Few documents in the history of the world have achieved as iconic a status as Magna Carta. It remains one of the best-known documents in British history, and its influence has been felt to varying degrees throughout the English[1]speaking world. Surviving copies of Magna Carta occupy a prominent place in the United States National Archives in Washington and in the Australian Parliament in Canberra. In the seventeenth-century, the great jurist Sir Edward Coke described Magna Carta as “declaratory of the principal grounds of the fundamental laws of England”, while two centuries later the nineteenth-century Whig historian Henry Hallam called it “the keystone of English liberty”. More recently, when the BBC History Magazine conducted a poll in 2006, the anniversary of Magna Carta’s signing on 15 June 1215 was voted the most suitable date for the nation to celebrate Britishness. The document itself – and the legacy of its influence ever since – thus clearly merits inclusion among the decisive moments in British history.
Like any great constitutional document, Magna Carta did not exist in a vacuum. It was not an expression of abstract philosophical principles but was rather the product of a particular set of political circumstances. The immediate context of Magna Carta was a severe breakdown in relations between King John and his leading subjects, the barons and the prelates, caused mainly by his unsuccessful attempts to regain his continental empire. However, the origins of the grievances that Magna Carta sought to redress dated back many decades before that. The political crisis of 1215 marked the climax of growing resentment again the tendency of the Norman and Angevin kings to maximise their powers in many areas of governance, especially in the conduct of justice and the raising of revenue.
Magna Carta was designed to push back against these royal tendencies and to establish that there were legal limits to monarchs’ authority and action. In the process it tried to make arbitrary royal rule more difficult and to legitimate resistance to it. Its main clauses were very much in the interests of the social and political elite – the “political nation” as medievalists often call it – rather than of the realm as a whole. These included provisions relating to the raising of revenue by means of feudal obligations, commerce and trade.
It was, perhaps, in relation to political freedom and justice that the enduring significance of Magna Carta lies. It stated that no free man could be imprisoned, outlawed or exiled, “nor will we go upon him, nor will we send upon him, unless by the lawful judgement of his peers, or by the law of the land”. Furthermore, “to none will we sell, to none will we deny or delay, right or justice”. John subsequently revoked the charter but Henry III later reissued it, and Edward I let it become a statute in 1279. Even today, although only four of the 63 sections of Magna Carta remain on the statute book, they form a fundamental barrier against arbitrary rule and include those clauses condemning the denial, sale and delay of justice, and those forbidding imprisonment or dispossession except by lawful judgement by one’s peers (social equals) or by the laws of the land.
The proposed mechanism for enforcing Magna Carta, through a council of twenty-five barons, was an innovative method of securing the monarch’s accountability. Yet the underlying tenor of Magna Carta was in many ways conservative. The barons were seeking a return to a semi[1]mythic past rather than a revolution, and Magna Carta contained frequent allusions to previous coronation oaths and charters. Although it would later be referenced as evidence of these ancient liberties and rights, Magna Carta was itself a product of those very same ideas.
Sir Geoffrey Elton neatly summed up Magna Carta and its legacy when he wrote that “it put an end to the despotic potential within Anglo-Norman kingship, anchored the principle of co-operation, and instituted a relationship between king and baronage marked by a mutual and watchful suspiciousness which endured for the rest of the Middle Ages.” Magna Carta was very much a document of its time, and it could not anticipate the issues and needs of future centuries. It was directed against the pretensions of Angevin kingship in general and not just against King John individually: many of the grievances it addressed were the result of the ways in which monarchs since the Norman Conquest had manipulated judicial processes and sought to maximise their rights and revenues.
The afterlife of Magna Carta has been very important for the subsequent course of British history. It provided the inspiration for parliamentary opposition to Charles I and James II in the seventeenth century, and for American resistance to George III in the eighteenth. Its influence can therefore be seen in the Petition of Right (1628), in the Bill of Rights (1689), and in the American Declaration of Independence (1776). Over time, Magna Carta came to be treated with an almost religious reverence, and to decry the charter was seen as deeply reprehensible. When Royalist writers in the 1650s wished to discredit Oliver Cromwell and to blacken his name, they circulated a story – seemingly without any foundation – that he had referred to Magna Carta as “Magna Farta”. In fact the truth was very different. In a speech to Parliament in September 1654, Cromwell declared that “in every government there must be somewhat fundamental, somewhat like a Magna Carta, that should be standing, and be unalterable.” Like other opponents of Charles I’s kingship, Cromwell understood the value of Magna Carta.
This reverence for Magna Carta has not faded in more modern times. Rudyard Kipling wrote in 1922 that “when Mob or Monarch lays Too rude a hand on English ways, The whisper wakes, the shudder plays, Across the reeds at Runnymede.” In 1964, Nelson Mandela, on trial for his life, declared his veneration as a democrat for the principles enshrined in Magna Carta and the democratic government to which it had helped to give rise.
The charter has thus provided a touchstone for the principles that executive action is legally limited and that subjects cannot be taxed or judged arbitrarily. Originally, in 1215, these provisions were designed to protect the interests of barons and prelates, but as society changed over time, more and more people have come to benefit from them. The basic principle that there were enforceable legal limits to executive action has remained central to the conduct of government in many parts of the world (although tragically in many places it has not).
In short, Magna Carta surely deserves its famous name, even though its nature and significance need to be understood within their historical context. The name Magna Carta is itself celebrated, and often people know the name and not much more about it. A classic line from the great Tony Hancock provides a good illustration of this, and is a fitting note on which to end. In a 1959 episode of Hancock’s Half Hour entitled “Twelve Angry Men”, Hancock exclaimed: “Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?”
