Magna Carta (1215)
Audience
The original audience for the Magna Carta consisted of the barons—possibly around 165 men, including some thirty-nine in rebellion—and the king. Additionally, the audience included advisers to the king and, to a lesser extent, ecclesiastical authorities. As the years passed, the audience for the Magna Carta grew. By using the word freemen in its introduction and first clause and “all Men of this our Realm” in Clause 37, the charter potentially had an audience that was much larger than the assemblage of men at Runnymede. There has been much dispute about what this language implied and to whom the rights granted by the Magna Carta applied. The jurist and legal scholar Sir Edward Coke used the term to include almost all men and, in 1628, promulgated the Magna Carta as a constitution by which the rights of Englishmen were guaranteed. Regardless of what the writers of Magna Carta may have originally intended, its scope came to include all men and eventually all people....
