source of error lies in the change which is always insensibly, but
sometimes completely, transforming the meaning of words. Generally the
change has been from the concrete to the abstract, because in their
earlier stages of education men find it very difficult to grasp
anything which is not concrete. The word "liberty" affords a good
illustration: in 1215 a "liberty" was the possession by a definite
person or group of persons of very definite and tangible privileges,
such as having a court of your own with its perquisites, or exemption
from the duties of attending the public courts of the shire or hundred,
of rendering the services or of paying the dues to which the majority
were liable. The value of a "liberty" was that through its enjoyment
you were not as other men; the barons would have eared little for
liberties which they had to share with the common herd. To them liberty
meant privilege and monopoly; it was not a general right to be enjoyed
in common. Now Magna Carta is a charter not of "liberty," but of
"liberties"; it guaranteed to each section of the coalition those
special privileges which Henry II and his sons had threatened or taken
away. Some of these liberties were dangerous obstacles to the common
welfare--for instance the "liberty" of every lord of the manor to try
all suits relating to property and possession in his own manorial
court, or to be punished by his fellow-barons instead of by the judges
of the king's court. This was what the barons meant by their famous
demand in Magna Carta that every man should be judged by his peers;
they insisted that the royal judges were not their peers, but only
servants of the crown, and their demands in these respects were
reactionary proposals which might have been fatal to liberty as we
conceive it.

Nor is there anything about trial by jury or "no taxation without
representation" in Magna Carta. What we mean by "trial by jury" was not