The Lacock Magna Carta

Magna Carta - What is it?

|Magna Carta. Everybody thinks that they know what it is, a charter of liberties and rights for the common man and it was signed in 1215, right?

Well, it was never signed. That was never the case and documents were given authority by the King having his seal attached to the document. As for liberties and rights for the common man, it wasn’t that either. At least initially.

The charter of 1215 was an agreement, more or less forced on King John by a coalition of English barons. It was nothing more than an attempt by the barons to stop the King from taking so much money from them. It was preceded by the charter of the Barons, which having been drawn up a few days before, formed the basis of the discussions on the 15th June 1215 at Runnymede.

Something else not widely appreciated, was that all the negotiations were conducted in French & the documentation was in Latin. Translation into English did not happen until years later.

The document produced as a result of the agreement at Runnymede was initially referred to by King John as his ’Charter’. The name Magna Carta was not coined until a couple of years later.

It is probable that King John only agreed with the terms of the 1215 charter, because he thought it would be forgotten almost immediately. When it wasn't, he at first ignored it and then appealed to the Pope, who annulled it. So, the document everybody thinks of, when they hear the term Magna Carta, had nothing to do with freedom, or liberties and was in effect a dead document within weeks.

1225

|When Henry III was seventeen he was old enough to issue documents under his own seal and he reissued Magna Carta in 1225. By now the whole tone of the document had changed, through the 1216 and 1217 issues it looked to satisfy many of the rebel barons’ original demands, but also to be in agreement with the King. The most controversial section, the so called ’security clause’, which had given the barons’ licence to go to war with their King if he refused to observe Magna Carta, was quietly dropped.

At the same time the number of clauses were reduced from the sixty-three chapters of the 1215 issue, to just thirty-seven in 1225. It was this version of Magna Carta that had lasting importance and became an established piece of legislation.

Oh yes, and one of the witnesses to the 1225 Magna Carta issue was William Longspée, High Sheriff of Wiltshire and husband of Ela.

Magna Carta in the 21stCentury

|The key to understanding the continuing influence of Magna Carta today is the fact that it is as much an idea, as it is a document or, a series of documents.

As Joshua Rosenberg, the respected journalist said before the Magna Carta 800 celebrations in 2015, “Magna Carta is a world-class brand. It stands for human rights and democracy. It stands for trial by jury. It stands for free speech, the rule of law and personal liberty. Except it doesn’t mention any of those things “.

It seems that there are very many strange ideas about what Magna Carta actually is. Rosenberg gives an example of Tony Hancock in a 1959 TV programme. In it, Hancock plays one of the jury in an important trial and they are deliberating on the verdict. Disagreeing with his fellow jurors he pleads to them “Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you?” “Did she die in vain?”.

The Official British Library Exhibition in 2015 was subtitled “Law, Liberty, Legacy” and it is the ‘rule of law’ that is continually being quoted in court cases across the world today. Having said that, the ‘rule of law’ has not been precisely defined. As a minimum it includes the requirement that the law must be applied fairly and impartially to all people, the powerful and the weak, the rich and the poor. To achieve this there must be an independent judiciary to interpret and apply the law.

The freedom recognised in Magna Carta is that of plain, ordinary citizens and it is from the power of the sovereign that they need and expect protection. In 1199, King John had absolute power and was above the law. Yet, he was forced by political reality to give up that power, not to any one person, or a group of people, but to the law itself.

Since the second half of the Twentieth Century, both the meaning and application of the rule of law have been shaped by the violation of human rights which occurred during the Second World War. One important consequence of this was The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its successive legislation.

From the early history of Magna Carta its terms were only applicable to King John and the Barons. Ordinary citizens were not included. By the time Henry III reached his 18th birthday in 1225 he had broadened the scope of the rule of law to include ordinary people. Over the centuries that has been progressively extended to include women, minorities and those who before Magna Carta were not considered worthy of possessing any rights at all.

The application of the rule of law across the world is a recent development. Until the middle of the last century, international law only concerned itself with the relationship between sovereign states. The rights of individual’s within those states were not considered.

The events of World War Two changed that and in 1945 the United Nations resolved ’to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small’. It was now that the protection of individuals against the power of the state that lay at the heart of Magna Carta was adopted as the means to ensure respect for the fundamental human rights of all.