"Magna Charta" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... filthy as he pleases, and with whatever amount of virgin gold he sees fit to encumber himself, and no one has any right at all to hinder and detain him in this procedure. I formulated that at last to myself, and repeated it over as a sort of private Magna Charta of ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... barons of England, supported and guided by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, had commenced against him the struggle which was to be ended some years afterwards by the forced concession of Magna Charta, that foundation-stone of English liberties. John, having been embroiled for five years past with the court of Rome, affected to defy the excommunication which the pope had hurled at him, and of which the King of France had been asked by several prelates of the English Church to insure the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... colonies on the great point, which afterwards separated them, made its appearance. The legislature of Massachusetts, employed in establishing a code of laws under their new charter, passed an act containing the general principles respecting the liberty of the subject, that are asserted in magna charta, in which was the memorable clause, "no aid, tax, talliage, assessment, custom, benevolence, or imposition whatsoever, shall be laid, assessed, imposed, or levied, on any of his majesty's subjects or their estates, on any pretence whatsoever, but by the act and consent ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... more have battled. A little because he pleads so eloquently, and loves me as no other mortal man did, or ever will; and oh! Charley, a great deal because he is Sir Victor Catheron of Catheron Royals, with a rent-roll of twenty thousand a year, and more, and a name that is older than Magna Charta. If there be any virtue in truth, there—you have it, plain, unvarnished. I like him—who could help it; but love him—no!" She clasped her hands above her head, and gazed dreamily out at the sparkling ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... administration were rather more severe than ever. "The proceedings of the Council were assailed by argument, eloquence, and satire, in prose and verse, in squib and essay. One number, issued just after James Franklin's release, was nearly filled with passages from 'Magna Charta,' and comments upon the same, showing the unconstitutionality of the treatment to which he had been subjected. It is evident that a considerable number of the people of Boston most heartily sympathized with the Courant in its gallant ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... their Magna Charta and Bill of Rights, and that of Americans for their national Constitution, seem weak in comparison with the intense gratitude and reverence of the Five Nations for the "Great Peace" which Hiawatha and his ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... look at his nuts. Of the latter commodity he had always a grim little heap, on which lay a little wooden measure which had no discernible inside, and was considered to represent the penn'orth appointed by Magna Charta. Whether from too much east wind or no—it was an easterly corner—the stall, the stock, and the keeper, were all as dry as the Desert. Wegg was a knotty man, and a close-grained, with a face carved out of very hard material, that had just as much play of expression as a watchman's rattle. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... law of Congress not made in pursuance of, or in unison with the Constitution, is an illegal and void law." Coke declared an Act of Parliament against Magna Charta was null ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... stratum of society, although some of those standing for the lower strata were suitably disguised. The peerage was well represented, so was Judah; there were women entitled to wear coronets dancing with men entitled to wear the broad arrow, and men whose forefathers had signed Magna Charta dancing with chorus girls from ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... that of Magna Charta. You will see that Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and indeed all the great men who follow him, to Blackstone,[84] are industrious to prove the pedigree of our liberties. They endeavor to prove that the ancient charter, the Magna Charta of King John, was connected with another positive ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... remain in force for seventeen years, was a master-stroke of diplomacy on the part of the Bell Company. It was the Magna Charta of the telephone. It transformed a giant competitor into a friend. It added to the Bell System fifty-six thousand telephones in fifty-five cities. And it swung the valiant little company up to such a pinnacle of prosperity that its stock went ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... or slogan, came to them from across the sea and was first uttered in England before the days of Magna Charta. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... Moses, 22, 25 ff., and the fifth, 24, 6. A very old Norman law provides that in actions for debt, execution should not issue against effects of the debtor which are indispensably necessary to him to maintain his position, such as the horses of a count or the armor of a knight. (Dialog. de Scaccario.) Magna Charta extended this provision so as to include the agricultural implements and cattle of the peasantry. The moment these laws, in consequence of a false principle of humanity, except anything but what is absolutely necessary, they injure credit. Thus, for instance, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... The next and last room of the manuscript department is appropriated to the ancient royal library of manuscripts, and Sir Robert Cotton's, with a few-later donations. On the table, in the middle of the room, is the famous Magna Charta of King John; it is written on a large roll of parchment, and was much damaged in the year 1738, when the Cotton library took fire at Westminster, but a part of the broad ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... meet and convenient for the general good of the colony," to which all "due submission and obedience" was promised. And this was followed a few years later in the sister colony of Massachusetts Bay by that "Body of Liberties" which, it is well said, may challenge comparison with Magna Charta itself or the latest Bill of Rights. Instinct with the spirit of common law, though somewhat ameliorating its rigor, these "rites, privileges and liberties," to be "impartially and inviolably enjoyed and observed throughout ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... pretence," hiccupped a young advocate, who was unable to rise from his chair, "be condemned, except by the legal decision of his peers, or by the law of the land. So sayeth the Magna Charta—King John—(hic)—right of all free-born Englishmen—including thereby all inhabitants of Great Britain, incorporated at ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... the Archaeological Gazette only last week.' And, do you know, it turned out that the Battle of Bouvines was fought in the Thirteenth Century, and had, as far as I could make out, something to do with Magna Charta." ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... a man of honour, and of as much liberal feeling as was compatible with wealth and station, had sat at the feet of the old Radical, Home Tooke. He had sympathised with the French revolution; but was mainly, like his mentor, Tooke, a reformer of the English type, and a believer in Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights. He had sat in parliament, and in 1802 had been elected for Middlesex. After a prolonged litigation, costing enormous sums, the election had been finally annulled in 1806. He had subscribed L1000 towards Paull's ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Somerset, and Thomas, Duke of Clarence, is shown occupying the centre of the chapel, but it just misses a more interesting, if much less beautiful, tomb, that of Stephen Langton, the courageous Archbishop who took such a leading part in forcing John to sign Magna Charta. The plain sarcophagus is partly within and partly outside the chapel, for when it was rebuilt in the fourteenth century it was extended so much to the east that it became necessary either to move Langton's tomb or else to make ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home
... drawing-rooms with young men in English frock-coats, instead of the French dress, good taste and commerce might alone have suffered; but the principles of English government had taken possession of these young heads. Constitution, Upper House, Lower House, national guarantee, balance of power, Magna Charta, Law of Habeas Corpus,—all these words were incessantly repeated, and seldom understood; but they were of fundamental importance to a party ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the country; he founded American Constitutional Law; he formulated, more tellingly than any one else and for a people whose thought was permeated with legalism, the principles on which the integrity and ordered growth of their Nation have depended. Springing from the twin rootage of Magna Charta and the Declaration of Independence, his judicial statesmanship finds no parallel in the salient features of its ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... that malevolent fly if I were to ask you to tell us that you do not know anything about King John?" He spent three delightful minutes in assuring himself of the fact that no one exactly remembered the date of Magna Charta. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... is the formal grant by Duchess Mary of the "Groot Privilegie," or Great Privilege, the Magna Charta of Holland. Although this instrument was afterwards violated, and indeed abolished, it became the foundation of the republic. It was a recapitulation and recognition of ancient rights, not an acquisition of new privileges. It was a restoration, not a revolution. Its principal ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... first the mother country and then in its turn the daughter country, to armed rebellion. It has been the spirit of the British Whig and the British Nonconformist almost up to the present day. In the Reform Club of London, framed and glazed over against Magna Charta, is the American Declaration of Independence, kindred trophies they are of the same essentially English spirit of stubborn insubordination. But the American side of it has gone on unchecked by the complementary aspect of the English character ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... great events in the history of the race require capitals; "The Flood, Magna Charta, Declaration ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... French grammar had survived the tenderness of Anacreon. Nevertheless, this brought the irksomeness of our situation to a climax, and P—— made up his mind to call on the Consul in the morning. For my part, I believe, I became feverish through the night, and in my sleep talked to the binnacle about Magna Charta. ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... Justice" and "The Spirit of Chivalry"—are over the strangers' gallery, as well as a half-dozen others by famous hands elsewhere. In niches between the windows and at the ends are eighteen statues of barons who signed Magna Charta. The House of Commons, 62 feet long, 45 broad, and 45 high, is much less elaborate than the House of Peers. The Speaker's chair is at the north end, and there are galleries along the sides and ends. In a gallery ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... stimulated other men to sing them. There was a moral infection of clap-trap in him. Strangers, modest enough elsewhere, started up at dinners in Coketown, and boasted, in quite a rampant way, of Bounderby. They made him out to be the Royal arms, the Union-Jack, Magna Charta, John Bull, Habeas Corpus, the Bill of Rights, An Englishman's house is his castle, Church and State, and God save the Queen, all put together. And as often (and it was very often) as an orator of this kind brought ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... otherwise) associates a particular character with a particular scene that is by any means presentable on the stage, that scene becomes obligatory in a drama of which he is the leading figure. The fact that Shakespeare could write a play about King John, and say nothing about Runnymede and Magna Charta, shows that that incident in constitutional history had not yet passed into popular legend. When Sir Herbert Tree revived the play, he repaired the poet's omission by means of an inserted tableau. Even Shakespeare had not the hardihood to let Caesar fall without saying, "The Ides ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... dare say if we could see the fine fellows who fought at Hastings, and those who afterward forced Magna Charta from King John without the poetic veil of seven hundred years, we should be very apt to call them 'rabble' also. Give the founders of Texas the same time, and they may also have a halo round their heads. Was not Rome founded by robbers, and Great ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history. It permeated the ancient life of early peoples. It blazed anew in the middle ages. It was written in Magna Charta. ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... families, and shows that the misfortunes which overtake the rich and noble are greater in proportion than those which overwhelm the poor. This author points out that of the twenty-five barons selected to enforce the observance of Magna Charta, there is not now in the House of Peers a single male descendant. Civil wars and rebellions ruined many of the old nobility and dispersed their families. Yet their descendants in many cases survive, and are to be found among the ranks of the people. ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... existed before the Constitution. Our institutions had their beginnings well-nigh with the beginning of time. They have developed through the ages. Magna Charta only marked a period in their growth; the assertion of the rights of the Commons marked another; our Revolution marked another; the adoption of ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... by a community of suffering, all ranks and races, at least south of the Tweed; and when the English rose after the storm, they rose as one homogeneous people, never to be governed again by an originally alien race. The English nobility were, from the time of Magna Charta, rather an official nobility, than, as in most continental countries, a separate caste; and whatever caste tendencies had developed themselves before the Wars of the Roses (as such are certain to do during centuries of ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... England, he knew the utter contempt in which Henry held the terms of the Magna Charta which he so often violated along with his kingly oath to maintain it. But what all England did not know, De Vac had gleaned from scraps of conversation dropped in the armory: that Henry was even now negotiating with the leaders of foreign mercenaries, and with Louis ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... country, even if that country should spread over the whole continent. It is our duty to carry English principles—I mean, sir [said Mr. Webster turning to Sir Henry Bulwer], Anglo-Saxon American principles, over the whole continent—the great principles of Magna Charta, of the English revolution, and especially of the American Revolution, and of the English language. Our children will hear Shakespeare and Milton recited on the shores of the Pacific. Nay, before that, American ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... For it would be a most dangerous, as it is a most idle and most groundless, conceit to assume as a general principle, that the rights and liberties of the subject are impaired by the care and attention of the legislature to secure them. If so, very ill would the purchase of Magna Charta have merited the deluge of blood, which was shed in order to have the body of English privileges defined by a positive written law. This charter, the inestimable monument of English freedom, so long the boast and glory of this ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... lessons suffered sometimes while they indulged in day-dreams, for it was hard to recall such mundane matters as the capital of Mexico, or the date of Magna Charta, when their thoughts were far away in the lantern room, busy with concealed prisoners ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... appropriation of money to meet the expenses which had been incurred by the crown officers in quartering troops in Boston. The members nobly met this demand by returning to the Governor (July 15, 1769) a grandly worded state-paper, in which, claiming the rights of freeborn Englishmen, as confirmed by Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights, and as settled by the Revolution and the British Charter, they expressly declared that they never would make provision for the purposes mentioned in the two messages. On the same day, it was represented in the House that armed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... are of course Norman. An hereditary aristocracy, the laws of primogeniture and entail—these are Norman. By the help of them the Norman hoped to perpetuate his authority over the Saxon herd; and failed. Magna Charta, Cromwell, the Roundheads, the Puritans, the spirit of nonconformity, most of the limitations of the power of the Throne, the industrial and commercial greatness of Britain—these things are Anglo-Saxon. The American colonists (however many individuals of Norman ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... State, when individuals were claiming the right to freedom of conscience in their form of worship and the people were growing more insistent for the recognition of their ancient rights and liberties, secured to them, in the first place, by the Magna Charta,—just at this time looms up the obstruction of a King so imbued with the defunct ideal of the divine right of Kings that he is blind to the tendencies of the age. What wonder, then, if the swirling waters of discontent should rise higher and higher until he became ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... [Footnote: From "Pilgrimages to English Shrines." Magna Charta Island lies in the Thames, a few ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... Jacqueminot, Margaret Dickson, M. P. Wilder, Jules Margottin, Magna Charta, Paul Neyron, Madam Gabriel Luizet, Baroness Rothschild, Anna de Diesbach, Ulrich Brunner, John Hopper, Rosa Rugosa (pink and white), Baron deBonstetten, Karl Druski, Madam Plantier, ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... of Elizabeth, in the great rebellion of 1642, in the Jacobite struggle of 1689, in the religious war into which the rebellion of 1798 speedily degenerated. These facts are about as conspicuous in the history of Ireland as Magna Charta and the Commonwealth in the history of England. No one who knows Ireland will deny that the policy of Mr. Gladstone has contributed more than any other single cause to revive and deepen the divisions which every good Irishman deplores." Mr. Lecky believes that history ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... that, after education such as this, we can stand silent witnesses while you sell our birthright of liberty, to save from a timely death an effete political organization? No, as we respect womanhood, we must protest against this desecration of the magna charta of American liberties; and with an importunity not to be repelled, our demand must ever be: "No compromise of human rights"—"No admission in the Constitution of inequality of rights, or disfranchisement on account of color ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and state were enabled to exert themselves in rooting out every error and heresy whatever, until they obtained a complete settlement according to the word of God, and our covenants established thereon; which covenants were then by several excellent acts both civil and ecclesiastic[8] made the MAGNA CHARTA of these nations, with respect to every civil and religious privilege; none being admitted unto any office or employment in church or state, without scriptural and covenant qualifications.—And then ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... spread across a continent to which have been gathered the peoples of the earth. We are the "heirs of all the ages." Our inheritance of tradition is greater than that of any other people, for we trace back not alone to King John signing the Magna Charta in that little stone hut by the riverside, but to Brutus standing beside the slain Caesar, to Charles Martel with his battle-axe raised against the advancing horde of an old-world civilization, to Martin Luther declaring his square-jawed policy of religious liberty, to Columbus in the ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... that Magna Charta "converted the right of taxation into the shield of liberty," but it did nothing of the sort. The liberty existed before, and the right to be taxed was an efflorescence and instance of it, not a sub-stratum ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... to its task, and bade the Spaniard Dominic arm new levies with the best weapons of science, and flaunt the name of Aristotle on the Church banners along with that of Saint Augustine. The year 1215, which happened to be the date of Magna Charta and other easily fixed events, like the birth of Saint Louis, may serve to mark the triumph of the schools. The pointed arch revelled at Rheims and the Gothic architects reached perfection at Amiens just as Francis died ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... magna charta of American rights, under whose wise and salutary provisions we have successfully conducted all our domestic and foreign affairs, sustained ourselves in peace and in war, and become a great nation among the powers of the earth—must assuredly be now adequate to the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... always bless the memory of this poor, timid creature for saving that dear remembrance of "Matchless Mitchel." How many, like him, have thought they were preaching a new gospel, when they were only reaffirming the principles which underlie the Magna Charta of humanity, and are common to the noblest utterances of all the nobler creeds! But spoken by those solemn lips to those stern, simpleminded hearers, the words I have cited seem to me to have a fragrance like the precious ointment of spikenard with which Mary anointed her Master's ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Magna Charta, a suit of mediaeval armour, several rusty helmets (Cromwellian and otherwise), antlers of several kinds of deer, and a variety of old swords, pistols, and guns were the objects that chiefly attracted my attention. The walls were likewise ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... reason why all southern Europe is in a turmoil to-day, is that American ideas of liberty are working there like leaven. We get our notions of liberty from the Bible and from the men who forced the Magna Charta from King John at Runnymede, but all other peoples in the world seem to be getting their ideas of liberty from us. That is what is the matter with the Old World to-day. The American idea is working like ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... to England from the pine-woods and bright order and regimen and foreign novelty of their Bohemian Kur-Ort, in a state of renewed perplexity. Already that undocumented Magna Charta was manifestly not working upon the lines she had anticipated. The glosses Sir Isaac put upon it were extensive and remarkable and invariably in the direction of restricting her liberties and resuming controls she ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... of the Ghadamseeah is, that all their children read and write. The whole population can read and write the Koran. This Saharan fact of the barbarians of The Desert suggests painful reflections to honest-minded Englishmen. We may boast of our liberties, our Magna Charta, our independence of character, our commerce, our wealth, the extent of the world which Providence (too good to us) has committed to our care. But after all we cannot boast of what the barbarians of The Desert boast. We cannot, dare not, assert, that every male child of ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... to the English, and in accordance with which the great structure of British and American liberty has been built up generation after generation and century after century. Through all the seven hundred years since Magna Charta we have been shaping, adjusting, adapting our system to the new conditions of life as they have arisen, but we have always held on to everything essentially good that we have ever had in the system. We have never undertaken ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... German power is not the only thing in question here; no, it concerns a great part of civilized Europe in regard to the suspension of their hard-won political liberty; and England, the people of the Magna Charta, the first free Constitution, can never be a party to that. That is why we call to you, Bernard Shaw, in the name of Europe, and ask you for your voice ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... against Church and against State, and against the Aristocracy, and Habeas Corpus, and against Physic, and against Standing Armies, and Magna Charta, and every other rascally tyranny and oppression to which we are subjected, that I will!" Here Tom gave such a thump with the pestle, that I thought he would have ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... shocks which the divisions between kings and the nobles gave to empires, the chains of nations were more or less heavy. Liberty in England sprang from the quarrels of tyrants. The barons forced King John and King Henry III. to grant the famous Magna Charta, the chief design of which was indeed to make kings dependent on the Lords; but then the rest of the nation were a little favoured in it, in order that they might join on proper occasions with their pretended masters. This great Charter, which is considered ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... Saxons; where the barons of England, in the year 1212, with their followers, (frequently amounting to five hundred persons,) held their private meetings, and took up arms, previous to their obtaining Magna Charta at Runny Mead, near ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... irregular, Mr. Cobbett addressed the assembled thousands, and moved an amendment, which I seconded. This amendment merely proposed to add, after the word Constitution, in the original address, "as established by Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, and the Act of Habeas Corpus, for which our forefathers fought and bled." This amendment Mr. Lockhart and his gang declared to be most seditious and wicked, and the Sheriff, a little whipper-snapper fellow, of the name of Fleming, absolutely refused ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... Such faith as this these twelve men had. They would have found it difficult, probably, to assent to the Nicene Creed or the Athanasian Creed; but they believed in Jesus as Lord and King, and they believed every word of his Magna Charta found in the Sermon on the Mount; and they were ready to do what they could to establish that kingdom in this world. It is just here that the faith of the church is lacking. It believes the Nicene Creed, but it does not believe the Sermon on ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... unlawful authority, it is a sufficient provocation to all people out of compassion; and where the liberty of the subject is invaded, it is a provocation to all the subjects of England, etc.; and surely a man ought to be concerned for Magna Charta and the laws: and if any one, against the law, imprisons a man, he is an offender ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... and they present but few attractions. The castle is every thing. You know this has been the favorite residence of most of the English monarchs, and the scene of many a tournament in the days of chivalry. The castle was the work of William the Conqueror. John lived at Windsor while Magna Charta was extorted from him by his barons at Runnymede. Henry III. did a great deal to the castle, but Edward III. invested it with its great glory. This was his native place. The architect he employed was the famous William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, a man of great genius. He built the noble ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... privileges of individual preemptors? What principle of justice requires such a policy? What motive of public welfare can fail to condemn it? Lands held by corporations were regarded by ancient laws as held in mortmain, or by "dead hand," and from the time of Magna Charta corporations required the royal license to hold land, because such holding was regarded as in derogation of public policy and common right. Preemption is itself a special privilege, only authorized by its supposed public benefit in promoting the settlement ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... me; they were helping me all they could to bring about a peace. This constitution, I discovered, would destroy, at one stroke, a treaty—that of Waitangi, which every Maori in New Zealand held to be sacred. It was a treaty securing them in their lands; it was their Magna Charta in every respect. Yet the constitution would go back upon all that, and I should be held traitor to every one of my pledges to the Maoris. Moreover, it would have seemed as if I had taken the chiefs away from their ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... it were lengthened into four. Spenser is my example for both these privileges of English verses; and Chapman has followed him in his translation of Homer. Mr. Cowley has given in to them after both; and all succeeding writers after him. I regard them now as the Magna Charta of heroic poetry; and am too much an Englishman to lose what my ancestors have gained for me. Let the French and Italians value themselves on their regularity; strength and elevation are our standard. I said before, and I repeat it, that the affected purity of the French has unsinewed their heroic ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... conclusion of the conference a declaration prepared by the Governors of Louisiana, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Utah, and South Carolina, was unanimously adopted. This Magna Charta of the conservation movement declared "that the great natural resources supply the material basis upon which our civilization must continue to depend and upon which the perpetuity of the nation itself rests," that "this material basis ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... say? Let us spell out the Magna Charta of which we humbly catch sight. Let us say to the people of whom all peoples are made: "Wake up and understand, look and see; and having begun again the consciousness which was mown down by slavery, decide that everything must be ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... that better terms might be made with the Repealers than the Government seem disposed to give. A hundred thousand Orangemen, with their colours flying, might yet meet a hundred thousand Repealers on the banks of the Boyne; and, on a field presenting so many solemn reminiscences to all, sign the Magna Charta of Ireland's independence. The Repeal banner might then be Orange and Green, flying from the Giant's Causeway to the Cove of Cork, and proudly look down from the walls of Derry ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... employed on documents A. D. 1213, although it was white wax which was used to seal the magna charta, granted to the English barons by King John, A. D. 1215. In 1445 red wax was much employed in England, but the earliest specimen of red sealing wax extant is found on a ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... zealous Protestants, by pre-arrangement, had crowned the prim and meagre statue of Elizabeth (still on the east side of the Bar) with a wreath of gilt laurel, and placed under her hand (that now points to Child's Bank) a golden glistening shield, with the motto, "The Protestant Religion and Magna Charta," inscribed upon it. Several lighted torches were stuck before her niche. Lastly, amidst a fiery shower of squibs from every door and window, the Pope and his companions were toppled into the huge bonfire, with shouts that ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... 'Why, that's Magna Charta!' Dan whispered. It was one of the few history dates that he could remember. Kadmiel turned on him with a sweep and a ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... cantons, fearing danger to their interests in the new settlement of the crown, formed a league for mutual protection and cooperation. The very parchment on which the terms of this union were written "has been preserved as a testimony to the early independence of the Forest Cantons, the Magna Charta of Switzerland." The formation of this confederacy may be regarded as the first combined preparation of the Swiss for that great struggle in defence of their liberties, in the history of which fact and legend, as shown in Baker's discriminating ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... with the management of the Church, and they positively refused to take the oath of allegiance to King William and Queen Mary until they should, on their part, have sworn to the Solemn League—and Covenant, the Magna Charta, as they termed it, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... a deed? Says Black-stone, "If any one that hath commission of martial authority doth, in time of peace, hang, or otherwise execute any man by colour of martial law, this is murder; for it is against Magna Charta."* [* Commentaries, b. i., ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... by Magna Charta were deemed of such importance, in the thirteenth century, that the Bishops, twice a year, with tapers burning, and in their pontifical robes, pronounced, in the presence of the king and the representatives of the estates of England, the greater ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... engrossed on parchment. What the convention may agree upon, draw up, and the people ratify by their votes, is no constitution, for it is extrinsic to the nation, not inherent and living in it—is, at best, legislative instead of constitutive. The famous Magna Charta drawn up by Cardinal Langton, and wrung from John Lackland by the English barons at Runnymede, was no constitution of England till long after the date of its concession, and even then was no constitution of the state, but a set of restrictions on power. The ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... justice. There was a militia for the defense of the people's rights, commanded by a tysatski. Every ward of the city had a starost, charged with preserving the peace. It is said that a written constitution, partaking of the nature of the Magna Charta, was granted to Novgorod by Iaroslaf the Great. The duke's rights and privileges, his duties and his revenues, were carefully set down. He was entitled to the tribute of some of the volosts,—cantons or counties,—and to certain fines; ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... subject which, as is well known, I discovered in my researches in history. Where is "Udolpho in the Tower"? or the "Duke of Rothsay the Fourth Day after He was Deprived of his Victuals"? or "King John Signing Magna Charta"? They are gone with the red curtain, the brown tree, the storm in the background. Art is revolutionary, like everything else in these times, when Treason itself, in the form of a hoary apostate and reviewer of contemporary fiction, glares from the walls, and is painted by Royal—mark ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... is often called by way of pre-eminence, is the magna charta of the liberties of the Gallican Church. Founded upon the results of the discussions of the Council of Basle, it probably embodies all the reformatory measures which the hierarchy of France was desirous ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... clerical and classical education gave birth, the sole general ideas which enlightened and enlarged the darkened and narrow brains of the men of the Middle Ages." The French historians are of the opinion that it was to his father's victory of Bouvines that England was indebted for her Magna Charta. ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... it should be remembered, are a time-honoured institution; the Lincolnshire Cardyke and Fossdyke date from the period of the Roman occupation of this country. The Magna Charta of the early 13th century took cognizance, not only of the roads, called "The King's Highway," but also of inland navigation, under the term "Haut streames de le Roy." The latter half of the 18th century was ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... my last, upon Thursday, the Bill for Vicarages hath been carryed up to the Lords; and a Message to them from our House that they would expedite the Bill for confirmation of Magna Charta, that for confirmation of marriages, and other bills of publick concernment, which haue laid by them euer since our last sitting, not returned to us. We had then the Bill for six moneths assesment ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... of the English constitution. He positively refused to lend a farthing. He was required to give his reasons. He answered, "that he could be content to lend as well as others, but feared to draw upon himself that curse in Magna Charta which should be read twice a year against those who infringe it." For this spirited answer, the Privy Council committed him close prisoner to the Gate House. After some time, he was again brought up; but he persisted in his refusal, and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the apologists of slavery, have eagerly seized upon this little passage of scripture, and held it up as the masters' Magna Charta, by which they were licensed by God himself to commit the greatest outrages upon the defenceless victims of their oppression. But, my friends, was it designed to be so? If our Heavenly Father would protect by law the eye and the tooth of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... result he ran the risk of seeing his valued privileges withdrawn once and for all. Supported by a few of his friends, the irate legislator brought the matter before the House of Assembly, and it was actually proposed that the Act of 1708, the Magna Charta so to speak of the Williams family, should be revoked. The effort, however, failed, and it seems reasonable to view that fact as a testimony to something of worth in John Williams, especially when we find that soon after his privileges ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... effort of Punch, in his individual quality and personality as a jester, was the pantomime of "King John, or Harlequin and Magna Charta." Punch had at that time become so popular, and was so generally regarded as the incarnation of all that was witty, that a commission was given for a pantomime that was to surpass for wit and humour any pantomime that had ever been written or thought of ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... fast as it was made here, was transmitted thither. The feudal baronage, and the feudal knighthood, the roots of our primitive Constitution, were early transplanted into that soil, and grew and flourished there. Magna Charta, if it did not give us originally the House of Commons, gave us at least an House of Commons of weight and consequence. But your ancestors did not churlishly sit down alone to the feast of Magna Charta. Ireland was made immediately a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and illegal acts of King John. Archbishop Langton laid before the assembly the charter of Henry I., and commented on its provisions. The result was an oath, taken with acclamation, that they would, if necessary, die for their liberties. And this led up to Magna Charta. But it was a scene as ignominious as the first surrender before Pandulf, when Pope Innocent accepted the homage of King John as the price of supporting him against his barons, and the wretched King, before ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... William III.'s spurs, and it is apparently impossible to defend Walpole as a collector to be taken seriously. Walpole, however, collected things in a mood of fantasy as much as of connoisseurship. He did not take himself quite seriously. It was fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang up Magna Charta beside his bed and, opposite it, the warrant for the execution of King Charles I., on which he had written "Major Charta." Who can question the fantastic quality of the mind that wrote to Conway: "Remember, neither Lady Salisbury nor you, nor Mrs. Damer, have seen my new divine ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Magna Charta or The doings of the Dutch, Or capes, or towns, or verbs, or nouns Do not excite me much; But when you mention motor rides— Down by the sea for choice Or chasing games, or chocolates, I love ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... way in which I was led, while teaching the Bakwains, to commence exploration, he will, I think, recognize the hand of Providence. Anterior to that, when Mr. Moffat began to give the Bible—the Magna Charta of all the rights and privileges of modern civilization—to the Bechuanas, Sebituane went north, and spread the language into which he was translating the sacred oracles in a new region larger than France. Sebituane, at the same time, rooted out hordes of ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... when he confirmed "Magna Charta," used the expression, On the word of a gentleman, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Parish. Pauper est Cinna, sed amat. The thing is therefore in abeyance. But there is love o' both sides. Little Fenwick (you don't see the connexion of ideas here, how the devil should you?) is in the rules of the Fleet. Cruel creditors! operation of iniquitous laws! is Magna Charta then a mockery? Why, in general (here I suppose you to ask a question) my spirits are pretty good, but I have my depressions, black as a smith's beard, Vulcanic, Stygian. At such times I have recourse to a pipe, which is ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... his crimes are, they form half the Magna Charta of the republic,* and the authority of the Convention is still supported ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... scarcely say, who got the Barons of England to league together and extort from the king that famous instrument and palladium of our liberties, at present in the British Museum, Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury,—The Magna Charta." Athelstane also quarrels with the king, whose orders he disobeys, and Rotherwood is attacked by the royal army. No one was of real service in the way of fighting except Ivanhoe,—and how could he take up that cause? "No; be hanged to me," said the knight bitterly. "This is a quarrel ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... seriously, because serious minds are exercised by deportation, and quite naturally. On December 13 nine Indians were arrested under a certain Indian Regulation of the year 1818, and they who reproach us with violating the glories of 1215 (which is Magna Charta) and the Petition of Rights, complain that 1818 is far too remote for us to be at all affected by anything that was then made law. Now what is the Regulation? I will ask you to follow me pretty closely for a minute or two. The Regulation of 1818 says:—"Reasons of State ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... by Common Consent; Earliest Social Statute; Recognition of Personal Property; Law of Land Tenure; The Charter of Liberties; Early Methods of Trial; Distinction Between Sin and Crime; Church Law Governs Sin; Important Clauses of Magna Charta; Freedom of Trade; Taxation for the Common Benefit; The Great "Liberty" Clause; "Administrative" Law not ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... you must dismiss from your minds the too common notion that there is now, in England, a governing Norman aristocracy, or that there has been one, at least since the year 1215, when Magna Charta was won from the Norman John by Normans and by English alike. For the first victors at Hastings, like the first conquistadores in America, perished, as the monk chronicles point out, rapidly by their own crimes; and very few of our nobility ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... to the days of Abraham; trace Jewish civilization; compare Greek and Roman progress; weigh the Crusaders of the Middle Ages and the Reformers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Then look to the English people who first wrested the great Magna Charta—the Bill of Civil Rights—and human freedom from King John, and implanted these principles first in Virginia with the best blood of England, producing a Washington, a Jefferson, a Patrick Henry, a Madison, a Monroe, ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... patriotic nation called the "Anglo-Saxons"; they shall be desperately defending themselves against certain French-speaking Scandinavians called Normans. He will deplore the defeat, but will say it was all for the best. Magna Charta he will have signed at Runnymede—probably he will have it drawn up there as well. He will translate the most famous clause by the modern words "Judgment of his peers" and "law of the land." He will represent the Barons as having behind them the voice of the whole nation—and ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... altogether unacquainted with the law of Christian love and kindness. They claim for themselves the broadest freedom. Boastfully they tell us that they have received from the court of heaven the Magna Charta of human rights that was handed down through the clouds, and amid the lightnings of Sinai, and given again by the Son of God on the Mount of Beatitudes, while the glory of the Father shone around him. They ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... docility and obedience in the creation of a machine of singular industry and rigidity and ruthless discipline. Similar methods would mean revolt in democratic France and individualistic England where every man carries Magna Charta, talisman of his own "rights," in ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... recognised, the tenant's share being made his own to sell, and being preserved for his profitable use by a right to have the rent payable to his sleeping partner, the landlord, fixed by a judicial tribunal. These rights were the famous three F's—fixity of tenure, free sale, and fair rent—of the Magna Charta of the Irish peasant. If these concessions had only been made in time, they would probably have led to a strengthening of the economic position and character of the Irish tenantry, which would have enabled them to take full ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... made myself quite clear in the interview to which I have referred that my feelings are not anti-English, for I shall never forget that liberal government and all forms of liberalism have had their origin, ever since the Magna Charta, in that great nation whom we so often love to call our cousins. But, with all of this, can you ignore the fact that England even today, without the further power and prestige victory in the present conflict would give her, practically dominates the high seas, that she treats the ocean ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... Let her tell two or three old women about town that they are young and handsome, and give some well-timed parties, and she may still keep the society which she hath been used to. The times are not so hard as they once were, when a woman could not construe Magna Charta with anything like impunity. People were full as gallant many years ago. But the days are gone by wherein my lord-protector of the commonwealth of England was wont to go a lovemaking to Mrs. Fleetwood, with ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... feat, and hence the professor's famous epigram has become one of the things at which scientific students of the human race smile sadly and kindly. And now the professor grows savage and so wildly Conservative that we fear he may denounce Magna Charta next as a gross error. I know very well that all men are not equal, and the professor's keenest logic cannot make me see that point any more clearly than at present. But suppose that one fine day some awkward leader of the people says, "You ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... smiling semicircularly, 'I am truly glad to visit America. I do not consider the magna charta,' says he, 'or gas balloons or snow-shoes in any way a detriment to the beauty and charm of your American women, skyscrapers or the architecture of your icebergs. The next time,' says Andy, 'that I go after the North Pole all the Vanderbilts in Greenland won't be able to turn me out in ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... so much, and which we take so much pride in, is an English institution, not an American one, and it comes of a great ancestry. The first Fourth of July in that noble genealogy dates back seven centuries lacking eight years. That is the day of the Great Charter—the Magna Charta—which was born at Runnymede in the next to the last year of King John, and portions of the liberties secured thus by those hardy Barons from that reluctant King John are a part of our Declaration of Independence, of our ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Government. On a handful of dates and a bit of coarse bread he had passed many a day of hard work when he was excavating in the East. One can always starve—for a purpose! The Squire conceived himself as out for Magna Charta—the root principles of British liberty. As for those chattering fellows of the Labour Party, let them conquer England if they could. While the Government ploughed up his land without leave, the Socialists would strip him of it altogether. Well, ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... contract, agreement, bargain; affidation[obs3]; pact, paction[obs3]; bond, covenant, indenture; bundobast[obs3], deal. stipulation, settlement, convention; compromise, cartel. Protocol, treaty, concordat, Zollverein[Ger], Sonderbund[Ger], charter, Magna Charta[Lat], Progmatic Sanction, customs union, free trade region; General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT; most favored nation status. negotiation &c. (bargaining) 794; diplomacy &c. (mediation) 724; negotiator ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... error about the contents of the Twelve Tables, which is really as monstrous as if we could fancy ourselves reading in the pages of a native historian of mark, Hume, Henry, or Lingard, some blunder, into which a schoolboy could not fall, about the contents of Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Rights, or any other well known English law, on which the constitution of the country is primarily founded. In a work given out as written by Tacitus we are told that the Twelve Tables first fixed interest for usury at an "uncia," or twelfth part of an as ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... down—15th June, 1215—from Windsor to the meadow at Runnymede, where the barons lay encamped, and signed the articles laid before him, happy enough in getting some of them softened. The Great Charter came into being, truly the 'Magna Charta,' which throws not merely all earlier, but also the later ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke |
