forfeiture of the
freeman on conviction of felony was never to include his tenement, or
that of the merchant his wares, or that of the countryman, as Henry the
Second had long since ordered, his wain. The means of actual livelihood
were to be left even to the worst. The seizure of provisions, the
exaction of forced labour, by royal officers was forbidden; and the
abuses of the forest system were checked by a clause which disafforested
all forests made in John's reign. The under-tenants were protected
against all lawless exactions of their lords in precisely the same terms
as these were protected against the lawless exactions of the Crown. The
towns were secured in the enjoyment of their municipal privileges, their
freedom from arbitrary taxation, their rights of justice, of common
deliberation, of regulation of trade. "Let the city of London have all
its old liberties and its free customs, as well by land as by water.
Besides this, we will and grant that all other cities, and boroughs, and
towns, and ports, have all their liberties and free customs." The
influence of the trading class is seen in two other enactments by which
freedom of journeying and trade was secured to foreign merchants, and an
uniformity of weights and measures was ordered to be enforced throughout
the realm.

[Sidenote: Innocent annuls the Charter]

There remained only one question, and that the most difficult of all; the
question how to secure this order which the Charter established in the
actual government of the realm. It was easy to sweep away the immediate
abuses; the hostages were restored to their homes, the foreigners
banished by a clause in the Charter from the country. But it was less
easy to provide means for the control of a king whom no man could trust.
By the treaty as settled at Runnymede a council of twenty-five barons
were to be chosen from the general body of their order to enforce on John
the observance of the Charter, with the right of declaring war on the
king should its provisions be infringed, and it was provided that the
Charter should not only be published throughout the whole country but
sworn to at every hundred-mote and town-mote by order from the king.
"They have given me five-and-twenty over-kings," cried John in a burst of
fury, flinging himself on the floor and gnawing sticks and straw in his
impotent rage. But the rage soon passed into the subtle policy of which
he was a master. After a few days he left Windsor; a