By the phrase "the law of the land," in chapter thirty-nine, the fundamental principles and axioms of the existing law were perpetuated. Exactly what those fundamental principles and axioms were then understood to be is not now capable of accurate exposition. The judges and the people of those days certainly had some definite ideas of reasonably just and fixed rules of conduct adequate for the solution of the simple questions arising in the controversies then being submitted for adjudication. Had the judges been pressed for a comprehensive or philosophical definition of "the law of the land," they might have said that they would not attempt to define the term any more than they would attempt to define justice itself, and that, as the Supreme Court of the United States declared only a few years ago, it is better to ascertain the intent of such an important phrase in a great constitutional document by the gradual process of judicial inclusion and exclusion as practical experience may dictate and as the cases presented for decision may require; in other words, that their decisions would in time sufficiently declare and perpetuate the principles of the law of "A land of settled government, A land of just and old renown, Where freedom slowly broadens down From precedent to precedent." The phrase "the law of the land," as used in Magna Carta, must have been intended at the time to include procedure as well as substantive law, but the term "due process of law," now its current equivalent, originally related only to procedure. A very early, if not the earliest, use of the term "due process of law" will be found in a statute of the year 1354, 28 Edward III., in which it was provided that no person should be condemned without being first brought to answer by due process of the law, the exact wording in the quaint Norman-French of the day being "_saunz estre mesne en respons par due proces de lei_." As at the same time the Great Charter was being expressly confirmed "to be kept and maintained in all points," the provision in regard to _due proces de lei_ in the act of 1354 was undoubtedly intended to be supplemental to the provisions of the Great Charter and to apply only to persons being brought to trial in a court of justice. It is true that in the seventeenth century Lord Coke used the phrase "due process of law" as the equivalent of "the law of the land," but in the contemporaneous Petition of Right of 1628 mention is made specifically of the "Great Charter of the Liberties of England" and its provision as to "the law of the land," and reference is made separately to the act of 28 Edward III. and its provision that no man should be prosecuted "without being brought to answere by due process of lawe."