The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Preface to the Liberty Fund Edition
• The Roots of Liberty
• Editor’s Introduction: (not Availbale Online For Copyright Reasons)
• 1.: The Ancient Constitution In Medieval England (j.c. Holt)
• 2.: The Place of Magna Carta and the Ancient Constitution In Sixteenth-century English Legal Thought (christopher W. Brooks)
• 3.: Ancient Constitutions In the Age of Sir Edward Coke and John Selden (paul Christianson)
• 4.: The Jurisprudence of Liberty: the Ancient Constitution In the Legal Historiography of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (john Phillip Reid)
• Epilogue: Diverse Viewpoints On Ancient Constitutionalism (corinne Comstock Weston)
• Appendix: Text and Translation of Magna Carta *
• The Great Charter of Henry Iii
• The Third Great Charter of King Henry the Third; *
• Notes On Contributors

The editor offers grateful acknowledgment to Liberty Fund, Inc., for support of the symposium which occasioned the inquiry precipitating the contents of this book in initial draft. The editor also acknowledges with thanks permission to quote from Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae, translated and edited by S. B. Chrimes, © 1942 Cambridge University Press. Excerpts from the English translation reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Salus populi suprema lex est, et libertas popula summa salus populi

(The welfare of the people is the supreme law and the liberty of the people the greatest welfare of the people).

—John Selden

It is an undoubted and fundamental point of this so ancient common law of England, that the subject hath a true property in his goods and possessions, which doth preserve as sacred that meum et tuum that is the nurse of industry, and mother of courage, and without which there can be no justice, of which meum et tuum is the proper object.

—Sir Dudley Digges

There is one nation in the world whose Constitution has political Liberty for its direct purpose.

—Montesquieu

The Rights of Magna Charta depend not on the Will of the Prince, or the Will of the Legislature; but they are inherent natural Rights of Englishmen: secured and confirmed they may be by the Legislature, but not derived from nor dependent on their Will.

—Philalethes [Elisha Williams]

Preface to the Liberty Fund Edition

It is with pleasure that I write a few prefatory lines for Liberty Fund’s reissue of The Roots of Liberty just twenty years after the symposium at Windsor Castle, which first elicited the scholarly studies the book contains. The devotion to liberty under law that is a hallmark of Anglo-American civilization and free government is nowhere symbolized with greater authority than in Magna Carta and the ancient constitution of which it is the noblest monument. The American constitutional tradition of which we so admiringly speak is grounded in the words and deeds brought together in this abiding centerpiece of our heritage as free men, the very liber homo announced by Magna Carta.

As conference director, discussion leader, contributor, and editor of the book, I take satisfaction in seeing a new edition appear. Furthermore, the conference itself spurred participants to renewed examination of the complex subject matter we addressed.

The impetus of our discussions can be traced in numerous publications since we deliberated at Windsor in 1988. Representative among these is Sir James Holt’s new edition of Magna Carta (2d edition; Cambridge University Press, 1992), with its sustained attention to the meaning of nullus liber homo, a point of our puzzlement in discussion; and there is John Phillip Reid’s The Ancient Constitution and the Origins of Anglo-American Liberty (Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), which expands chapter four of the present volume. My own efforts in the meanwhile directly continue the analysis begun then in chapters six and seven of The Politics of Truth (University of Missouri Press, 1999), which deal with Sir John Fortescue and with American religion and higher law.

This new edition is both valuable in itself and timely. With our millennial institutions of freedom and unique devotion to individual human worth and dignity under unremitting assault, we face an ideological and international conflict whose end and outcome lie nowhere in sight, beyond a horizon bounded by the iron curtain of the future. The Roots of Liberty can be one small help in guiding our passage through the perplexities of these treacherous times.

Ellis Sandoz

September 11, 2007