Alternate use, see charter airline, yacht charter, bare-boat charter or Charter Communications.

A charter is a document bestowing certain rights on a town, city, university, land or institution; sometimes used as a loan of money. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a bill of rights. The term derives from a root word meaning "paper".

Origin

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As John Fiske described in his 1890 treatise on the Origin of Civil Government in the United States:

The word "charter" originally meant simply a paper or written document, and it was often applied to deeds for the transfer of real estate. In contracts of such importance papers or parchment documents were drawn up and carefully preserved as irrefragable evidences of the transaction. And so, in quite significant phrase the towns zealously guarded their charters as the "title-deeds of their liberties."

After a while the word charter was applied in England to a particular document which specified certain important concessions forcibly wrung by the people from a most unwilling sovereign. This document was called Magna Carta, or the "Great Charter," signed at Runnymede, June 15, 1215, by John, king of England.

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