Is Your Ancestor a Signer of the Magna Charta, 1215?

The Magna Charta is a royal charter agreed to by King John of England in 1215 that protected a group of barons from false imprisonment, granted them impartial justice, and limited their feudal fees to the King. The Charter was designed to be enforced by a council of 25 barons. “Magna Charta is generally considered to be a cornerstone of Anglo-Saxon law, since it is the earliest agreement between sovereign and subject . . .on the rights of both parties.”

The leading genealogical source on the signers of Magna Charta and their descendants is The Magna Charta Sureties, 1215: The Barons Named in the Magna Charta, 1215 and Some of Their Descendants Who Settled in America During the Early Colonial Years, by Frederick Lewis Weis, with Additions and Corrections by Walter Lee Sheppard, Jr. with William R. Beall, now in a Fifth Edition.

As stated in the Introduction to the Fifth Edition, “Of the twenty-five Sureties only seventeen have identified descendants. Four had no known surviving issue; the issue of one died out in the third generation, and of another in the fourth. Nothing, whatever is known of William de Hardell and his family. The twenty-fifth, Richard de Percy, left only an illegitimate son, Henry, to whom he gave the manor of Settle (Yorks.). . . .” Readers will find below (1) A list of all twenty-five barons specifying which ones’ left colonial American descendants; and (2) A second list of clerics and Nobles named in the Preamble to the Magna Charta. Not included here but found in the book itself is a list of roughly 150 colonial descendants named in the Magna Charta lineages.

Finally, to illustrate the content and arrangement of genealogical information to be found in Magna Charta Sureties, 1215, we have attached the descendancy of Magna Charta Surety Roger Bigod, 2^nd Earl of Norfolk, died 1221. (View Book Details)