English nobility saw universal laws as the guarantee of their own liberty

Evidence

For hundreds of years following the Magna Charta, there was a lively awareness in England that certain fundamental rights had to be preserved and increased for all classes; that nobility could not maintain its freedoms without the freedoms of the weaker classes being maintained at the same time; and that only the law which applied to nobility, burgher, and peasant alike represented a limitation of the personal reign. — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 5133

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: A concrete historical instance of ‘rights for all as a restraint on the crown’ which supports the tension-mechanism that could underpin a piece on institutions and impersonal guardianship as Simmel’s dual-relation to subordination.
• XREF: Nobility preserving its freedom by widening legal rights to all classes parallels Shapiro’s notion that guardian constraints must apply uniformly to hold agents in check. — connects to: Eighteenth-century English thinkers held law as the source, not enemy, of civil liberty — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 214; Royal judges unified English legal procedure by the thirteenth century — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 107