Reissues of 1216, 1217, and 1225

King John died on October 18/19, 1216, while Louis of France (afterward Louis VIII), supported by rebellious English barons, was trying to gain control of England. One of the first acts of the council of John’s young successor, Henry III, was to reissue the Magna Carta on November 12 in the hope of recalling men to their allegiance to the rightful king. The charter of 1216 was considerably shorter than its predecessor—42 clauses versus 63 in the 1215 document—as the council had omitted clauses dealing with purely temporary and political matters as well as those that might limit its own power to raise money or forces to carry on the war. The church, while keeping a general promise of freedom, lost its specific guarantee of free election to office. Even in that moment of danger, the council did not forget one main purpose of the charter: to provide a definitive statement of feudal law. It tried to address points in doubt, such as specific matters of inheritance law and the precise year at which an heir should attain his majority (age 21). Instead of the “form of security,” the council stated that all omissions were postponed for future consideration. They were never replaced.

When the charter was reissued for the second time, in the autumn of 1217, the council had reconsidered it clause by clause. They made further verbal changes for the sake of clarity and accuracy. They modified the promise of assize justices’ visiting every shire four times a year to the more-practical suggestion of an annual visit. More difficult cases would be heard by the bench judges. A widow’s rights in issues of inheritance were more clearly set out. The vexed question of scutage, omitted altogether in 1216, was in 1217 glossed over by a promise to revert to the practice of Henry II. That the council in 1217 still wished to make the charter an authoritative statement of English law and practice is shown by the inclusion of three new clauses, each dealing with a question of the day: the possibility of a land owner’s giving away so much of his holdings that he could not perform his service to his lord from the remainder (clause 39); the conduct of the shire court and view of frankpledge, a mutual responsibility to keep the peace (clause 42); and a first attempt at mortmain legislation (clause 43). Section VII of the 1215 document was set aside in favour of a separate forest charter that dealt with the use and scope of royal land holdings. That attempt at compartmentalization demonstrates that the council was beginning to realize that a full statement of the law on a single important subject could not be compressed into a general charter of liberties, no matter how long that charter might be.

In 1223 Pope Honorius III declared that Henry III was of age to make valid grants, and the young king reissued the Magna Carta two years later. That version reflected only minor changes from the 1217 document, and it seems probable that the council had concluded that maintaining the charter as an evolving code of law was impracticable.

Historical significance of the Magna Carta

By the time of the 1225 reissue, the Magna Carta had become more than a sober statement of the common law; it was a symbol in the battle against oppression. It had been read so many times in shire courts throughout the land that memorable phrases would be invoked in later documents, and whenever liberty seemed in danger, men spoke of the charter as their defense. The influence of the Magna Carta in England—and, later, in its colonies—had come not from the detailed expression of the feudal relationship between lord and subject but from the more-general clauses in which every generation could see its own protection. In England the Petition of Right in 1628 and the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 looked directly back to clause 39 of the 1215 charter, which read:

No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimised, neither will we attack him or send anyone to attack him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

Indeed, this passage would serve as the foundational expression of the concept of due process in Anglo-American jurisprudence. In the 17th century, when England’s North American colonies were shaping their own fundamental laws, the words of the Magna Carta were worked into them. The basic rights embodied in the Constitution of the United States of America (1789) and the Bill of Rights (1791) echo the charter, and the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) can trace its ancestry to the Magna Carta as well.

The essential virtue of the Magna Carta, which has made it comparable in historical importance to the Twelve Tables of ancient Rome, lies not in any individual clause or group of clauses but in the solemn circumstances of its first granting and the comprehensive nature of that grant. Thus, the Magna Carta that is commonly remembered is the Magna Carta of King John, and the date that always has been commemorated as its granting is 1215. That many clauses were omitted from the charter as it finally appeared on the statute rolls and that new ones had been inserted and some original clauses redrafted have made no difference in the collective memory of this venerable document. Nevertheless, in trying to estimate the influence of the charter on constitutional development in England and elsewhere, it should be borne in mind that, while the drama has never faded from the field of Runnymede, the actual phrases studied by those who fought oppression in 17th-century England or 18th-century America came immediately from the 1217 charter.

Surviving copies of the Magna Carta

There still exist four original copies of the charter of 1215, two of them held by the cathedral churches in which they were originally deposited—Lincoln and Salisbury—and the other two in the British Library. The Lincoln charter was considered the most nearly perfect and was reproduced in the Statutes of the Realm in 1810. Lincoln also possesses the forest charter of 1225. Durham Cathedral holds the 1216, 1217, and 1225 versions of the Magna Carta as well as the forest charters of 1217 and 1225. The Wiltshire copy of the 1225 charter was deposited at Lacock Abbey and survives. The four extant “originals” of the 1215 Magna Carta were assembled in one place for the first time in February 2015 as part of a British Library commemoration of the 800th anniversary of the charter’s issue.