A mere 793 years ago today, a group of English nobleman cornered King John on a peaceful sward in England's green and pleasant land persuaded him to sign Magna Carta, generally considered the first document of freedom in the Western world.
Magna Carta limited certain kingly rights, most notably that of habeas corpus. It began the gradual process of the sharing of royal power with a body of subjects and, by the time of the English Civil War, became a rallying point for those espousing ideas that would eventually lead to the modern concept of democracy embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
(In one of the more amusing moments in the history of references to the foundational agreement, Margaret Thatcher, in sniffing at the awe in which we hold our Declaration -- well, some of us, anyway -- reminded us that what she called "the Great Charter" antedated it for several hundred years, eschewing, in her hidebound Englishness, even the Latin name by which we know it.)