The Magna Carta was created during the reign of King John I.
The Magna Carta is a letter granted by John I of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on June 15, 1215. First drafted by the archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, to make peace between the English monarch, with ample unpopularity, and a group of rebellious barons, promised the protection of ecclesiastical rights, the protection of barons from illegal imprisonment, access to immediate justice, and limitations on feudal fees to the Crown, which would be implemented through a council of twenty-five barons. None of the sides complied with their commitments and the letter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, which led to the first Barons War. After the death of John I, the government of regency of the young Henry III returned to promulgate the document in 1216 - although stripped of some of its more radical clauses -, in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain political support for its cause. At the end of the war in 1217, the letter was part of the peace treaty agreed upon at Lambeth, where it became known as the "Magna Carta" to distinguish it from the small Forest Charter issued at the same time. Before the lack of funds, Henry III decreed again the letter in 1225 in exchange for a concession of new taxes. His son Edward I repeated the sanction in 1297, this time confirming it as part of the statutory right of England.
The document became part of the English political life and was usually renewed by the monarch on duty, although over time the newly created English Parliament passed new laws, so the letter lost some of its practical significance. At the end of the sixteenth century there was a growing interest in the Magna Carta. The lawyers and historians of the time thought that existed an old English constitution, traced back to the days of the Anglo-Saxons, that it protected the individual freedoms of the English. They argued that the Norman invasion of 1066 had suppressed these rights; according to them, the Magna Carta was a popular attempt to restore them, which made it an essential basis for the contemporary powers of Parliament and legal principles such as habeas corpus. Although this historical account had its flaws, jurists like Edward Coke used the Magna Carta a lot in the early seventeenth century to object to the divine right of kings, proposed by the Stuarts from the throne. Both Jacob I and his son Charles I tried to prohibit the discussion of the Magna Carta, until the English Revolution of the 1640s and the execution of Charles I restricted the issue.
