Episode Details

Before the American colonists ever claimed the rights of man, they claimed the rights of Englishmen. For the first ten years of the quarrel with Britain they argued not like philosophers but like lawyers — citing charters with dates on them, quoting Magna Carta, demanding the concrete, inherited liberties of British subjects. This episode takes down the second of the two great rights traditions of the founding: not the universal philosophy of Locke, but the older, particular inheritance won by six centuries of English struggle and written into law.

From the meadow at Runnymede in 1215, where a hated king was forced to put his seal to the Great Charter, through the common law and Sir Edward Coke — who told King James to his face that the king is under God and the law — to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the English Bill of Rights, whose clauses the American Bill of Rights would echo almost word for word. The colonists argued from this inheritance first, and reached for natural rights only when Parliament gave them the devastating answer that a right granted by law can be taken away by law. Two streams of liberty, about to be braided into one — with a third still to come.