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First and foremost among the cardinal principles of Magna Carta was the idea, then beginning again to germinate throughout Europe, that the individual has natural rights as against the government, and that those rights ought to be secured to him by fundamental laws which should be unalterable by king or council. No one can study the history of European politics during the great constructive thirteenth century without being impressed by the fact of the revival of this conception in men's minds, not only in England, but on the Continent, where it manifested itself in varying forms and in different connections. I say revival, because the same conviction had prevailed hundreds of years before in both Greece and Rome; but it had been lost for centuries.

The idea that the fundamental laws of the land—the pious and good old laws of Alfred and of Edward, as the English called them, or les lois fondamentales, as the French were then calling them—were unalterable and that any governmental regulation, or edict, or statute to the contrary should be treated as void and null, is plainly enunciated in the first chapter of Magna Carta, where King John grants to the freemen of the kingdom "all the underwritten liberties, to be had and held by them and their heirs, of us and our heirs forever," and in chapter sixty-one, where the king covenants that he "shall procure nothing from any one, directly or indirectly, whereby any part of these concessions and liberties might be revoked or diminished; and if any such thing has been procured, let it be void and null." It is certain that during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the theory generally prevailed in England that the concessions and liberties of the Great Charter had been granted forever and were unalterable by the king, or even by parliament. Thus, we find parliament enacting in 1369, with the consent of Edward III., that the Great Charter of Liberties should be "holden and kept in all points, and if any statute be made to the contrary, that shall be holden for none."