INDEX TO STATUTES, 597 GENERAL INDEX 599 HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION. PART I. EVENTS LEADING TO MAGNA CARTA. The Great Charter is too often treated as the outcome of purely accidental causes. Students of its origin are sometimes content to explain it as a mere tangible product of the successful resistance called forth by the tyrannies of King John. That monarch’s personal misdeeds, it is maintained, goaded into determined action a fierce unflinching opposition which never rested until it had achieved success; and the outcome of this success was the winning of the Great Charter of Liberties. The moving causes of events of such tremendous moment are thus sought in the characteristics and vices of one man. If John had never lived and sinned, so it would appear, the foundations of English freedom would never have been laid. Such shallow views of history unnecessarily belittle the magnitude and inevitable nature of the sequence of causes and effects upon which great issues really depend. The compelling logic of events forces a way for its own fulfilment, independent of the caprices, aims and ambitions of individual men. The incidents of John’s career are the occasions, not the causes, of the great national movement which laid the foundations of English liberties. The origin of Magna Carta lies too deep to be determined by any purely contingent or accidental phenomena. It is as unwise as it is unnecessary to suppose that the course of constitutional development in England was suddenly and violently wrested into a completely new channel, merely because of the incapacity or misdeeds of the temporary occupant of the throne. The source of the discontent fanned to flame by John’s oppressions must be sought in earlier reigns. The genesis of the Charter cannot be understood apart from its historical antecedents, and these are inextricably bound up with the whole story how England grew to be a nation.