By Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The nobility’s long-smoldering resentments against royal overreach was at a boiling point in 1215, when Henry II’s second successor—his youngest son, John—was forced to affix his seal to Magna Carta, ‘the great charter’ of liberties. And, in its longest provision, it established a new kind of grand jury empowered to hold the king himself to account.
Magna Carta, the Charter
Among other landmarks, the Magna Carta institutionalized the right to a trial by jury and established the principle of habeas corpus in Article 39:
No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or deprived or property or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimized … except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
Magna Carta also acknowledged that the monarch’s legitimacy depended on his careful appointment of officeholders in Article 45:
We will not make justices, constables, sheriffs, or bailiffs unless they are men that know the law of the land and mean to observe it well.
The elected body of 25 barons, which would meet regularly “in parliament”, for deliberation, was empowered “to observe, hold, and cause to be observed, the peace and liberties which we have conceded to them”. That’s the royal we. Note the careful language; by “conceding” to these demands, John was careful not to set himself below the law; and yet the very liberties he had granted to his own subjects, both the barons and “the whole community of the country,” gave them the right “to distress and injure us [the king] in every way that they can … saving our person and that of our queen, and the persons of our children”. Once the king had made restitution, “let them devote themselves to us as they did before”.
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Justifying Rebellion against the Monarch
Clearly, Magna Carta, therefore, justified armed rebellion against the monarch if he did not uphold his side of the bargain, and this enabled the Barons’ Revolt of the 1260s and the period of civil unrest known as the Wars of the Roses during much of the 15th century.
More fundamentally, though, Magna Carta proclaimed that England was a kingdom ruled by law, which could not be arbitrarily enacted or ignored by the king. And this was something of which the king needed to be reminded, constantly. In 1278, for example, Edward I opened an inquest known as quo warranto, which empowered royal justices to demand “by what warrant” any of his barons held their lands; and if they did not have a good warrant, their lands would immediately be seized.
Edward was betting that most of England’s barons did not have documentary proof of the land bestowed on their ancestors by his ancestor William the Conqueror, since he was now defining a “good warrant” as a type of document that had not existed back in 1066.
The threat of seizure was a way to ensure that all those summoned would appear in court to defend their rights, whereupon Edward’s legal team would be able to verify or dismiss whatever proofs they had.
John de Warenne
But this plan backfired when one of the first magnates to appear in the king’s court was John de Warenne, the earl of Surrey. Earl Warenne was a formidable warrior and an old companion of King Edward’s; he had even joined the younger Edward in rebellion against his own father during the previous decade.
But when asked by the king’s justiciars what warrant he held, he produced in their midst a sword, ancient and corroded with rust, and said, “Here, my lords, here is my warrant. For my ancestors came with William the Bastard and these lands were conquered by the sword, and by the sword I will defend them from anyone wanting to occupy them. For the king didn’t overcome and subdue this land by himself: our forefathers were with him, aiding and abetting.”
If Edward’s aim had been to reestablish the extent of royal lands lost during his grandfather John’s reign, he now found himself bested by his dynasty’s indebtedness to the descendants of those men who had fought at Hastings in 1066. In the 1290s, Edward I accordingly reissued Magna Carta under his own name.
The Rule of Law
The Oxford English Dictionary notes that first use of the phrase “the rule of law” in English is attributed to a certain John Blount, a justice for the peace (another medieval English office) from Staffordshire who became a high sheriff and member of parliament. Around the year 1500, Blunt wrote that, “Lawes And constitutcions be ordeyned be cause the noysome Appetit of man maye be kepte vnder the Rewle of lawe by the wiche mankinde ys dewly enformed to lyue honestly.”
A generation or so later, a student reading law at the Middle Temple in London, one William Bavand, wrote that, “A Magistrate should kepe rekenyng of all mennes behauiours, and to be carefull, least thei despisyng the rule of lawe, growe to a wilfulnes.”
In neither case was the reigning monarch held to be subject to this rule, and yet the principle of its utmost importance to a peaceful society, was clearly well established.
Common Questions about Magna Carta
The Magna Carta institutionalized the right to a trial by jury and established the principle of habeas corpus.
Magna Carta justified armed rebellion against the monarch if he did not uphold his side of the bargain, and this enabled the Barons’ Revolt of the 1260s and the period of civil unrest known as the Wars of the Roses during much of the 15th century.
John de Warenne, the Earl of Surrey, was a formidable warrior and an old companion of King Edward’s; he had even joined the younger Edward in rebellion against his own father during the previous decade.
