The six essays of this symposium address different aspects of the meaning and legacy of the Magna Carta—“the Great Charter” in Latin. Although social scientists and legal scholars routinely describe the Magna Carta as foundational for concepts of justice and liberty, the charter itself is rarely assigned in political science classes or scrutinized by political theorists. The aim of the symposium is twofold: first, to affirm the document's historical rootedness and intellectual richness, and, second, to explore the ways in which the Magna Carta's text and reputation have informed the development of common law and modern politics. The Magna Carta was the product of times very different from our own, yet it continues to be cited by jurists and human rights activists around the globe. This symposium makes the case for why political scientists should take an interest in the Magna Carta, not just as a cultural icon, but as a durable political text.

The Magna Carta set out the terms of a de facto constitutional settlement between the crown, the country's most powerful families, and the community as a whole. While it affirmed numerous social distinctions, it nevertheless assumed a rough legal parity among those people designated as free men. Rather than proposing a wholesale overhaul of England's political and legal institutions, the Magna Carta honored the country's “ancient liberties and free customs.” In common with other medieval charters, “Magna Carta took the form of a legal letter, recording agreements which the parties had already made verbally” (Breay Reference Breay2002, 34). Its terms were negotiated between barons, church leaders, and King John in the winter and spring of 1215, following the devastating English military defeat in France the year before and the growing unpopularity of the monarch's policies (and sheriffs) at home. By June of that year, “a party of barons dressed in full armor had arrived to meet the king's representatives at Runnymede, a meadow by the River Thames between the baron's camp at Staines and the royal castle at Windsor. The detailed negotiations held there led to an “agreement involving many concessions by the king” (Breay Reference Breay2002, 25).

The original charter, stamped with the king's great seal on June 15, 1215, contains 63 articles, the bulk of which are concerned with taxation, criminal justice, public administration, and royal abuses of feudal customs. Several clauses address the status and prerogatives of specific groups such as widows, landholders, Jews, Welshmen, juveniles, town-dwellers, the Church, and foreign merchants. Others focus on the proper conduct of constables, sheriffs, and bailiffs. The document's most striking aspect is its bold assertion of baronial privilege. In effect, it describes the role of the upper nobility as a kind of safeguard against the irresponsible or tyrannical use of monarchial power. The relationship between the language of the document and existing laws and practices of the time is complex, however. As the historian J. C. Holt has written, “Sometimes Magna Carta stated the law. Sometimes it stated what its supporters hoped would become law. Sometimes it stated what they pretended was law” (Holt Reference Holt1992, 300).

Strictly speaking, the original charter was only valid for a few weeks. As soon as he was in a position to do so, King John renounced the document, and his ally Pope Innocent III helpfully released the king from his oath on the grounds that it was given under duress (“as unlawful and unjust as it is base and shameful”; Breay Reference Breay2002, 40). Far from establishing a lasting peace, the negotiations at Runnymede represented “a pause and a source of fresh contention” (Holt Reference Holt1992, 345). By late 1215, “King John was preparing to march against the barons, and the barons themselves were preparing to invite Louis, son of the French king Philip Augustus, to cross to London and to claim the throne of England as their nominated successor to King John. There followed a year of civil war, fought out across most parts of England” (Vincent Reference Vincent2007, 19). The conflict came to a halt with the sudden death of King John in late 1216. His only heir was his nine-year-old son, the future Henry III.

In the interests of easing tensions between the crown and the rebel nobles, and to “advertise the desire of the new royal regime to rule differently from King John … the guardians of Henry III now revived the Great Charter of June 1215, reissuing it at Bristol in November 1216, not now as an assault upon royal privilege but as a manifesto of future good government by the King” (Vincent Reference Vincent2007, 19). The Magna Carta was modified once again in 1217, when the articles relating to feudal rights and the royal forests were taken out and expanded into a separate Charter of the Forest (see Linebaugh Reference Linebaugh2008 and Hindley Reference Hindley1990, chapter seven). In 1225, the court of King Henry III prepared yet another version of the document, which the king stamped with his seal “in return for a grant of taxation from his subjects sufficient to pay for war in both France and England” (Vincent Reference Vincent2007, 19). Within a few decades, it became “virtually inconceivable that Henry III or his successors could in any way seek to annul Magna Carta” (Vincent Reference Vincent2007, 20). The 1225 version was transcribed onto England's first statute roll at the end of the thirteenth century, under the aegis of Henry's formidable heir, Edward I (see Carpenter Reference Carpenter2003 and Morris Reference Morris2009.) By the middle of the following century, officers of the state were legally required to pledge to observe the terms of the charter. Three of its clauses remain statutory law in England and Wales.

The Magna Carta was the product of months of difficult negotiations and was drafted in a climate of near civil war. Much of the text is concerned with grievances that had been simmering for years. As Holt writes, the “Charter and its associated documents are complex records which bear the imprint of nearly three years of political crisis and protracted, discontinuous negotiation. They cannot be properly understood apart from this crisis” (Holt Reference Holt1992, 188). Rather than setting forth universal principles, the document affirms the value of customary practices that, taken as a group, place strict limits on the autonomy of the crown. In locating the monarchy in a wider institutional matrix, Magna Carta draws on centuries of legal and political discourse concerning the duties of and relationship among various feudal constituencies, such as the landed nobility, clergy, merchants, foreigners, and the monarchy. At the same time, as Holt emphasizes, its specific formulations and emphases reflect the crisis of legitimization that engulfed the crown in the early thirteenth century.

In general, the document is careful not to stray too far from established norms. Its most audacious component addresses baronial prerogatives rather than popular liberties. In Article 61, the barons arrogate the right to “choose any twenty-five barons of the realm they will, who with all their might are to observe, maintain and cause to be observed the peace and liberties which we have granted and confirmed to them by this our present charter.” If the “liberties” that were “granted and confirmed” by the charter were “offended,” the barons reserved the authority to seize the king's “castles, lands, and possessions, and in such other ways as they can … until, in their judgment, amends have been made.” The “barons already had the capacity to levy war against the king and had already done so through the formal process of defiance and renunciation of fealty. The Charter now allowed them to distrain [i.e., seize the property of] the king by acts which were warlike, and yet still remain the king's men and retain title to land and liberties” (Holt Reference Holt1992, 343). Article 61 expresses the leadership crisis of the period most acutely. It was excised from all subsequent editions in the interests of establishing peace.

A key source for the Great Charter's overall format and tone was the Coronation Charter of 1100, which Henry I issued on his ascension to the throne. In this epochal document, sometimes referred to as the Charter of Liberties, the king pledged to “take away the bad customs by which the kingdom of England was unjustly oppressed.”Footnote ¹ Like Magna Carta, Henry I's charter opens by affirming the independence and autonomy of the Church (“in the first place make the holy church of God free”), and then concedes a variety of privileges to noble families, including the right of barons' widows to choose whether and whom to marry. By implication, it embedded the crown in a legal framework that promised to promote the common good. The legal scholar Tom Bingham has described it as a “sort of non-election manifesto [that] promised relief from the evil custom and oppressive taxation of the previous reign, but also forbade the imposition of excessive penalties and required that penalties should fit the crime” (Bingham Reference Bingham2010, 11).

Both documents insisted that the monarchy conform to a subtly configured, multilayered environment. Furthermore, both drew on norms and concepts—most important, that free men enjoy certain customary rights and privileges—that found their expression in dozens of legal edicts and treatises composed from the seventh century onwards. Indeed, nearly 150 edicts and treatises were issued between the post-Roman era and the early thirteenth century in England. The earliest of these documents was drafted by King Aethelbert of Kent and his advisors in approximately 602 AD. Aethelbert's laws, as well as those of other Saxon and Norman monarchs, are preserved in a twelfth-century legal codex, the Textus Roffensis, a remarkable yet little-known repository of early English law. (A major international conference on the Textus Roffensis will be held at the University of Kent on July 25–27, 2010.Footnote ²) If the Magna Carta is constitutive of the Anglo-American legal tradition—and, after all, nearly a thousand federal and state courts in the United States have cited the Magna Carta in formal decisions, and, in the half-century between 1940 and 1990, the Supreme Court cited the text in over 60 cases (Bingham Reference Bingham2010, 13)—it is at the same time indebted to Roman, Saxon, Norman, and Church (canon) laws, customs, and practices.

The Great Charter was originally written in Latin on papyrus. Despite its iconic status, the Magna Carta does not achieve the coherence of an eighteenth-century constitution or nineteenth-century legal code, nor is it a work of political philosophy. Its declaratory prose presumably met the practical needs of its noble-born petitioners. At the same time, much of its language has an incautious, open-ended quality that has clearly facilitated revisionist and ever more expansive reinterpretations. As more than one scholar has noted, the document has proved highly adaptable: “The class and political interests involved in each stage of the Charter's history are one aspect of it; the principles it asserted, implied or assumed are another. Approached as political theory[,] it sought to establish the rights of subjects against authority and maintained the principle that authority was subject to law” (Holt Reference Holt1992, 18–19).

A thicket of pledges, stipulations, and restrictions can be found in the original charter's 63 articles. As noted previously, a fair number of these stipulations are concerned with the status and treatment of various collectivities and corporate bodies, including the Church, the city of London, foreign merchants, and Welshmen:Footnote ³

• • “The English church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished and its liberties unimpaired … which we shall observe and wish our heirs to observe in good faith in perpetuity” (Article 1)

• • “The city of London is to have all its ancient liberties and free customs both by land and water. Furthermore, we will and grant that all other cities, boroughs, towns and ports shall have all their liberties and free customs” (Article 13)

• • “All merchants are to be safe and secure in leaving and entering England, and in staying and traveling in England, both by land and by water” (Article 41)

• • “If we have disseised [dispossessed] or deprived Welshmen of lands, liberties or other things without lawful judgment of their peers, in England or in Wales, they are to be returned to them at once” (Article 56)

Some take up aspects of (aristocratic) family law:

• • “If any of our earls or barons, or others holding of us in chief by knight service shall die, and at his death his heir be of full age … he shall have his inheritance on payment of the ancient relief … if, however, the heir of any such person has been under age and in wardship, when he comes of age he shall have his inheritance without relief or fine” (Articles 2 and 3)

• • Legal guardians “shall not take from the land more than the reasonable revenues, customary dues and services … and he shall restore to the heir when he comes of age” (Articles 4 and 5)

• • “No widow shall be compelled to marry so long as she wishes to live without a husband” (Article 8)

Several sections are concerned with the movement of people and goods along rivers and waterways:

• • “No vill [village] or man shall be forced to build bridges at river banks, except those who ought to do so by custom and law” (Article 23)

• • “Henceforth all fish-weirs [fish traps] shall be completely removed from the Thames and the Medway and throughout all of England, except on the sea coast” (Article 33)

A plurality of clauses focus on the administration of justice:

• • “A free man shall not be amerced [subject to arbitrary penalty] for any trivial offense … and for a serious offense he shall be amerced according to its gravity” (Article 20)

• • “No constable or any other of our bailiffs shall take any man's corn … unless he pays cash for them” (Article 28)

• • “No sheriff or bailiff of ours or anyone else is to take horses or carts of any free man for carting without his agreement” (Article 30)

• • “No bailiff shall put anyone on trial by his own unsupported allegation without bringing credible witnesses to the charge” (Article 38)

• • “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay justice or right” (Article 40)

• • “We will not make justices, constables, sheriffs or bailiffs who do not know the law of the land and mean to observe it well” (Article 46)

• • “All fines which were made by us [i.e., the King] unjustly and contrary to the law of the land … shall be completely remitted” (Article 55)

No section is more practical in its application than Article 35, which specifies: “Let there be one measure of wine throughout our kingdom and one measure of ale and one measure of corn.” Many of the document's stipulations have a similarly pragmatic feel. Yet the Magna Carta ends on a lofty, almost transcendental note: “The men in our realm shall have and hold all the aforesaid liberties, rights and concessions well and peacefully, freely and quietly, fully and completely for them and their heirs of us and our heirs in all things and places forever” (Article 63).

The document's best-known passage is probably Article 39, which is concerned with what we now know as due process and habeas corpus. Its framers did not intend for its promises to apply beyond the ranks of a fraction of the population, of course. Only subsequent developments make it possible for us to read Article 39 as an assertion of universal human rights: “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” That said, numerous clauses are vague or silent on the question of to whom the document's protections applied. Although some articles only applied to titled members of the community, numerous clauses left the beneficiaries of significant rights unnamed.

Although the incorporation of the Magna Carta into statutory law at the end of the century was by no means a foregone conclusion, English monarchs after King John reconciled themselves to the idea of working within its framework as long as any excessive expressions of baronial power were removed. The Magna Carta seems to have been only occasionally invoked during the following two centuries but was subsequently revived in the Tudor and Stuart eras. The writings of two prominent legal scholars, Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) and Sir William Blackstone (1723–1780), powerfully shaped how the framers of the U.S. Constitution, among others, understood the charter. In particular, these writers helped reframe the Magna Carta as a cornerstone of individual property rights, rather than as a medieval text concerned with corporate and sectional interests (see Boyer Reference Boyer2003 and Prest Reference Prest2008).

At different times, both left- and right-leaning groups have laid claim to the document. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Chartist movement in England embraced the Magna Carta as the “palladium of our liberties” (Brand Reference Brand1927, 793). By the middle of the twentieth century, “the cultural development of Magna Carta led to its reification: it ceased to be an active constitutional force and became a symbol characterized by ambiguity, mystery, and nonsense … it became an idol of the ruling class” (Linebaugh Reference Linebaugh2008, 192). The contemporary war on terror and, in particular, the extraordinary claims made on behalf of executive power by Bush administration lawyers, has brought the document into renewed focus for many legal thinkers. The modern specialist literature is substantial, of course, with J. C. Holt's three books (Reference Holt1972, Reference Holt1985, Reference Holt1992) being especially admired by historians and legal scholars. Additional secondary sources include Clanchy (Reference Clanchy1998), Daniell (Reference Daniell2003), Helmholz (Reference Helmholz1999), Howard (Reference Howard1997), Pallister (Reference Pallister1972), and Prestwich (Reference Prestwich1990).

The articles in this symposium tackle a range of compelling themes, from the document's intellectual roots to its impact on contemporary jurisprudence. In his opening piece on the Magna Carta and the status of the Church, Cary Nederman revisits the document's first clause to address the longstanding question of “whether the charter represents a principled defense of human liberty or instead reflects a pragmatic statement of baronial liberties” (457). Elizabeth F. Cohen's contribution explores the implications of the language of the Magna Carta for modern concepts of sovereignty, territory, and citizenship. She finds that “laws based on dates and temporal durations” create “sovereign boundaries as powerful as territorial borders or bloodlines” (463).

The legal historian Bruce O'Brien recovers a “massive collection of older and near contemporary English laws,” the Leges Anglorum, that was compiled shortly before the Magna Carta was set down on paper. As O'Brien notes, the collection includes “long interpolations and spurious codes that enunciated many of the principles that guided the baronial opposition to King John” (467). His article helps show how the Magna Carta is a part of a larger “legal literature of complaint” that stands “at the center of the development of English constitutional thought” (472).

Justin Wert explores the relationship of the Magna Carta to modern legal philosophy, with an emphasis on how “substantive readings of Magna Carta's legem terrae” by English and American scholars have fleshed out the document's libertarian potential (475). While Wert recognizes that the Magna Carta has been the subject of intense historical revisionism, he nevertheless suggests that “our acceptance of less than accurate histories is, at the very least, testament to our normative preference for more capacious notions of personal rights” (477).

Justin Dyer writes about the ways in which the ideas contained in the Magna Carta were incorporated into legal and political debates over slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Did “the protections and privileges associated with Magna Carta” inhere in “Englishmen qua Englishmen” or did the document establish “natural rights owed by virtue of a common humanity” (479)? Could its provisions be more plausibly interpreted as applying to slaves or to the southern states? “In our own day,” Dyer points out, “the task of reinterpreting the meaning and legacy of the Magna Carta continues as we balance the demands of national security with the claims of individual liberty” (482).

Security and freedom are the subject of the symposium's final contribution, Robert Pallitto's piece on the Magna Carta and recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings on detainee rights and the war on terror. Although justices have made a point of referring to the Magna Carta since the country's inception, Pallitto rightly notes that “strong claims of executive power” under recent administrations have underscored the salience of “the history of the writ of habeas corpus” (483).

The inspiration for this symposium was sparked not only by these important recent Supreme Court cases, but also by the publication of Peter Linebaugh's The Magna Carta Manifesto (Reference Linebaugh2008). Linebaugh's text has an aphoristic, polemically charged quality that many political scientists may find disconcerting. It is nevertheless a powerful read. The book's chief virtue is its recovery of the land question. Fierce disputes over royal forests, the role of the sheriffs, and access to common lands sat at the core of the great charter. Rather than exclusively focusing on Article 39 and questions of due process and the rights of the accused, Linebaugh shifts our attention to passages and themes that have been largely overlooked in the secondary literature:

Scholars continue to debate the meaning of the Magna Carta. Its legacy is far from resolved. The aim of this symposium is to invite members of our discipline to reconnect with ongoing conversations regarding the Magna Carta, early English law, and the deep sources of law and politics in the Anglophone world.