Sorry, The Original Magna Carta Was A Flop
That Annoying History Again
The original Magna Carta was a flop.
On 15 June 1215, a group of the well and good—rebel barons—the elite of England, trapped King John’s arse in Runnymead, a swamp along the Thames.
With what amounted to swords at this throat, they forced him to sign a royal charter, that essentially was supposed to confirm the Charter of Liberties, aka the Coronation Charter, or Statutes of the Realm.
The Charter of Liberties was a written proclamation issued by Henry I when he took the throne in 1100. The Charter of Liberties was supposed to hold the king to certain laws regarding the treatment of nobles, church officials, and certain individuals. It didn’t apply to everybody.
The Charter was designed to curb the royal abuses by Henry’s brother and predecessor, William II, who warmed the throne from 1087–1100. The abuses, as the nobility saw them, were over-taxation, the abuse of vacant bishops’ offices, selling church offices and sacred relics, and giving money to royal cronies in return for special favors.
Does this scenario sound familiar? Some things never change.
The Charter of Liberties essentially addressed most of the same issues that the English barons brought back to the swamp at Runnymead 115 years later.
It will come a no surprise that the Charter of Liberties was ignored by every king up to and including King John.
These barons must have been a rather dense lot. It wasn’t until 1213, when Cardinal Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, reminded the slow-witted nobles that their liberties had been guaranteed more than a century before by Henry I’s completely ignored Charter of Liberties.
So, in 1215, the barons were back again with a list of demands for a king that essentially had been fooking with their feudalism.
This new document was originally written by the above mentioned Cardinal Langton, and demanded the king re-confirm the ignored Charter of Liberties. It also demanded protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment (habeas corpus), access to swift and impartial justice, and limitations on feudal payments (that fooking with their feudalism thing) to the Crown.
Like any good, soon-to-be useless agreement, the Magna Carta (medieval Latin for “Great Charter”) was to be overseen by a large committee. This one would have of 25 barons.
Of course it flopped immediately.
Neither side honored their commitments, especially King John. The Magna Carta was quickly annulled by Pope (Not-So) Innocent III. This led directly to a war, the First Barons’ War, with the festivities lasting from 1215 to 1217.
King John was one of England’s more incompetent kings. He lost Normandy, was excommunicated by Pope Innocent, had many of his former allies turn against him in the Barons’ War. He was described by some of his contemporaries as being sinfully lustful and lacking in piety. He was suspected of being impious at best, and at worst an atheist, a really big problem at the time.
King John got dysentery in the midst of a disastrous military campaign in September 1216 that featured losing most of his baggage train and personal belongings, including the English Crown Jewels, which were sucked into quicksand and whirlpools of a tidal estuary.
For worse or better, King John pooped himself to death on the night of 18/19 October 1216, at Newark Castle, Nottinghamshire.
After King John died, a noble, William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, became nine-year-old Henry III’s protector and head of the regency. Because it worked so well the first time, Marshal revived an edited version of the Runnymede charter, and tried to use it as the basis for a government.
It was at this time the document became known as the Magna Carta, in part to distinguish it from the smaller and more specific Charter of the Forest, issued of 6 November 1217. The Charter of the Forest re-established rights of access to the royal forest for free men. The revised Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest are considered companion documents.
The Charter of the Forest came about because access to forested land became more restricted as King Richard and King John made ever-increasing areas of royal forest, off-limits to commoners. The royal forest eventually covered about one-third of southern England.
In need of cash, Henry III reissued both charters in 1225, this time to gain permission for a new taxes. The content was nearly identical to the 1217 version In the new versions. This time the king claimed the charters were issued of his own "spontaneous and free will". The king confirmed them with the royal seal, giving the new Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest of 1225 greater authority.
Henry III’s son, Edward I, reissued it again in 1297, this time making it part of England’s statute law.
The charters continued to evolve with the reconfirmation in 1300. An additional document was added, the Articuli super Cartas (The Articles upon the Charters), containing 17 articles to help deal with the problem of enforcing the charters.
Copies of Magna Carta and the Forest Charter were issued to the sheriff of each county, with the mandate they should be read four times a year when the county courts met. Each county had three-man committee to hear complaints about charter violations.
As the years passed, and the Parliament of England was established and passed new laws, Magna Carta’s significance faded.
As the 16th century drew to a close, there was renewed interest in the Magna Carta.
Interesting theories arose that there was an ancient English constitution, dating back to time of the Anglo-Saxons, that had protected individual freedoms, but was overthrown by the Normans after 1066.
Although this idea had no real basis in fact, it did promote making the charter an essential foundation for the powers of Parliament and legal principles such as habeas corpus. Elizabethan jurists such as Sir Edward Coke invoked Magna Carta in the early 17th century to argue against the divine right of kings.
Unsurprisingly, Kings James, and his son Charles I, tried to scotch discussion of the Magna Carta.
However, the political myth of Magna Carta as a revival of an ancient guarantee of personal liberties persisted through the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and into the 19th century. It influenced the early American colonists. It informed and the creation of the United States Constitution, which became the supreme law of the land in the United States, at least until the past 10 years.
So, much ado was made about the Magna Carta during the recent visit of the current King of England, who had to politely remind the de facto king of America about the rule of law and its hard fought, hard won history.
And the King of England actually used complete sentences and never had to resort to accordion hands to do so.