Page:Select historical documents of the Middle Ages.djvu/25

Rh obliged to swear once more to this charter of liberties. Thirty-eight distinct confirmations of this kind are recorded.

John succeeded in losing all that kings ave to lose. To France he sacrificed the great fiefs held by the English from the French kings—he had scorned to answer before Philip Augustus for the death of Prince Arthur, and they were confiscated in consequence. Of the church he became the bondsman, laying the independence of England in the hands of a papal legate, and promising a shameful tribute. To the barons he conceded the privileges here translated. They will be seen to place legal restraint on the king in many different ways. The death-knell of absolutism had struck in England.

The demands that the king, as feudal lord, could make on his subjects were distinctly regulated—what aids he might ask, for what purposes, and when and how often. All barriers were levelled which had prevented freemen from obtaining justice in the county and other courts — either in criminal or in civil cases. Fines for petty offences

were not to be inordinate, and clemency in cei'tain cases was guaranteed. The taxes and payments of cities as well as of individuals were established upon a just basis. All in all, as Hallam remarks, "Magna Carta is the foundation stone of English freedom, and all later privileges are little more than a confirmation and commentary upon it."

No. VIII., the Statute of Mortmain, was intended, as Stubbs tells us, to put an end to " the fraudulent bestowal of estates on religious foundations, on the understanding that the donor should hold them as fiefs of the cliurch, and as so exonerated from public burdens. . . The Statute of Mortmain bears a close relation to the statute Quia Emptores, enacted eleven years later, in which