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It was Magna Carta that established in England the doctrine of the rule of law administered in fixed courts by learned and independent judges bound to obey the law; and it was Magna Carta that established the greatest of all the English constitutional doctrines, that of the supremacy of the law over every official however high. When the Great Charter was being translated and explained in the cathedrals, churches and monasteries of England, the people fully understood the tremendous significance and value to them, determined as they were to establish a rule of law and put an end to arbitrary decrees, of the famous covenant in chapter forty-five that the king would "appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or bailiffs only such as know the law of the realm and mean to observe it well," and of the covenants in chapter seventeen that the "common pleas shall not follow our court, but shall be held in some fixed place"—in chapter eighteen that the petty assizes should be held in the county court—in chapter thirty-six that the writ of inquisition should be freely "granted, and never denied"—in chapter forty that "to no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice," which in time came to be interpreted as a universal guaranty of free and impartial justice to all classes high and low.