A CALL TO ARMS FROM OUR KING

"Here is a law which is above the King and Parliament, and which even He and They must not and may not legally break. And in the event they or anyone else were to try to abrogate it, such attempt at abrogation shall have no force nor effect [1297] and can be safely ignored with no legal ill effect. In addition, in the event of successful attempts at abrogation of such liberties, customs, or rights, the King has commanded and do hereby compel any and all subjects to swear oath to join the barons to assail the properties and persons and families of those (saving the King, Queen and the royal children) who had successfully completed such abrogation, including but not limited to that of the individual Members of Parliament who had voted in favour of any such successful attempts at abrogation [1215]. This reaffirmation of a supreme law and its expression in a general charter is the great work of Magna Carta; and this alone justifies the respect in which men have held it." - from volume I, chapter 8 of Churchill's "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples" published 1956. @p. 218 of The Folio Society's 2003 edition,published in London.
 

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Trial by jury in all cases, our English ancestors deemed (as Story correctly tells us), "the great protection of their civil  and political liberties, and watched with an unceasing jealousy and solicitude." "Nullus liber homo capiatur nec imprisonetur aut exulet, aut aliquo modo, destruator, etc.; nisi per legae judicium parium suorum, vel per legem terrea." Magna Carta [1225, 1297]
 

It put a stop to the robberies of petty government "authorized" tyrants:

Chapter 28: No constable or other bailiff of ours shall take anyone’s corn or other chattels [property] unless he pays on the spot in cash for them . .

Edward Coke’s Petition of Right

Four centuries after 1215, the 17th-century crisis of political legitimacy began. English reformers wished to show that they were not innovators but rather restorers of ancient and true ways that had been lost after 1066. From the Tudor autocracy at the beginning of the century to the Whig oligarchy at the end, and passing through civil wars among the “four kingdoms” and the bourgeois revolution in between—the crisis was conducted in terms of the Magna Carta.

Edward Coke was the hero of the Magna Carta’s chapter 39. Dismissed as Chief Justice of King’s Bench, imprisoned in the Tower, he helped draw the Petition of Right of 1628. Charles I heard he was working on a book on the Magna Carta. As Coke lay dying his chambers were ransacked and his manuscripts confiscated. At the beginning of the English Revolution, Parliament ordered their recovery, and they were published posthumously in 1642.

Coke’s interpretations focused on chapter 39, which is declaratory of the old law of England, ancient and fundamental. He linked it to Parliament and “due process of law.” He found that it prohibited torture. It upheld habeas corpus. It provided trial by jury. It established rule by law.
 

The Levellers Embody the Magna Carta

Coke’s chapter 39 as it spread through the empire can be contrasted with its interpretation by commoners in the 17th century. As the early Stuarts sought to intensify their exploitation of forest resources during the transition to coal, they met objections, not from barons so much as from the common people, for the common people were often people with rights in the commons.

In response the Levellers fought for “the right, freedome, safety, and well-being of every particular man, woman, and child in England.” They argued that Parliament may not act against the fundamental law of the land as expressed in the Magna Carta. It became “the Englishman’s legall birthright and inheritance.” “Free-Born John” Lilburne based his arguments on the Magna Carta; he said “the liberty of the whole English nation” is in clause 39.

William Blackstone tells us that it was not until September 11, 1217, that France and England made peace, at an island in the river Thames near Kingston. Barefoot and shirtless, Louis was required to renounce all claim to the English throne and to restore the charters of liberties granted by King John. Not only did the treaty put an end to two years of civil war, but as the Victorian constitutional historian, William Stubbs, concluded, the treaty was “in practical importance, scarcely inferior to the charter itself.” While the charter served a treaty-like function during the baronial wars, its reissue in time of peace established it as a basis of government.

The survival of the original Magna Carta of King John thus depended on the peace of September 11, 1217. This is not all. In the following days the new king granted a new charter of liberties, based on the 1215 charter and “also a charter of the forest,” drafted in 1217. Unlike the 1215 version known to us, the final form of the Magna Carta was in fact comprised of two charters.

The charters were reissued together in 1225.9 They were published by being read aloud four times a year: at the feast of St. Michael’s, Christmas, Easter, and at the feast of St. John’s. They were read in Latin certainly, in French translation probably, and in English possibly. William McKechnie states, “it marked the final form assumed by the Magna Carta.”

By 1297 Edward I established the charters and directed that they become the common law of the land. Blackstone, who published a scholar’s edition of the charters in 1759 while working at Oxford University Press, writes, “There is no transaction in the ancient part of our English history more interesting and important, than the rise and progress, the gradual mutation, and final establishment of the charters of liberties.” By the beginning of the 14th century, he concludes, “the final and complete establishment of the two charters, of liberties and of the forest, which from their first concession under King John A.D. 1215, had been often endangered, and undergone many mutations, for the space of near a century; but were now fixed upon an eternal basis.”

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