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Magna Carta
Magna Carta (Latin for "the
Great Charter"), also called Magna Carta Libertatum (Latin for "the Great
Charter of the Liberties"), is a charter agreed by King John of England at
Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. First drafted by
the Archbishop of Canterbury to make peace between the unpopular King and a
group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection
for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and
limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council
of 25 barons. Neither side stood behind their commitments, and the charter was
annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons' War. After John's
death, the regency government of his young son, Henry III, reissued the document
in 1216, stripped of some of its more radical content, in an unsuccessful bid to
build political support for their cause. At the end of the war in 1217, it
formed part of the peace treaty agreed at Lambeth, where the document acquired
the name Magna Carta, to distinguish it from the smaller Charter of the Forest
which was issued at the same time. Short of funds, Henry reissued the charter
again in 1225 in exchange for a grant of new taxes; his son, Edward I, repeated
the exercise in 1297, this time confirming it as part of England's statute law.
The charter became part of English political life and was typically renewed by
each monarch in turn, although as time went by and the fledgling English
Parliament passed new laws, it lost some of its practical significance. At the
end of the 16th century there was an upsurge in interest in Magna Carta. Lawyers
and historians at the time believed that there was an ancient English
constitution, going back to the days of the Anglo-Saxons, that protected
individual English freedoms. They argued that the Norman invasion of 1066 had
overthrown these rights, and that Magna Carta had been a popular attempt to
restore them, making the charter an essential foundation for the contemporary
powers of Parliament and legal principles such as habeas corpus. Although this
historical account was badly flawed, jurists such as Sir Edward Coke used Magna
Carta extensively in the early 17th century, arguing against the divine right of
kings propounded by the Stuart monarchs. Both James I and his son Charles I
attempted to suppress the discussion of Magna Carta, until the issue was
curtailed by the English Civil War of the 1640s and the execution of Charles.
The political myth of Magna Carta and its protection of ancient personal
liberties persisted after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 until well into the
19th century. It influenced the early American colonists in the Thirteen
Colonies and the formation of the American Constitution in 1787, which became
the supreme law of the land in the new republic of the United States. Research
by Victorian historians showed that the original 1215 charter had concerned the
medieval relationship between the monarch and the barons, rather than the rights
of ordinary people, but the charter remained a powerful, iconic document, even
after almost all of its content was repealed from the statute books in the 19th
and 20th centuries. Magna Carta still forms an important symbol of liberty
today, often cited by politicians and campaigners, and is held in great respect
by the British and American legal communities, Lord Denning describing it as
"the greatest constitutional document of all times – the foundation of the
freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot".
In the 21st century, four exemplifications of the original 1215 charter remain
in existence, held by the British Library and the cathedrals of Lincoln and
Salisbury. There are also a handful of the subsequent charters in public and
private ownership, including copies of the 1297 charter in both the United
States and Australia. The original charters were written on parchment sheets
using quill pens, in heavily abbreviated medieval Latin, which was the
convention for legal documents at that time. Each was sealed with the royal
great seal (made of beeswax and resin sealing wax): very few of the seals have
survived. Although scholars refer to the 63 numbered "clauses" of Magna Carta,
this is a modern system of numbering, introduced by Sir William Blackstone in
1759; the original charter formed a single, long unbroken text. The four
original 1215 charters were displayed together at the British Library for one
day, 3 February 2015, to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta.
Magna Carta was given its name in Latin, a language which has no direct,
consistent correlate of the English definite article "the". As a result, the
usual academic convention is to refer to the document in English without the
article as "Magna Carta" rather than "the Magna Carta". Nonetheless, "the
Magna Carta" is frequently used in both academic and non-academic speech.
Especially in the past, the document has also been referred to as "Magna
Charta", but the pronunciation was the same. "Magna Charta" is still an
acceptable variant spelling recorded in many dictionaries due to continued use
in some reputable sources. From the 13th to the 17th centuries, only the
spelling "Magna Carta" was used. The spelling "Magna Charta" began to be used in
the 18th century but never became more common despite also being used by some
reputable writers.
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Magna Carta English Translation
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