No document in the history of any nation is more important than the Great Charter; in the words of Bishop Stubbs, the whole of the constitutional history of England is only one long commentary upon it. Its importance lay not merely in the fact that it was won from an unwilling sovereign by the united action of nobles, clergy, and people, but also in the admirable summary which it embodies of the fundamental principles of English government, so far as they had ripened by the early years of the thirteenth century. The charter contained almost nothing that was not old. It was not even an instrument, like the Constitution of the United States, providing for the creation of a new government. It merely sought to gather up within a single reasonably brief document all the important principles which the best of the English sovereigns had recognized, but which such rulers as Richard and John had lately been improving every opportunity to evade. The primary purpose of the barons in forcing the king to grant the charter was not to get a new form of government or code of laws, but simply to obtain a remedy for certain concrete abuses, to resist the encroachments of the crown upon the traditional liberties of Englishmen, and to get a full and definite confirmation of these liberties in black and white. Not a new constitution was wanted, but good government in conformity with the old one. Naturally enough, therefore, the charter of 1215 was based in most of its important provisions upon that granted by Henry I. in 1100, even as this one was based on the righteous laws of the good Edward the Confessor. And after the same manner the charter of King John, in its turn, became the foundation for all future resistance of Englishmen to the evils of misgovernment, so that very soon it came naturally to be called _Magna Charta_--the Great Charter--by which designation it is known to this day. King John was in no true sense the author of the charter. Many weeks before the meeting at Runnymede the barons had drawn up their demands in written form, and when that meeting occurred they were ready to lay before the sovereign a formal document, in forty-nine chapters, to which they simply requested his assent. This preliminary document was discussed and worked over, the number of chapters being increased to sixty-two, but the charter as finally agreed upon differed from it only in minor details. It is a mistake to think of John as "signing" the charter after the fashion of modern sovereigns. There is no evidence that he could write, and at any rate he acquiesced in the terms of the charter only by having his seal affixed to the paper. The original "Articles of the Barons" is still preserved in the British Museum, but there is no _one_ original Magna Charta in existence. Duplicate copies of the document were made for distribution among the barons, and papers which are generally supposed to represent four of these still exist, two being in the British Museum.