Magna Carta

The story

A king in trouble

John of England, called John Lackland, had become king in 1199 after his brother Richard the Lionheart. He was not a popular king. In 1204 he lost Normandy and most of the territories the English held in France, to the advantage of the French king. To win them back he needed a great deal of money, and he demanded from the barons, the great nobles of the kingdom, taxes that grew ever higher and were often arbitrary. He took hostages, confiscated lands and imprisoned his enemies.

He was also at odds with the Church: he refused to accept the Archbishop of Canterbury chosen by Pope Innocent III, and from 1208 to 1214 England lay under an interdict, that is, without most public religious ceremonies. In the end the king gave way. In 1214 he tried to recover France, but was defeated at Bouvines. He went home with no lands and poorer than before.

The barons rebel

Many barons had had enough. In the spring of 1215 they rebelled, and in May they occupied London. The king, outnumbered, agreed to negotiate. The two sides met on 15 June 1215 at Runnymede, a meadow on the banks of the Thames not far from Windsor. There the king put his seal on a long document, drawn up in Latin by advisers, which listed the barons' demands. He did not sign it, because in those days kings used a seal, not a signature.

The document, which had 63 clauses, was not made to defend the rights of everyone. Many clauses dealt with very concrete problems of the nobles: how much they had to pay when they inherited land, how widows were to be treated, which courts had authority. But some phrases had a greater meaning.

Immediately after the ceremony, the king's scribes copied the text by hand several times and sent it to the bishops and officials of the various counties, who had to read it out in public. The copies were written in Latin, with abbreviations, on parchment. Nobody could have imagined that some of those parchments would be kept for eight hundred years.

The phrases that made history

One clause says that the king cannot impose certain taxes without the consent of the kingdom, an idea that would later become the principle “no taxation without representation”. Another, famous one, says that no free man may be arrested, imprisoned or stripped of his possessions except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land. Another states that the king will not sell, and will not deny to anyone, justice.

The king was not above the law: this was the central point. To check that the document was respected, the barons created a committee of twenty-five of their own number, with the power to force the king, even by force of arms, to keep the agreement.

A failure that became a symbol

At the time, Magna Carta failed. John had no intention of respecting it, and asked the pope to annul it. Innocent III declared it void, with a bull of August 1215, because it had been extorted by force. A civil war broke out, the First Barons' War. John died in October 1216. His son Henry III, still a child, was crowned, and his advisers reissued the charter, with some changes, in 1216, 1217 and 1225. The 1217 version was called “Magna Carta”, that is, “Great Charter”, to distinguish it from another, smaller one, the Charter of the Forest.

At Runnymede, in 1957, the American Bar Association built a small memorial in memory of the charter, a sign of the importance it has had in the United States too.

Today four original copies of 1215 survive: two at the British Library in London, one in Lincoln Cathedral and one in Salisbury Cathedral. Of the original clauses only three remain in force in England.