Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 72

MODERN AGE

has some sixty paragraphs of demands under
the common law. Today's secularists may be
surprised to reflect upon the circumstance
that the principal organizer of the Run-
nymede confrontation and certainly the
main author of the document was Stephen
Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury.
Besides being a man of action, he was a great
scholar who had participated in Paris in the
editing of a uniform edition of the Bible. To
Langton has been attributed the numbering
of the verses of the Bible, an innovation that
facilitated the study of scripture; with the
later advent of printing, numbered verses
made the Bible accessible to any layperson.
To one man, Bishop Langton, goes the credit
of putting a firm foundation on the two
sources of English law, Magna Carta and the
Holy Bible.
In 1628 Parliament was in dispute with
Charles I, who was attempting to levy taxes
and fight wars without the assent of that
body. The Speaker of the House was Sir
Edward Coke, the foremost jurist of his
time. Coke composed a document in the
usual form that was formally entitled the
Petition of Right. It sought the restoration
of the ancient rights, drawing upon tradition
and reaffirming Magna Carta. The petition
restored habeas corpus, rejected unapproved
taxes, and blocked the quartering of troops
in private houses.
The execution of Charles I in 1649 led to
forty years of monarchial instability. Parlia-
ment and Cromwell blocked the accession
to the British throne of the late king's son
Charles II, who had been proclaimed by
the Scottish Parliament as king of Scotland.
Charles II fled to France, but the monarch
was restored nine years later when Cromwell,
and his dictatorship, died. The Restoration
led to a period of harmony and prosper-
ity, but the death of Charles II brought his
brother, James, to the throne. Unfortunately,
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FALL 2014

the Catholicism of James brought him into
conflict with the powerful Protestant Whig
aristocracy. James II was eventually deposed
and sent into exile.
The tug-of-war between Parliament and
the monarchy led Parliament to seek guar-
antees of parliamentary supremacy before
the monarchy next was offered to William
of Orange and his wife, Mary. William was
acceptable because he was a Protestant, but
he was also the grandson of the executed
Charles I. Mary, as daughter of James II,
was the next in the line of succession, but
of course James had been deposed and
sent into exile. Therefore both were tainted
with memories of monarchial struggle and
upheaval.
In 1688 William of Orange and Mary
were invited to take the throne but only after
Parliament had obtained their consent to a
document known as the Bill of Rights. It
completed the subordination of the monarch
to Parliament and repeated the language of
Coke's 1628 Petition of Right. In 1689 Par-
liament also passed the Act of Habeas Cor-
pus to expand and strengthen the rights of
due process for the individual and to protect
against false imprisonment.
These five charters-the Charter of Lib-
erties, Magna Carta, the Petition of Right,
the Bill of Rights, and the Act of Habeas
Corpus-are considered to be the unwritten
constitution of British law. They embody
a doctrine of "the rights of Englishmen,"
which protect the individual from oppres-
sion by the state and its apparatus. They
emerged not by edict but through adversarial
struggle.
Since the common law as applied in the
courts was never a product of academic
speculation, it was never taught in the uni-
versities. Finding the right precedents to
put in briefs submitted to the court was a
practical matter of searching through past
Modern Age - Fall 2014

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