Word: charta
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This onslaught left the House of Lords gaping and gasping. "I had nothing to do with drafting the obnoxious clause," bleated the Master of the Rolls, Baron Hanworth of Hanworth, onetime High Steward of Stratford-on-Avon and President of the Magna Charta Society...
...jailed, his lawyer gets a piece of paper from a judge and shows it to the police who are then bound to yield their prisoner for a hearing before a magistrate on the charges and evidence' against the prisoner, or straightway release him. Long before the Magna Charta (1215) Anglo-Saxons wrested from king and barons the freeman's right to that piece of paper. It was, and is, called a writ of habeas corpus ("you may have the body"). It is issued on the theory that a man is innocent until the state has proved him guilty...
This is, on the whole, quite a serviceable theory, but it omits the rather vital fact that Magna Charta was signed in 1215. It is perhaps not fair to the English to accuse them of such blindness. But for them the man and the charter do seem anomalous companions...
...necked, barons rumbling down to the waters of Runnymede to defend their rights and the right. All unconscious of the fact that they were transforming English history, interested only in the problems of the day, they confronted the greatest tyrant the nation has ever known and snarled out Magna Charta. The significance of 1215 can be found in Kipling's "The Reeds of Runnymede" which the Vagabond would like to suggest as a comfortable method of absorbing history. Because he knows the lassitude of the mind, he will quote four lines from it which contain the spirit of the document...
...bulls of Alexander VI, on which, as its magna charta, Spain founded its right, all the regions which had been, or should be discovered, were bestowed as a free gift upon Ferdinand and Isabella. They, and their successors, were uniformly held to.be the universal proprietors of the vast territories acquired by conquest in the new world. * * * It was an opinion, perhaps as ancient as trie crusades, that the pope, as the head of the church on earth, had competent authority to dispose of all countries inhabited by heathen nations, in favor of Christian potentates * * * This high power being accorded...