The framers had grasped the great truth that jurisprudence is a science, that the law must be administered by men learned in that science and bound to obey its rules and follow its precedents, that uniformity and certainty are essential to the administration of justice, and that the highest political liberty is the right to justice according to law and not according to the will of the judge or the judge's master, or according to the judge's individual discretion, or his notions of right and wrong. They had also arrived at the conclusion that every Englishman was entitled as of absolute right to a day in a court which would hear before it condemned, which would proceed upon notice and inquiry, and which would render judgment only after a fair trial. The plain people of England knew full well that the struggle for their old laws--the laws of their land, pious, good, fixed and permanent, as they devoutly believed them to be--would be fruitless unless they secured permanent courts and learned, independent and impartial judges; and they instinctively felt, if they did not clearly perceive, that the law is infinitely wiser than those who may be called upon to administer it, and that, as Aristotle had declared fifteen hundred years before, "to seek to be wiser than the laws is the very thing which is by good laws forbidden." It was Magna Carta that established in England the doctrine of the rule of law administered in fixed courts by learned and independent judges bound to obey the law; and it was Magna Carta that established the greatest of all the English constitutional doctrines, that of the supremacy of the law over every official however high. When the Great Charter was being translated and explained in the cathedrals, churches and monasteries of England, the people fully understood the tremendous significance and value to them, determined as they were to establish a rule of law and put an end to arbitrary decrees, of the famous covenant in chapter forty-five that the king would "appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or bailiffs only such as know the law of the realm and mean to observe it well," and of the covenants in chapter seventeen that the "common pleas shall not follow our court, but shall be held in some fixed place"--in chapter eighteen that the petty assizes should be held in the county court--in chapter thirty-six that the writ of inquisition should be freely "granted, and never denied"--in chapter forty that "to no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice," which in time came to be interpreted as a universal guaranty of free and impartial justice to all classes high and low.