onal principles. The Charter of Henry the First formed the
basis of the whole, and the additions to it are for the most part formal
recognitions of the judicial and administrative changes introduced by
Henry the Second. What was new in it was its origin. In form, like the
Charter on which it was based, it was nothing but a royal grant. In
actual fact it was a treaty between the whole English people and its
king. In it England found itself for the first time since the Conquest a
nation bound together by common national interests, by a common national
sympathy. In words which almost close the Charter, the "community of the
whole land" is recognized as the great body from which the restraining
power of the baronage takes its validity. There is no distinction of
blood or class, of Norman or not Norman, of noble or not noble. All are
recognized as Englishmen, the rights of all are owned as English rights.
Bishops and nobles claimed and secured at Runnymede the rights not of
baron and churchman only but those of freeholder and merchant, of
townsman and villein. The provisions against wrong and extortion which
the barons drew up as against the king for themselves they drew up as
against themselves for their tenants. Based too as it professed to be on
Henry's Charter it was far from being a mere copy of what had gone
before. The vague expressions of the old Charter were now exchanged for
precise and elaborate provisions. The bonds of unwritten custom which the
older grant did little more than recognize had proved too weak to hold
the Angevins; and the baronage set them aside for the restraints of
written and defined law. It is in this way that the Great Charter marks
the transition from the age of traditional rights, preserved in the
nation's memory and officially declared by the Primate, to the age of
written legislation, of Parliaments and Statutes, which was to come.

Its opening indeed is in general terms. The Church had shown its power of
self-defence in the struggle over the interdict, and the clause which
recognized its rights alone retained the older and general form. But all
vagueness ceases when the Charter passes on to deal with the rights of
Englishmen at large, their right to justice, to security of person and
property, to good government. "No freeman," ran a memorable article that
lies at the base of our whole judicial system, "shall be seized or
imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or in any way brought to rui