The Great Charter, in form granted by John as a voluntary gift to the nation, was in reality a treaty concluded between him and his barons. That its provisions relative to taxation are important has already been hinted at; as a matter of history, the recurrence of references to these particular sections of the Charter proves the esteem in which Englishmen of later generations regarded this early book of their Bible of Liberties. Whether this veneration, displayed by the framers of subsequent and perhaps equally important instruments, was based upon the intrinsic value of the Charter or upon nothing firmer than sentiment, is somewhat of a mooted question.[76] The fact that it was held in such esteem is for us the important and sufficient reason for considering it in detail. It is essential to understand upon what the later champions of parliamentary taxation based their arguments, even though those arguments presumed interpretations of Magna Carta which the framers of the Charter would have been far from admitting. [Chapter 12] The twelfth chapter,[77] taken with the fourteenth,[78] serves as the legal basis for much of the eloquence against arbitrary taxation from the time of John to the acceptance of the United States Constitution. It has been taken to admit “the right of the nation to ordain taxation”[79] and even as the surrender of the “royal claim to arbitrary taxation.”[80] An analysis of the contents and application of the twelfth chapter together with additional comment on the fourteenth may throw some light on the substance for these assertions.[81] The impositions which are specified in the chapter are “scutage” and “aid.” The arbitrary levy of scutage upon the lands of his tenants was the chief moving cause which brought John to Runnymede, and this chapter undertook the correction of the abuse of abuses. The aids mentioned are to be distinguished from the incidents of feudal tenure, reliefs, marriages, primer seisins, and similar payments which are dealt with elsewhere in the Charter and belong to the peculiar history of feudalism. The twelfth chapter provides that the three ordinary aids--for ransoming the king, for knighting his eldest son, and for the marriage of his eldest daughter--should be reasonable in amount. These might be exacted by the king as a matter of course, without the common council of the realm. The extraordinary aids, which the Charter places in the same category with scutages, include all other arbitrary feudal exactions levied to meet some particular emergency and in an unusual manner. The Charter places both these extraordinary aids and the obnoxious scutages beyond the pale of royal imposition; hereafter they are leviable only “by common counsel” of the kingdom. That they were to be laid by the body known as the Common Council is indicated by the provisions of Chapter Fourteen. [Provision regarding London]