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English Liberties, or, The Free-Born Subject's Inheritance Containing Magna Carta, printed by James Franklin (Benjamin FranklinÃ's older brother) in Boston in 1721.
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The ‘great charter’ that grew in greatness

Block News Alliance/Lake Fong

The ‘great charter’ that grew in greatness

“In 1215, Magna Carta was a failure.” Such was the startling judgment of Sir James Holt in his classic study of the document, published in 1965, a judgment shared by virtually all specialists in the history of the period.

Today, Magna Carta is revered as the basis of representative government, even of democracy. It began, however, as a problematic peace treaty hammered out by an inept king and angry barons in a futile attempt to end a civil war.

Its background lay both in longstanding practices of English royal government and in the failures of King John. Earlier English kings, involved in civil wars and competition for the crown, had given away much of the land that was meant to support them. As a result, they had to resort to a variety of jury-rigged methods to support their tiny but growing governments and their many wars.

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Because baronial families were the ones with the money, the kings targeted them. For instance, rulers customarily had a say in the marriage of the heiresses and widows of dead barons, because in this sexist society husbands controlled their wives’ lands and the king demanded loyal husbands. Kings often exploited such rights to sell the marriage of widows and heiresses to the highest bidder.

Such tactics were politically dangerous, and John’s shortcomings made the situation far worse. John’s father, Henry II, and his brother, the extraordinarily gifted warrior Richard the Lionhearted, controlled far more of France than the king of France did.

Within five years of becoming king, John had lost most of these lands. His efforts to recover them and to simultaneously reinforce his overlordship over Wales, Ireland, and Scotland meant that he had to tighten the financial screws far more than his predecessors had done. John, moreover, was ruthless, even by the standards of the day. He probably had his nephew and rival, Arthur, murdered. He certainly starved to death the wife and son of a leading baron.

In 1215, a large number of barons revolted and forced John into negotiations at Runnymede in June of that year. There they created Magna Carta, which was designed to bring two sides, divided by deep distrust, into agreement. Among other terms was an agreement that if John failed to carry out his end of the deal, a committee of 25 barons was allowed to move forcibly against him.

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This worked about as well as one might imagine, and by September the two sides were at war again. The barons, having given up on Magna Carta, offered the crown to the son and heir of the king of France, who soon captured much English territory. Magna Carta only survived because, after John greatly improved royalist chances by dying in 1216, the regents of his young son, Henry III, proclaimed a new and far less radical version of it to win support.

Even though Henry himself subsequently accepted Magna Carta as an adult, it failed to create a firm, viable relationship between king and barons. Unfortunately, Henry, though much nicer than his father, was just as incompetent. Magna Carta solved some problems, but others festered and new ones arose.

In the end, there was another round of rebellions against Henry, as there would be against subsequent kings. Magna Carta obviously did not solve the many problems of medieval government.

It was also a conceptual mess, not surprisingly in a document resulting from tense negotiations. Anyone looking for the clear writing and conceptual clarity of a document such as the Declaration of Independence will look in vain. As Nicholas Vincent, a leading scholar of Magna Carta, has written, “Its terms are themselves a bizarre combination of the over-general and what can seem the excessively precise.”

The document is filled with large numbers of badly organized but often very specific concessions to the barons, their followers, and their allies. For instance, clause 33 has the stirring words, “All fish weirs [giant fish traps] shall be removed from the Thames and the Medway, and through all of England.” This clause was a concession to London merchants who were allied to the barons and wanted to make sure boat traffic was not impeded. As for the over-general, it is represented in the far more famous clause, 39, prohibiting imprisonment except by “the judgment of the peers or the law of the land.” Because there was in fact no official compilation of the law at this time, “the law of the land” was a pious abstraction.

Moreover, many of Magna Carta’s stipulations were already outmoded by 1300, let alone today. Today only three clauses and parts of a fourth are officially part of English law. Modern readers who read the text in English translation still find themselves confronted with a plethora of strange, untranslatable terms: scutage, novel disseisin, amercement. Without a commentary, many passages will make no sense to a contemporary audience.

Some aspects of Magna Carta will even seem repugnant to modern audiences. Most notably, the document perpetuated the class structure of the time. Indeed, a century ago, some historians dismissed Magna Carta as a reactionary document of little benefit to anyone but barons. The views of most historians today are more nuanced, but there is no doubt that barons benefitted most and made sure that others did not benefit too much at their expense.

In particular, the rights granted by the charter were limited to free people. Chattel slavery had disappeared in England a century earlier, but serfdom still existed, and serfs made up a substantial proportion of the population until the late Middle Ages.

This exclusion of the unfree was no mere oversight; David Carpenter, another leading Magna Carta scholar, has shown the careful drafting that went into making sure that serfs got little if any benefit from Magna Carta.

So why, then, did such an antiquated, problematic, at best partially successful document matter for so long? Why does it matter now?

In part, because it did explicitly or implicitly incorporate broader, more abstract ideas and ideals as well as concrete demands. Many of these ideas and ideals had deep earlier roots, and some have continuing significance. Even the clause on fish traps raises issues of public goods versus private property.

More important for the time, there was an idea that the king and even the barons were to some extent answerable to the whole community of the realm.

The idea of taxation by consent later had obvious implications in the United States, but earlier still helped push England toward the formation of parliament. The long-term historical impact of these and other important ideas in Magna Carta will be covered more fully in subsequent articles in the series.

Partly because of these ideas, Magna Carta quickly became a symbol of good government, and it remained so after it became obsolete as a working document. Through the centuries, Magna Carta has been used for a variety of often wildly anachronistic purposes and causes, so much so that historians sometimes speak of the myth of Magna Carta. The term “myth” is not entirely fair, because subsequent readers have gone back to the text time and again for inspiration.

Of course, the broad and frequently vague ideas of Magna Carta were often used in later centuries in ways that would have infuriated or simply baffled its creators, but that meant that it remained important and relevant. Part of the job of specialists like me is to separate the myths and the anachronisms from the reality.

That said, in many ways it is the later anachronistic, even mythological uses of Magna Carta that still give it so much importance.

The Block News Alliance consists of The Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Hugh Thomas is a professor of history at University of Miami. Contact him at h.thomas@miami.edu.

First Published June 13, 2015, 4:00 a.m.

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English Liberties, or, The Free-Born Subject's Inheritance Containing Magna Carta, printed by James Franklin (Benjamin FranklinÃ's older brother) in Boston in 1721.  (Block News Alliance/Lake Fong)
A Guide to the Knowledge of the Rights and Privileges of Englishmen. Containing, I. Magna Charta, with Remarks Thereon; II. The Bishops Curses; III. The Habeas Corpus Act; IV. The Bill of Rights; and, V. The Act of SettlementÉ, printed for J. Scott in London in 1757.  (Block News Alliance/Lake Fong/)
The Great Charter Called in Latyn Magna Carta, printed in London by Thomas Petyt in 1542.  (Block News AlliancE/Lake Fong)
British Librarys Magna Carta  (Joseph Turp)
Magna Carta unification: the four original Magna Carta manuscripts being prepared for display at the British Library.  (Clare Kendall)
Block News Alliance/Lake Fong
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