tenants in demesne, had passed unquestioned.  Some impositions, that especially on the export of wool, affected all the king’s subjects.  It was now the moment to enfranchise the people and give that security to private property which Magna Charta had given to personal liberty.”  Edward’s statute binds the king never to take any of these “aids, tasks, and prises” in future, save by the common assent of the realm.  Hence, as Bowen remarks, the Confirmation of the Charters, or an abstract of it under the form of a supposed statute de tallagio non concedendo (see Stubbs, p. 487), was more frequently cited than any other enactment by the parliamentary leaders who resisted the encroachments of Charles I. The original of the Confirmatio Chartarum, which is in Norman French, is still in existence, though considerably shriveled by the fire which damaged so many of the Cottonian manuscripts in 1731.

THE GRANT OF THE GREAT CHARTER.

An island in the Thames between Staines and Windsor had been chosen as the place of conference:  the King encamped on one bank, while the barons—­covered the marshy flat, still known by the name of Runnymede, on the other.  Their delegates met in the island between them, but the negotiations were a mere cloak to cover John’s purpose of unconditional submission.  The Great Charter was discussed, agreed to, and signed in a single day.  One copy of it still remains in the British Museum, injured by age and fire, but with the royal seal still hanging from the brown, shrivelled parchment.  It is impossible to gaze without reverence on the earliest monument of English freedom which we can see with our own eyes and touch with our own hands, the great Charter to which from age to age patriots have looked back as the basis of English liberty.  But in itself the Charter was no novelty, nor did it claim to establish any new constitutional principles.  The Charter of Henry the First formed the basis of the whole, and the additions to it are for the most part formal recognitions of the judicial and administrative changes introduced by Henry the Second.  But the vague expressions of the older charters were now exchanged for precise and elaborate provisions.  The bonds of unwritten custom which the older grants did little more than recognize had proved too weak to hold the Angevins; and the baronage now threw them aside for the restraints of written law.  It is in this way that the Great Charter marks the transition from the age of traditional rights, preserved in the nation’s memory and officially declared by the Primate, to the age of written legislation, of Parliaments and Statutes, which was soon to come.  The Church had shown its power of self-defence in the struggle over the interdict, and the clause which recognized its rights alone retained the older and general form.  But all vagueness ceases when the Charter passes on to deal with the rights of Englishmen at large, their right to justice,