AUTHOR: ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY STEPHEN LANGTON
DATE: 1215
Magna Carta (which translates from Latin as The Great Charter) is an agreement hammered out in the early thirteenth century by England’s King John and a group of his fractious barons with a view to avoiding civil war. It was the product of political pragmatism, geared towards preserving the wealth and power of a political elite. But its impact has gone much further than any of its signatories could have dreamed. It is widely regarded as nothing less than the founding document of the democratic ideals and civil liberties that have underpinned much of the Western world in the eight hundred or so years since its creation.
King John had come to the throne in 1199, succeeding his brother, Richard I (‘the Lionheart’). Richard’s reign had been largely peaceful at home and reasonably prosperous as well. He spent most of his time abroad on Crusade, so the English barons could oversee domestic affairs with little interference from above. John, though, was a different sort of ruler. Believing in his divine right to reign, he sought to impose his will and, at the same time, to do everything possible to enrich the royal coffers. He ruthlessly extracted taxes due on inheritances, in lieu of military service and even on the estates of widows who remarried. His barons did not take kindly to his heavy touch and discontent among them grew rapidly.
Matters came to a head when John undertook a series of expensive forays into France, culminating in the loss of Brittany and Normandy in 1214. The country was divided between those barons determined to take John to task, those who stood loyal to the monarch, and the majority who did not wish to show their colours. By 1215, the most powerful religious figure in the country – Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury – felt compelled to intervene. On 15 June that year, the two sides met at Runnymede, on the River Thames between London and Windsor, to put their seals on a document drafted by Langton.
The agreement gave various assurances about the rights of the Church, taxation, access to justice and protection from illegal imprisonment. Nonetheless, the bickering continued, not least because the barons accused John of quickly disregarding his pledges, leading to the First Barons’ War in which plans were made to replace John with the future Louis VIII of France. But John would be dead before the end of the following year (a victim of dysentery), to be replaced by his nine-year-old son, Henry III. The Charter went through a series of revisions and reissues over the next few years, most notably by Henry in 1225 – the version that went onto the statute books – and in 1258, when the ‘Provision of Oxford’ set out terms for a baron-selected Privy Council to advise the monarch and formalized the calling of parliament three times a year.
So, how did this all come to matter so much in the wider world? For all Magna Carta’s mention of ‘community of the whole land’ and ‘consent of the kingdom’, its real intention was to consolidate rule by a monarch supported by a social elite. Rights were extended to those considered freemen, but there was little to cheer the ‘unfree’ – those serfs and villeins who eked out an existence in the service of their lords, a class that made up over half the population.
TAILOR-MADE
Although the exact number is not known, it is thought that at least thirteen copies of the original Charter were issued in 1215 to various authorities. Today, though, only four remain, and only one of those with its seal. All remain in the UK, one at Lincoln Cathedral, another at Salisbury Cathedral and two at the British Library in London. These latter two were collected in the seventeenth century by politician and antiquarian, Sir Robert Cotton. It is thought one was donated to him by a lawyer, Humphrey Wyems, who discovered it in a London tailor’s shop!
Yet the barons had done something remarkable, almost by default. Despite having scant interest in the plight of the common people, they set a number of crucial precedents and principles. First, they established that a monarch could not simply rule in any way they saw fit. A king (or queen) was accountable for their actions and could be made to answer to the law. In other words, the rule of law prevailed.
In a similar vein, freemen of the realm were entitled to expect that the law should be executed with ‘due process’ and that no one should be deprived of their liberty without that due process. Only three of the Charter’s original sixty-three clauses remain enacted, but they include the following ground-breaking Clause XXIX: ‘No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.’ By the mid-thirteenth century, it was understood that these rights should extend to every person, regardless of their social status.
In the seventeenth century, the English jurist Edward Coke leaned heavily on Magna Carta in drafting the ‘Petition of Right’, which sought to limit the powers of the Stuart monarchs. There are also clear echoes of the barons’ agreement of 1215 in the British Bill of Rights (1688) and the US Bill of Rights (1791). It informed constitutions across the New World and is there too in landmark documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1949). Not bad for a document agreed on the hoof to quell a little local discontent in England all those centuries earlier.
In the words of Sir Winston Churchill in his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1958): ‘And when in subsequent ages the State, swollen with its own authority, has attempted to ride roughshod over the rights and liberties of the subject, it is to this doctrine [Magna Carta] that appeal has again and again been made, and never as yet, without success.’