Last year, Vision Forum Ministries traveled to Scotland for one of the best Faith and Freedom tours I have ever had the privilege to be a part of.

After spending two weeks in Scotland, I took my family to England to visit some of the historic sites that the country has to offer. One of the highlights for me was the time I spent walking with my children on the ancient fields of Runnymede, located just outside of Windsor near the River Thames. It was on this battlefield 794 years ago today in 1215, that King John was forced by the nobles and barons to affix his Royal Seal on the “Great Charter” of liberty. In 2015 we will celebrate the 800th anniversary of the signing of this great document of freedom. The Magna Carta is the seedbed of our modern concepts of the proper understanding of “Separation of Church and State,” free speech, free association, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, the right of due process according to the law of the land, the right to a public and impartial trial at the hands of our peers, the right to travel freely in the time of peace, and fundamentally of all the recognition that even the sovereign is subject to the law of the land. The king is under the law! This was the first time in Christendom that this principle was enshrined into law.

While on the fields of Runnymede, I took my family to the Jamestown Magna Carta Tree, a landmark of liberty planted with soil from America’s birthplace. This tree is more than just a little taste of home, it is a link to Biblical principles of liberty articulated, on this field and carried to the shores of America four hundred and two years ago. Vision Forum celebrated this event in Jamestown in 2007 with the Jamestown Quadricentennial, a grand celebration which ended on the anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, June 15, 1215. (Two years ago, participants in the Jamestown 400: Our National Treasure Hunt, will remember being directed by super code-maker/breaker Jack Bradford to the Magna Carta Tree in Jamestown, VA.)

So foundational and instrumental is the Magna Carta to our own legal system, that not only is there a tree planted with the soil from Jamestown, Va, to commemorate this fact, but England has ceded a small section of land on the field of Runnymede to the American Bar Association in honor of the fact that our very Charter—the U.S. Constitution, codifies into our law system many of the ancient principles that were secured on this field. The Constitution of the United States of America refers specifically to the Magna Carta’s principles in several sections of the document: Article one section nine, and in Amendments one, five, six, and eight. The founding fathers did not just draft our constitution out of thin air. It was birthed over several centuries of legal theory rooted in Biblical law and springing from the fields of Runnymede.

One of the most important legal theorists to uphold the principles of the Magna Carta and who the founders drew heavily from, was none other than Sir Edward Coke. Coke (pronounced Cook) was the Attorney General for Elizabeth, Chief Justice during the reign of James I, and was one of the fiercest opponents to Charles I. Coke would use the Magna Carta against the tyrannical Stuart kings and even proclaimed to Parliament in 1628, “Magna Carta—will have no sovereign.”

It was from Coke, (and later William Blackstone) who was writing at the time of the colonial charters, that the founding fathers learned their common law history. Each charter guaranteed that those coming to the New World and their heirs would have “all the rights and immunities of free and natural subjects.” So foundational was the Magna Carta and the study of our common law history to our founders, that Edmund Burke would say of America, “In no country, perhaps in the world, is law so general a study.” It was by reading Coke, whose four-volume Institutes of the Laws of England was widely read by American law students, such as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison that they learned of the spirit of the charter and the common law. Thomas Jefferson would write to James Madison of Coke’s influence : “a sounder Whig never wrote, nor of profounder learning in the orthodox doctrines of the British constitution, or in what were called English liberties.”

Magna Carta enshrined the concept that the King was under the law. In 1779 John Adams expressed it this way : “A government of laws, and not of men.”

Happy 794th Birthday Magna Carta!