[T]he whole of the constitutional history of England is little more than a commentary on Magna Carta. - William Stubbs

The nation, on whom and by whom he [Edward I] was working, had now become a consolidated people, aroused by the lessons of his father's reign to the intelligent appreciation of their own condition, and attached to their own laws and customs with a steady though not unreasoning affection, jealous of their privileges, their charters, their local customs, unwilling that the laws of England should be changed. The reign of Henry III, and the first twenty years of Edward, prove the increasing capacity for self-government, as well as the increased desire and understanding of the idea of self-government.

It is far from easy to determine the mutual relations of the courts of the hundred and shire, and those of the manor and honour, or the co-ordinate departments of the bench, the pleas, and the exchequer, or the rival merits of the chancery, the house of lords, and the judicial committee of privy council. But that very complexity is a sign of growth; simplicity of detail signifies historically the extinction of earlier framework. That which springs up, as our whole system has done, on the principle of adapting present means to present ends, may be complex and inconvenient and empiric, but it is natural, spontaneous, and a crucial test of substantial freedom.

The Great Charter is the first great public act of the nation, after it has realised its own identity: the consummation of the work for which unconsciously kings, prelates, and lawyers have been labouring for a century. There is not a word in it that recalls the distinctions of race and blood, or that maintains the differences of English and Norman law. It is in one view the summing up of a period of national life, in another the starting-point of a new, not less eventful, period than that which it closes.