Does the concept of natural rights have roots, logical and historical, in the concept of natural law? Our answer is, ‘it depends’. By this, we mean that some conceptions across Western history do not in fact allow for the derivation of natural rights in the subjective sense. In contrast, others are conceived such that natural rights follow logically therefrom. Our premise is that talking about ‘natural law’ in the singular – at least in the period from Roman times to sixteenth-century – represents a distortion of on-the-ground realities.

The documentary reconstruction of the history of the life and martyrdom of Thomas Becket of Canterbury has proven among the most vexing challenges for historians of twelfth-century Europe. Contemporary reports (those composed within fifteen or so years of the archbishop's fateful murder on 29 December 1170) abound, including accounts by his intimates and other participants in key events of Becket's career. But these voices speak in a bewildering and exasperating cacophony, as might be expected by the sheer number of vitae, as well as letters and other important pieces of evidence, available to the modern reader. At the end of the nineteenth century, Edwin Abbott, in his masterful attempt to collate the multitude of accounts of one crucial moment in Becket's career – the few hours surrounding his actual death – stated with evident frustration that examination of the extant narratives shows ‘how even eye-witnesses may have been misled, and may have misled others, as to important details, and also how easy and natural it was for the miraculous to intrude, even within five years of the Martyrdom’. Yet, recent scholars have doggedly sought to separate the wheat from the chaff so as to create a single coherent tale about Becket's procession from birth to afterlife, applying the critical tools of the modern historian to the rich body of evidence afforded by the many reports of the saint's deeds and words.

The showdown between King John of England and his barons, climaxing with the sealing of Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215, was surely one of the most dramatic and weighty events in the course of medieval English history. The document and the circumstances of its ratification continue to be valorized, perhaps with dubious accuracy, as a key moment in the development of Western human rights and liberties. Such judgments, while reinforcing Magna Carta's mythological status, require some serious historical qualification. First and foremost, one must recognize that the final and ‘official’ version of the document – the one that was reconfirmed by English kings on numerous occasions during the Middle Ages and beyond – was actually ratified in 1225, early in the reign of King Henry III. The 1225 Magna Carta was in many ways a changed document, in terms of its length and organization (it contains 37 articles in contrast to the 63 of the 1215 original), as well as some of its language. Even in its 1225 redaction, however, the grievances expressed were of limited applicability. Cursory examination of the text of Magna Carta would lead one to the entirely reasonable conclusion that it reflects the interests of a tiny population of England, namely, the upper echelons of the landed nobility. Certainly, its specific articles in its earliest form pertained almost exclusively to grievances expressed by that class.

Most importantly, serious scholarship has challenged and decisively defeated the once-dominant view that Magna Carta was instantly recognized by thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Englishmen to be a document that embraced constitutional monarchy and limited government. The concentration of recent research concerning the Charter has generally been devoted instead to its technical dimensions as applied in the courts and (after the late thirteenth century) parliament, for example, its many reconfirmations and, more broadly, the shifting significance of the utilization of its various articles during the 1200s and 1300s. Any further conceptual features ascribed it have been now relegated to the revival of interest in it among sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English legal theorists such as Edward Coke and William Blackstone, who found in it common law principles of constitutionalism. Certainly, opportunities existed during the thirteenth century to put Magna Carta to work in normative writings.

Some readers may find it surprising to encounter a chapter on “individual autonomy” in a survey of medieval philosophy, especially in connection with political philosophy. After all, an established tradition of historical scholarship insists that the Middle Ages was a period in which hierarchy, interdependence, and communal holism were emphasized to the virtual exclusion of the individual. The recovery of Aristotle’s writings on ethics and politics during the course of the mid-thirteenth century would seem only to reinforce the generally “communitarian” and anti-individualistic orientation commonly ascribed to medieval thinkers. Recently, the image of medieval Europe as hostile to the individual has been reaffirmed by its depiction as a “persecuting society.” Thus, according to the conventional view, the Renaissance and the Reformation constituted the watershed for the appearance of the individual as a moral and political category worthy of philosophical consideration.

Yet medieval political thinkers, both before and after the dissemination of Latin translations of Aristotle’s work, were surprisingly attuned to the standing of the individual and the role of free choice in public affairs. In their emphasis on the centrality of private property and consent to government, as well as their insistence on the ability of individuals to enjoy forms of personal liberty (such as free thought, judgment, and speech), these authors resisted the supposedly hierocratic (even authoritarian) tendencies that scholarship often ascribes to the Middle Ages. In turn, the ability of high and late medieval writers to establish a firm grounding for the individual in relation to religious as well as political authority depended upon their access to a wide range of pagan and Christian sources that yielded philosophical and theological principles supporting personal autonomy. For example, the political and legal traditions inherited from Rome endorsed such values as liberty, philosophical skepticism, and economic freedom.