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Magna
Carta

Sealed 15 June 1215
Historical Archive  ·  Document Study
Magna Carta
Magna Carta
Runnymede, 1215  ·  Reissued 1216 · 1217 · 1225 · 1297

A failed peace treaty between a bad king and his barons — which became the most famous charter of liberty in the world.

King John sealed it in a Thames-side meadow to buy peace with rebel barons. Most of its sixty-three clauses concern feudal dues, widows, forests, and fish-weirs. The Pope annulled it within ten weeks and war resumed. Then John died, and his son's regents reissued it — and kings confirmed it again and again for three centuries.

Sir Edward Coke woke it in the 1600s as the ancient constitution. The American colonists carried it across the ocean. Only three of its clauses are still law in England.

Consultation

To no one will we sell,
to no one deny or delay right or justice.

Magna Carta speaks from 758 chunks — its own text of 1215 in English translation, and William Sharp McKechnie's clause-by-clause commentary on the Great Charter, with the Latin and the history of every reissue.

Its discourse holds two readings of its afterlife: Francis Stoughton Sullivan's eighteenth-century Lectures on the Constitution and Laws of England, which made it the root of English liberty, and William D. Guthrie's Magna Carta and Other Addresses, an American constitutional lawyer tracing it into the Bill of Rights.

Ask it whether it was really about liberty, or barons guarding their privileges. Ask it what 'the law of the land' meant in 1215. Ask it how a feudal charter reached the Fifth Amendment — and whom it left out.

Rule of LawDue ProcessClauses 39 & 40King JohnThe BaronsCokeThe Bill of Rights
No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.
Magna Carta  ·  Clause 39  ·  1215

Drawn From the Corpus