Magna Carta: the liberties of the cities

King John sealed the charter in a meadow at Runnymede on June 15, 1215, after his barons pressed him to accept written limits. Four copies of the 1215 charter survive, two of them in the British Library. Clause thirteen protects the ancient liberties of London and extends the same promise to every other city, borough, town, and port. The English wording here was made by William Sharp McKechnie and printed in 1915.

Where this text comes fromThe clause numbers are not medieval. The 1215 charter was written as continuous Latin with no divisions at all, and the numbering you see here belongs to later editors who cut it into clauses for teaching and citation. The page linked below comes from a book of source problems assembled for history students, which is why the English is smooth and modern rather than literal: it was made to be read by undergraduates, not to reproduce the syntax of the original. Read it as a working translation, not as the charter itself.

What you might not noticeThe clause protects liberties as well by land as by water, putting river trade on the same footing as roads, which is why ports appear in the same list as cities, boroughs and towns. Source

What it trainsThe passage opens with a number, 13 followed by a full stop, which means your very first keystroke is on the number row before your hands have settled into the letter rows. Almost nothing else on this shelf starts that way. After that the difficulty is a list: cities, boroughs, towns, and ports, five commas in 43 words, with the same phrase about liberties and free customs repeated at both ends of the clause. Repetition is where accuracy slips, because the second time through the eye recognizes the shape and stops reading the letters.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource