Existing comment:
Interpreting the Rule of Law
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, English lawyers and scholars of the law began to take a new interest in Magna Carta. As a result of historical research by sixteenth-century humanists, a new picture of the English legal tradition emerged that cast Magna Carta as an affirmation of principles of individual liberty that were recognized and upheld in England from earliest antiquity.
This interpretation of Magna Carta led prominent lawyers of the seventeenth century, such as Sir Edward Coke and John Selden, to give Magna Carta a special status among the statutes that were created in medieval England. Other statutes could be repealed, but Magna Carta was permanent because it enshrined the original liberties that the English people held against the powers of the state. In the legal contests surrounding the conflict between the House of Commons and King Charles I (reigned 1625–1649), the opposition to the crown advanced this reading of Magna Carta to support their demand to limit the king's prerogative. Their efforts quickly gave rise to a decades-long constitutional challenge to the throne, which concluded in civil war and the execution of King Charles I. Even though by the mid-seventeenth century a new generation of historians was already casting doubt on the historical accuracy of this reading of the document, the idea of Magna Carta as a charter of individual freedoms became a reality with lasting political impact. |