In the reissue of the following year, 1217, the clauses omitted in 1216 were not replaced. The regency council might be using the charter as a political weapon to win men to their side, but they regarded it as above all an administrative measure, a guide to and a check on judges and local officers in the difficult years of reconstruction. The rights of the widow are still more carefully defined. The rules for the taking of assizes are modified. There were three fresh clauses forbidding a freeman to give or sell so much of his land as may hinder the proper performance of his services to his lord; regulating the conduct of the sheriff with regard to the holding of the shire court ; and forbidding the prac tice of giving land to a religious house and receiving it back as its tenant. The delay of 3 weeks in the payment of goods taken for the use of a royal castle in 1216 is extended in 1217 to 4o days, but in 1217 the carts of ladies, knights and parsons are exempt from cartage duties. The provision in the 1215 issue that service with the army exempts from castle guard is limited by the statement that the exemption only applies to fiefs from which service with the army is due. If the clause which declares that the promises made by the king to his tenants shall be observed by his men to theirs is weakened by the saving clause reserving to "all archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, templars, hospitalers, earls, barons and all other as well ecclesiastical as secular persons their liberties and free customs which they had before," it is, at any rate, made clear that all villeins, not only the king's are protected from excessive amercements. The forest clauses were omitted and issued later in a separate charter. It is to this issue that the name Magna Carta became attached in contrast with the charter of the forest. The edition of 1225 contained nothing new,
except the statement that the charter is issued of the king's free and spontaneous will and in return for an aid. That later issues of the charter were no more than confirmations of this edition is not surprising. The administrative system was yearly becoming more complicated, the law more intricate. A carefully drawn statute was needed at the end of the century to deal with a matter for which a short clause would have sufficed in 1217.
There still exist four originals of the charter of 1215, two of them in the cathedral churches in which they were originally deposited, Lincoln and Salisbury, the other two in the British Museum. The Lincoln Charter was considered the most perfect and was reproduced in the Statutes of the Realm in 181o. The charter was commented on by Sir Edward Coke in his Second Institute published by order of the Long Parliament in 5642, but modern criticism was begun by Blackstone The Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest (1759). Richard Thomson's Essay on the Magna Carta of King John (1829), was a serious attempt to collect all the information on the circum stances and people connected with the charter. It also contains a use ful section on the existing manuscripts, copies and printed editions of the charter. Modern authorities to be consulted are C. Bemont, Chartes des libertes anglaises (1892) ; W. S. McKechnie, Magna Carta (1905) ; Petit-Dutaillis, Studies supplementary to Stubbs' Constitu tional History ii. (1908) ; R. L. Poole, The Publication of Great Charters by the English Kings in Eng. Hist. Review (1913) ; Magna Carta Commemoration Essays (1915) ; F. M. Powicke, Stephen Lang ton (1928). (D. M. S.)