There were other provisions made in the Great Charter that went deeper than the feudal tenure, and affected the whole body of the civil government.  A great part of the king’s revenue then consisted in the fines and amercements which were imposed in his courts.  A fine was paid there for liberty to commence or to conclude a suit.  The punishment of offences by fine was discretionary; and this discretionary power had been very much abused.  But by Magna Charta, things were so ordered, that a delinquent might be punished, but not ruined, by a fine or amercement; because the degree of his offence, and the rank he held, were to be taken into consideration.  His freehold, his merchandise, and those instruments by which he obtained his livelihood were made sacred from such impositions.

A more grand reform was made with regard to the administration of justice.  The kings in those days seldom resided long in one place, and their courts followed their persons.  This erratic justice must have been productive of infinite inconvenience to the litigants.  It was now provided that civil suits, called Common Pleas, should be fixed to some certain place.  Thus one branch of jurisdiction was separated from the king’s court, and detached from his person.  They had not yet come to that maturity of jurisprudence as to think this might be made to extend to criminal law also, and that the latter was an object of still greater importance.  But even the former may be considered as a great revolution.  A tribunal, a creature of mere law, independent of personal power, was established; and this separation of a king’s authority from his person was a matter of vast consequence towards introducing ideas of freedom, and confirming the sacredness and majesty of laws.

But the grand article, and that which cemented all the parts of the fabric of liberty, was this,—­that “no freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or disseized, or outlawed, or banished, or in any wise destroyed, but by judgment of his peers.”

There is another article of nearly as much consequence as the former, considering the state of the nation at that time, by which it is provided that the barons shall grant to their tenants the same liberties which they had stipulated for themselves.  This prevented the kingdom from degenerating into the worst imaginable government, a feudal aristocracy.  The English barons were not in the condition of those great princes who had made the French monarchy so low in the preceding century, or like those who reduced the Imperial power to a name.  They had been brought to moderate bounds, by the policy of the first and second Henrys, and were not in a condition to set up for petty sovereigns by an usurpation equally detrimental to the crown and the people.  They were able to act only in confederacy; and this common cause made it necessary to consult the common good, and to study popularity by the equity of their proceedings.  This was a very happy circumstance to the growing liberty.