Magna Carta

"Neither we nor our officials will seize any land or rent in payment of a debt, so long as the debtor has movable goods sufficient to discharge the debt."

"No man shall be forced to perform more service for a knight's 'fee', or other free holding of land, than is due from it."

"For a trivial offence, a free man shall be fined only in proportion to the degree of his offence, and for a serious offence correspondingly, but not so heavily as to deprive him of his livelihood."

"No constable or other royal official shall take corn or other movable goods from any man without immediate payment, unless the seller voluntarily offers postponement of this."

"No sheriff, royal official, or other person shall take horses or carts for transport from any free man, without his consent."

"In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it."

"No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way harmed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him, except by the legal judgement of his peers or by the law of the land."

"To none will we sell, to none deny or delay, right or justice."

"All merchants may enter or leave England unharmed and without fear, and may stay or travel within it, by land or water, for purposes of trade, free from all illegal exactions, in accordance with ancient and lawful customs. This, however, does not apply in time of war to merchants from a country that is at war with us. Any such merchants found in our country at the outbreak of war shall be detained without injury to their persons or property, until we or our chief justice have discovered how our own merchants are being treated in the country at war with us. If our own merchants are safe they shall be safe too."

"To any man whom we have deprived or dispossessed of lands, castles, liberties, or rights, without the lawful judgement of his equals, we will at once restore these."

"It is accordingly our wish and command that the English Church shall be free, and that men in our kingdom shall have and keep all these liberties, rights, and concessions, well and peaceably in their fulness and entirety for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all things and all places for ever."

"[T]he Charter was demanded by those who complained of the irregular and arbitrary violence of King John, and the restrictions it imposed upon the Crown's action became the corner stone of English freedom. Its provisions, never repealed, though varied and to some extent amplified in subsequent instruments similarly extorted from subsequent monarchs, were solemnly reasserted in the famous declaration by Parliament in 1628 which we call the Petition of Right, and were finally re-enacted in the Bill of Rights of 1689. Thus the Charter of 1215 was the starting-point of the constitutional history of the English race, the first link in a long chain of constitutional instruments which have moulded men's minds and held together free governments not only in England but wherever the English race has gone and the English tongue is spoken."

"Magna Charta is such a fellow, that he will have no sovereign."

"The Great Charter dealt with grievances of the time in a practical way. It gave legal redress for the wrongs of a feudal age. But it was expressed in language which has had its impact on future generations. It put into words the spirit of individual liberty which has influenced our people ever since."

"When the colonists crossed the seas from England to countries the world over, they took with them the principles set down in the Great Charter. Those who went to Virginia took its very words. When they renounced their allegiance in 1776, they stated in the Declaration of Rights that "no man be deprived of his liberty, except by the law of the land or the judgment of his peers". Thence the provisions of the Charter found their place in the Constitution of the United States. There it is revered as much as here."

"The Great Charter was a concession, not a gift, as John proved when he cancelled it (with papal help), but it was restored early in Henry III's reign and remained as a foundational charter of liberties and rights available to an ever-increasing part of the nation as growing wealth and growing law swept in layers of society well below the ranks that had first promoted it. The real significance of that famous confrontation at Runnymede where John surrendered to the pressures of barons and prelates could not be long evaded: it put an end to the despotic potential within Anglo-Norman kingship, anchored the principle of co-operation, and instituted a relationship between king and baronage marked by a mutual and watchful supiciousness which endured for the rest of the Middle Ages."

"At Runnymede, at Runnymede, Oh hear the reeds at Runnymede:— You mustn't sell, delay, deny, A freeman's right or liberty, It wakes the stubborn Englishry, We saw 'em roused at Runnymede!"

"And still when mob or monarch lays Too rude a hand on English ways, The whisper wakes, the shudder plays, Across the reeds at Runnymede. And Thames, that knows the moods of kings, And crowds and priests and suchlike things, Rolls deep and dreadful as he brings Their warning down from Runnymede!"

"No Statute whatever (eodem modo constituitur) is ordained by so great Authority as that which Magna Charta has at length acquired, by the express confirmation, from time to time, of so many different Kings and Parliaments: The wisdom of ages has made it venerable, and stamped it with an authority equal to the Constitution itself, of which it is, in reality, a most essential and fundamental part; so that any attempt to repeal it would be treason to the state!"

"A great deal has been written about the Charter and the last word has not yet been said. No single state document has had more influence on the course of history and its influence is even now not spent. It is the forerunner of the great constructive statutes of the thirteenth century, the first detailed review of necessary reforms. It points the way to the new age, to a kingship controlled not by fear of revolt but by acceptance of the restraint of law. To John it seemed that in making such promises he made himself a slave, and indeed the Charter marks the first long step towards the constitutional kingship of a far later day. No medieval king was ever allowed to forget that his predecessor had granted the Charter to his subjects. Every king in turn confirmed it until the days when the middle ages ended in confusion and an autocrat was needed to re-order the land."

"The Great Charter is the first great public act of the nation, after it has realised its own identity: the consummation of the work for which unconsciously kings, prelates, and lawyers have been labouring for a century. There is not a word in it that recalls the distinctions of race and blood, or that maintains the differences of English and Norman law. It is in one view the summing up of a period of national life, in another the starting-point of a new, not less eventful, period than that which it closes."

"[T]he whole of the constitutional history of England is little more than a commentary on Magna Carta."

"Several clauses in Magna Carta give expression to the spirit of individual liberty, as it has ever since been understood in England. And the constant repetition of these brave words in centuries to come, by persons who were ignorant of the technical meaning they bore to the men who first wrote them down, helped powerfully to form the national character."

"The Charter was regarded as important because it assigned definite and practical remedies to temporary evils. There was very little that was abstract in its terms, less even than later generations supposed. Yet it was the abstract and general character of the event at Runnymede that made it a great influence in history. A King had been brought to order, not by a posse of reactionary feudalists, but by the community of the land under baronial leadership; a tyrant had been subjected to the laws which hitherto it had been his private privilege to administer and to modify at will. A process had begun which was to end in putting the power of the Crown into the hands of the community at large."

"[W]hen, under James I, Prince and people again began to take up opposing ground, Magna Carta came quickly back into more than its old splendour. The antiquarians and lawyers who asserted our Parliamentary liberties in the age of Coke and Selden, saw looming through the mists of time the gigantic figure of Magna Carta as the goddess of English freedom. Their misinterpretations of the clauses were as useful to liberty then as they are amazing to mediævalists now. Under the banner of Runnymede the battle of Parliament and the Common Law was fought and won against the Stuarts."

"America revolted in its name and seeks spiritual fellowship with us in its memory."