Introduction

The Treasures Gallery of the British Library is an extraordinary place. The hum of the humidifiers drowns out the endless roar of traffic along London’s Euston Road; it is calm and quiet in the Gallery. The lights are very low; it takes a little time to adjust your eyes to the gloom, but too bright a light would damage the priceless books and manuscripts that lie in cases and displays around the warren of rooms.

Shakespeare’s First Folio and Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook, with his extraordinary mirror-image right-to-left handwriting, are open to view, as well as dozens of books of such physical beauty as to rival any painting. There is the Lindisfarne Gospels, written and illuminated by the monk Eadfrith in honour of St Cuthbert around AD 698, in the monastery of Lindisfarne, on Holy Island, just off the coast of Northumbria. That was roughly around the time that Bede was writing his history of the English Church and its people. It is wonderfully illuminated, with incredible, vivid colours. At a time when most other books in Europe tended to use only three, this book has virtually every colour you could imagine: rich ruby reds and intense aquamarines along with deep, majestic purples.

Beowulf is in the gallery too, and the Barcelona Hagadah, named after the heraldic shield it bears, an exquisite Hebrew service book from 1350, still read each year in Jewish homes at the Seder meal on the eve of Passover. The Sherborne Missal, the Roman Catholic book of prayers made for Sherborne Abbey in Dorset between 1400 and 1407, is there. It is a masterpiece of book painting, a massive volume of seven hundred pages, with lavishly decorated margins peopled by kings, nobles, bishops, monks, saints and angels in a celestial throng and, most unexpected of all, a choir of the native birds of the British Isles. It is possibly the only service book of stature to have survived the Reformation intact. Continuing around the Treasures Gallery, there are manuscript scores by Mozart, Handel, Chopin and Beethoven, handwritten lyrics of two of The Beatles’ most famous songs, ‘Ticket to Ride’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, and there’s a Gutenberg Bible. In the mid-fifteenth century, Johannes Gutenberg invented a way of mechanising the production of type, and the Bible he printed in Mainz, around 1485, was the first major book printed in the West. About 180 copies were made, and significant parts of forty-eight copies still survive. The British Library has two complete copies, and the cover of the one on display is richly illuminated in gold; it is a thing of beauty.

But what we have come to see, laid out under a bullet-proof glass casing, isn’t illuminated: it has no drawings or illustrations in the margins, and, to be perfectly frank, is a dull, rather ugly-looking thing. There is, however, a bigger crowd here than at any other exhibit. There are Japanese tour-leaders waving umbrellas, and Americans who breathe reverentially over the glass. Even French schoolchildren are a little less boisterous in front of it. Everyone here, from these nations and many others, has come to see it before they see anything else, and believes it to be an important document.

What we are looking at is a single sheet of parchment. Originally, it would have had a green and black wax seal, attached to a vellum strip at the bottom of the Charter, that would have shown the King, King John, enthroned, and holding his sceptre. But it is rare for the document and the seal to have survived together for such a long time. It is quite densely arranged, lots of long lines in a cursive but quite showy hand, not written in the characteristic Gothic script you see in music and liturgical manuscripts.

The parchment is slightly oblong, almost square. When it was written, in 1215, they were using a gall-based ink. If you look at an oak tree, you will see little pimples, called galls, growing from the bark. They develop when a wasp stings the tree to lay its eggs: the tree prevents the poison spreading by forming a little nut around it. If you tap into that nut, you get a clear liquid, an acid almost; when this is used as an ink on parchment or vellum, it etches itself into the membrane. And when you add something like soot, or most effectively, iron salts, the ink turns a rich dark colour, although over time it will fade to a mid-brown. The ink here has retained its blackness pretty well – those scribes were professionals and knew how to mix their materials. Their pens were quills: they would have taken the flight feather of a goose, possibly a swan, and cut it into shape. If you were right-handed, you took a left wing feather, because the feather curves the other way, and you compensated according to the direction in which you wrote. Every ten lines or so, possibly less, depending on how long the lines were, you’d dip your quill into the ink and re-trim the nib with a penknife – which is where the word comes from.

This document, which we know as Magna Carta, was at first known as the Charter of Liberties. A few years later it became known as Magna Carta, the ‘big charter’, to distinguish it from another important, but much shorter, contemporary piece of legislation, the Forest Charter.

We don’t know for sure how many copies of the ‘big charter’ were made in 1215, but only four exist now. One is in Lincoln Cathedral; another is at Salisbury Cathedral. The remaining two are in the British Library, and it is a miracle they both exist, because one of them was badly damaged by a fire. Before the government set up a British Museum and Library, the charter was kept in an outhouse store, roughly on the site where Westminster School is now, close to Westminster Abbey. One night, late in the year of 1731, a fire broke out, and despite the best attempts of the librarian and his father-in-law to save what they could, certain documents, including a copy of Magna Carta, and the Beowulf manuscript, were badly damaged, and has gradually deteriorated over the years.

The other copy of Magna Carta, the one under the bullet-proof glass, lies there intact, nearly eight hundred years old. It is just as famous as any document you can name in any museum or parliament. It holds its own against the American Declaration of Independence, indeed, the authors of that document professed to have read Magna Carta before they put pen to paper. There are sixty-three clauses in Magna Carta, but there are two that reverberate down the centuries, and have come to represent today a ringing expression of freedom for mankind the world over.

Nullus liber homo capiatur, vel imprisonetur, aut disseisiatur, aut utlagetur, aut exuletur, aut aliquo modo destruatur, nec super eum ibimus, nec super eum mittemus, nisi per legal judicium parium suorum vel per legem terre.

Nulli vendemus, nulli negabimus aut differemus rectum aut justiciam.

To translate from the original Latin into English:

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or deprived or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.

To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.

The eloquence of those sentences, the nobility and idealism they express, has elevated this piece of legislation to eternal iconic status. In America, Magna Carta is revered as the foundation stone of modern freedom. It is an important document in Britain too. It has always been regarded as a romantic and formative piece of legislation; the image of the barons curbing the power of an overreaching monarch appeals to the British sense of fair play. Rudyard Kipling was moved to verse:

And still when Mob or Monarch lays

Too rude a hand on English ways,

The whisper wakes, the shudder plays,

Across the reeds at Runnymede.

And Thames that knows the moods of kings,

And crowds and priests and suchlike things,

Rolls deep and dreadful as he brings

Their warning down from Runnymede.

What drew us to write about this particular moment in time was both the familiarity of Magna Carta, and the people around at this time. King John, that charismatic villain, as he is always depicted, his brother, Richard Coeur de Lion – and we should call him that rather than Lionheart because, like all the Plantagenets, he was essentially French. John and Richard’s parents were Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine – depicted in the film Lion in Winter by Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn. ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ Henry exclaimed in a moment of anger, referring to his friend Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, and the initiative of four knights at court who overheard this and subsequently killed Becket in front of his altar at Canterbury is one of the most poignant stories in British history.

At this time, the Crusades were in full swing, and Jerusalem had been captured by the Muslim leader, Saladin. In fact, the decades on either side of 1200 marked the climax of the conflict, and the bloody struggle for control of Jerusalem, a city that three faiths, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, regarded as sacred. In that city we can see a direct and continuing link with today. Eight hundred years ago, it was our western society which considered it was waging a holy war; from the time of the First Crusade, Jerusalem has had the power to draw men on – as it still does – to fight, kill and die.

In Europe, St Francis of Assisi founded the mendicant order of monks, the Franciscans, and St Dominic founded the Order of Dominican Preachers. By the end of the century, 150 friaries had been established in England alone.

The pope in 1215, Innocent III, was one of the ablest popes in the Church’s history. In 1215 he presided over a great assembly of clergy, the Fourth Lateran Council whose decrees not only gave lasting shape to the teaching and structure of the Catholic Church but also affected the way justice was carried out throughout western Europe.

England was a staunchly Catholic country, but Pope Innocent and King John of England often quarrelled. Innocent placed England under an Interdict, which effectively banned church services throughout the country and, for good measure, excommunicated John, the first English sovereign to suffer such a fate. (Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were to be next.)

Beyond Europe, 1215 saw the fall of Peking to the armies of Genghis Khan, who broke through the Great Wall of China. After that, the Mongols moved on to sack Samarkhand and advance into Persia and Russia. Soon they would terrify Europe – they were the thirteenth-century equivalent of the Vikings – but twice as ruthless.

There remained parts of the world which the thirteenth-century expansion of Europe did not reach, cultures and peoples in Australia and Polynesia of whom even the best educated European knew nothing. Above all, despite the Viking voyages to the north-east coast of America, they knew nothing of the advanced culture of the Maya in Central America, nor of the great mounds being built in the Mississippi region, and the awesome apartment houses in what is now New Mexico. Meanwhile, in England, some 150 new towns sprung up, places like Chelmsford, Leeds, Liverpool and Portsmouth. By 1300, nearly a hundred thousand people lived in London alone; the whole country had a population of around four million.

The beginning of the next millennium saw life lived at a subsistence level. Two hundred years later, life was more comfortable: important technological advances had been made. Improvements in spinning, weaving and dyeing made cloth manufacture more efficient. Bright colours were available for the first time. The spinning wheel had been invented. Horses were harnessed to create more traction power. Windmills were first erected at this time; clocks appeared, spectacles too. Indeed, it has been argued that spectacles were vital for scientific and scholarly advance, enabling the middle-aged and elderly to continue book and other close work for decades longer than any of their ancestors. The new inventiveness was clearly visible in the technology of war: siege artillery, in the form of trebuchets that hurled huge missiles with great accuracy over long distances, were in their day as deadly as Exocets. New armour and helmets allowed the rich to hammer away at each other in colourful tournaments, which took place across the land.

There was a more effective transport system, better designed and faster carts – and cart parks for parking at crowded market places. Smoother roads were built, and hundreds of old, wooden bridges were replaced with stone ones. New ports, such as Boston and Lynn, later King’s Lynn, and Newcastle, were founded, quays were built and cranes constructed to load and unload goods, and a new design was developed for a bulk-carrying cargo ship called the cog, which allowed merchants to transport more goods. Trade with Europe and the rest of the world meant that exotic new foods and clothes became available. Although the technological advances helped men to become more productive, no one found ways of making improvements to the yield of crops until the eighteenth century.

As the population of England continued to grow, the rich grew richer, and life for the poor became harder. Poverty, famine and disease stalked the land. Medical and nutritional knowledge was minimal, and people from all classes suffered terrible physical ailments. Large intestinal worms burrowed into nearly every orifice, although skeletal evidence shows that at least their teeth were sound: sugar and chocolate were not yet part of the English diet.

It was at this period also that the first English university, in Oxford, came into being, at which the greatest scientist of the age, Robert Grosseteste, lectured. Cambridge was established in the 1220s. Elsewhere, vast Romanesque and Gothic buildings were constructed, some of which are still standing – the magnificent Keep at Rochester Castle, Orford Castle in Suffolk, the Tower of London and many great Cathedrals, such as Salisbury, Durham and Lincoln. Architects and builders had a greater understanding of physics, which allowed them to build with a mastery of space and light, the triumph of a revolution in engineering that flooded once gloomy interiors with brightness. Stained glass enhanced their beauty.

The England and Europe of 1215 are much more visible to us today than those of the year 1000. For one thing, relatively few buildings that were standing in 1000 can still be seen. Above ground not even ruins survive. Most churches built before 1000 were wooden, and now in England only one pre-Conquest wooden church is still in use, at Greensted in Essex. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, masonry became the fashionable building material for major churches, and even for thousands of local churches. The same development in building technology has resulted in many castles, either much altered or ruined, surviving from the same period. We can easily see, visit, explore and touch many thousands of buildings that were standing in 1215, but hardly any from 1000.

We can also read their thoughts. In the England of 1215 writers felt at home in both French and English, and those who were highly educated could express themselves in Latin too. People today often imagine that hardly anyone except monks wrote anything down in the Middle Ages, but that was not the case. Indeed, so much was being written by all sorts of people, women as well as men, that for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire, we have a real idea of daily life and thought. Fiction becomes important, whether verse or prose, written in French and English. The new vernacular literatures of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Arthurian romances, the stories of Tristan and Isolde, the bawdy tales known as the fabliaux, survive in far greater quantities than earlier works. And for all the importance of a poem like Beowulf, the only activities on which it sheds much light are feasting and fighting. The new stories represent a revolutionary breakthrough – at any rate from the point of view of the historian trying to understand how men and women felt in the past: it is the literature of the cultural movement often called the twelfth-century Renaissance, the cultural background of the men and women who made history in 1215.

A new genre of lifestyle and etiquette literature sprang up, of which the greatest was The Book of the Civilised Man, written by Daniel of Beccles. He instructs the aspiring gentleman on how to behave in an enormous variety of social situations: in church, as a page in a noble household, at the dinner table, as a guest, in the street (don’t eat in the street and don’t peer into other people’s windows), in a brothel – and many more. He tells you when, where and how you can urinate, defecate, spit, belch and fart politely. He offers advice on how to live a long, healthy and happy life, what to eat and drink, with some recipes thrown in, discusses exercise, when to take baths, how often to have sex. Moderation in all things is the guiding principle, seasonally adjusted: in summer, for example, you should cut back on hot baths and sex. Cheerful songs will keep you in a good mood. Cultivate entertaining conversation, avoid quarrels, and get yourself some new clothes now and again.

In 2003, we wait to see what will unfold in the next century on the assumption that, whatever the disasters, life will go on. Many who lived in the year 1000 wondered if human experience had run its course. The Christian dating system, the Anno Domini, had been devised to mark the gap between Christ’s first appearance on earth and his second coming: it was not unreasonable to fear – and for many to hope – that the end of the world was nigh.

By 1215, the average man and woman searched for God in their great cathedrals, which had taken thousands of workers decades to finish, and they asked for relief from their ills. They also gave thanks for their blessings, and they knew that their world would go on. Nearly eight hundred years later, we must acknowledge that, by their hard work, bravery and application, they assured our future, here, now in the twenty-first century.

On the day we finished this book, we drove out to Runnymede to get a feel of the place where King John had met the barons and had been forced to put his seal to the Magna Carta. It was a cold, dank December day, and although it was only a little after three in the afternoon, the light was beginning to fade. The fields were wet and muddy.

There are two memorials at Runnymede – chosen as a site because of its connection with freedom, justice and human liberty.

The John F. Kennedy Memorial is Britain’s tribute to the thirty-sixth president of the United States of America, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was assassinated on the 22 November 1963. Following his tragic death, it was decided by the House of Commons that a memorial should be erected in his memory. Under the John F. Kennedy Memorial Act, one acre of land at Runnymede, forming part of the Crown Estate, was transferred to the people of the United States by way of a gift from the Queen and her government.

The memorial is entered from the wet fields of Runnymede through a gate. Once the visitor passes through this gate, he or she sets foot on American soil. The gate gives access to a pathway of fifty individually carved granite steps, each representing an individual state. The memorial itself is carved in Portland stone. The hawthorn beside the stone is a symbol of Catholicism, reflecting President Kennedy’s religion, but equally symbolic is the American scarlet oak which stands guardian behind the stone, and flowers into a vivid red in November, the time of the anniversary of President Kennedy’s death. The inscription is from the president’s inaugural address of 28 January, 1961. ‘Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, or oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.’

The second memorial is a rotunda, built by the American Bar Association, as ‘a tribute to Magna Carta, symbol of freedom under law’. In 1971, the American Bar Association came here again and pledged their adherence to the principles of the Great Charter – and again, in July 1985, returning once more in July 2000 ‘to celebrate Magna Carta, foundation of the rule of law for ages past and for the new millennium . . .’

It is very moving that a nation, which wasn’t founded until nearly six centuries after Magna Carta was first discussed here, should invest such belief in and commitment to this ancient document.

A heavy rain was falling on the muddy, churned fields of Runnymede as we made our way back to the car, both pleased and saddened to have finished a book which was an enormous pleasure to write.

For all mistakes the authors blame each other.