3 C. Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and the Great Charter

• Magna Carta (1215) — Runnymede: King John (lost wars, taxed barons, quarrelled with church) forced by the rebel barons to seal the Great Charter (63 clauses):• the money clauses (12): no scutage or aid "but by the common counsel of the realm" — taxation by consent's ancestor;• clause 39: no free man arrested, imprisoned, dispossessed… "except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land" — due process's fountainhead;• clause 40: "To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice" — the rule-of-law sentence itself;• the committee of 25 barons to enforce — the first sanction machinery against a king;• its afterlife: reconfirmed (the 1217/1225 versions; the companion Charter of the Forest — the "lesser" Great Charter of common woods), mythologised by Coke against the Stuarts, ancestor of every bill of rights — and read into Nepal's constitutional fabric via the global due- process lineage.• The Petition of Right (1628) — Parliament against Charles I: no forced loans or taxes without parliament; no imprisonment without cause (habeas corpus fortified — the Act of 1679 making the writ effective); no billeting of soldiers; no martial-law commissions — the second great "liberty statute," pairing Magna Carta (the syllabus's trio completed by "the Great Charter" = Magna Carta itself…