The 1225 reissue, granted by the young King Henry III in exchange for a tax grant, became the definitive version of Magna Carta, later entered into statute law in 1297. Unlike the hastily sealed 1215 original, this version was freely and deliberately confirmed, giving its clauses — including limits on arbitrary imprisonment — lasting constitutional weight.
Magna Carta's original 1215 sealing at Runnymede was a battlefield truce between King John and rebellious barons, annulled by the Pope within weeks and functionally dead within the year. It took several reissues under Henry III to turn the document from a failed peace treaty into the cornerstone of English law.
The 1225 version, issued when Henry III was just seventeen, was different: it was granted voluntarily by the king's own council in return for a tax on movable property, meaning it carried the weight of genuine royal consent rather than coercion. This is the text that entered the statute books in 1297 and which later generations of lawyers, from Edward Coke to the American revolutionaries, actually cited.
Clauses guaranteeing that no free man could be imprisoned or dispossessed except by lawful judgment of his peers trace their legal lineage to this 1225 charter, not the more famous but legally inert 1215 version. It is a quiet reminder that the documents we mythologize are often not the ones that did the actual legal work.