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After losing most of his French lands to Philip II in 1204, King John spent a decade squeezing the English barons to win them back, turning scutage into a routine tax, setting arbitrary inheritance reliefs and selling verdicts under a rule of vis et voluntas, force and will. His defeat at Bouvines in 1214 sparked revolt, led by Robert FitzWalter, implicated in a 1212 plot to kill the king. The rebels took London and in June 1215 met John at Runnymede, a marshy meadow between Windsor and Staines. Archbishop Stephen Langton turned their demands into a charter protecting church rights, limiting feudal payments and promising justice. Its free men meant barons, knights and merchants, and only three of over 60 clauses touched the peasantry.

Clause 61 created 25 barons empowered to seize the king’s castles and lands if he ignored a breach for 40 days. John, a papal vassal since surrendering his kingdom to Innocent III, appealed to Rome, and the pope annulled the charter as shameful and demeaning, setting off the First Barons’ War and a French prince’s invasion. John died of dysentery in October 1216, and the regents of nine-year-old Henry III reissued it without Clause 61. In 1217 a separate forest charter made it the Great Charter by size. Henry III reissued it in 1225 for a tax, and Edward I made it statute in 1297. In the 17th century Sir Edward Coke recast it as ancient English liberty against the Stuarts, a myth later carried to the American colonies.

• The barons cited Henry I’s Charter of Liberties, issued a century earlier, against John’s taxes.
• A 1660 pamphlet claimed Oliver Cromwell mocked the charter as Magna Farta.
• Charles I tried to suppress discussion of the charter as its myth fed the English Civil War.
• Only three clauses of the 1297 version remain law in England and Wales, including the guarantee of judgment by peers and the law of the land.
• Four 1215 copies survive, two at the British Library and one each at Lincoln Castle and Salisbury Cathedral, added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2009.