Читать книгу Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John. With an Historical Introduction онлайн

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The results of this inquiry seem then to be completely negative. It is useless to describe phenomena of the thirteenth century in modern phraseology which would have been unintelligible to contemporaries. Medieval lawyers experienced great difficulties in trying to express the actual facts of their day in terms of such categories of the Roman jurisprudence as had survived the fall of Rome and Roman civilization. There is no one of the ancient or modern categories which can be applied with confidence to the Great Charter or to the transaction of which it is the record. Magna Carta may perhaps be described as a treaty or a contract which enacts or proclaims a number of rules and customs as binding in England, and reduces them to writing in the unsuitable form of a feudal charter granted by King John to the freemen of England and their heirs.

ssss1. The quid pro quo received by the King was merely the promise of conditionel homage, dependent (as we learn from chapter 63) on his observance of the conditions of the Charter. This arrangement may be compared with the agreement made between Stephen and the Earl of Gloucester in 1136 (see supra, p. ssss1), and it bears some points of analogy with the procedure adopted by the framers of the Bill of Rights, who inserted a list of conditions in the Act of Parliament which formed the title of William and Mary to the throne of England.