lation, it did in effect accomplish both, because, in insisting upon the just discharge of special feudal relations, it affirmed a principle of equity which was found generally applicable far beyond them; that it turned into a tangible possession what before was fleeting and undetermined ; and that, throughout the centuries which succeeded, it was violated by all our kings and appealed to by every struggling section of our countrymen.

To very many of its provisions no reference needs to be made, beyond the mention that they redressed grievances of the military tenants, hardly intelligible since the downfall of the system of feuds, but then very severely felt. Reliefs were limited to a certain sum, as fixed by ancient precedent; the waste committed, and the unreasonable services exacted, by guardians in chivalry, were restrained; the disparagement in matrimony of female wards was forbidden; and widows were secured from compulsory marriage and other wrongs. Its remedies on these points were extended not to the vassals only, but to the sub-vassals of the Crown. At the same time the franchises, the ancient liberties and free customs, of the City of London, and of all towns and boroughs, were declared to be inviolable. Freedom of commerce was also guaranteed to foreign merchants, with a proviso to the King to arrest them for security in time of war, and keep them until the treatment of our own merchants in the enemy's country should be known. The tyranny exercised in connection with the Royal Forests was effectively controlled; and a remedy was applied to that double grievance of expense and delay, long bitterly felt, to which private individuals were subjected when prosecuting suits in the King's court, by the necessity of following the King in his perpetual progresses. "Common Pleas shall not follow our court," said this memorable provision of Magna Charta, "but shall be "held in some certain place."

As striking a provision had relation to the levy of aids and scutages, and this, which was not in the articles first submitted to the King, appears to have originated during

the four days' conference at Runnymede. The frequency of foreign expeditions had given a very onerous character to these aids; always liable to be farmed out with peculiar circumstances of hardship, and lately become of nearly annual recurrence. But the provision in question now limited the exaction of them to the three acknowledged legal occasions—the King's personal captivity, the knighthood of his eldest son, and the marriage of his eldest daughter; and in case aid or scutage should be required on any other grounds, it rendered necessary the previous consent of the great council of the tenants of the crown. It proceeded to enumerate the constituent parts of this council, as to consist of archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons, who should be summoned personally by writ; and of all other tenants in chief of the crown, who should be summoned generally by the sheriff; and it ordered the issue of summons forty days beforehand, with specification of time and place, and intended subject of discussion. Nor did anything in the Charter, notwithstanding the careful limitation of the article to royal tenants and to purposes of supply, prove so hateful to succeeding princes as this latter stipulation. It was soon formally expunged, and was never formally restored; yet in its place arose silently other and larger privileges, such as no one was found daring enough in later years to violate openly.

Upon many smaller though very salutary provisions which, relating to the better administration of justice, to the stricter regulation of assize, to mitigation of the rights of pre-emption possessed by the Crown, and to the allowance of liberty of travel to every freeman excepting in time of war, took a comparatively narrow and local range, it is not necessary to dwell. I proceed to name those grander provisions which proved applicable to all places and times, and were found to hold within them the germ of our greatest constitutional liberties.

These were the clauses which protected the personal liberty and property of all freemen, by founding accessible securities against arbitrary imprisonment and arbitrary

spoliation. "We will not sell, we will not refuse, we will "not defer, right or justice to any one," was the simple and noble protest against a custom never thenceforward to be practised without secret crime or open shame. In the same great spirit, the thirty-ninth clause, beginning with that rude latinity of nullus liber homo which Lord Chatham thought worth all the Classics, stipulated that no freeman should be arrested or imprisoned, or disseised of his land, or outlawed, or destroyed in any manner; nor should the King go upon him, nor send upon him, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. And a supplementary clause, not less worthy, provided that earls and barons should be amerced by their peers only, and according to the nature of their offence; that freemen should not be amerced heavily for a small fault, but after the manner of the default, nor above measure for a great transgression; and that such amerciaments-saving always to the freeholder his freehold, to the merchant his merchandise, and to a villein his implements of husbandry-should be imposed by the oath of the good men of the neighbourhood. It was at the same time provided that every liberty and custom which the King had granted to his tenants, as far as concerned him, should be observed by the clergy and laity towards their tenants, as far as concerned them; thus extending the relief generally, as before remarked, to the sub-vassals as well as vassals, but restricting it still to the freeman.

Manifest as were such omissions in the Charter, however, and limited as the bearing seemed to be even of its greatest remedial clauses, these did not avail against its mighty and resistless effect through the succeeding centuries. Its framers might have paused, could they wholly have foreseen or known what it involved; and that under words intended only to be applicable to the relations of feudal power, lay concealed the most extended truths of a just and equitable polity. By the very right they claimed to deny protection to serfs, the bonds of serfdom were for ever broken. By the authority

they assumed of protesting against the power of taxation in a prince, they forfeited the power of taxation in a like case which they believed they had reserved to themselves. They could not assert a principle, and restrict its operation and consequences. They could not insist upon regular meetings of the great council with the purpose of controlling the King, and prevent the ultimate admission into it of forms of popular election which were most effectually to control the Nobility. If required to convey by a single phrase the truth embodied in the Great Charter, it might be simply and sufficiently expressed as resistance to irresponsible tyranny; and this substantially is the same, under the jerkin of the peasant and under the coat of mail of the baron. In all the struggles of freedom, therefore, which filled the centuries after Runnymede, it played the most conspicuous part; and from the solid vantage ground it established, each fresh advance was always made. Never, at any new effort, were its watchwords absent, or its provisions vainly appealed to; although, when old Sir Edward Coke arose to speak in the third parliament of James I, the necessity had arisen no less than thirty-two times to have them solemnly reaffirmed and re-established. Thirty-two several times had they then been deliberately violated by profligate ministers and faithless kings.

Already twice had this wrong been suffered in the reign succeeding John's, when, six years after the Regent Pembroke's death, and while the person of the young King was under the guardianship of a Poitevin bishop, Peter des Roches, formerly a tool of John's, there was summoned the earliest Great Council which bore the ominous name of Parliament. The Court's urgent necessities had called it together: but upon the demand for a subsidy, fresh violations of the Charter were made broadly the ground for refusing it; and it was only at length conceded, in the shape of a fifteenth of all movables, upon receipt of guarantees for a more strict observance of the Charter, and with the condition that the money so raised should be placed in the treasury and none of it

taken out before the King was of age, unless for the defence of the realm, and in the presence of six bishops and six earls. As far as I am aware, this is the first example of parliamentary control brought face to face with the royal prerogative, and the transaction contained in the germ whatever has been worthiest of a free people in our history.

Indirectly may be traced to it, among other incidents very notable, that proclamation from Henry III, summoning his people to take part with him against the barons and great lords, which was one of the most memorable of the precedents unrolled by Sir Robert Cotton and Sir Edward Coke when the struggle with the Stuarts began. It was then late in the reign; but Henry was only seeking to better the instruction received in his nonage from appeals exactly similar addressed to the people by the barons, while their conflict still continued with Peter des Roches. The wily Poitevin, galled by the conditions attached to the subsidy, precipitated the young King into further disputes; in the course of which, offices of trust were gradually taken from the English barons and filled by foreigners brought over into England. The men of old family, wedded now to the land of their fathers as jealously as the Saxon had been, saw themselves displaced for the French jester, tool, or pander; and these so-called Norman chiefs turned for sympathy and help to a people no longer exclusively either Norman or Saxon, but united inseparably on their English soil.

Historians have been very reluctant to admit so early an intrusion of the popular element into the government of the Plantagenets; and it is still the custom to treat of this particular reign as a mere struggle for the predominance of aristocracy or monarchy. But beneath the surface, the other and more momentous power is visible enough, as it heaves and stirs the outward agencies and signs of authority; and what might else have been a paltry struggle, easily terminable, for court favour or military predominance, was by this converted into a war of principles, awful and irreconcileable, which ran its