magna carta

The charter King John was forced to seal at Runnymede in 1215 bound the crown to the law: no free man to be imprisoned or dispossessed except by lawful judgment, no taxation without counsel. Reissued and reinterpreted for centuries, it became the ancestral text of due process and limited government, and the Petition of Right of 1628 invoked it against Charles I.

Read with the Petition of Right (1628) in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.