(2): Aut disseisiatur.

Avarice was a frequent motive of John’s oppressions: the machinery of justice was an engine for transferring land and money to his treasury. Crown–tenants frequently found their estates appropriated by the Crown as escheats. That this was a grievance to which the barons attached supreme importance is shown in many ways: by the care taken in the 25th Article of the Barons and in chapter 52 of the Charter to provide procedure for restoring “disseised” estates, and by the terms of writs issued by John after the treaty at Runnymede, for the immediate restoration of “lands, castles, and franchises from which we have caused any one to be disseised injuste et sine judicio.”

Later versions of Magna Carta (beginning with that of 1217) are careful to define the objects to be protected from disseisin: “free tenements, franchises, and free customs.” (a) Liberum tenementum. “Free” tenements were freeholds as opposed to the villenagium that passed into the modern copyhold. None of the possessions thus protected were more highly valued by the barons than their feudal strongholds. Castles claimed by great lords as their own property are mentioned in many writs of the period, while chapter 52 of Magna Carta gives them a prominent place among the “disseisins” to be restored. (b) “Libertates” covered feudal jurisdictions, immunities, and privileges of various sorts, of too intangible a nature to be appropriately described as “holdings.” (c) Consuetudines had two meanings, a broad general one and a narrower financial one. As the Charter of 1217 uses a proprietary pronoun (no freeman shall be disseised of his free customs), it probably refers to such rights as those of levying tolls and tallages. These vested interests were of the nature of monopolies; and Coke, in treating this passage as a text on which to preach the doctrine that monopolies have always been illegal in England, aims wide of his mark. Commenting on the words “de libertatibus,” he declares that generally all monopolies are against this Great Charter, because they are against the liberty and freedom of the subject and against the law of the land.” In this error he has been assiduously followed.