developed till long after 1215; there was still no national, but only
class taxation; and the great council, which was to give its assent to
royal demands for money, represented nobody but the tenants-in-chief of
whom it was composed. All that the barons meant by this clause was that
they, as feudal tenants-in-chief, were not to pay more than the
ordinary feudal dues. But they left to the king, and they reserved to
themselves, the right to tallage their villeins as arbitrarily as they
pleased; and even where they seem to be protecting the villeins, they
are only preventing the king from levying such judicial fines from
their villeins as would make it impossible for those villeins to render
their services to the lords. It was to be no affair of the king or
nation if a lord exacted the uttermost farthing from his own chattels;
legally, the villeins, who were the bulk of the nation, remained after
Magna Carta, as before, in the position of a man's ox or horse to-day,
except that there was no law for the prevention of cruelty to animals.
Finally, the provision that no one was to be arrested until he had been
convicted would, if carried out, have made impossible the
administration of justice.

On the other hand, the provisions for the fixing of the court of common
pleas at Westminster, for standard weights and measures, for the
administration of law by men acquainted with English customs, and some
others were wholesome reforms. The first clause, guaranteeing that the
church should be free from royal (not papal) encroachments, was sound
enough when John was king, and the general restraint of his authority,
even in the interests of the barons, was not an unmixed evil. But it is
as absurd to think that John conceded modern liberty when he granted
the charter of medieval liberties, as to think that he permitted some
one to found a new religion when he licensed him to endow a new
religious house (_novam religionem_); and to regard Magna Carta as