Magna Carta failed within months, and its fame is partly a myth
King John sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215 to make peace with rebel barons. Neither side kept its promises, the Pope annulled the charter, and civil war followed. Its later reputation as an ancient charter of liberty for everyone was largely built centuries afterwards.
John had lost most of his family's French lands to Philip II in 1204, taxed his barons heavily to win them back, and failed at Bouvines in 1214. Returning home humiliated, he faced barons in the north and east who swore to stand fast for the liberty of church and realm and demanded he confirm Henry I's old Charter of Liberties. Archbishop Stephen Langton mediated at Runnymede, a meadow on neutral ground between royal Windsor and the rebel camp at Staines, turning the Articles of the Barons into a charter over about ten days.
The text protected church rights, guarded against unlawful imprisonment, promised swift justice and, above all, limited the king's feudal levies, requiring baronial consent for some taxes. Historian David Carpenter observed that it wasted no time on political theory. Its boldest part, later called clause 61, created a council of 25 barons empowered to seize royal castles and lands if John ignored a complaint for 40 days. Historian Wilfred Warren judged that clause crude and almost certain to cause war.
After John died, his young son's regents reissued a toned-down version in 1216, and in 1217 it gained the name Magna Carta to set it apart from the smaller Charter of the Forest. Henry III reissued it again in 1225 in return for new taxes, and Edward I made it statute law in 1297. Similar charters existed elsewhere, so it was far from unique.
Its legend grew in the late sixteenth century, when lawyers imagined an ancient Anglo-Saxon constitution crushed in 1066 and restored by the charter. Sir Edward Coke wielded it against the divine right of kings, and James I and Charles I tried to suppress the debate. Victorian historians showed it concerned barons, not ordinary subjects, yet Lord Denning in 1956 still called it the greatest constitutional document of all time.
Source: Magna Carta
