The charter of liberties sealed by King John at Runnymede on 15 June 1215, surviving in four original exemplars written in iron gall ink on parchment.
Magna Carta — at first simply the Charter of Liberties — is the settlement that King John sealed under duress at Runnymede on 15 June 1215, at the end of a rebellion by his barons. It was a peace treaty between a king and his tenants-in-chief, not a constitution, and as a peace treaty it failed within three months.
It survived because it was reissued. The charter was granted again in 1216, 1217 and 1225, and confirmed as statute in 1297, and by then its clauses had detached themselves from the crisis that produced them and become a general statement of what a king might not do.
John's position collapsed after the defeat of his allies at the Battle of Bouvines in July 1214 ended any hope of recovering Normandy and left him with a lost war and unpayable debts. The northern and eastern barons renounced their homage in May 1215 and took London, and the king had to negotiate.
The meeting on the meadow at Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines, was brokered largely by Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury. The document agreed there was drafted from a list of demands known as the Articles of the Barons, and copies were written up and sent out to the shires and to cathedrals to be read and kept.
Most of the sixty-three clauses address specific grievances of the landholding class: the sums payable on inheriting an estate, the treatment of widows and heirs, the abuses of royal forest law, the conduct of sheriffs, standard measures for wine and cloth, and the removal of fish weirs from the Thames and the Medway. The first clause guarantees the freedom of the English church, and another confirms the liberties of London and other towns.
Two clauses outlived their occasion. One states that no free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed or outlawed except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land; the next, that the king will sell, deny or delay justice to no one. The famous clause 61 set up a committee of twenty-five barons entitled to seize the king's lands if he broke the terms — an arrangement no monarch could accept, and the reason the settlement was doomed.
Each exemplar is a single sheet of parchment, written on one side in iron gall ink in a small, heavily abbreviated chancery Latin hand, the text running the full width in close lines with no paragraphing — the clause numbers used today are a later editorial convenience.
The charter was sealed, not signed. John did not write his name on it; the document was authenticated by his great seal in wax, appended on a cord or a parchment tag, and the popular image of the king signing at Runnymede is an invention of later art. Of the four survivors only the burnt British Library copy retains its seal.
John appealed at once to his overlord the pope. Innocent III annulled the charter by the bull Etsi carissimus in August 1215, calling it shameful, demeaning, illegal and unjust, and excommunicated the barons who enforced it. The First Barons' War followed, and John died in October 1216 with the country divided and a French prince holding London.
The regency government of his nine-year-old son immediately reissued the charter, stripped of the clauses that had made it unworkable, as a way of detaching moderate rebels from the French cause. The 1217 version was issued alongside a separate Charter of the Forest, and it is from that pairing that the name Magna Carta — the big charter, as distinct from the small one — comes. Henry III granted a definitive version in 1225 in return for a tax, and Edward I confirmed it as part of English statute law in 1297.
The charter was reinterpreted in the seventeenth century by lawyers such as Edward Coke, who read its protections of free men as ancient guarantees against arbitrary royal power and used them against the Stuarts. That reading, historically strained, carried into the American colonies and into later declarations of rights.
Three clauses of the 1297 statute remain law in England and Wales: the liberty of the English church, the liberties of the City of London, and the promise of lawful judgment and unsold, undelayed justice. The rest has been repealed, which is a fair indication of how much of the document was about thirteenth-century feudal grievance and how little about principle — and of how much the little has mattered.