Almost everything commonly said about Magna Carta is wrong, and it is worth clearing the ground first.
It was not a declaration of rights. It was a peace treaty between a defeated king and the barons who had rebelled against him, and most of its sixty three clauses are about their specific grievances.
It did not establish trial by jury, which was already developing by other routes, or parliament, which did not yet exist, or habeas corpus, which came later, or democracy, which nobody in the meadow would have regarded as anything but a disaster.
It did not apply to most people. The famous protections are granted to free men, and in England in 1215 a large share of the rural population was not free.
And it did not work. The pope annulled it ten weeks later at the king's request, and the country went straight back to civil war.
What it did contain was two sentences that turned out to be portable, and a demonstration that a king could be made to write down limits on himself. The rest of this chapter is about how much that turned out to be worth.
John became king of England in 1199, inheriting an empire that stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees, and by 1204 he had lost Normandy and most of the French lands to the king of France.
Everything follows from that. Recovering them meant an army, an army meant money, and the money had to come out of England, which now had to fund on its own what an empire had funded before. So he taxed, hard and inventively: repeated levies in lieu of military service, arbitrary fines, enormous payments demanded from heirs before they could inherit, the sale of wardships and of widows in marriage, and manipulation of the forest law, under which large areas of the country were subject to a separate and harsh jurisdiction that existed to protect the king's hunting.
He also quarrelled with the pope over the appointment of an archbishop, was excommunicated, had England placed under interdict so that church services stopped for six years, and then settled by surrendering the kingdom to the papacy and receiving it back as a fief, which was a shrewd move that gave him a powerful protector.
And he was, by the accounts of people who dealt with him, untrustworthy in a way that mattered. Medieval politics ran on personal obligation and the expectation that a lord would keep faith. A king who imprisoned hostages, moved the goalposts on debts and was believed to have murdered his nephew was hard to make an agreement with, which is precisely the problem the barons tried to solve in 1215.
The trigger was a defeat. In 1214 the coalition he had funded was destroyed at Bouvines in Flanders, the French lands were gone for good, and the money had bought nothing.
The rebels took London in May 1215, which gave them the leverage to negotiate. In June the two sides met at Runnymede, a meadow beside the Thames, and the king had a document sealed. It was not signed; John's seal was affixed by clerks, and copies were sent to the counties to be read out.
Most of it is highly specific and now unintelligible without a glossary: the sum an heir must pay, the rights of widows, the treatment of debts owed to Jewish lenders, the standardisation of measures for wine and cloth, and the removal of fish weirs from the Thames and the Medway. That last has probably done less for liberty than any clause in constitutional history and mattered a great deal to people who moved goods by river.
Two clauses were different. One states that no free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, nor will we proceed with force against him, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. The other, immediately following, states that to no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay, right or justice.
Those are not descriptions of an existing English liberty. They are prohibitions on things this particular king had been doing. Their power comes from the fact that they were written in general terms rather than as a list of individual complaints, which meant that later generations could pick them up and apply them to situations nobody in 1215 had in mind.
There was also a clause providing that twenty five barons would monitor the king and, if he broke the agreement, could seize his castles and lands until he made amends. That is a licence for permanent civil war, and no king could live with it. It is the clause that guaranteed the settlement would collapse.
John appealed to his new overlord the pope, who annulled the charter in August as shameful, demeaning, illegal and unjust, and excommunicated the barons. War resumed. The rebels invited the French king's son to take the throne, and he landed with an army.
Then John died of dysentery in October 1216, and the situation transformed. His heir was nine years old. A child king could not be accused of tyranny, and the regents governing for him needed to detach the rebels from the French claimant. Their instrument was the charter, reissued within weeks in the boy king's name, with the unworkable clauses removed.
It was reissued again in 1217, alongside a separate charter dealing with the forests, which is where the name Magna Carta comes from: the great charter, meaning the larger of the two documents, not the important one.
And it was reissued definitively in 1225, this time not as a settlement imposed on a king but as a grant made freely by him, in exchange for a tax. That is the version that entered English law, and the trade is the significant part. From then on, a pattern was established: the king wants money, the subjects want the charter confirmed, and the confirmation is the price. It was confirmed dozens of times over the following two centuries, usually attached to a tax negotiation, and each confirmation entrenched it further.
One reason England produced this document, and France did not, is that England had unusually strong royal government, not unusually weak.
The Norman conquest had given one man the whole country at once, and his successors built on it. By John's reign there was a national system of royal courts with professional judges going on circuit, a treasury that audited the sheriffs of every county twice a year against written accounts, and a chancery that recorded outgoing letters on rolls. Those rolls survive, which is why we can check the chroniclers.
That apparatus was popular where it delivered justice, because a royal court was faster and less corruptible than a lord's. Free men used it in large numbers and paid for the privilege. It was hated where it delivered extraction, and the same sheriff collected both.
So the barons at Runnymede were not trying to dismantle royal government. Several clauses ask for more of it: regular sittings of the common pleas in a fixed place so that litigants need not follow a travelling king around the country, and honest local officials. What they wanted was the machine with the arbitrariness taken out, which is a demand only worth making about a machine that works.
The comparison is instructive. Where royal power was weaker and more diffuse, as in Germany after the quarrels of chapter fourteen, nobles did not need a charter, because they simply were the government in their own territories. A written limit on a king is something you draft when the king is strong enough to need limiting and not strong enough to refuse.
By the sixteenth century the charter was a dusty piece of feudal law that the Tudors largely ignored, and it does not appear in Shakespeare's play about John at all.
It was revived by lawyers in the seventeenth century, in the constitutional fight between the crown and parliament that is chapter thirty one. Edward Coke, the greatest common lawyer of the age, went back to the medieval texts and read them as evidence of an ancient English constitution that the Stuart kings were violating. He interpreted the clause about lawful judgement as guaranteeing trial by jury, and the clause about not selling justice as prohibiting arbitrary imprisonment and taxation without consent.
As history this is largely invention. As law it was enormously effective, because it gave the parliamentary side a document, and a document that kings had confirmed dozens of times is very hard to dismiss.
From there it crossed the Atlantic. Colonial charters quoted it, colonists cited it against parliament in the 1760s and 1770s, and its language runs into the American constitutional tradition, where the phrase due process of law is a direct descendant of by the law of the land.
The irony is worth stating plainly. Magna Carta became important because a group of seventeenth century lawyers misread it, and the misreading was so useful that it became true in the only sense that matters for a constitution, which is that people acted on it.
Of the sixty three clauses, three remain on the statute book in England and Wales. One confirms the liberties of the English church. One confirms the liberties of the City of London and other towns. And one is the combined text of the two famous clauses, on judgement by peers and the law of the land, and on not selling or delaying justice.
Four original copies from 1215 survive, two in the British Library, one at Lincoln and one at Salisbury. They are not identical, because they were written out separately by different clerks.
What the document genuinely established, stripped of the mythology, is narrower than the legend and not small. That the king is under the law. That the limits can be written down. That subjects may lawfully combine to hold him to them. And that a grant of taxation is an occasion on which those limits get renegotiated.
None of those propositions was invented at Runnymede, and all of them were in doubt. What happened there is that they were put in writing, sealed, published in the counties, and then confirmed so many times that they could not be denied.
Firm: the texts. We have the 1215 original in four copies and every subsequent reissue, plus the papal annulment, plus a large body of royal administrative records that let us check what was actually happening on the ground.
Firm: the failure. The war resumed within months, and this is not disputed by anyone.
Soft: John's character. The chroniclers who blackened him were mostly monastic writers with grievances about his treatment of the church, and twentieth century historians working from the administrative records found a competent, hard working and unusually hands on administrator. He is now generally regarded as an able king who was untrustworthy and unlucky, which is a duller verdict than either the older villain or the revisionist rescue.
Contested: how much continuity there is between 1215 and the later constitutional tradition. One view treats the charter as genuinely foundational. Another treats it as a piece of feudal bargaining that was retrospectively conscripted, and points out that the seventeenth century reading is demonstrably anachronistic.
This chapter takes the second view of the history and the first view of the effect, and it is worth noticing that this is not a contradiction. Foundational documents are not usually foundational when they are written. They become so when a later generation needs one and reaches back for the most authoritative thing it can find.