The English barons forced the King to sign the Magna Carta, a limitation of royal power in favor of lay and ecclesiastical feudal lords; it was the cornerstone of Britain’s unwritten constitution and the foundation of the constitutions of the United States of America and other Western countries. England thus became the first country to have a pluralistic and rights-respecting system, though not yet a liberal democracy, which would only arrive with the American Revolution, over half a millennium later.
