ABSTRACT
Although rulers as late as Henry V (1399-1413), continued to con-firm Magna Carta, it slipped into the shadows of high politics by the mid-fifteenth century to remain in the background until the seventeenth century. England under Edward II (1307-27), witnessed a halt to the progress toward powerful monarchy that had characterized Edward I’s reign and a revival of baronial efforts to bridle kings seen as unfit for the crown. By the fifteenth century, the king’s subjects gave greater priority to confronting rapid economic change and endemic lawlessness than to preserving restraints on royal power, and their cries for confirmation of the Charters ceased. After more than thirty confirmations in the fourteenth century, Magna Carta was confirmed only eight times in the next century.
