Definition
Chartae Libertatum (Latin: "charters of liberties") is the collective designation for the two foundational constitutional documents of medieval English law: Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest (Charta de Foresta). Together, these instruments established the core framework of liberties, rights, and limitations on royal power that became the bedrock of English constitutional and common law development.
Magna Carta (1215, reissued in various forms through the 13th century) addressed the liberties of freemen, procedural protections, and restraints on arbitrary royal authority. The Charter of the Forest (1217) addressed the rights of common people in relation to royal forests — including rights of access, pasture, and use of woodland resources that had been aggressively enclosed by the Crown. The two charters circulated and were confirmed together repeatedly by Parliament, giving them a paired constitutional status that neither held alone.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research significance of this term is taxonomic. When historical sources reference "the charters," "the two charters," or Chartae Libertatum, researchers should not assume the reference is exclusively to Magna Carta. The Charter of the Forest is frequently the missing half of this equation and has received far less attention in American legal scholarship, despite its structural importance to English constitutional history.
In corpus research, the term appears most often in treatises on constitutional history and early English law rather than in case reports, where Magna Carta is more commonly cited directly by name or chapter. The maxim preserved in Black's — Chartarum super fidem, mortuis testibus, ad patriam de necessitudine recurrendum est ("the witnesses being dead, the truth of charters must of necessity be referred to the country, i.e., a jury") — appears in Coke's commentary and signals a broader evidentiary context in which the term may surface: disputes about ancient grants and the authentication of historical documents when living witnesses are unavailable.
Researchers working in pre-modern English legal history should also note that "liberties" in this context carries its technical medieval meaning — franchises, privileges, and immunities granted by royal authority — not the broad modern constitutional sense of individual freedoms. This distinction matters when tracing how the documents were understood and cited in their own era versus how later common law courts reinterpreted them.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (2nd Ed.) gives a concise and accurate identification: Chartae Libertatum refers to Magna Carta and the Charta de Foresta. The entry is notable for appending the Coke maxim on charter authentication, which reflects the practical procedural context in which the charters were invoked in litigation — not merely as constitutional monuments but as documentary evidence of specific grants and liberties.
Black's entry is representative of how 19th- and early 20th-century legal dictionaries treated the term: brief, Latin-forward, and oriented toward the practitioner who needed to recognize the reference rather than understand it in depth. What these sources do not provide is any account of the Charter of the Forest as a distinct instrument with its own substantive content and history, or any analysis of how the paired charters were confirmed by Parliament and given statutory force. Researchers relying solely on dictionary entries will miss that dimension.
Jurisdictional Note
Chartae Libertatum is a term of English constitutional history with no direct jurisdictional application in American law. Its relevance to U.S. legal research is historical and interpretive — primarily in the context of tracing the foundations of due process, the rights of the accused, and constitutional limitations on government power back through English common law antecedents.