The Magna Carta

10 Key excerpts on "The Magna Carta"

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  A Magna Carta for all Humanity

  Homing in on Human Rights

  • Francesca Klug(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9 and has taken on a symbolic significance that far exceeds any legal effect.

  Although many people in the UK may only be vaguely aware of The Magna Carta, its symbolic status has endured. Regardless of the actual words of the text, its impact or legacy, The Magna Carta has come to stand for ‘the rule of law’, limits to monarchical or executive power and basic liberties.

  Whilst The Magna Carta’s remaining legal provisions have been superseded by more modern statutes, it lives on, in historian J. C. Holt’s words, as ‘propaganda’ as much as law.10 At a ceremony to kick-off the countdown to the 800th anniversary, Lord Neuberger, former chair of The Magna Carta Trust and president of the Supreme Court, described the medieval document as the foundation of modern liberties:

  It enshrined such noble concepts as freedom under law, democracy and the importance of limited government; it was a pre-cursor to many of the freedoms and liberties that humanity rightly expects their governments to respect today.11

  Yet most of The Magna Carta addressed specific grievances, rather than general principles, which have no relevance outside the feudal society they were drafted in. As the former Lord Chief Justice, the late Lord Bingham, pointed out with characteristic forthrightness in a speech delivered at St Alban’s Cathedral in June 2010, many of the Charter’s clauses are of local, particular or feudal interest only and ‘about as interesting as our rules for recycling rubbish are likely to be to our descendants 800 years from now.’ But he went on to assert that ‘this yellowing parchment, soon to celebrate its 800th birthday, can plausibly claim to be the most influential secular document in the history of the world.’12

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  Beyond Magna Carta

  A Constitution for the United Kingdom

  • Andrew Blick(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  The quest to realise the principles of Magna Carta eventually led the Americans not only to free themselves from British rule, but to dispense with monarchy and aristocracy, with parliamentary sovereignty and with established religion. In place of these features they created, on a continental scale, a secular, federal republic in which all institutions—including the federal legislature—were subject to an entrenched written constitution grounded in the principle of popular consent. A principle soon developed that the courts were able to annul even congressional primary laws if incompatible with the text. Constitutional standards of the late eighteenth century were not the same as those of today. Slaves and women were not within the scope of the system. Yet, like Magna Carta, it could adapt, in accordance with demands that it expand its coverage, partly drawing on its own words for inspiration. The US version of Magna Carta, however, has tended to focus on civil and political liberties and limitations on government, and not socio-economic protections.

  From 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, the states began producing bills of rights that once more consciously modelled themselves on the provisions making up chapters 39 and 40 of the 1215 Magna Carta. An important feature of the US Constitution drafted in 1787 was that it created a potentially more powerful central authority than that which previously existed, but set out to limit it—in accordance with the principle of constrained government connected with Magna Carta—with safeguards for the rights of states. The first set of amendments to the Constitution, applied in 1791, comprised the US ‘Bill of Rights’. It contained the by-now predictable mirroring of portions of Magna Carta, for instance in Article 7, stipulating that no one shall be ‘deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law’. As well as influencing constitutional documents, Magna Carta itself has retained greater hard legal relevance in the US than in the UK. In the words of RH Helmholz writing in 1999:

  The number of chapters that survive in today’s English statute book can be counted on the fingers of one hand, but across the Atlantic the Charter continues to be widely cited in judicial opinions for the great principles, and even some of the mundane details, it contains.70

  Proceedings in recent times in which Magna Carta figured include the case taken by Paula Jones against the then-US President, Bill Clinton, in which she alleged sexual harassment.

  Consequently many observers in the US treat Magna Carta as a heavy influence upon or even direct ancestor of their Constitution, and by extension linked to further subsequent developments of great import. As Henry Sherman Boutell wrote at the time of the 700th anniversary in 1915: ‘The most illustrious documentary offspring of Magna Carta is the Constitution of the United States, the oldest written national constitution now in force, and the progenitor of all modern constitutions’.71 As the Boutell comment suggests, traces of Magna Carta can be found in many constitutions internationally, reaching them both via the US model and more directly from the UK. In his essay marking the 750th anniversary of Magna Carta, Sir Ivor Jennings even detected its influence on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 (not strictly a constitution, but certainly constitutional, and fundamental). Article 7 of this historic statement stipulates that legal proceedings should take place in accordance with defined legal and procedural norms.72 Jennings’ observation was suggestive not only of far reaching impact for Magna Carta, but was further evidence that any notion of a firm dichotomy between English/UK and mainland continental constitutional development is false. Beyond Europe, British imperialism spread a text that could at the same time present a threat to the Empire, as events in the American colonies from 1776 demonstrated. After the Second World War, various former colonial territories—such as India, Pakistan and Malaya—also echoed Magna Carta in their constitutions.73 At the supranational level, Magna Carta had a direct impact upon the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the ECHR. The UK is itself a signatory to both. When presenting the declaration to the UN in 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt speculated that it might become ‘the international Magna Carta for all men everywhere’.74

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  Myths That Shaped Our History

  From Magna Carta to the Battle of Britain

  • Simon Webb(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword History

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1

  Magna Carta 1215: ‘The great cornerstone in England’s temple of liberty’?

  B ritain was not founded or created at any particular moment, nor was there any event which marked definitely its becoming a nation, such as the signing of a declaration of independence. Instead, the British have The Magna Carta. Before Magna Carta, there are a few memorable dates such as 55 BC and 1066 AD, along with a handful of notable kings such as Alfred the Great, William the Conqueror and Richard the Lionheart. These rulers seemed to do pretty much as they pleased. From 1215 onwards though, following King John placing his seal on the great charter which the barons presented to him, we know that we have been living in a nation where the rule of law is paramount. Even the monarch is bound by the law to respect the rights of his or her subjects.

  Most of us think that we know the story of The Magna Carta, how the barons grew tired of King John’s arbitrary rule and the way in which he was riding roughshod over ancient liberties and oppressing the common people. They put together a set of principles, including habeus corpus, which guaranteed that from then on every person in the kingdom would have the right to a fair trial and nobody could be detained without a just cause. In fact if there is one thing most people know about Magna Carta, it is that it stops people being locked up without recourse to the courts. Isn’t that what habeus corpus is all about? That The Magna Carta was actually a reactionary document, specifically devised to deny ordinary people any rights and to reverse progressive changes made in the law some years earlier, sounds shocking and even absurd to modern ears. Before going any further, it might be helpful to look at the popular image of the events at Runnymede 800 years ago, just to remind ourselves of what we think we know about the matter. In other words, before examining the historical fact, let us look first at the myth, as we have received it today.

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  Property Rights

  From Magna Carta to the Fourteenth Amendment

  • Bernard Siegan(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The History of England , David Hume describes the execution of The Magna Carta in these terms:

  It only guarded and that merely by verbal clauses, against such tyrannical practices as are incompatible with civilized government, and, if they become very frequent, are incompatible with all government. The barbarous license of the kings, and perhaps for the nobles, was thenceforth somewhat more restrained: Men acquired some more security for their properties and their liberties: And government approached a little nearer to that end, for which it was originally instituted, the distribution of justice, and the equal protection of the citizens. Acts of violence and iniquity in the crown, which before were only deemed injurious to individuals, and were hazardous chiefly in proportion to the number, power, and dignity of the persons affected by them, were now regarded, in some degree, as public injuries, and as infringements of a charter, calculated for general security. And thus, the establishment of the Great Charter, without seeming anywise to innovate in the distribution of political power, became a kind of epoch in the [English] constitution.10

  Though King John’s version of The Magna Carta would end up being largely a parchment victory, on the map of history it was an enormous substantive achievement. The king’s powers were limited, and this was the beginning of the end of despotism in the English-speaking nations.

  Initially, King John appeared to comply with the many requirements of the charter, but in fact he sought to revoke the promises he had made. At the instigation of King John, Pope Innocent III issued a bull dated August 24, 1215 declaring the entire charter void, primarily on the grounds that it was invalid and derogatory to the dignity of the apostolic see; it was a “shame for England.” Pope Innocent considered King John’s approval of the charter as defective because the king had no authority as a feudatory of the papacy to sign it and, furthermore, his consent was obtained “by violence and fear.” The pope forbade King John to obey or the nobles to enforce its terms. In September, the king recalled all the liberties he had granted his subjects in the charter, and repudiated its restraints upon him. He died in October, 1216 and was succeeded by his son Henry III.11

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  The Rights and Aspirations of the Magna Carta

  • Elizabeth Gibson-Morgan, Alexis Chommeloux, Elizabeth Gibson-Morgan, Alexis Chommeloux(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  7

  For Lord Sumption, one of the UK Supreme Court Justices and also a historian specialising in medieval studies, two schools of thought co-exist:

  The first can conveniently be called the lawyer’s view, although it is held by many people who are not lawyers. This holds the charter to be a major constitutional document, the foundation of the rule of law and the liberty of the subject in England. The other is the historian’s view, which has tended to emphasise the self-interested motives of the barons and has generally been sceptical about the charter’s constitutional significance.

  8

  This approach is shared by Lord Neuberger, the current president of the UK Supreme Court, who expressed it in a speech made in May 2015 at Lincoln’s Inn:

  Not only the constitutional principles, but the practicalities, religious beliefs, the state of technology, and social and cultural mores governing the lives of people in 1215 England were very different from those which govern our lives today. So it requires a great leap of imaginative thought and immersion in the culture before we can begin to understand what the Barons and the King thought that they were doing when they met at Runnymede. […].

  9

  The importance of Magna Carta must therefore be put in perspective, even more so since, from the seventeenth century, the Great Charter was given a new interpretation – a new lease of life so far as its application in the US is concerned—by two British lawyers, Edward Coke and William Blackstone. The former was Chief Justice and a politician under James I. He presided over the committee which drafted the Petition of Right 1628, one of the components of today’s British Constitution. The latter is the author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England published in 1765. For Lord Sumption:

  Coke transformed Magna Carta from a somewhat technical catalogue of feudal regulations, into the foundation document of the English constitution, a status which it has enjoyed ever since among the large community of commentators who have never actually read it. […] He regarded it as the origin of the writ of habeas corpus and of trial by jury. More generally, Coke took the provisions of the charter which protected a man’s ‘liberties’, which actually meant his privileges and immunities, and treated them as referring to the liberty of the subject. This meant, according to him, that all invasions of personal liberty by the Crown were unlawful.

  10

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  Legal History Matters

  From Magna Carta to the Clinton Impeachment

  • Amanda Whiting, Ann O'Connell(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Melbourne University Press Digital

    (Publisher)

  A Nineteenth-Century View of The Magna Carta

  Phoebe Williams

  As a legal document, The Magna Carta* remained untouched for 613 years. This chapter endeavours to analyse the period between 1828 and 1892, during which twenty-two clauses of the Charter were repealed.

  Popular historian Dan Jones wrote that by the nineteenth century, The Magna Carta was ‘enshrined in Western political thought as being a document of great and formative importance to modern ideas of freedom’.1 This certainly seems to have been the case in the United States of America, but it is questionable whether it retained the same significance in England, even as a symbol. Clare Simmons proposed that The Magna Carta was used as a concept rather than an actual legal document in the nineteenth century.2 This is undeniably true, but such usage is not unique to this period. Arguably, what is distinctive about the use of The Magna Carta in nineteenth-century England is the scrutiny of the Charter’s use as a ‘concept’ by people such as Major John Cartwright and Henry Brougham who found this use to be medieval and unnecessary for contemporary political regimes. Miles Taylor has suggested that The Magna Carta only became scrutinised and questioned towards the end of the nineteenth century.3 However, as Anne Pallister points out, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the Charter had already become divorced from its historical setting and was used instead as an icon representing a vague concept of freedom and justice.4

  This chapter argues that twenty-two clauses of The Magna Carta were repealed between 1828 and 1892 because, unlike previous centuries, nineteenth-century England was ready for modest political reform. This was, in part, due to the increased scrutiny of the Charter as a legal document, but this characteristically British approach to reform was also a result of careful navigation of a time of change. The French Revolution was spurring on reform from across the channel, but also scaring English conservatives into being cautious with their political aims. A balance had to be struck between political stability, veneration of the past and the ‘spirit of reform’ evident in both conservative and more liberal politicians as well as legal scholars of the time.

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  Magna Carta

  • Ralph Turner(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The European Convention and the Human Bights Act mark the impact that Magna Carta's central principle of the rule of law has made throughout western Europe. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the guarantees in the Great Charter and the 1689 Bill of Bights are again relevant in Britain's political debates. In the eyes of concerned citizens, the central idea that government and its officials must act within the law in dealings with individuals first expressed in Magna Carta still needs defending. Fears remain that Britons' liberties can be jeopardized under the present constitutionally sanctioned parliamentary sovereignty just as they were earlier under a despotic monarchy with a subordinate Parliament.

  Impact of the new scientific history on views of the Charter

  The nineteenth century was a crucial period for the emergence of history as a distinct discipline, as it left its traditional place among the liberal arts as a branch of literature or philosophy and passed from the hands of learned amateurs into those of trained professionals. While this process was under way, several powerful intellectual movements were influencing historians, first romanticism and nationalism early in the century and later a scientific and materialist world-view. The romantic and nationalist movements sparked popular enthusiasm for medieval history, and illustrations of this infatuation are Sir Walter Scott's novels, which reinforced the notion of 'Bad King John' and his Norman officials inflicting their autocratic rule on the downtrodden Saxons. Yet these two trends also had serious consequences for English historians' views of Magna Carta.

  Rejecting eighteenth-century Enlightenment attitudes toward the past scornful of medieval society and glorifying Greco-Roman civilization, the romantics extolled the Middle Ages. They gloried in tribal villagers' sense of community, the spirituality of the saints, the mystery of medieval epics and romances, knights' code of personal honour and pursuit of fame. They contrasted medieval villagers' happy and harmonious lives with the misery of workers in the new industrial towns. For some writers, William Cobbett (d. 1835) for example, this nostalgia for lost English rural life made them advocates of radical political change. Other romantics' preference for gradual evolution over revolutionary change in history encouraged an organic view of nations, societies, laws and institutions. This view led them to reject the rationalists' pragmatic study of primitive cultures as results of trial and error, adopted for practical results; instead, they admired earlier societies as unplanned living and growing things, evolving gradually toward a predetermined end or purpose.

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  The Encyclopedia of Civil Liberties in America

  • David Schultz, John R. Vile(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Magna Carta (1215)

  Preamble:

  John, by the grace of God, king of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and count of Anjou, to the archbishop, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justiciaries, foresters, sheriffs, stewards, servants, and to all his bailiffs and liege subjects, greetings. Know that, having regard to God and for the salvation of our soul, and those of all our ancestors and heirs, and unto the honor of God and the advancement of his holy Church and for the rectifying of our realm, we have granted as underwritten by advice of our venerable fathers, Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, primate of all England and cardinal of the holy Roman Church, Henry, archbishop of Dublin, William of London, Peter of Winchester, Jocelyn of Bath and Glastonbury, Hugh of Lincoln, Walter of Worcester, William of Coventry, Benedict of Rochester, bishops; of Master Pandulf, subdeacon and member of the household of our lord the Pope, of brother Aymeric (master of the Knights of the Temple in England), and of the illustrious men William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, William, earl of Salisbury, William, earl of Warenne, William, earl of Arundel, Alan of Galloway (constable of Scotland), Waren Fitz Gerold, Peter Fitz Herbert, Hubert De Burgh (seneschal of Poitou), Hugh de Neville, Matthew Fitz Herbert, Thomas Basset, Alan Basset, Philip d’Aubigny, Robert of Roppesley, John Marshal, John Fitz Hugh, and others, our liegemen.

  1. In the first place we have granted to God, and by this our present charter confirmed for us and our heirs forever that the English Church shall be free, and shall have her rights entire, and her liberties inviolate; and we will that it be thus observed; which is apparent from this that the freedom of elections, which is reckoned most important and very essential to the English Church, we, of our pure and unconstrained will, did grant, and did by our charter confirm and did obtain the ratification of the same from our lord, Pope Innocent III, before the quarrel arose between us and our barons: and this we will observe, and our will is that it be observed in good faith by our heirs forever. We have also granted to all freemen of our kingdom, for us and our heirs forever, all the underwritten liberties, to be had and held by them and their heirs, of us and our heirs forever.

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  Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (Routledge Revivals)

  • Walter Ullmann(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  excessum by not adhering to the pact he had just concluded? For a theocratic king this possibility just did not exist: the king can do no wrong; no writ runs against the king. And not the least significant feature of chapter 61 is that nowhere is there the

  1 If my reading is correct, the statement made by Louis’ legates (in 1216) brings the distinction between the two functions of kingship out very clearly. Although John was a ‘rex inunctus, tamen tamquam comes et dux erat de jurisdictione domini regis Francorum’ but if a duke or count committed in France an offence, he should and would be sentenced to death by his peers, see M.Paris, Chron. Maj., ii. 657. The objection of Innocent III (ibid.) was to the condemnation to death within the feudal order: ‘Barones Franciae non potuerunt judicare eum ad mortem, quia est rex inunctus et ita superior… major dignitas quodam modo absorbet minorem.’ This tallies of course entirely with the papal point of view.

  slightest hint at any coronation promise or oath. The framers of Magna Carta knew too well that that platform provided no assistance. They had taken great trouble in devising the machinery which was to come into operation if the king were to default. Perhaps nothing shows the character of Magna Carta and the substance as a feudal pact more convincingly than the security clause. Since this pact was feudal, in his feudal function alone the king was legally part of the pact, and in this capacity was ‘getatable’. In his feudal function he was a member of the feudal community; in his theocratic function he stood outside it, and no earthly power could devise a remedy for his delinquency. It would be true to say that the exemption of the person of the king from the punitive measures envisaged in the case of a violation of the provisions reveals the respect which the framers of the Charter had for the theocratic function of the king.1 When presented with the Articles of the Barons, John’s irate exclamation ‘Why do they not ask for my

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  Hume's Politics

  Coordination and Crisis in the History of England

  • Andrew Sabl(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Similarly and more substantively, this is not the “total dissolution of government” whose effects Hume most fears. To appeal to Magna Charta in particular as the original contract is to imply the illegitimacy of making a new one. Finally, we may note that the language of ramparts and defense seems at least as relevant to an accepted convention as to an actual promise: Magna Charta seems more like a line on a map than like a provision in a deed. “As they secured the rights of all orders of men, they were anxiously defended by all” perfectly describes an arrangement for mutual advantage that is not grounded on an actual promise. It describes a convention, not the kind of contract whose terms are explicitly spelled out and signed off on. The second question is whether Hume’s praise of Magna Charta constitutes praise for “natural rights” and a universal standard for liberty. In the key passage, Hume writes that the legal rights established by Magna Charta involve all the chief outlines of a legal government, and provide for the equal distribution of justice, and free enjoyment of property; the great objects for which political society was at first founded by men, which the people have a perpetual and unalienable right to recal [ sic ], and which no time, nor precedent, nor statute, nor positive institution, ought to deter them from keeping ever uppermost in their thoughts and attention

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