The Great Charter was signed on the 15th of June, 1215, in the presence of the archbishop, the whole of the baronage, and a vast assembly of all ranks. It is a document of sixty-three clauses, of which many were quite trivial and related to purely personal or local grievances. But the important part of its provisions may be summed up under six heads. Firstly, the king promises that "the English Church shall be free"--free, that is, from violent interference in the election of its prelates, and from illegal taxation. Secondly, the feudal rights of the king over his tenants-in-chief are defined. He is only to raise the customary "aids" and dues, and their amount is laid down. His rights of wardship over widows and orphans are stated and limited. In a similar way the tenants-in-chief promise to exercise only these same rights over their own vassals. Thirdly, there is to be no taxation without the consent of the Great Council--the first indication of the control of Parliament over the national revenues. Fourthly, the administration of justice is to be strengthened and purified. No one is to be tried or punished more than once for the same offence. No one is to be imprisoned on the king's private fiat, but if arrested he must be at once put on trial, and that before a jury of his peers. Fines for every sort of offence are to be fixed and made proportionate to the crime, not to the king's idea of the amount he could extract from the criminal. Fifthly, the king is not to put foreigners, ignorant of the laws of England, in any judicial or administrative post, and he is at once to dismiss all his foreign mercenary troops. Sixthly, the city of London, and all other cities which enjoy rights and privileges under earlier royal charters, are to be fully confirmed in them. The Great Charter then plunges into a mass of smaller grievances, where we need not follow it. But it ends with a most peculiar and important clause, which shows how little the baronage trusted the king. A body of twenty-five guardians of the Charter is appointed, who undertake to see that the king carries it out, and they are authorized to constrain him to observe it by force of arms if he swerves from his plighted word. These guardians include seven earls, fourteen barons, three sons of great lords whose fathers still survived, and the Mayor of London.