Based too as it professed to be on Henry's Charter it was far from being a mere copy of what had gone before.

The vague expressions of the old Charter were now exchanged for precise and elaborate provisions.

The bonds of unwritten custom which the older grant did little more than recognize had proved too weak to hold the Angevins; and the baronage set them aside for the restraints of written and defined law.

It is in this way that the Great Charter marks the transition from the age of traditional rights, preserved in the nation's memory and officially declared by the Primate, to the age of written legislation, of Parliaments and Statutes, which was to come.
Its opening indeed is in general terms.

The Church had shown its power of self-defence in the struggle over the interdict, and the clause which recognized its rights alone retained the older and general form.