The Magna Carta

QUESTION 5: WHY DID KING JOHN & THE BARONS MEET AT RUNNYMEDE?

The meadows were simply a convenient meeting point at which large numbers of people could conveniently congregate. King John was staying at his castle of Windsor, already a major royal fortress. The barons, having taken possession of London in May, had advanced to Staines, a village by the River Thames with a bridge carrying the main road from London to the south- west. By early June, after negotiations between the two sides had been initiated, lots of American-style shuttle diplomacy was under way. When by around 10 June the king and the leading barons were ready to settle, and outline terms were agreed, they decided to meet at a neutral half way point - that is to say, Runnymede. The wide stretch of meadow by the river was probably an important meeting place as early as Anglo-Saxon times. Significantly it was sited on the boundary between two kingdoms - Mercia and Surrey (the latter subsequently absorbed into Kent) - just as it stands today on the border between two counties, Surrey and Berkshire. The notion that the two sides met on an island in the river is pure myth and entirely without contemporary foundation. They met on the Surrey bank, because it is on that side that the road made its way from Windsor to Staines (the route of the modern A308). It should be borne in mind, however, that the course of the river has almost certainly changed in the eight hundred years since the meeting. Unfortunately we have no maps showing us the course of its meanderings in the thirteenth century.

What was the purpose of the Magna Carta?

To limit the kings power

QUESTION 7: WHAT DID MAGNA CARTA DO FOR WOMEN?

Two important clauses in Magna Carta dealt with the rights of women, specifically those of landholding widows, numbers 7 and 8. Clause 7 said that after her husband's death a widow was entitled to her marriage portion and inheritance at once and without hindrance, and she should not have to pay anything for these rights; furthermore, she would be able to stay in her husband's house for forty days after his death, while her dower rights were being assigned. Clause 8 said that no widow should be compelled to marry so long as she wished to live without a husband, subject to the qualification that if she were a royal tenant, then she would seek the king's consent in the event of remarriage. These two clauses essentially safeguarded the rights of wealthy aristocratic widows. King John had long been in the habit of rewarding his unpopular foreign- born mercenary captains by granting them the hand in marriage of widows of deceased tenants in chief, something which in a feudal society he was fully entitled to do. By this device he made considerable sums of money for his exchequer - the mercenary captains naturally had to pay for the privilege - while, at the same time, rewarding those captains at someone else's expense.

QUESTION 2: HOW MUCH OF MAGNA CARTA IS STILL IN THE STATUTE BOOK?

Very little, in fact. To be precise, just four clauses of the original 1215 version of the Charter. These are: clause 1, guaranteeing the liberties of the Church; clause 13, guaranteeing the liberties of the City of London; and the famous clauses 39 and 40, guaranteeing due legal process. These represent clauses 1, 9 and 29 of the definitive reissue of the Charter in a slimmed down version by King Henry III in 1225. All the rest of the Charter has been repealed in stages over the centuries, most especially in the nineteenth century, a period which saw the repeal of a great deal of obsolete medieval legislation. Does that mean that the Charter no longer matters? Most definitely not. All great documents are the product of specific historical circumstances and lose their immediate relevance over time. But that does not mean that they can be forgotten or consigned to the historical waste paper bin. Magna Carta, although overtaken by events even in the medieval period, acquired huge symbolic significance, and it is its symbolic power as a touchstone of liberty which has guaranteed its continuing fame and importance over the centuries.

QUESTION 6: WHAT IS THE CHARTER OF THE FOREST?

When Magna Carta was confirmed by Henry III's minority government in 1217, the opportunity was taken to hive off the clauses relating to the forests and place them in a separate charter, at the same time adding to their number. This second charter was known as the Charter of the Forest. The original 1215 charter, hitherto generally referred to as the charter of liberties, was itself reissued in amended form, and from this time known as Magna Carta - the Great Charter - to distinguish it from its younger sibling. There was much in the 1215 Charter about forest matters because the extent of the king's forests and the administration of the forest law were both sources of popular grievance. By way of redress the king promised limited disafforestation and investigations into the malpractices of his forest officials.

QUESTION 4: DID MAGNA CARTA BENEFIT ONLY THE UPPER CLASSES?

most definitely not. As clause 39 of the original 1215 version of the Charter makes clear, the benefits of the Charter were to extend to all free men. The villeins, the unfree tenants, were of course excluded, but it would be entirely unrealistic to expect a thirteenth-century constitutional document to include them; technically, they fell within the jurisdiction of their lords. It is also worth remembering that in clause 60 the benefits which King John extended to his barons at Runnymede were extended by them to their own free tenants: 'all the customs and liberties which we have granted to our own men shall be observed by all of our men, both lay and clerk, to their own men'. The liberties conceded in Magna Carta were spread down the tenurial chain

who wanted the magna carta to be signed

the serfs and nobles.

QUESTION 9: WHO WROTE MAGNA CARTA?

A good question! No one really knows, and there is no contemporary who tells us. Having said that, it is a fair assumption that the Charter's 63 clauses were the product of committee work, the collective outcome of round after round of drafting and re-drafting by the two sides. The so- called Articles of the Barons, a document preserved in the British Library alongside the two copies of the Charter itself, probably represent a working draft of the Charter from the last few days before the final agreement. A highly influential figure in the drafting process may have been the man who was the leading public intellectual of his day, the archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton. For much of his career as a teacher in the University of Paris, Langton had reflected on the problem of how to deal with errant kings in commentaries that he had written on the Old Testament, a text full of stories of kings equally as bad as John. Limited circumstantial evidence associates two baronial-leaning clerks with the drafting process - Elias of Dereham, Archbishop Langton's steward and a canon of Salisbury Cathedral, and Gervase of Howbridge, a canon and later chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral; the latter had gone into exile with the future baronial leader, Eustace de Vesci, in 1212. For all the undoubted prominence of the clerks in the drafting process, however, it is important not to underestimate the capacity for independent thought of the barons themselves.

When was the Magna carta created

June 1215

What king was forced to sign the Magna Carta?

King John

QUESTION 3: IS MAGNA CARTA ABOUT ENGLAND OR ABOUT BRITAIN?

Magna Carta was issued by a king of England at a time when England and Scotland were separate kingdoms, and when Wales outside the Marches constituted a separate principality. So strictly speaking the Charter is an English document. However, some of the Scottish and Welsh leaders were associated with the rebellion against John, and Eustace de Vesci, the lord of Alnwick, a rebel leader, was married to the half-sister of Alexander, king of Scots. For this reason, there are clauses in the Charter relating to Scottish and Welsh affairs. In clause 56, King John promised that, if he had dispossessed Welshmen of their lands and liberties in England or Wales without judgement of their peers, those lands and liberties were to be immediately restored. If, however, there was dispute over this, it was to be settled by the judgement of peers, for land in England according to English law, for land in Wales according to Welsh law, and for land in the March (the borders) according to the law of the March. In the following clause, 57, John promised to restore immediately to Llewellyn, prince of North Wales, Llewellyn's son, who had been taken as a hostage. In clause 59 the king addressed the grievances of the king of Scots over his sisters, who were in John's custody, and his rights and liberties, promising to deal with these matters in the same way that he proposed to deal with the grievances of his English barons, that is, by either offering immediate redress or submitting to the judgement of the Twenty Five. The Charter is remarkable in acknowledging the distinctiveness of English, Welsh and Marcher law, the first time that all three had appeared in an English state document. King John was also lord of Ireland, but there are no clauses relating to Irish affairs in the Charter.

When did king John die?

October 19, 1216

QUESTION 8: WHERE CAN I SEE A COPY OF MAGNA CARTA?

QUESTION 8: WHERE CAN I SEE A COPY OF MAGNA CARTA? Happily, copies of the Charter can be seen in quite a number of places around the country, although they won't all necessarily be on permanent public display at the same time. There are four surviving copies of the original Charter issued on 15 June 1215. Two of these are in the British Library, London, one in good condition, and the other, since the nineteenth century, in very poor. The third is in Salisbury Cathedral, and the fourth at Lincoln. Of these, the only one which goes on tour is the Lincoln copy, and this autumn - 2014 - it will be on display at Bury St Edmunds Cathedral in Suffolk. In the early years of Henry III's reign Magna Carta went through a number of reissues, and numerous copies of these reissue texts, or engrossments, have survived. The first such, made in November 1216, a month after Henry's accession, survives in a unique copy, in the archives of Durham Cathedral. The second, made a year later, and associated with the peace agreement between Henry's minority government and the rebel barons, survives in four engrossments. Three of these are in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the fourth in the Library of Hereford Cathedral. The final and authoritative reissue of the minority, that of 11 February 1225, which was subsequently embodied in statute law, again survives in four engrossments, one in the British Library, the second in the National Archives, the third in the Bodleian Library, and the fourth in the Library of Durham Cathedral. In 1297 Edward I reissued the Charter yet again, as part of the settlement of a major political crisis that year. Four copies of this text survive, one in the National Archives, a second - the City of London's copy - in the London Metropolitan Archives, and a third in the Australian National Parliament, Canberra, Australia. A fourth copy is in private ownership in the United States.

QUESTION 1: WHAT HAS MAGNA CARTA DONE FOR ME?

Quite simple - it's because of Magna Carta that we live in a free country today. Magna Carta affirmed the vital principle of freedom under the law. Clause 39 of the Charter said: 'no free man shall be imprisoned or deprived of his lands except by judgement of his peers or by the law of the land'. Clause 40 said: 'To no one shall we sell, delay or deny right or justice'. Before the making of Magna Carta the king had been able to do pretty well whatever he liked - and did. After the making of the Charter he was subject to the law like everyone else. In the mid thirteenth century the lawyer Henry Bracton was to write, 'in England the king is below God and below the law'.

What documents did the Magna Carta inspire?

The United States Constitution,Bill Rights, and the Declaration of independence