charter of a mediaeval town was a kind of written contract by which the town obtained certain specified immunities or privileges from the sovereign or from a great feudal lord, in exchange for some specified service which often took the form of a money payment. It was common enough for a town to buy liberty for hard cash, just as a man might buy a farm. The word _charter_ originally meant simply a paper or written document, and it was often applied to deeds for the transfer of real estate. In contracts of such importance papers or parchment documents were drawn up and carefully preserved as irrefragable evidences of the transaction. And so, in quite significant phrase the towns zealously guarded their charters as the "title-deeds of their liberties." [Sidenote: The "Great Charter" (1215).] After a while the word charter was applied in England to a particular document which specified certain important concessions forcibly wrung by the people from a most unwilling sovereign. This document was called _Magna Charta_, or the "Great Charter," signed at Runnymede, June 15, 1215, by John, king of England. After the king had signed it and gone away to his room, he rolled in a mad fury on the floor, screaming curses, and gnawing sticks and straw in the impotence of his, wrath.[2] Perhaps it would be straining words to call a transaction in which the consent was so one-sided a "contract," but the idea of Magna Charta was derived from that of the town charters with which people were already familiar. Thus a charter came to mean "a grant made by the sovereign either to the whole people or to a portion of them, securing to them the enjoyment of certain rights." Now in legal usage a charter differs from a constitution in this, that the former is granted by the sovereign, while the latter is established by the people themselves: both are the fundamental law of the land.[3] a The distinction is admirably expressed, but in history it is not always easy to make it. Magna Charta was in form a grant by the sovereign, but it was really drawn up by the barons, who in a certain sense represented the English people; and established by the people after a long struggle which was only in its first stages in John's time. To some extent it partook of the nature of a written constitution. [Footnote 2: Green, _Hist. of the English People_, vol. i. p. 248.] [Footnote 3: Bouvier, _Law Dictionary_, 12th ed., vol. i. p. 259.]