John also was not as effective a military tactician as his brother and father, King Henry II, had been. King Philip II of France, also known as Philip Augustus, managed to take most of England’s territorial possessions in France, including Normandy itself, the land of John’s ancestors.

The next major controversy of John’s rule was his conflict with Pope Innocent III over the election of the archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Stephen Langton. Innocent III refused to accept John’s candidate, the bishop of Norwich John de Grey, and a confrontation ensued. John saw this as a direct assault on his power, and after he refused to back down, the pope put England under a papal interdict, which meant that no sacraments could be performed in England except baptism and the last rites. John essentially ignored the interdict, prompting the pope to depose him—in effect, to strip him of his crown. After a protracted struggle that saw John excommunicated and church lands seized by the Crown, John capitulated in 1212 and allowed Langton to assume his duties as archbishop of Canterbury. The damage to John’s reputation, however, was already done.

During this same period, John had come into increasing conflict with his nobles and had begun to resort to ever more cruel and unusual tactics to control his barons, such as holding hostage the wives and children of those with whom he was quarrelling. John thus cultivated considerable antagonism among the barons on whom he greatly depended for financial and military support. John also continued the burdensome tax-collection policies of Richard I.

In 1214 John suffered a major military defeat at the hands of the French and returned to England in disgrace. Once again, his standing in the eyes of his people had suffered, and the stage was set for his acceptance of the Magna Carta the following year. As part of the uprising against him, the barons seized control of the Tower of London in May 1215. One month later at Runnymede, a meadow along the Thames west of London, the barons persuaded John to affix his seal to a charter of liberties intended to rein in the king’s power.

Time Line

About the Author

The authorship of the Magna Carta is not entirely known. Some historians believe that a document called the “Articles of Barons” formed the basis of the Magna Carta. The consensus is that these articles were worked into a final document by a group of learned men, most likely headed by Stephen Langton, William Marshal, and Robert Fitzwalter.

Langton was born around 1150. After the death of the archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, in 1205, Langton became embroiled in a power struggle between King John and Pope Innocent III. Langton was the pope’s choice to succeed Walter, but John had another candidate in mind. Eventually, John capitulated, and Langton became the archbishop of Canterbury. During the baronial conflict with John, Langton supported and advised the barons. However, he extricated himself from the conflict when the opposition turned to violence, and he was one of the king’s emissaries at Runnymede. He died in 1228.

William Marshal, the First Earl of Pembroke, was born in about 1146 and died in 1219. He was considered one of the greatest warriors of his day, and his bravery in battle became the stuff of legend. Marshal aided in the succession of John after the death of Richard I. By 1213 he had become one of John’s most important counselors, and he remained loyal to the king during the baronial conflict. He represented the king at Runnymede and was probably among the authors of the final document. After John’s death, Marshal acted as the regent for the underage Henry III and thus became the de facto ruler of England.

The birth date of Robert Fitzwalter is unknown. It is known, however, that he died on November 9, 1235. He came to prominence as the leader of the opposition to John. In 1212 he was accused of actions against the king and fled to France. His lands were seized and his castles destroyed. The following year, his lands were restored by John, but he remained a staunch opponent of the king. He was one of the chief negotiators of the Magna Carta, though it is not known exactly how much input he had.

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The Magna Carta originally contained sixty-three “chapters,” or clauses, that asserted what the barons considered to be their ancient rights in an effort to protect themselves and their property. By the time Edward I agreed to reissue the Magna Carta in 1297, there were thirty-seven clauses. The clauses that pertained solely to the conflict leading up to the signing of the document in 1215 had been eliminated, and all clauses concerned with the administration of forests had been transferred to a separate Forest Charter in 1217.

The document commences with a preamble, which states that it is a declaration of liberties granted to “Archbishops, Bishops, Abbots, Priors, Earls, Barons, and … all freemen of this our realm.” The clauses that follow enumerate various types of liberties, including freedom of the church, feudal law regarding the holding of land, the rights of widows, the reformation of the justice system, property rights, the rights of people accused of crimes, and the rights of merchants. They appear in no particular order, and the language of the clauses often reflects the influence of Norman French legal and feudal practices.

Clause 1

Clause 1 contains at least two important provisions. The first is its assertion that “the Church of England shall be free.” Stephen Langton was in all likelihood the architect of this clause. After the bitter confrontation between Pope Innocent III and King John over Langton’s appointment as archbishop of Canterbury, Langton wanted to prevent any such confrontations in the future. This provision would become an antecedent to later concepts of the division of church and state. The phrase “Church of England” assigned an idiosyncratic nature to the Church of England, distinguishing it from the Roman Catholic Church. This concept of a distinct Church of England would be played out in the sixteenth century during the reign of Henry VIII.

A second important aspect of Clause 1 is the use of the word freemen. Although it is not entirely clear what the authors meant by this term at the time, what is important is what it later came to mean. Over time, the category of freemen came to apply to an increasingly broad range of people, and this usage is one of the features that has allowed the Magna Carta to be interpreted flexibly over the centuries.

Clauses 2-7

These clauses address feudal relationships and rights. In the early thirteenth century English society was defined by feudal relationships and agreements. The nobility held their lands as direct grants from the king in exchange for military service and payment of taxes. These taxes came in many forms, many of which involved the transference of estates from one generation to the next. Many of the barons’ complaints against John pertained to the king’s having overstepped his authority. These clauses define the boundaries of feudal relationships with the king and protect the rights of the nobles from abuses by royal authority.

Clauses 2 and 3, for example, deal with issues of inheritance and who may profit from the transference of property. Both address the amount of “relief” that could be assessed to someone receiving an inheritance. Relief was a fee paid in order to collect one’s inheritance, but there was no limit on the amount of relief to be paid, which Clause 2 tried to correct. Clause 3 prevented the king from receiving relief when he had already profited from having been the guardian of an inheritance. Clauses 4 and 5 protected the rights of heirs who were too young to collect their inheritance from king’s representatives, who might otherwise have tried to profit dishonestly from the property of their charges.

In Clause 6 the marriage of heirs is addressed. The king had made a practice of selling female heirs to men wishing to gain the women’s title and fortune. In many cases these marriages were seen as inequitable because the man was from a lower social station than the woman. The barons wanted to curtail this practice. Clause 7 stipulates the rights of widows and states that a widow could not have her inheritance denied to her. The implication of the second portion of the clause is perhaps more significant. The clause states, “No widow shall be distrained to marry herself.” In other words, no widow had to marry if she chose not to do so. Allowing widows autonomy in deciding whether to remarry represented a small step toward granting rights not just to men but also to women.

Clauses 8-14

This sequence of clauses deals with a variety of issues. Clause 8 spells out the relationship between debtors and sureties. A surety was someone who was responsible for a debt if the debtor could not pay. This clause says that a debt collector could not go to the surety without first endeavoring to collect the debt from the debtor. It further states that if a surety satisfied the debt, he was entitled to compensation from the debtor equal to the amount settled.

The city of London played a major role in the conflict between King John and the barons. By siding with the barons in the conflict, the people of London earned a special position with the barons, and that position earned them Clause 9 of the Magna Carta. Clause 9 stipulates that London was granted all of the traditional rights and privileges that the city had previously enjoyed. These rights and privileges were protected now by law.

Clause 10 reflected an effort to define the terms of military service under the feudal code. The exact amount of service was not well defined, and the Magna Carta did not do much to rectify this murkiness. However, this clause put in writing the principle that the amount of service required was to be based on the amount of land a noble had been granted.

Clauses 11 through 14 deal with issues of justice. Clause 11, for example, was intended to limit the expenses individuals incurred while seeking justice. Prior to 1215, individuals who had to go to court literally had to go to court—that is, to the location of the king. If the king was moving from place to place, those seeking justice had to follow him at their own expense. This clause fixed where court would be held and limited expenses. Clause 12 was aimed at making justice more convenient by stating that certain trials would be held in the county. It names two types of legal proceedings, using language that had been imported from Norman French. “Assises of novel disseisin” were court proceedings for the recovery of land of which a person had recently lost ownership; an “assise,” spelled “assize” now, was simply a sitting of the court. Assises of “Mortdancestor,” usually spelled mort d’ancestor, were actions to recover land of which a person had been deprived by the death of an ancestor. Clause 13 introduces another legal term: “Assises of Darrein Presentment.” “Darrein Presentment” translates to “last presentation” and had to do with legal complications that could ensue over conflicting claims to a benefice, or an ecclesiastical office.

Clause 14 expresses the view that there should not be excessive punishment for those convicted of a crime. The clause addresses the assessment of fines, and its thrust is that the fine should be commensurate with the severity of the crime. The principle that the punishment should fit the crime has become important in the judicial systems of democratic nations and was later set forth in the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Clauses 15-24

These clauses define the feudal rights of the king and the barons, particularly as they pertained to property and matters of civil justice. It was the practice of the day in England for the king’s subjects to build and maintain bridges. Villages and individuals had no option to refuse when the king ordered them to build a bridge. Clause 15 sought to end this practice. Clause 16 deals with riverbanks and fishing rights, stating that fishing rights were not to be curtailed, save on those rivers that were designated in the time of King Henry II. Later, Clause 23 deals with fish weirs, or traps that were used to catch fish by placing wooden posts in the riverbed. Since these wooden posts often were impediments to commerce, the barons wanted them removed.

Clause 17 returns to the administration of justice by stating that trials must be conducted by the proper authorities. This instruction was to ensure that proper justice would be dispensed and people would be protected from the brand of justice doled out by local officials, whose sentences were often much harsher than those passed by the king’s officials. Clause 18 deals with estates of Crown tenants who owed debts to the Crown. It specifies how a Crown tenant would be protected from abuses by royal authorities who tried to collect debts. The clause states that documentation was required from royal officials in order to settle debts. An escheator was a royal official responsible for holding an inquest on the death of a tenant in chief and determining who should inherit the property.

Clauses 19 through 21 share the common theme of property rights. In general, they established the principle that property could not be taken from a person arbitrarily without proper remuneration. This concept later became the linchpin in English philosopher John Locke’s understanding of property and enumeration of “natural rights” in the seventeenth century.

Clause 22 represented another attempt to define the scope of the king’s power and make that power less arbitrary. The clauses pertaining to feudal relationships do not say that the king did not have certain powers; rather, they defined and limited those powers. Clause 22 limited the king’s power to take away the land of a noble convicted of a felony. By attaching a specific timetable to when a baron’s land could be taken from him after conviction of a felony, another safeguard was put in place against the abuse of royal power. Clause 24 deals with Writs Praecipe, also called writs of covenant. These writs, issued by the king, gave local sheriffs the authority to take away a noble’s land and remit it to another party who claimed the land. Practices such as these had been at the heart of the conflict between the barons and King John.

Clauses 25-29

Clauses 25 through 29 deal with fundamental issues of fairness. The purpose of Clause 25, one of the more straightforward of the Magna Carta’s clauses, was to establish standard measurements for the sale of certain items in order to protect buyers. A “haberject” was a type of dyed cloth. Clause 26 pertains to the subject of trial by combat. A “Writ of Inquisition” was the right to trial by combat for an accuser, an important function of justice at that time. Governments had not yet fully developed their judicial function, and trial by combat was one of the main forms of redress for someone wronged by another. This clause simply provided that this right could not be taken away and would be granted without charging a fee. The Magna Carta takes up this issue again later, in Clause 34. Clause 27 reined in the king’s ability to collect a tax from guardianship when it was not within the scope of the law to do so. The term fee-ferm means “fee-farm,” or a farm on which a farmer paid rent. Under the practice of socage, a farmer held land in exchange for service; the term burgage referred to property in towns on which the holder paid rent.

Clauses 28 and 29 would later become quite influential in the practice of criminal law. The most accepted interpretation of Clause 28 is that a bailiff (meaning any number of different officials) may not charge a person with a crime without first producing a credible witness. Clause 29 is perhaps the most well-known clause and the one that was seized on by later legal scholars, for from it the concept of trial by jury evolved:

In other words, a person could not be convicted by the arbitrary whim of another person but must be found guilty of a legitimate crime by a group of his peers. Trial by jury has since become the foundation of democratic judicial systems. The clause concludes with a strong statement that justice may not be bought.

Clauses 30-37

Clause 30 provided for free trade with merchants of all nations not at war with the king. It states that trade was to be unencumbered by excessive royal taxation. Another clause designed to rein in the power of the king, Clause 31, enabled barons to regain rights that they had held under previous kings but that had not been recognized by King John. Before John’s reign, the rights to property ownership and inheritance of subtenants, another layer of the feudal order, had been recognized. John ignored these rights when land was escheated (left without an heir). Instead of allowing the land to pass to the proper tenant, John claimed the land for himself. An addition to the original 1215 version, Clause 32, deals with the practice of subdividing fiefs (feudal estates) in order to break down the feudal order. Extreme fragmentation of estates could have broken down the feudal order and made tenants independent of their feudal lords. Clause 32 sought to end this practice.

Clause 33 specifies who would have guardianship over churches and thus have had the right to an appointment at a church. Churches were founded by either the king or a lesser feudal lord. The founder of a particular church had the right to appoint its head. In certain cases, John ignored this and appointed heads of the churches. This clause was meant to define legally another feudal relationship and protect the feudal rights of the barons. Taking up again the issue of trial by combat, Clause 34 eliminated the advantage women were seen to have, for female accusers had been able to hire a champion to fight in their stead, but an accused man had to fight for himself. Clause 34 sought to end this practice.

Clause 35 returns to the issue of judicial procedure. It makes reference to two institutions: “Frankpledge” and “Tything.” The latter was a group of ten men; the former referred to the obligation of the ten to stand as sureties for the members of the group and to produce any one of the members if he was summoned to a legal proceeding. The purpose of this clause was to specify when and under what circumstances these institutions could be invoked while preventing their misuse to harass people. Clause 36 attempted to prevent another abuse: in this case, abuse over the ownership of church lands, particularly the practices of granting land to a church and taking it back and of the church’s taking land and leasing it back to the donor. Finally, Clause 37 regulated the practice of escuage, also called scutage. This term referred to the obligation of a tenant to follow his lord in military service at his own expense.

Audience

The original audience for the Magna Carta consisted of the barons—possibly around 165 men, including some thirty-nine in rebellion—and the king. Additionally, the audience included advisers to the king and, to a lesser extent, ecclesiastical authorities. As the years passed, the audience for the Magna Carta grew. By using the word freemen in its introduction and first clause and “all Men of this our Realm” in Clause 37, the charter potentially had an audience that was much larger than the assemblage of men at Runnymede. There has been much dispute about what this language implied and to whom the rights granted by the Magna Carta applied. The jurist and legal scholar Sir Edward Coke used the term to include almost all men and, in 1628, promulgated the Magna Carta as a constitution by which the rights of Englishmen were guaranteed. Regardless of what the writers of Magna Carta may have originally intended, its scope came to include all men and eventually all people. The Magna Carta would have its heyday not in the thirteenth century but rather hundreds of years later during the Enlightenment, when political thinkers drew on the Magna Carta to resist absolute monarchy and advocate more representative constitutional government.

Impact

Upon its inception, the Magna Carta did not make much of an impact, as King John largely ignored it. It faded in importance during the Tudor period of English history, but the document was revived in the seventeenth century during the Stuart period, when Parliament was at odds with the king. Sir Edward Coke was the seventeenth-century champion of the Magna Carta. He asserted that it was proof of an ancient set of liberties that English people possessed. Coke invoked an ideal of the Magna Carta, rather than the probable intention of its authors. Although Coke died in 1634, his view of the Magna Carta was used as a spark to ignite the English Civil War of the 1640s and later the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought King William III and Queen Mary II from the Netherlands to the English throne and produced the English Bill of Rights. It was also the inspiration behind the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679. As time went on, power shifted increasingly from the king to Parliament, and many historians argue that the Magna Carta was at the center of this evolution. Coke’s idealized interpretation of the Magna Carta would eventually become reality.

In the American colonies, the Magna Carta became a symbol. Many colonies were being founded and settled concurrently with the strife between Parliament and the Stuart kings James I and Charles I in the seventeenth century. As a result, colonists were often mindful of the Magna Carta when colonial charters were being drawn up. Colonists saw themselves as entitled to the ancient rights granted to them by the Magna Carta, and they invoked the Magna Carta in their arguments against British taxation and infringements upon their rights. The ideal of the Magna Carta remained powerful in the writing of the U.S. Constitution, and many interpretations of the Magna Carta live on in the American Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Questions for Further Study