" and then locked
them all up on the strength of it. If he had, this interpretation of the
word "charter" would have struck the barons with considerable surprise.
I doubt if their narrow mediaeval minds could have taken it in.

The roots of the real England are in the early Middle Ages, and no
Englishman will ever understand his own language (or even his own
conscience) till he understands them. And he will never understand them
till he understands this word "charter." I will attempt in a moment
to state in older, more suitable terms, what a charter was. In modern,
practical, and political terms, it is quite easy to state what a charter
was. A charter was the thing that the railway workers wanted last
Christmas and did not get; and apparently will never get. It is called
in the current jargon "recognition"; the acknowledgment in so many words
by society of the immunities or freedoms of a certain set of men. If
there had been railways in the Middle Ages there would probably have
been a railwaymen's guild; and it would have had a charter from the
King, defining their rights. A charter is the expression of an idea
still true and then almost universal: that authority is necessary
for nothing so much as for the granting of liberties. Like everything
mediaeval, it ramified back to a root in religion; and was a sort of
small copy of the Christian idea of man's creation. Man was free, not
because there was no God, but because it needed a God to set him free.
By authority he was free. By authority the craftsmen of the guilds were
free. Many other great philosophers took and take the other view:
the Lucretian pagans, the Moslem fatalists, the modern monists and
determinists, all roughly confine themselves to saying that God gave
man a law. The mediaeval Christian insisted that God gave man a charter.
Modern feeling may not sympathise with its list of liberties, which
included the liberty to be damned; but that has nothing to do with the
fact that it was a gift of liberties and not of laws. This was mirrored,
however dimly, in the whole system. There was a great deal of gross
inequality; and in other aspects absolute equality was taken
for granted. But the point is that equality and inequality were
ranks—or rights. There were not only things one was forbidden
to do; but things one was forbidden to forbid. A man was not only
definitely responsible, but definitely irresponsible. The holidays of
his soul were immovable feasts.