Background
King John of England (reigned 1199–1216) had inherited an Angevin empire that included England, the Welsh marches, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, and Aquitaine. By 1204 he had lost most of the continental territories to King Philip II of France. The military campaigns to recover them were expensive and unsuccessful; financing them required substantial increases in royal taxation, arbitrary seizure of baronial property, and the manipulation of royal feudal rights. The campaigns also produced a 1213 conflict with Pope Innocent III that placed all of England under papal interdict for six years.
By 1215 a substantial fraction of the English baronial class had revolted. The rebels, led by Robert Fitzwalter and styling themselves the Army of God and the Holy Church, captured London in May 1215. John was forced to negotiate. The two sides met at the meadow of Runnymede on the Thames, between Windsor and Staines, in mid-June 1215. The document called by the rebels the Articles of the Barons was reformulated by royal clerks into Latin and sealed by John on 15 June 1215.
What the charter said
The Magna Carta of 1215 contained 63 clauses. Most addressed specific baronial grievances about royal taxation, feudal incidents, justice, and the administration of royal forests. The most consequential clauses, in subsequent constitutional history, were:
Clause 39: “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 judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.” This is the medieval foundation of the modern principle of due process of law.
Clause 40: “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.” The medieval foundation of equal access to justice.
Clause 12: No general taxation without the common counsel of the realm (with specific exceptions). The medieval foundation of parliamentary control of taxation.
Clause 61: A committee of 25 barons could enforce the charter against the king by seizing his castles and lands until any breach was remedied — the explicit mechanism for armed enforcement of the charter, which made it acceptable to the rebellious baronage.
The charter was, in its 1215 form, not a document about universal human rights. It was a peace treaty between the king and a faction of his rebellious feudal vassals, addressing specific feudal-administrative grievances and protecting the legal position of a specific privileged class.
Annulment and reissues
The Magna Carta of 1215 was annulled by Pope Innocent III (John’s recently reconciled overlord) in August 1215, within ten weeks of its sealing. The annulment took the formal position that John had been compelled by force and that the charter was therefore invalid in canon law. Civil war resumed. John died of dysentery in October 1216 while campaigning against the rebels.
John’s nine-year-old son Henry III’s regents reissued a substantially revised Magna Carta in November 1216 as a peace-offering to the baronial party. They reissued it again, with further revisions, in 1217 — splitting the forest clauses off into a separate Carta de Foresta. Henry III himself reissued the charter in 1225, in what became the definitive form. Edward I’s reissue of 1297 entered the statute book and is the version that has formal legal status in modern English law.
Survival
Of the original 1215 sealed copies (probably 13 or more), four survive: two in the British Library, one in Lincoln Cathedral, and one in Salisbury Cathedral. The 1215 text is in Latin, written in highly compressed medieval administrative hand. The clauses are not numbered in the original (the numbering is a 19th-century scholarly convention).
The 1297 Edward I version was on permanent display at the United States National Archives in Washington from 1988 to 2007 as a gift from the Perot Foundation; it has since been displayed at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
Legacy
Magna Carta’s actual operational effect on 13th-century English politics was modest. Its conceptual influence on subsequent English constitutional development was enormous. The principle that royal authority was subject to written legal limits, that arbitrary imprisonment was constitutionally prohibited, and that taxation required some form of common consent all flow from the charter into the English Petition of Right (1628), the Bill of Rights (1689), the American Declaration of Independence (1776), the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights (1787–1791), and the modern international human-rights framework (the 1948 Universal Declaration explicitly invokes Magna Carta in its preamble).
The clause-39 principle that no free person may be imprisoned except by due legal process is the direct medieval ancestor of the modern protections of habeas corpus, the right to a fair trial, and the prohibition of arbitrary detention. The clause is still on the English statute book (now numbered as clause 29 of the 1297 reissue) and has not been repealed.