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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2015
This article examines the influence of the Magna Carta on the development of rights and liberties in the Anglo-American common law tradition, especially in the seventeenth century. Originally issued by King John of England in 1215, the Magna Carta set forth numerous prototypical rights and liberties that helped to shape subsequent legal developments in England, America, and the broader Commonwealth. The Magna Carta served as an inspiration for seventeenth-century English jurists, like Sir Edward Coke, and Puritan pamphleteers, like John Lilburne, who advocated sweeping new rights reforms on the strength of the charter. It also inspired more directly the new bills of rights and liberties of several American colonies, most notably the expansive 1641 Body of Liberties of Massachusetts crafted by Nathaniel Ward, which anticipated many of the constitutional rights formulations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America.
1 See sources and discussion in Charles A. Donahue, “Ius in Roman Law,” in John Witte, Jr. and Frank S. Alexander, eds., Christianity and Human Rights: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 64–80; Max Kaser, Ius Gentium (Cologne: Böhlau, 1993); Kaser, Ausgewählte Schriften, 2 vols. (Naples: Jovene, 1976–1977); Tony Honoré, Ulpian: Pioneer of Human Rights, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
2 Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997); A. S. Brett, Liberty, Right, and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); R. W. Davis, ed., The Origins of Modern Freedom in the West (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Michel Villey, La formation de la pensée juridique moderne: Cours d'histoire de la philosophie du droit, 1961–1966 (Paris: Montchrestien, 1968); Villey, Le droit et les droits de l'homme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1983); Villey, Leçons d'histoire de la philosophie du droit, new ed. (Paris: Dalloz, 1977).
3 C. Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950); Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Annabel Brett and James Tully, eds., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
4 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
5 R. H. Helmholz, “Magna Carta and the Law of Nations,” in Magna Carta, Religion, and the Rule of Law, eds. Robin Griffith-Jones and Mark Hill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 70–80; Helmholz, , “Magna Carta and the Ius Commune,” University of Chicago Law Review 66, no. 2 (1999): 297–371CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 See J. C. Holt, Magna Carta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); Anne Pallister, Magna Carta: The Heritage of Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
7 In Randy J. Holland, ed., Magna Carta: Muse and Mentor (Eagan, MN: Thomson Reuters, 2014), 243; cf. article 52, in ibid., 244. See also A. E. Dick Howard, Magna Carta: Text and Commentary (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1964).
8 See 28 Edward III, chapter 3 (1354), which renders this provision: “no man shall … be put out from land or tenement or arrested, imprisoned, or disinherited, or put to death without being brought to answer by due process of law.” On the various applications of this provision before the seventeenth century, see John Baker, “The Legal Force and Effect of Magna Carta,” in Holland, Magna Carta: Muse and Mentor, 65–84. On the development of parallel rights in this same period, see Thomas J. McSweeney, “The Right to Jury Trial and Magna Carta,” in ibid., 139–58; Justin Wert, “Habeas Corpus and Magna Carta,” in ibid., 159–80.
9 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765; repr. Buffalo, NY: Hein, 1992), vol. 1, chapter 1.
10 See John H. Baker, Selected Readings and Commentaries on Magna Carta 1400–1604 (London: Selden Society, 2015).
11 John H. Baker, “Magna Carta and Personal Liberty,” in Griffith-Jones and Hill, eds., Magna Carta, 81–108.
12 For earlier treatments, especially around the 750th anniversary of the Magna Carta, see Maurice Ashley, Magna Carta in the Seventeenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1965); Herbert Butterfield, Magna Carta in the Historiography of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Reading: University of Reading, 1969); Faith Thompson, Magna Carta: Its Role in the Making of the English Constitution, 1300–1629 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948). See also the cautionary tale about rights talk told by James Hutson, Forgotten Features of the Founding Era: The Recovery of Religious Themes in the Early American Republic (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 73–110.
13 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1972).
14 See Catalogue of the Thomason Tracts in the British Museum (London, 1906); Charles R. Gillett, ed., Catalogue of the McAlpin Collection of British History and Theology, vol. 5, Index (New York: Union Theological Seminary, 1930). See samples in William Haller, Tracts in the Puritan Revolution, 1638–1647, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934); Don M. Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution: 1638–1647 (New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1944); Arthur S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–9), 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). Throughout this article, I have modernized the spelling of quotations from earlier English sources but have retained the original spelling of the titles. See discussion in William Haller, Liberty and the Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955); George Yule, Independents in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1958); Henry N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961); George P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1959), and analysis of more recent scholarship in David Wootton, “Leveller Democracy and the Puritan Revolution,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, eds. James H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 412–42.
15 Magna Carta, articles 1 and 63, in Holland, Magna Carta, 239, 247.
16 In Joyce Lee Malcolm, ed., The Struggle for Sovereignty: Seventeenth-Century Political Tracts (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999), 2:536.
17 See Haller, Tracts, 1:102–07, 111–13, 177–78, 182; 2:170ff; 3:263–65, 305, 311–15, 365–66; Malcolm, Struggle for Sovereignty, 2:502–04, 535–42.
18 In Pauline Gregg, Free-Born John: A Biography of John Lilburne (1971; repr. London: Phoenix Press, 2000), 120–22, 129, 149.
19 In Hubert Lister Parker, Magna Carta and the Rule of Law: An Address by Lord Parker of Waddington, Jamestown, Virginia, June 15, 1965 (Richmond, VA: Magna Carta Commission of Virginia, 1965), 9.
20 See especially Coke's colloquies with Francis Bacon, discussed in Ashley, Magna Carta, 8–17.
21 In Steve Sheppard, ed., The Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2003), 3:1285. But cf. Robert C. Johnson et al., eds., Commons Debates, 1628 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 3:494–95, which renders Coke's quote as “Magna Carta is such a fellow that he will have no saving.”
22 In Sheppard, Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke, 2:745–914. Coke's approach to Magna Carta is analyzed in Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution, vol. 2, The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 214–16, 238–45, 257–60, 263–69; Doris M. Parsons Stenton, After Runnymede: Magna Carta in the Middle Ages (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1965).
23 Carl Stephenson and F. G. Marcham, eds., Sources of English Constitutional History from ad 600 to the Present (New York: Harper Bros., 1937), 450–53.
24 Haller, Tracts, 3:313–15.
25 Ibid.
26 In Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes, 400–10; see also with prototypes in ibid., 223–34, 291–303.
27 Ibid., 410.
28 Ibid., 139, 317.
29 Ibid., 300.
30 Ibid., 122–23, 139, 300–01.
31 Ibid., 195, 329.
32 John Milton, Areopagitica and Other Political Writings of John Milton, ed. John Avis (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999).
33 See detailed sources and discussion in Witte, John Jr., “Prophets, Priests, and Kings: John Milton and the Reformation of Rights and Liberties in England,” Emory Law Journal 57, no. 6 (2008): 1527–604Google Scholar.
34 Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes, 139–40, 406–08.
35 Ibid., 268–70, 288–89.
36 In Haller, Tracts, 1:113.
37 See sources in John Witte, Jr., The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 217–20; John Witte, Jr., Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
38 See detailed sources and discussion in Witte, The Reformation of Rights, 209–75.
39 See detailed sources and discussion in ibid., 124–34, 181–96, 288–318.
40 See, e.g., Christopher Goodman, How Superior Powers Ought to Be Obeyd, ed. Charles H. McIlwain (1558; repr. New York: Published for the Facsimile Text Society by Columbia University Press, 1931).
41 In Areopagitica and Other Political Writings, 58–59, 63; see, more generally, ibid., 98–313.
42 In Stephenson and Marcham, Sources of English Constitutional History, 557–59.
43 Ibid., 599–608.
44 See detailed discussion in A. E. Dick Howard, The Road from Runnymede: Magna Carta and Constitutionalism in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1968), 14–34; Anthony Pagden, “Law, Colonization, Legitimation, and the European Background,” in The Cambridge History of Law in America, ed. Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlin, vol. 1, Early America (1580–1815) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–31.
45 Charter of Massachusetts Bay (1629), in Francis Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America, ed. Francis N. Thorpe, vol. 3, Kentucky–Massachusetts (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909), 1856–57; see additional examples in Howard, Road from Runnymede, 14–22. On the importance of these constitutional constraints in the American colonial charters, see Mary Sarah Bilder, The TransAtlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
46 Plantation Agreement of Providence (1640) and Charter of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (1663), in Thorpe, The Federal and State Constitutions, vol. 6, Porto Rico–Vermont, 3205–06, 3211–13. See further discussion in John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Religious Liberty (New York: Viking, 2012).
47 William H. Browne, ed., Archives of Maryland, vol. 1, Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly of Maryland, January 1637/8–September 1664 ([1883]; repr. Baltimore, MD: Maryland Historical Society, 1965), 82–83; see discussion in Howard, Road from Runnymede, 53–65.
48 In Browne, Archives, 1:244, 246.
49 In J. T. Mitchell and J. Flanders, eds., Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania (1911), 1:107–09; see further Andrew R. Murphy, ed., The Political Writings of William Penn, (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2002); Murphy, Andrew R., “The Emergence of William Penn, 1668–1671,” Journal of Church and State 57, no. 2 (2015): 333–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50 J. William Frost, A Perfect Freedom: Religious Liberty in Pennsylvania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
51 William Penn and William Bradford, The Excellent Priviledge of Liberty & Property, Being the Birth-Right of Free-Born Subjects of England (1687; repr. Philadelphia: The Philobiblon Club, 1897); also reprinted in part in Howard, Road from Runnymede, 412–25, and discussed in ibid., 78–95.
52 On these different local colonial instruments, see Donald S. Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).
53 John Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal: History of New England, 1630–1649, ed. J. K. Hosmer (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1908), 1:151.
54 See Witte, The Reformation of Rights, chapters 1–4.
55 On Ward, see Jean Béranger, Nathaniel Ward (ca. 1578–1652) (Bordeaux: Société Bordelaise de Diffusion de Travaux des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, 1969); Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 217–43.
56 Nathaniel Ward [Theodore de la Guard], The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America [1646/7], ed. Paul M. Zall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), 46. The Body of Liberties is reprinted in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Puritan Political Ideas: 1558–1794 (1965; repr. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003), 177–202.
57 Ibid., 178–79.
58 Ibid., 179.
59 Ibid., 182–89.
60 Ibid., 183–86.
61 Ibid., 180–82.
62 Ibid., 194–97.
63 Ibid., 190–96.
64 Ibid., 199–201.
65 Ibid., 190.
66 In Massachusetts, many provisions of the Body of Liberties were echoed—and some qualified—in The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts Bay: Reprinted from the Copy of the 1648 Edition in the Henry E. Huntington Library, ed. Max Farrand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929). For other documents and discussion, see W. Keith Kavenagh, ed., Foundations of Colonial America: A Documentary History, 3 vols. (New York: Chelsea House, 1973); Donald S. Lutz, ed., Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998).
67 See detailed sources and discussion in David Little, “Differences over the Foundation of Law in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century America,” in Griffith-Jones and Hill, Magna Carta, 136–56; Witte, John Jr., “‘A Most Mild and Equitable Establishment of Religion’: John Adams and the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution,” Journal of Church and State 41, no. 2 (1999): 213–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
68 Ward, Simple Cobler, 40–61. In 1646, in fact, the Massachusetts Bay Authorities drew up a list of the “parallels” between English and colonial laws, arguing that the Body of Liberties “is framed according to the charter, and the fundamental and common laws of England … beginning with Magna Carta.” The document is set out in the appendix to Howard, Road from Runnymede, 401–11.
69 See “John Winthrop's Discourse on Arbitrary Government” [1644], in Winthrop Papers, vol. 4, 1638–1644 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1944), 468–88; see also materials analyzed in Francis C. Gray, Remarks on the Early Laws of Massachusetts Bay (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1843), 7, 11, 16.
70 Body of Liberties, in Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas, 202.
71 See David Novak, Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); John Witte, Jr. and Eliza Ellison, eds., Covenant Marriage in Comparative Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005).
72 See analysis of this theory in John Witte, Jr., God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006), 143–68.
73 See detailed discussion of this in Robin Griffith-Jones, “Magna Carta and Religion: For the Honor of God and the Reform of Our Realm,” in Holland, Magna Carta, 47–64, at 48.
74 Magna Carta, preamble, in Holland, Magna Carta, 239.
75 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd. ed., s.v. “right”; Alfred Kiralfky, “Law and Right in English Legal History,” in La formazione storica de diritto moderno in Europa (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1977), 3:1069–86.
76 Magna Carta, arts. 12, 18, 33, 37 in Holland, Magna Carta, 241–44.
