Magna Carta

Magna Carta, Latin for “Great Charter,” is a royal charter of rights agreed by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. It was drafted as a peace agreement between the unpopular king and a group of rebel barons. It promised to protect the rights of the Church, to protect the barons from illegal imprisonment, to give swift and fair justice and to limit the payments that the Crown could demand from its feudal tenants.

As a peace treaty, it failed within weeks. Neither side trusted the other, the Pope declared the charter void, and civil war broke out. Yet the charter did not disappear. After John’s death it was reissued in revised forms in 1216, 1217 and 1225, and in 1297 it was entered into English statute law. Over centuries it became one of the most famous documents in the history of law and government.

Today historians stress two different stories. One is the charter of 1215 itself: a practical, often technical settlement about the rights of barons and free men in a feudal kingdom. The other is the “myth” or legend of Magna Carta, built mainly from the 17th century onward, which saw it as an ancient guarantee of liberty for everyone. Both stories matter for understanding why it is still remembered.

King John was the third king of the Angevin dynasty, which also held large lands in France. In 1204 he lost Normandy and most of these French lands to King Philip II of France. For ten years he raised heavy taxes and fees from his barons to pay for a war to win them back. In 1214 his allies were defeated at the Battle of Bouvines, and the campaign ended in expensive failure.

Angevin kings often ruled by what historians call vis et voluntas, “force and will,” making arbitrary decisions and sometimes claiming to be above the law. John used his powers to demand large sums from barons when they inherited land, married or wanted justice in the royal courts, and many barons were deep in debt to the Crown. He was also personally distrusted.

Rebel barons, especially in the north and east of England, swore to “stand fast for the liberty of the church and the realm.” They demanded that John confirm the Charter of Liberties issued by King Henry I around a century earlier. In May 1215 they renounced their loyalty to the king and marched on London, which they captured. John agreed to negotiate.

On 10 June 1215 John met the rebel leaders at Runnymede, a water-meadow on the south bank of the Thames. It was a traditional place for assemblies, and it lay on neutral ground between the royal fortress of Windsor Castle and the rebel base at Staines. The charter itself names the place as “Ronimed, between Windsor and Staines.”

The rebels presented their demands in a document known as the Articles of the Barons. Over about ten days, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, helped turn these demands into a full charter. By 15 June a text had been agreed, and on 19 June the rebels renewed their oaths of loyalty to John and copies of the charter were formally issued.

Contrary to the popular picture, John did not sign Magna Carta, and the barons did not add their seals. Royal clerks wrote out copies in abbreviated Latin on sheets of parchment, and each was authenticated with the king’s great seal in wax. At least thirteen copies were sent out to sheriffs and bishops across the kingdom.

The original text runs continuously, without paragraphs or numbers; the clause numbers used today were introduced by the jurist William Blackstone in 1759. Most of the charter deals with the feudal rights of the Crown over the barons. Clauses 2 and 3 fixed the “relief” an heir had to pay to inherit an estate. Clauses 12 and 14 said that scutage (money paid instead of military service) and certain other aids could only be raised with the common counsel of the kingdom, gathered in a council of bishops, abbots, earls and greater barons.

Clause 1 promised that the English Church would be free. Other clauses protected widows from being forced to remarry, confirmed the liberties of the City of London and other towns, ordered the removal of fish weirs from rivers, set standard measures for wine, ale and cloth, and promised to reverse recent extensions of the royal forests, whose special laws were widely hated. Clauses 10 and 11 dealt with debts owed to Jewish moneylenders, who were under the king’s special protection; clauses 56 and 57 addressed Welsh lands and hostages.

The most famous clauses are 39 and 40. Clause 39 says, in paraphrase, that no free man shall be arrested, imprisoned, stripped of his property, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor will the king proceed against him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land. Clause 40 reads: “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.” In 1215 these were demands aimed at John’s abuse of royal justice; later generations read them as general principles of due process.

Clause 61, the “security clause,” set up a council of twenty-five barons. If the king broke the charter and did not correct it within forty days, the council could seize his castles and lands until amends were made. This formal means of collectively coercing a king was new, and it helped make the 1215 settlement impossible for John to accept.

Neither side put the peace into practice. The twenty-five barons chosen for the council were all rebels, and many rebels kept their forces armed. John, who had made himself a vassal of the Pope in 1213, appealed to Pope Innocent III in July, arguing that the charter harmed the Pope’s rights as his feudal lord. In a letter dated 24 August 1215 the Pope declared the charter “shameful and demeaning, illegal and unjust,” and “null and void of all validity for ever.”

By then fighting had begun. The rebel barons offered the English crown to Louis, son of King Philip II of France, who landed in England in 1216, was proclaimed king by the barons in London (though never crowned) and soon controlled more than half the kingdom. The war settled into stalemate. John fell ill and died in October 1216, leaving his nine-year-old son, Henry III, as heir.

The regency government of the boy king, led by the famous knight William Marshal and the papal legate Guala Bicchieri, cleverly adopted the charter as its own. It reissued a shortened version in November 1216, removing clause 61 and other provisions, to win back rebels. After royalist victories at Lincoln and in a sea battle off Sandwich in 1217, Louis agreed to the Treaty of Lambeth and left England.

In 1217 the government issued the charter again, together with a separate Charter of the Forest dealing with the royal forests. To tell them apart, scribes called the larger document magna carta libertatum, “the great charter of liberties,” and in time it became simply Magna Carta. The name originally meant “big charter” in contrast to the smaller forest charter.

In 1225, needing money to defend his lands in Gascony, Henry III reissued both charters in exchange for a large tax. This time the king declared that he granted them of his own “spontaneous and free will,” which gave the 1225 version much more authority. It became the definitive text, and it is the version that later lawyers usually knew. The National Archives holds an original of this issue.

Kings confirmed the charters many times, often in return for taxation. In 1297 Edward I reissued the 1225 text, and it was entered on the statute rolls as part of English law. The Confirmatio Cartarum of the same year ordered copies to be sent to cathedrals and read to the people twice a year. According to Sir Edward Coke, the charter was reconfirmed 32 times between the 13th and 15th centuries.

Of the thirteen or more copies of the 1215 charter, four survive, all in England. The British Library holds two. One was given to the antiquary Sir Robert Cotton in 1629 by a lawyer who may have found it in a tailor’s shop; the other was found in Dover Castle in 1630 and was badly damaged in the Cotton library fire of 1731 and by a failed attempt at conservation in the 1830s. It is the only 1215 copy with its great seal still attached, though melted.

Lincoln Cathedral’s copy has been in Lincoln since 1215. During the Second World War it was kept at Fort Knox in the United States for safety. It is now displayed at Lincoln Castle beside an original 1217 Charter of the Forest. Salisbury Cathedral’s copy, first delivered to the old cathedral at Old Sarum, is often described as the best preserved; its handwriting differs from the others, suggesting it was written by cathedral staff and then authenticated by the royal court.

Later issues also survive in several places, including a single 1216 copy at Durham, copies of 1217 at the Bodleian Library and Hereford, and copies of 1297 in the National Archives in London, the Guildhall, Parliament House in Canberra and the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where a 1297 exemplification is on loan from its owner. In 2009 UNESCO added the four 1215 copies to its Memory of the World Register.

By the mid-15th century Magna Carta had lost much of its central political role, although lawyers still used it, especially to protect property rights, and printed editions from 1508 spread its text. Early printers worked from the 1225 version and often attributed the charter to Henry III rather than John.

From the late 16th century antiquarians developed the idea of an “ancient constitution”: a set of Anglo-Saxon liberties overthrown by the Norman Conquest and restored in 1215. In the early 17th century the judge and parliamentarian Sir Edward Coke used Magna Carta repeatedly against the Stuart kings’ claims to rule by divine right. He and his allies argued that it guaranteed trial by jury, habeas corpus and the powers of Parliament. The Petition of Right of 1628 cited it in its preamble. Modern historians such as Ralph Turner and Claire Breay have criticised Coke’s reading as anachronistic, while J. C. Holt noted that the charter’s history had already become distorted by Coke’s time.

The Whig view of history after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 made Magna Carta a founding document of English liberty. William Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England in the 1870s marked the high point of this interpretation. From the 1890s onward, historians including F. W. Maitland and Edward Jenks, whose 1904 article was titled “The Myth of Magna Carta,” returned the charter to its 13th-century context as a document about baronial rights rather than the liberties of the people at large.

English colonists took the idea of Magna Carta across the Atlantic. The Virginia Charter of 1606, largely drafted by Coke, promised settlers the same liberties as people born in England, and the Massachusetts Body of Liberties echoed the charter’s due-process clause. In 1687 William Penn published the first copy of Magna Carta printed in America. During the American Revolution, colonists argued that they were defending rights they believed Magna Carta guaranteed.

The United States Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which says that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” uses a phrase that descends from the charter through a statute of 1354 that rephrased “lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land” as “due process of law.” The U.S. National Archives presents this link to visitors alongside its 1297 copy. In 1957 the American Bar Association erected a memorial at Runnymede.

The charter’s influence also travelled through the British Empire. Chapter 29 of the 1297 statute remains in force in New Zealand and in several Australian states and territories. Campaigners and courts around the world have invoked Magna Carta, though often as a symbol rather than as working law. Its legacy is thus bound up with the spread of English common law, including in colonised societies whose own legal traditions were displaced.

Modern scholarship treats Magna Carta as one of many charters of its age, in England and elsewhere in Europe, that set out rights and limited royal power. Its language drew on Henry I’s Charter of Liberties, on charters granted to towns and on church and baronial practice. Historians debate how far it was a narrowly baronial document and how far it reached beyond the barons: it spoke of “free men,” a limited category, but some clauses also concerned widows, merchants, towns and even the villeins (serfs) in clauses 16, 20 and 28.

J. C. Holt’s Magna Carta (first published 1965) placed the charter within the political thought and administrative practice of its time. David Carpenter, who observed that the charter “wasted no time on political theory,” has worked on its drafting and copies; in 2015 he argued that the British Library’s damaged copy found at Dover was probably the one sent to Canterbury Cathedral. The discovery in 2013 of a draft text in a Peterborough Abbey register, and the identification in 2025 of a Harvard copy of the 1300 confirmation as an original, show that research on the documents continues.

Historians also study the charter’s treatment of marginal groups: its clauses on Jewish creditors reflect the precarious position of England’s Jewish community, which would be expelled in 1290, and its promises were made to “free men” in a society where many people were unfree. At the same time, as W. L. Warren observed, many who knew little of its content invoked its name, because it came to mean more than it said.