Magna Carta Signed: King John Grants Rights

English barons forced King John to affix his seal to Magna Carta at Runnymede, a meadow along the Thames near Windsor, on June 15, 1215. The charter was the product of a political crisis, not abstract philosophy. John had lost most of England's French territories, imposed crushing taxes to fund unsuccessful military campaigns, and alienated nearly every powerful constituency in the kingdom, from feudal lords to the Church to London's merchant class. Armed rebellion, not enlightenment ideals, brought him to the negotiating table. Archbishop Stephen Langton and a group of rebel barons, calling themselves the "Army of God," drafted the initial terms. Magna Carta contained sixty-three clauses addressing specific grievances: limits on royal taxation without baronial consent, protections for the English Church, guarantees of fair trial, restrictions on the Crown's right to seize property, and regulations on debts owed to Jewish moneylenders. Most clauses dealt with narrow feudal concerns that mattered only to the thirteenth-century aristocracy. Three clauses survived to become the foundation of constitutional law. Clause 39 guaranteed that "no free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled, or ruined in any way... except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." Clause 40 declared: "To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice." These principles became the basis for habeas corpus, due process, and trial by jury. John repudiated the charter within weeks, and Pope Innocent III annulled it. Civil war resumed immediately. John died of dysentery in October 1216. His nine-year-old son Henry III reissued Magna Carta repeatedly during his reign, embedding it in English law. Over eight centuries, the document has been invoked by Parliament against the Stuarts, by American colonists against George III, and by the framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.