He is not to levy any more land-taxes without calling his Great Council of all the great landowners (barons and others), and asking their consent. He is not to exact higher payments of rent or of other customary dues than earlier kings did. He is to pay his debts to his creditors. His courts of justice shall sit regularly, as those of Henry II and Richard had sat; and they shall sit in a fixed place instead of rambling over England and France in the train of the King. [This ‘fixed place’ came to be Westminster.] All free men shall be entitled to a fair trial, and shall not be deprived of their land without a fair trial. The great abuses of the game laws shall be abolished.
And so on. No doubt to many of the barons of this year, 1215, it was their own grievances of which they were thinking most—the grinding taxes, the loss of their Norman lands, their cruelly murdered Kinsfolk. But in order to get these grievances redressed they were obliged to ask also for the redress of the grievances from which other classes were suffering; even ‘villeins’ are carefully protected by one of the articles of the Charter; even to the hated Scots and Welsh ‘Justice’ is to be done. To the Church much more than justice is to be done; it is to be ‘made free’, which, I fear, means that the Kings are not to appoint its bishops. But later Kings always found a way of avoiding this restriction.
The Reeds of Runnymede.
Runnymede, June 15, 1210.
What say the reeds at Runnymede?
The lissom reeds that give and take,
That bend so far, but never break,
They keep the sleepy Thames awake
With tales of John at Runnymede.
