What was the Magna Carta?

In June 1215 a group of rebellious barons compelled King John to seal a charter at Runnymede addressing their grievances over arbitrary taxation, abuses of feudal rights, and the conduct of royal justice. Most of its 63 clauses dealt with narrow feudal matters that lost relevance quickly, and the charter itself failed almost immediately: John repudiated it within weeks, the Pope annulled it, and civil war followed. It was reissued in altered form several times under his successors, and it is the 1225 version that entered English statute law.

Its lasting significance rests on a small number of clauses and on a principle. Clause 39, providing that no free man should be imprisoned or dispossessed except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land, together with clause 40 promising that justice would not be sold, denied, or delayed, became the textual root of due process and the prohibition on arbitrary detention. More broadly, the charter established that the monarch was subject to law rather than above it, which was the genuinely radical idea.

Its later influence was substantially a work of reinterpretation. Seventeenth-century English lawyers, notably Edward Coke, invoked it against the Stuart kings in terms that went well beyond what the 1215 barons intended, and that reading crossed to the American colonies, shaping colonial charters, state constitutions, and the Fifth Amendment's due process clause. Only four original 1215 exemplars survive, held by the British Library and the cathedrals of Lincoln and Salisbury, and a copy of the 1297 version is on permanent display at the National Archives in Washington. Three clauses of the English statute remain in force today.