What Does Magna Carta Actually Say? A Clause-by-Clause Guide

Written by Simon Williams

Magna Carta's 63 clauses were mostly narrow feudal grievances specific to 1215, but a handful, including Clause 39's promise that no free man would be punished except by lawful judgment, became the basis for the modern principle of due process.

Key Facts

• Total clauses: 63, in the numbering used today
• Numbering introduced by: Sir William Blackstone, in his 1759 edition
• Original 1215 text: Continuous Latin prose, with no numbers or chapter breaks
• Clause 39: No free man punished except by lawful judgment of his equals or the law of the land
• Clause 40: The Crown will not sell, deny or delay justice to anyone
• Clause 61: The "security clause", creating a council of 25 barons empowered to seize royal castles after 40 days of non compliance
• Fate of Clause 61: Dropped entirely from the 1216 reissue after King John's death
• 1225/1297 status: Clauses 39 and 40 were merged into a single due process guarantee, later Chapter 29 of Edward I's 1297 Confirmation

Open a modern printed edition of Magna Carta and you will find sixty three neatly numbered clauses, each one easy to cite in an essay or a court judgment. Open the actual 1215 original and that numbering simply is not there. What John's scribes produced at Runnymede was a single block of continuous Latin prose, with no paragraph breaks, no headings, and no numbers at all.

This matters more than it sounds. The numbering scheme almost everyone uses today, including "Clause 39" and "Clause 61", was not created by the barons who negotiated the charter. It was added more than five centuries later by the jurist Sir William Blackstone, in his 1759 edition of the text. Reading Magna Carta clause by clause is therefore reading it through a lens the document's own authors never used, which is exactly why it is worth being precise about what each clause actually said in 1215 versus what it came to represent later.

For the full story of why the charter was sealed and what happened to it afterwards, see Magna Carta Explained: The Charter That Redefined Royal Power. This article stays close to the text itself: what the most significant clauses said, what they meant to the barons who wrote them, and what they came to mean centuries later.

Why Magna Carta Has No "Real" Clause Numbers

It is worth pausing on this before going any further, because it changes how you should read everything that follows. The 1215 Magna Carta was sixty three consecutive provisions of Latin prose with no numbering system at all. Medieval readers navigated it by content, not by citation.

The numbering used in every modern edition, textbook, and exam specification was supplied by Sir William Blackstone in 1759, when he produced a critical edition of the charter and added reference numbers in the margin for ease of use. Almost every later edition kept his scheme, which is why "Clause 39" is such a fixed reference point today, even though John and his barons never used or saw that number.

This is not a pedantic detail. It is the difference between describing what a specific medieval clause said and imposing a modern citation system onto a document that predates it by over five hundred years. Keep this in mind as the clause numbers below are used purely as a modern convenience, not as evidence of how the original document was structured.

Clause 39: The Due Process Guarantee

Clause 39 is the clause most people mean when they talk about Magna Carta's legacy. In the standard translation, it promises that no free man shall be seized, imprisoned, stripped of his rights, outlawed, exiled, or destroyed in any way, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.

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 judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

In 1215, this was not an abstract statement of human rights. It was a direct response to King John's habit of imprisoning and dispossessing his enemies without trial, purely as a tool of royal control. The barons who forced this clause into the charter were protecting their own class from arbitrary royal punishment, not proposing universal liberty.

What makes this extraordinary is how far the clause travelled from that narrow starting point. Centuries later, seventeenth century lawyers read it as a general prohibition on arbitrary detention, and it became the direct ancestor of the modern legal principle of due process, still cited in courts and constitutions today.

Clause 40: Justice Not for Sale

Clause 40 is shorter than Clause 39 but just as significant. It states plainly that the Crown will sell justice to no one, and will not deny or delay it either.

This clause targeted a specific and well documented abuse. Under John, access to royal courts and favourable rulings could effectively be purchased, and cases could be deliberately delayed or obstructed against those who had fallen out of royal favour. Clause 40 was a direct promise to stop that practice.

I find it telling that clauses 39 and 40 were treated as a single idea almost as soon as the charter was reissued. By the 1225 version, and formally by Edward I's 1297 Confirmation of the Charters, the two had been combined into a single guarantee, known in that later text as Chapter 29. It is this merged clause, promising both lawful judgment and unobstructed justice, that most modern references to "Magna Carta's due process clause" are actually describing.

Clause 61: The Security Clause

If clauses 39 and 40 are Magna Carta's most enduring legacy, Clause 61 is its most radical original provision, and the one the Crown could least afford to keep. Known as the security clause, it established a council of twenty five barons with the explicit power to enforce the charter against the king.

The mechanism was blunt. If the king or his officials broke any of the charter's terms and the offence was reported to four of the twenty five barons, those four could demand redress. If the king failed to correct the matter within forty days, the full council of twenty five could seize his castles, lands, and possessions until amends were made. In effect, Clause 61 placed King John under a form of supervised probation, enforced by his own barons and backed by the threat of open rebellion.

No king could tolerate this for long, and no successor reissue kept it. Clause 61 was dropped entirely when Magna Carta was reissued in 1216, immediately after John's death, and it never reappeared in any later version. It stands as the clearest evidence that the 1215 charter was, at its heart, a document about controlling a specific king rather than establishing permanent constitutional machinery.

What the Other Sixty Clauses Actually Covered

It is easy to focus entirely on clauses 39, 40 and 61 and forget that they sit inside sixty three provisions covering far more mundane ground. Several clauses fixed the relief payments an heir owed the Crown on inheriting land, protected widows from being forced into remarriage, and restricted arbitrary taxation by requiring the common counsel of the kingdom for extraordinary levies.

Other clauses dealt with weights and measures, the removal of fish weirs from the Thames and the Medway, and the treatment of merchants and foreign traders during wartime. None of this is the language of universal liberty. It is the language of a negotiated settlement between a king and a specific group of aggrieved barons, addressing their specific complaints in 1215.

This context matters because it shows how unusual clauses 39, 40 and 61 really were within the document as a whole. If you are studying this period in depth, the Medieval Law Study Guides Bundle covers this kind of clause by clause legal detail across several related topics.

From the Histories and Castles store

Go deeper into medieval history

Five Academy study guides and standalone investigations. Choose your starting point.

The Histories and Castles Academy: view all ↗

Study Guide

The Labour Machine

Survivors of the Black Death and the laws that tried to bind them back into serfdom. How labour became a battleground after plague.

Get the guide →

Study Guide

Servants of the Royal Chamber

How the Crown used a legal designation to control, exploit, and ultimately expel the Jewish community of medieval England.

Get the guide →

Study Guide

The King's Deer

Norman forest law and the system of punishment that made the king's animals worth more than a peasant's livelihood.

Get the guide →

Study Guide

The Neck Verse

The medieval loophole that let literate men escape the hangman's rope, and what it reveals about law, class, and the Church.

Get the guide →

Investigated Histories

The Price of Survival

The Black Death killed half of England. What happened to the survivors, and who tried to make sure they paid for their escape.

Get the download →

Book

No Law for the Poor

Justice and power in medieval England and Wales. Simon A. Williams's full length investigation into who the law was actually written for.

Buy now on Amazon →

This article is part of the Magna Carta series. Explore all articles at Medieval Laws.

Deepen Your Understanding

→ Magna Carta Explained: The Charter That Redefined Royal Power — The full pillar article covering why John sealed the charter, its immediate failure, and its long term legacy.

→ Why Was King John Forced to Seal Magna Carta in 1215? — The crisis that produced the clauses explained in this article.

→ Did Magna Carta Fail? The First Barons' War and Its Aftermath — What happened once these clauses were tested against a king who had already broken his word.

→ Why Is Magna Carta Important? Its Lasting Legacy Explained — How Clause 39 in particular was revived centuries later and shaped modern due process law.

→ The Statute of Rhuddlan (1284): How Edward I Reshaped Wales — A later royal statute that shows how far English kings would reshape law by decree once Magna Carta's constraints on unilateral rule had faded.

→ Magna Carta: From a Failed Peace Treaty to the Foundation of Human Rights — The account of how the charter collapsed within weeks of being sealed.

Note for the cluster map: all six planned Magna Carta articles on the medieval-laws blog (Cluster J) are now live and cross linked.

People Also Ask

What does Magna Carta mean in simple terms?

Magna Carta means "Great Charter" in Latin, and in practical terms it refers to a list of promises King John made to his barons in 1215 to end a rebellion. Most of those promises addressed narrow feudal grievances specific to the time, such as inheritance payments and taxation limits. A small number, particularly the clauses on due process and access to justice, went on to influence legal systems well beyond their original medieval context.

What is Clause 39 of Magna Carta?

Clause 39 is the provision promising that no free man will be seized, imprisoned, or destroyed except by the lawful judgment of his equals or the law of the land. It was written to stop King John's practice of punishing enemies without trial, but it later became the foundation for the modern legal principle of due process. The clause number itself is a later convention, added by Sir William Blackstone in 1759, rather than something present in the original 1215 document.

What is Clause 61 of Magna Carta?

Clause 61 is known as the security clause, and it created a council of twenty five barons with the power to enforce Magna Carta against King John, including seizing his castles and lands if he failed to correct a breach within forty days. It was the most radical clause in the entire charter because it placed a reigning king under formal supervision by his own subjects. It proved too threatening to survive and was dropped from every reissue after 1215.

How many clauses does Magna Carta have?

Magna Carta has 63 clauses in the numbering system used today. That numbering was not part of the original 1215 document, which was written as continuous Latin prose with no numbers or chapter divisions. The reference numbers familiar from textbooks and exam papers were added by the jurist Sir William Blackstone in his 1759 edition, and almost all later editions have followed his scheme.

What is the difference between Clause 39 and Clause 40?

Clause 39 guarantees that no free man will be punished except by lawful judgment or the law of the land, while Clause 40 separately promises that the Crown will not sell, deny, or delay justice to anyone. They address related but distinct abuses: arbitrary punishment in Clause 39, and corrupt or obstructed access to the courts in Clause 40. By the 1225 reissue and Edward I's 1297 Confirmation, the two had been merged into a single due process guarantee, known in that later text as Chapter 29.

Are any of Magna Carta's original clauses still law today?

Yes, a small number of clauses descended from the 1215 charter remain on the statute book in England and Wales, most notably the due process guarantee that developed from clauses 39 and 40. Most of the other sixty clauses, which dealt with specific feudal grievances such as inheritance payments and forest boundaries, have long since been repealed as no longer relevant. The surviving fragments are largely symbolic today, but they are still occasionally cited in legal argument.

Primary Sources and Further Reading

• The British Library — Magna Carta, digitised collection and translation of the 1215 exemplars, including the standard modern English translation of clauses 39, 40 and 61 used throughout this article. bl.uk/magna-carta
• The National Archives — Edward I's Confirmation of Magna Carta, 1297, covering the 1297 text in which clauses 39 and 40 were combined into Chapter 29. nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/magna-carta
• The Magna Carta Project (University of East Anglia and King's College London) — clause by clause commentary on the 1215 text, including detailed notes on Clause 61 and the council of twenty five barons. magnacartaresearch.org
• Carpenter, D. (2015) — Magna Carta, Penguin Classics. A modern scholarly edition and translation with clause by clause commentary, available via WorldCat.
• Danziger, D. and Gillingham, J. (2003) — 1215: The Year of Magna Carta, Touchstone. A narrative account of the political crisis that produced the charter's key clauses, available via WorldCat.

Note: the attribution of Magna Carta's clause numbering to Sir William Blackstone's 1759 edition is well established scholarly consensus, though later editors, including Bishop Stubbs, made minor variations to the scheme. The description of Clause 39's evolution into a general due process principle reflects the dominant interpretive position among legal historians rather than a claim about the original 1215 authors' intentions, which is described accurately elsewhere in this article.

Regular podcasts by Histories and Castles to help you get a deep dive understanding of histories events and figures.