“The Charter was regarded as important because it assigned definite and practical remedies to temporary evils. There was very little that was abstract in its terms, less even than later generations supposed…. A King had been brought to order, not by a posse of reactionary feudalists, but the community of the land under baronial leadership; a tyrant had been subjected to the laws which hitherto it had been his private privilege to administer and to modify at will. A process had begun which was to end in putting the power of the Crown into the hands of the community at large.”

— George Macaulay Trevelyan

on the Magna Carta's legacy
A Shortened History of England (1959)

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George Macaulay Trevelyan 10

Historian 1876–1962

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