What is Magna Carta and how did it come to be?
This is not as easy a question to answer as one might expect, for while the Charter was originally issued by King John on the field of Runnymede near Windsor Castle in June 1215—serving as a sort of treaty to end an uprising that the barons and their allies had clearly won—the text that subsequently became authoritative was the reissue a decade later by his successor, Henry III; and this in turn achieved its full authority by being confirmed in a statute of Parliament in 1297. The 1215 version contained sixty-three chapters (what we would call articles or paragraphs). Several of these were split off a few years later to form a separate Charter of the Forest, and a number of the others merely made provision for John’s remitting fines “imposed by us unjustly and contrary to the law of the land” (ch. 55) or otherwise settled specific grievances with his subjects (and the Welsh and Scots), so that the 1225 Charter of Liberties included only thirty-seven chapters as worthy of being held “in
