The Charter That Failed in Ten Weeks and Won the Centuries

On 15 June 1215, in a meadow called Runnymede beside the Thames, King John of England set his seal to a charter that his rebellious barons had drafted. It promised, among other things, that the king would not seize a free man or strip him of his rights except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. Another clause said that justice would not be sold, denied or delayed. Later generations would call the document Magna Carta, or the Great Charter.

The charter, however, was a failure on its own terms. John had signed under pressure and had no wish to be bound. Within about ten weeks Pope Innocent III declared the agreement void, and England slid into civil war. John died in October 1216, and the charter was reissued in the name of his young son Henry III with some parts removed and others altered. A version of 1225 was confirmed again in later reigns, and it is this one that gave the text its long life.

What survived was less a set of rules than an idea. The seventeenth century lawyer and judge Sir Edward Coke argued that even a king stood beneath the law, and he used the old charter to resist the Stuart monarchs. Colonists in America and reformers across the English speaking world later borrowed its language, often with little regard for what the barons had meant. Most of the original clauses dealt with feudal dues, forest laws and the price of inheriting land, and only a few remain in force in English law today.

What survived was less a set of rules than an idea.

The history of the charter shows how a failed bargain can become a lasting standard. A principle does not need to be honoured at the moment of its birth to shape the conduct of later rulers. It needs only to be remembered by people who are willing to demand it.