What Happened at Runnymede

Up the River Thames 20 miles from London lies Runnymede, where King John in 1215 fixed his seal to a strip of parchment that Winston Churchill later called "the most famous milestone of our rights and freedom." That document was Magna Carta (Great Charter). Last week scores of bewigged and berobed British judges, in the company of dignitaries of foreign lands, gathered in London to celebrate Magna Carta's 750th birthday. The ceremonies were somber and simple. Australia's Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies reminded the listeners that Magna Carta established that "the law is king." And American Bar Association President Lewis F. Powell Jr. declared that whatever else it may have set out to be, "Magna Carta now stands for many of the cherished rights of free men."

Vitality & Life. Modern historians dismiss most of Magna Carta as something of a relic of 13th century feudalism, and most schoolboys read of it but never in it. Yet the remarkable thing about that venerable document is that it enunciated many of the brilliant first principles that give vitality to the U.S. Constitution and thus life to the law that affects and protects the great and the humble alike.

Chapter 12 of Magna Carta, for example, heralded the principle of "taxation through representation," indirectly inspired the American Revolution by providing that the King should levy no taxes except by "general consent" of the kingdom. Chapters 17 through 19 laid to rest the practice of meting out justice only through the King's traveling court, led to permanently based courts (Common Pleas, King's Bench, Chancery and Exchequer) set up to deal with everything from debts to divorces.

That the punishment should fit the crime was the bedrock principle of Magna Carta's Chapter 20, which declared that "a free man shall be fined only in proportion to the degree of his offense," and required that no fine be so stiff "as to deprive him of his livelihood." Chapters 28 through 31 insisted that no government official might requisition food, troops, horses or carts without immediate payment: this is the seed of the "just compensation" clause in the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Rich & Poor. Of the 63 chapters in Magna Carta, two stand above all others. Said Chapter 40: "To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice." That statement opened the courts to rich and poor alike.

But even if there were no Chapter 40, indeed if Magna Carta contained only a single chapter, its greatness would have been ensured by Chapter 39: "No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land." In that brief statement lies the forerunner of "due process," habeas corpus, trial by jury, the limitation of the powers of government, and many of the other laws and liberties guaranteed to free citizens by the U.S. Constitution today.

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