This Little Britain: How One Small Country Changed the Modern World. Harry Bingham

      This particular charter seemed doomed from the start. John himself had only ever used the document as a kind of stalling tactic. His aim, still, was to repudiate the charter and slaughter the rebels. The rebels too hardly treated the treaty as sacrosanct, reneging instantly on their agreement to hand over London. For both sides, Magna Carta was a diversion from the real business, which would have to be settled at sword point. Sure enough, less than three months after Magna Carta, king and barons were at war again. The charter seemed to be dead and buried.

      It was nothing of the sort. The same realpolitik that had created the treaty in the first place brought it back from the dead. In 1216, a French army was on English soil, chasing John northwards through the country. The French seemed certain to succeed, but then John did the most brilliant thing of his career so far: he died. His son was speedily proclaimed Henry III, and the regency council reissued Magna Carta in order to rally support. The reissue may have been little more than a PR stunt, but if so it was one with stunning results. Backing for the French invaders flooded away. The French were forced to go back home. England had been spared a second conquest.

      For all this cynicism, the charter nevertheless remained about more than realpolitik and effective PR. No other medieval charter, in England or elsewhere, had ever contained such sweeping freedoms for the ordinary man. The very document had been addressed not only to nobles, in the manner of most such charters, but to all free men. Here in Article 1 comes the ringing statement from a king to his people:

      …We have also granted to all the free men of Our realm, for Ourselves and Our heirs forever, all the liberties written below, to have and to hold by them and their heirs from Us and Our heirs.

      It’s hard to know quite why the men negotiating Magna Carta had chosen to include such language. The rebel barons didn’t care a fig about the liberties of the man on the Clapham horse-and-cart. Most of the liberties mentioned had little enough to do with him anyway. But some did, two in particular. Articles 39 and 40 run as follows:

      39: No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised [unlawfully dispossessed of land or property] or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.

      40: To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.

      At the time, these clauses meant less than now appears. For one thing, they applied to free men only, and many Englishmen were villeins bound to the manor and therefore not technically free. Furthermore, the two clauses initially had less significance than they came to accrue. Article 39 was not intended to guarantee trial by jury—it just came to mean that. Article 40 was not meant to prevent indefinite imprisonment without trial—but it too came to mean that. One of the most striking things about the agreement is precisely how it came to take on a deeper significance with every passing century.

      Arguably, though, the most startling innovation of Magna Carta lies in the largely forgotten Article 61. Almost the last article in the whole agreement, this clause set up a panel of twenty-five barons who would, in effect, supervise the king’s adherence to the agreement. If the king was found to fail then:

      …those five-and-twenty barons shall, together with the community of the whole land, distrain and distress us in all possible ways, namely, by seizing our castles, lands, possessions, and in any other way they can, until redress has been obtained as they deem fit, saving harmless our own person, and the persons of our queen and children;…

      In the political climate of the age, this proposal was simply nuts: a recipe for civil war. But, in the most dramatic way conceivable, it drove home the fact that the king was subject to the law. His ‘castles, lands, possessions’ were at stake if he broke the rules. This was a shockingly novel position. Under Roman law—the emerging law of continental Europe—the king was the rule-maker. It was no more possible for a king to bind himself than it was for the sun to scorch itself. In England, by contrast, the law was the law of the land, the common law, the semi-mythical law of Edward the Confessor and his Saxon predecessors. If the law had been there for centuries before the king and would be there for centuries after, then how could the king possibly claim a greater place? Clause 61 was dropped from every subsequent reissue of the agreement, but its spirit persisted and grew.

      Virtually all modern states today either practice the rule of law or pretend that they do. It’s perhaps the most revered political ideal in the world, more elemental than representative democracy, almost as ancient an ideal as political thought itself. But while the ancient Greeks may have originated the theory, the actual, effective practice was to come very much later. If you’re looking for the practical, rather than theoretical, origin of the rule of law, then there you have it, in Article 61 of Magna Carta. For the first time in the post-Roman world, a king had become a subject in his own kingdom, servant to the law and the ‘community of the whole land’. It was an example that first England, then the rest of the world, would come to respect and emulate; a Runnymede acorn whose roots now cover the globe.