The king's courts of justice shall be stationary, and shall no longer follow his person: they shall be open to every one; and justice shall no longer be sold, refused, or delayed by them.

Circuits shall be regularly held every year: the inferior tribunals of justice, the county court, sheriff's turn, and court-leet shall meet at their appointed time and place: the sheriffs shall be incapacitated to hold pleas of the crown; and shall not put any person upon his trial, from rumor or suspicion alone, but upon the evidence of lawful witnesses.
No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or dispossessed of his free tenement and liberties, or outlawed, or banished, or anywise hurt or injured, unless by the legal judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land; and all who suffered otherwise in this or the two former reigns, shall be restored to their rights and possessions.

Every freeman shall be fined in proportion to his fault; and no fine shall be levied on him to his utter ruin; even a villain or rustic shall not by any fine be bereaved of his carts, ploughs, and implements of husbandry.

This was the only article calculated for the interests of this body of men, probably at that time the most numerous in the kingdom.
It must be confessed that the former articles of the Great Charter contain such mitigations and explanations of the feudal law as are reasonable and equitable; and that the latter involve all the chief outlines of a legal government, and provide for the equal distribution of justice, and free enjoyment of property; the great objects for which political society was at first founded by men, which the people have a perpetual and unalienable right to recall, and which no time, nor precedent, nor statute, nor positive institution, ought to deter them from keeping ever uppermost in their thoughts and attention.

Though the provisions made by this charter might, conformably to the genius of the age, be esteemed too concise, and too bare of circumstances to maintain the execution of its articles, in opposition to the chicanery of lawyers, supported by the violence of power, time gradually ascertained the sense of all the ambiguous expressions; and those generous barons, who first extorted this concession, still held their swords in their hands, and could turn them against those who dared, on any pretence, to depart from the original spirit and meaning of the grant.