A week passed before all the formalities were complied with, the barons remaining obstinately in camp, yielding not one jot of their demands, and at last tiring out the king and securing his assent to everything.
What is Magna Charta? What are its provisions, what reforms did it work, what good has it done? Everybody has heard of it, not one in a thousand probably can answer these questions. It undertook two things—reform of existing abuses and provisions for further justice; remedy for the past, security for the future. Its great mission in the cause of civilization has been as a rallying-point for popular rights against royal encroachments. Kings and ministers in succeeding centuries were again and again patiently brought back to that ground and made to swear obedience to the principle of limitation of authority. On this one point British obstinacy stuck and never budged, and it is due to that resistance and persistance for Magna Charta that limited monarchy, and constitutional, representative government stand where they do on the earth to-day.
A remarkable thing about the instrument itself is the lawyer-like accuracy of its language and the minuteness and fullness of its provisions, showing care in its preparation and affording evidence of the state of the jurisprudence and scholarship of the time, and of the extent of the ramifications of the executive wrongs it sought to remedy.
But this is not a constitution, not a statement of rights; it is a statute-law of the sort then possible, viz: in the form of a royal edict. In each section the king ordains so and so. Nor is it a charter in the interest of the rights of man. The bondsmen, who made the bulk of the population of England at that time, are not included in its benefits, and not mentioned save once, and that exception was doubtless inserted for the benefit of the masters, for it exempts from execution the tools of the slave, which of course belonged to his owner. So much for what the charter is not and does not.
A large share of its articles are devoted to defining and regulating the feudal tenure, duties and rights of the barons, and were quite selfish in their scope, although they mark progress as reducing ill-understood relations of king and feudatories for the first time to a written form. But they went further, and stipulated that all these privileges and immunities should apply to all classes of freemen—an important point, as it made Normans and Englishmen equal before the law. Much space is devoted to regulating business and commercial matters; as leasehold rights, treatment of the estates of wards and widows, fixing the widow’s right of dower, freeing of trade, home and foreign, from restrictions and imposts, regulating fisheries, bridge-building, highways, weights and measures.
Advancing into the domain of property and personal rights, it fixed the terms and places of courts and opened them freely to all; no man could be tried without witnesses, or detained in prison without trial; borough franchises were declared inviolable. Then came three sections which struck at the heart of the tyrannical practices of John’s reign:
Foreign officers, temporal or spiritual, were to be removed and their holdings filled by Englishmen; and mercenary troops were to be removed from the realm.
“Justice or right shall not be sold, delayed or denied to any man.”
And then came the declaration of civil rights, which has never ceased to echo wherever free institutions aspired to live:
“No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or disseized of rights and property, or be outlawed or exiled, or otherwise destroyed but by lawful judgment of his peers or the law of the land.”