The spanish origins of the Magna Carta: some thoughts upon consent totaxation and tax duty

This essay aims at placing the Magna Carta into a more generale European context and, most of all, at showing that, with respect to taxation, it established two limitation to the principle of “consent to taxation": on the one hand, such consent ceased to be and individual matter and became a specific concern of an “assembly”; on the other hand, it was necessary only where the public nature of the expenditures to be funded was in question. In other words, the Magna Carta underlined the prevalence of tax duty upon consent to taxation. And this feature, from a contemporary perspective, may provide a key to the understanding