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Magna Carta started as a failure

Magna-carta-014-800x450How did a gang of thirteenth century one-percenters in England change the course of history with a document that failed at its start?

The Magna Carta, which is celebrating its 800th anniversary this year, is often held up as a beacon of liberty, protecting us from the arbitrary tyranny of our governments, even today.

In its startling original form, the charter proclaimed that the king could not raise any new taxes without the general consent of his kingdom, could not imprison anyone “except by the law of the land,” could not sell, deny, or delay justice to anyone, and was to have his actions scrutinised by a committee of 25 barons, lest he fail to abide by the charter.

Lord Denning, the famous English judge, called the ancient peace treaty between King John of England and his barons “the greatest constitutional document of all time”, and, at one point or another, it seems to have been celebrated as the foundation of everything good about the Anglosphere, from property rights to women’s rights, from the rule of law to democratic government.

But did these 800-year-old pieces of English calfskin really achieve so much?

After all, most of the charter was not filled with the sweeping rhetoric that we have come to expect from timeless political documents, but spoke instead of debtor’s sureties, scutage, socage, burkage, paying money for castleward, and removing fish weirs from the Thames. It was firmly a medieval treaty, concerned with medieval problems, and proposing medieval solutions.

In fact, King John and his barons would probably be surprised at the reception given to the Magna Carta today.

As a peace treaty, it was an abject failure, collapsing faster than Chamberlain’s Munich pact with Hitler, or Heath’s Sunningdale Agreement in Northern Ireland.

It lasted less than three months, ushering in a two-year civil war that devastated England, led to an attempted French invasion, and ended with King John dead, a nine-year-old boy on the throne, and the English significantly poorer, after paying off the French king to leave them alone.

Even 300 years after the Magna Carta, Henry VIII and his successors were manipulating the Star Chamber into the brutal inquisitorial faux-court that we remember today, forcing defendants to testify about their involvement in alleged crimes, with no care for the presumption of innocence, or any privilege against self-incrimination.

And eight centuries after its sealing, we still pay homage to this fabled document. Why? The question rings even louder when you consider some of the archaic content of the Magna Carta.

You could hardly describe a document that calls for a woman to ask not only, presumably, her closest male family members, but also her entirely unrelated feudal overlord for permission to re-marry, as a victory for women’s rights.

This must particularly be so when the document goes on to declare that “no one shall be arrested or imprisoned on the appeal of a woman for the death of any person except her husband”. Forgive the feminists if they don’t quite wax lyrical about the thirteenth century.

So much of what we say we know about the Magna Carta turns out to be wishful thinking; the product of believing that one thing we like must necessarily be linked with all the other things we like. “Of course the Magna Carta is the foundation of human rights,” we say, “and the rule of law, and the separation of powers.”

We look back on that meadow in Runnymede as the precursor to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as if all the problems of the early Middle Ages were solved with the flick of a quill.

But history rarely runs in a straight line, and the reverence in which we hold the Magna Carta today can obscure the original document.

It did not immediately bring democratic government to England. It did not immediately end the venality of the English Crown. It did not guarantee trial by jury.

It was anti-Semitic. It reserved almost all its benefits to the upper classes. It was written by tough, sometimes brutal, men – and they were all men – only a few generations removed from their vicious Viking heritage, which saw their ancestors sack the glorious monasteries at Lindisfarne and Iona, and lay siege to Paris.

So, again, why do we hold this hallowed document in such high regard?

After all, the countless other charters of Anglo-Saxon and early Norman England ceased to play any part in our political discourse many centuries ago.

Henry I’s Charter of Liberties, which predated the Magna Carta by more than a century, and from which the Magna Carta drew much of its text, is now almost completely forgotten.

The Forest Charter, Henry III’s 1217 companion document to the Magna Carta, whose shortness gave rise to the very name ‘Magna Carta’ (which means the big, or great, charter), has been similarly consigned to the dusty shelves of medieval historians.

But the Magna Carta also managed to endure in a way that no other medieval document did.

It did not suffer the fate of those other charters because, for all its faults and follies, it represented a small, tentative, experimental — perhaps even somewhat unintentional — step towards liberty. And the champions of liberty down the ages have never forgotten it.

In the sixteenth century, it was cited by Henry VIII’s opponents, who rioted against his arbitrary dissolution of the English monasteries, and his high-handed interference in Church affairs.

In the seventeenth century, the great English judge and parliamentarian Sir Edward Coke, and other opponents of the grasping Stuart monarchy, reminded their fellow Englishmen about its restrictions on executive power in the lead-up to the English Civil War.

In the eighteenth century, the American revolutionaries claimed its provisions as support in their battles with George III, and its reverberations were felt from the initial drafting of the American Constitution, through to the antebellum Amendments that abolished slavery and extended the protections of due process through all levels of government.

And it is these reverberations down the centuries that are important, because the Magna Carta was not an immediate panacea or a silver bullet, leading inevitably from the darkness of the thirteenth century to the liberty, prosperity, and security that so many of us are privileged to enjoy today.

It was only a small, half-step forward, which needed constant attention through the centuries, and many helping hands, to reach its storied position today.

So among the pageantry of the celebrations this year, and the Anglo-American tub-thumping that will accompany them, we might do well to remember that the process of building the rule of law and democratic government, of protecting liberty against arbitrary interference, and of opposing tyranny, did not begin, nor did it end, in 1215.

Remembering the whole story of the Magna Carta might encourage us to play our own part in fostering liberty with greater humility. Rome was not built in a day, nor the rule of law established with one international human rights convention, or a UN General Assembly Resolution.

Instead, the story of liberty is one of slow, often anonymous, struggle. It’s a story of gradual accretions of freedom, opposed by vested interests at every turn; a story whose characters often face tragedy, as — to borrow from Kipling  — they watch the things they gave their life to, broken, and stoop to build them up again with worn out tools.

But it is also, thankfully, a story of progress.

Our world has changed immeasurably in the eight centuries since those barons gathered in the meadow at Runnymede, and almost completely for the better. Many people have contributed to that change; some, perhaps, even more than the barons themselves.

And in paying homage to the Magna Carta, we must remember them all.

 

William Shrubb is a Research Assistant at the Centre for Independent Studies