For the barons, the clauses that really mattered in Magna Carta dealt with the inheritance, marriages and ownership of land. These may seem remote now, but they established what half the world, from Russia to China, still lacks - that the state can't help itself to private property at will. And then there are the famous clauses which best have come to symbolise the universal freedoms promised by Magna Carta - clauses 39 and 40.
"No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. To no-one will we sell, to no-one deny or delay right or justice."
There was, indeed, there is, something here that really matters. The sense that Magna Carta protects and defines those three key fundamental freedoms of the Anglo-Saxon world - life, liberty and property - is spot on.
The charter had achieved something truly revolutionary and almost by accident. The great charter, despite its name, contained no great general statement of principle. However, its multitude of detailed clauses did imply one - that the king, however great his power, however much the law was his law, was, finally, UNDER the law.
Runnymede is the most English of places and Magna Carta, the most English of events. But what perhaps is most English of all, is that there is nothing much to mark the spot of one of the most famous events in human history. Nothing English, but there is this. It's erected in 1957 by the American Bar Association to commemorate Magna Carta, symbol of freedom under the law. It's here because Magna Carta matters in America too. It's our very first English export there, because Magna Carta was carried in the minds of the English colonists themselves.
Magna Carta makes no grand, general statements about liberty and freedom. It's not got right first time. It has to be reworked again and again. And yet, the outcome of this process of trial and error is a profound change of political behaviour. Consultation and accommodation between ruler and ruled ceased to be exceptional crisis management and have become instead a matter of habit of how we English do things.
