The under-tenants were protected against all lawless exactions of their lords in precisely the same terms as these were protected against the lawless exactions of the Crown.  The towns were secured in the enjoyment of their municipal privileges, their freedom from arbitrary taxation, their rights of justice, of common deliberation, of regulation of trade.  “Let the city of London have all its old liberties and its free customs, as well by land as by water.  Besides this, we will and grant that all other cities, and boroughs, and towns, and ports, have all their liberties and free customs.”  The influence of the trading class is seen in two other enactments by which freedom of journeying and trade was secured to foreign merchants, and an uniformity of weights and measures was ordered to be enforced throughout the realm.

[Sidenote:  Innocent annuls the Charter]

There remained only one question, and that the most difficult of all; the question how to secure this order which the Charter established in the actual government of the realm.  It was easy to sweep away the immediate abuses; the hostages were restored to their homes, the foreigners banished by a clause in the Charter from the country.  But it was less easy to provide means for the control of a king whom no man could trust.  By the treaty as settled at Runnymede a council of twenty-five barons were to be chosen from the general body of their order to enforce on John the observance of the Charter, with the right of declaring war on the king should its provisions be infringed, and it was provided that the Charter should not only be published throughout the whole country but sworn to at every hundred-mote and town-mote by order from the king.  “They have given me five-and-twenty over-kings,” cried John in a burst of fury, flinging himself on the floor and gnawing sticks and straw in his impotent rage.  But the rage soon passed into the subtle policy of which he was a master.  After a few days he left Windsor; and lingered for months along the southern shore, waiting for news of the aid he had solicited from Rome and from the Continent.  It was not without definite purpose that he had become the vassal of the Papacy.  While Innocent was dreaming of a vast Christian Empire with the Pope at its head to enforce justice and religion on his under-kings, John believed that the Papal protection would enable him to rule as tyrannically as he would.  The thunders of the Papacy were to be ever at hand for his protection, as the armies of England are at hand to protect the vileness and oppression of a Turkish Sultan or a Nizam of Hyderabad.  His envoys were already at Rome, pleading for a condemnation of the Charter.  The after action of the Papacy shows that Innocent was moved by no hostility to English freedom.  But he was indignant that a matter which might have been brought before his court of appeal as overlord should have been dealt with by armed revolt, and in this crisis both his imperious pride and the legal tendency of his mind swayed him to the side of the king who submitted to his justice.  He annulled the Great Charter by a bull in August, and at the close of the year excommunicated the barons.