Happy Birthday, Magna Carta!
I'm one of its admirers.
Yes, I'm aware it's written in Medieval Latin, a language I happen never to have read.
A few excerpts translated into some form of English suffices for me.
I get the point, that some fifty or so landed barons got fed up with wicked King John taking them and their land whenever he wished and they had no recourse to law or trial by their peers, other barons.
Reminds me of the Italian client I represented who shot his neighbor five times, paralyzing him.
"What kind of jury do you want?" I happened to ask while discussing the upcoming trial.
I want them all to come from "Lucca dentra," he reported, not only from his native city of Lucca, but from within the surrounding walls. The real thing, in other words, not some suburban wannabe Lucchese.
We all want our friends on the jury, or at least our fellow neighbors, townsmen, and community members, religious, political, social, employment, partisan, etc., to be our judges, if we have to be judged in the first place.
So, the barons wanted other barons and made their wish into a right by including it in the same list as opening the fishing weirs on the Thames and the Medway, but not on the coast. You could look it up.
So basically, the barons presented their list of demands on the wicked king who reneged first chance he got.
No matter that the great charger died aborning.
It's the thought that counts.
Later, over the subsequent 800 years, anyone who needed authority for basic fairness could point to the principles suggested by the words to support the new claim.
So Magna Carta is so useful for that. It has become our magic token for fairness and equal protection of law, which can be summarized as due process of law, "the law of the land."
There have been any number of articles on the significance of the document, a copy of which recently sold for over $20 million to a rich guy and has been placed on loan to the National Archives.