Magna Carta

Magna Carta, Latin for Great Charter and formally Magna Carta Libertatum, is a charter of liberties King John of England sealed at Runnymede in June 1215 under pressure from a coalition of rebel barons. It is genuinely a peace settlement first and a legal text second: its sixty three clauses addressed specific baronial grievances over feudal dues, forest law, debt to Jewish moneylenders, and the conduct of royal justice, protecting the privileges of the barons and the Church far more than any general population. Pope Innocent III annulled it within about ten weeks as extracted under duress, and civil war followed immediately. The charter took its lasting form only through reissues, chiefly the 1225 version confirmed by Henry III and the 1297 confirmation entered onto the statute roll, which is the version with continuing legal force in England today, of which only clauses on the liberties of the English Church, the customs of the City of London, and clause 29 (numbered 39 and 40 in 1215) survive as live law. Clause 39, promising that no free man would be imprisoned or dispossessed except by lawful judgment of his peers or the law of the land, and clause 40, promising that justice would not be sold, denied or delayed, were read by later centuries, especially Sir Edward Coke in the seventeenth century and the framers of the United States Constitution, as founding statements of due process and the rule of law. That later reading did enormous work in constitutional history, but it is a reading built on top of the document, not a description of what the 1215 charter itself was.