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The first line names King John and the bishops and barons he says he is taking advice from. No king signed a charter. Hot wax and a seal did that job.

It was not a declaration of rights and it was not meant to last. In June 1215, in a meadow at Runnymede between Windsor and Staines, English barons in open rebellion forced King John to seal a long, technical document. It listed what they wanted fixed: forest boundaries, fish traps on the Thames, the treatment of widows, the tax a lord paid instead of sending knights, and the foreign mercenaries to be sent home. Most of its 63 clauses are about the specific complaints of a few dozen wealthy men in a specific year, and its purpose was to end a civil war. It did not. John wrote to the pope, who threw the charter out within ten weeks as shameful and forced. The war went on. John died of dysentery the following year with the country still in pieces. The document should have vanished with him. Instead his son's regents reissued it to buy support, and reissued it again. By 1297 a revised version was on the statute rolls. It had stopped being a treaty and started being law. What kept it alive is two clauses about ordinary justice, still on the books in England today. No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, except by the lawful judgement 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. In 1215 free man meant a small minority of the population, and the barons who insisted on it were not thinking about anyone below them. But the words were general, and general words get borrowed. Seventeenth-century lawyers used them against the Stuarts, American colonists used them against Parliament, and the phrase due process of law traces to a fourteenth-century restatement of that clause. Four originals from 1215 survive. This one is in the British Library. A London lawyer named Humphrey Wyems gave it to the collector Robert Cotton in January 1629, and may have picked it up in a tailor's shop. The handwriting is a scribe's, run edge to edge without paragraph breaks to save parchment. The king's name appears in the first line, among a long list of the bishops and barons whose advice he is supposed to be taking. He never signed it. Kings did not sign. A seal was pressed into wax and the thing was done.