IN 1215 England’s King John was in trouble. He had spent heavily on a failed attempt to regain bits of France; the French were threatening to invade; rebellious barons, whom he had been fleecing to finance his wars, were marching against him. He had no choice but to sue for peace with the rebels; the peace treaty, sealed at Runnymede on the Thames on June 15th, was called the Magna Carta. Since the barons had the upper hand, its main thrust was to protect their rights against monarchical abuse. It did not, as some suppose, spawn democracy (which only started to emerge even in embryonic form rather later) or trial by jury (which was already in use). But its chapter 39 (29 in subsequent versions) asserted the right to due process of law—“no free man shall be seized or imprisoned...except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land”—for which it has been revered ever since.
