The Magna Carta (the "Great Charter") emerged from a struggle between 13th-century English aristocracy defending their rights and property against the harsh taxation policies of an overstepping monarch. In an attempt to quell this revolt by his barons, King John affixed his seal to the Magna Carta on June 15, 1215, but to little avail: the Pope nullified the charter and King John ignored it. Ten weeks after the Magna Carta was signed, England was enmeshed in the First Barons' War—essentially a civil war. Upon John's death in 1216, the Magna Carta was reissued by his son, Henry III. It was reissued once more in 1217, and a third and final time in 1225, when it entered English statute law.
Despite its shaky start, the Magna Carta set down the principle of "the law of the land" (as opposed to the sole will of the king, a blow to the royal principle of absolutism). Clause 39 read "no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised [dispossessed] or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimised...except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." This has been identified as an early guarantee to trial by jury and of habeas corpus (a protection against unlawful detention). The Magna Carta was a strong statement for its time of the individual's political rights, of no person being above the law, and the right to be free of taxation without representation.
Read more about the Magna Carta here.
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/magna-carta
Another predecessor of our Constitution was the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Under the commoner Oliver Cromwell, England was governed for the first time with a formal constitution called "the Instrument of Government," but after Cromwell's death in 1658, monarchy was restored. The throne passed first to Charles II and then to his Catholic brother James II, who ruled at loggerheads with Protestant nobles and bishops during a period of widespread English fear of Catholicism. Before long, his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange of the Netherlands, was secretly invited by a group of nobles to take the throne. James was deposed and eventually died in exile. Another outcome of what became known as "the Glorious Revolution" was that an English Bill of Rights was enacted, establishing the supremacy of Parliament and limiting royal power.
Learn how the English Bill of Rights influenced the United States Constitution at the link below.
