Magna Carta

Magna Carta, Latin for "Great Charter", is a charter of liberties agreed by King John of England with rebellious barons at Runnymede, beside the Thames near Windsor, in June 1215. It was meant as a peace settlement and failed within weeks, but reissued versions became part of English law, and over the centuries it came to stand for the principle that rulers are bound by law.

John succeeded his brother Richard I in 1199. By 1204 he had lost Normandy and most of his family's other lands in France to the Kingdom of France. To pay for wars to win them back he pressed heavily on his barons with taxes, fines and feudal dues, and used the courts and hostage-taking to keep them in line. He also quarrelled with Pope Innocent III over the choice of an archbishop of Canterbury, leading to an interdict on England, before submitting to the pope in 1213. When his allies were defeated at the Battle of Bouvines in July 1214, his plans to recover his French lands collapsed.

A group of rebel barons gathered at Northampton, renounced their allegiance in May 1215 and captured London. The archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, helped mediate. At Runnymede, the king and the rebels agreed a document on about 15 June 1215, and the barons renewed their oaths of loyalty a few days later. Copies were sealed and sent across the kingdom.

The charter had over sixty clauses, most dealing with specific grievances: limits on the sums the king could demand from heirs and widows, protection of the church's freedoms, the rights of the City of London and of merchants, standard weights and measures, and the removal of foreign mercenaries. Its most famous provisions declared that no free man should be imprisoned, stripped of his property or otherwise punished except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land, and that justice would not be sold, denied or delayed. A council of twenty-five barons was given power to enforce the agreement, if necessary by seizing the king's property.

Neither side trusted the other. At John's request Innocent III declared the charter void in August 1215, and the First Barons' War followed. The rebels invited Prince Louis of France to take the throne, and he occupied much of the south-east. John died in October 1216, and the regents of his nine-year-old son, Henry III, reissued the charter without its most radical clauses to win back support. It was issued again in 1217, when the war ended, alongside a separate Charter of the Forest, and in a final form in 1225 in return for a grant of taxation. Edward I confirmed it in 1297, and that text entered the statute book.

In the later Middle Ages Magna Carta was confirmed many times by Parliament. In the seventeenth century lawyers such as Edward Coke used it to argue against the claims of the Stuart kings, and it influenced the thinking behind the Glorious Revolution. English colonists carried its ideas to America, where they shaped the language of the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights. Much of its significance comes from these later readings rather than from the intentions of the barons of 1215.

Four original copies of the 1215 charter survive: two in the British Library and one each belonging to Lincoln and Salisbury cathedrals. Almost all of its clauses have been repealed, but three remain part of the law of England and Wales.

Our 1200 map shows the Kingdom of England and its French possessions shortly before their loss, in the years leading up to the charter.