The document commonly called the Magna Carta bears the full title Magna Carta Libertatum, which is Medieval Latin meaning “the Great Charter of the Liberties”.  We tend to think of it as a single entity, but it is in fact the product of several iterations over a period of nearly a hundred years.  The first Magna Carta was drafted in 1215 by the Archbishop of Canterbury to make peace between the unpopular King John and the land-owning barons throughout the Kingdom.  It consisted of a long unbroken text in heavily abbreviated Latin that was later broken into 63 numbered clauses by Sir William Blackstone in 1759. The King met with a council of 25 barons on June 15, 1215 at Runnymede, near Windsor, to review and sign the agreement, which provided for the protection of church rights, protection of the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift process of justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown. Both sides soon failed to honor the agreement, and the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, prompting the First Baron’s War. King John died in 1216, and the regency government of his son, Henry III, issued a revised document in 1216 stripped of its more radical elements in an unsuccessful attempt to build political support. Nevertheless, the document formed part of the peace treaty at Lambeth that ended the First Baron’s War in 1217 and acquired the name Magna Carta at that time to distinguish it from the smaller Charter of the Forest, issued at the same time. Henry reissued the charter in 1225 as part of a deal for a grant of new taxes.  His son, Edward I, did the same in 1297, at which time it was confirmed as part of England’s statute law. Thereafter it was renewed by each succeeding monarch.

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