Copies of it were made and sent for preservation to the cathedrals and churches, and one copy may still be seen in the British Museum, injured by age and fire, but with the royal seal still hanging from the brown, shrivelled parchment.  It is impossible to gaze without reverence on the earliest monument of English freedom which we can see with our own eyes and touch with our own hands, the great Charter to which from age to age men have looked back as the groundwork of English liberty.  But in itself the Charter was no novelty, nor did it claim to establish any new constitutional principles.  The Charter of Henry the First formed the basis of the whole, and the additions to it are for the most part formal recognitions of the judicial and administrative changes introduced by Henry the Second.  What was new in it was its origin.  In form, like the Charter on which it was based, it was nothing but a royal grant.  In actual fact it was a treaty between the whole English people and its king.  In it England found itself for the first time since the Conquest a nation bound together by common national interests, by a common national sympathy.  In words which almost close the Charter, the “community of the whole land” is recognized as the great body from which the restraining power of the baronage takes its validity.  There is no distinction of blood or class, of Norman or not Norman, of noble or not noble.  All are recognized as Englishmen, the rights of all are owned as English rights.  Bishops and nobles claimed and secured at Runnymede the rights not of baron and churchman only but those of freeholder and merchant, of townsman and villein.  The provisions against wrong and extortion which the barons drew up as against the king for themselves they drew up as against themselves for their tenants.  Based too as it professed to be on Henry’s Charter it was far from being a mere copy of what had gone before.  The vague expressions of the old Charter were now exchanged for precise and elaborate provisions.  The bonds of unwritten custom which the older grant did little more than recognize had proved too weak to hold the Angevins; and the baronage set them aside for the restraints of written and defined law.  It is in this way that the Great Charter marks the transition from the age of traditional rights, preserved in the nation’s memory and officially declared by the Primate, to the age of written legislation, of Parliaments and Statutes, which was to come.

Its opening indeed is in general terms.  The Church had shown its power of self-defence in the struggle over the interdict, and the clause which recognized its rights alone retained the older and general form.  But all vagueness ceases when the Charter passes on to deal with the rights of Englishmen at large, their right to justice, to security of person and property, to good government.  “No freeman,” ran a memorable article that lies at the base of our whole judicial system, “shall be seized or imprisoned,