Gone Medieval - Magna Carta in America

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

What does a document written in 1215 in England have to do with the United States? Surprisingly a lot actually! The Magna Carta is thought to have influenced foundational documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But where did this inspiration come from? And why were America's founding fathers so influenced by a charter that King John broke almost immediately after signing it? In today's episode of Gone Medieval, we bring you an episode from our sister podcast American History Hit to answer all these questions and more. Don Wildman, host of AHH, is joined by our very own Eleanor Janega to explore the influence of this medieval document on the very fabric of the United States.Gone Medieval is presented by Eleanor Janega and edited by Joseph Knight. The producer is Joseph Knight, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Magna Carta is perhaps one of the best known medieval documents. And as a result, it has an outsized mythology to match its fame. But is it really the levelizing document we portrayed as? I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga. And today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, we're bringing you an episode from our sister podcast, American History Hit, where I joined Don Wildman to talk about what I believed to be one of the most overrated medieval charters,

and how something that only ever guaranteed rights for an insignificant handful of people was built up into a revolutionary document, hundreds of years later, by Americans. It's a story of riches, rich people, and righteous myths that I cannot wait to dig into. Greetings, listeners, this is American History Hit, and I'm your host, Don Wildman. Welcome. June 15th, 2003, which passed about a month ago as I speak, just marked another anniversary of an age-old document scribed with quill pen upon parchment, one which many say was fundamental to the rule of law in the United States, essential in the thinking and legal grounding of our nation. But I'm not speaking of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution or the Bill of Rights or any of the amendments to the Constitution, although, again, many would source those documents to this earlier

one. I am speaking, of course, of the Magnicarta, written over 800 years ago in 1215, presented laid upon a table in Runamead, England, to a disgruntled English regent, King John, who was forced by the threat of civil war to broker a peace with rebellious English barons that would entail him signing off on a document written by their side that held within it certain guaranteed rights and liberties which those barons saw necessary to maintaining a balance of power. Sound familiar? Hmm. It was not the first time a document of this nature had been signed in England. It would not be the last. But there was something that was importantly unique about this one, different in ways that we will discuss today with Dr. Eleanor Yaniga, an American medieval historian who lives in England.

She is a guest teacher at the London School of Economics, an author, and a broadcaster. She is an expert in all things medieval. And more importantly than all that, she is the co-host of the history hit podcast Gone Medieval. Excellent. You should listen to it. Hello, Alinar. Welcome to our podcast. Don, thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. Our subject today is right in the pocket of our transatlantic employer, the Magnacarta, this thoroughly English matter 800 years ago that somehow had much to do with the founding of

United States, or did it. Depends on how you talk to or who you Google. Some say, and we can certainly include Benjamin Franklin in this group, that the very roots of the American Liberty Tree, the metaphorical one, the rights are founders and stated in our original documents, are nourished by the soils of this medieval moment in English political life. There is basic language lifted straight from the Magna Carta or its descendant documents, right? That's right. The most important thing that you could say about Magna Carta and its influence is particularly on the Bill of Rights. And that really, it's kind of enshrined specifically from the 20th clause of Magna Carta, the most important thing here, which is, for a trivial offense, a free man shall be fined only in proportion to

the degree of his offense, and for a serious offense correspondingly, but not so heavily as to deprive himself of his livelihood. And this is a really interesting one, because Magnacarader in many ways is overblown in terms of what it means in an English context, right? Because essentially it's a document that was created because of, again, the threat of civil war, just as you said, between a collection of barons here in England and King John I. But it really only pertains in most senses to those barons, right? And when people read things like this and they say, oh, yes, well, free men really should have particularized rights. And what Magna Carta was doing was it was establishing what all of these people within England could expect to see in terms of

how justice would be meted out on them. And that's all well and good. But there aren't very many free men in England at that time. About 70% of the population are serfs in England, which is a kind of unfree person. Well, this is one of these discussions that we have to be careful about the modern sensibility versus the context of those times. That's an ongoing dilemma in this day and age. Let's start this conversation at a very basic place. Magna Carta means great charter. In 1215, a guy named King John was struggling with a situation, a looming civil war based on taxation and all sorts of problems at these barons. And by barons, I mean people who are controlling great swaths of land. They would be like governors of American states would be some kind of equivalent, I suppose.

And they had all gathered, as one does, to say to this guy supposedly in charge, we need changes. And we need to bake them into a document that you sign that guarantees us that you will not cross a certain line. What was that line most clearly? So most clearly, what they really wanted was to be in charge of judicial things within their own counties, as it were. So if you are, for example, I don't know, the baron of Oxfordshire, pulling one off the top of my head, what you want to be sure is that you're the person who's meeting out justice for the most part in Oxfordshire, right? You don't want it to be that if there is some kind of land dispute between yourself and another landowner, that the king comes in and makes those decisions.

And this is in many ways a really common thing in the medieval period. You generally see, just as a general very slapdash rule of thumb, in the countryside, nobles control things, and they control their own land, they bring in their own taxation, they oversee the course. But in cities, it's the king. And the king kind of is an overarching thing, and barons have to kick up money to them. But King John, he's in the process of attempting to sort of consolidate more legal rights at the time. They're coming out of a period of some light chaos, let's put it that way. The period of the anarchy when no one really knew who was the king is only a generation behind. There was rather a lot of wars between King John's mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and his father, Henry II. And so John is in here saying, all right, we're cleaning a house.

This is what it's going to mean to be a king. And we want to establish this. But the barons are sort of like, no, maid. There are what you often call customary rights or customary laws that we want seen to. And what is interesting about this is it is a way of enshrining these things that were sort of how things were done for the most part and actually writing it down in one place, instead of just saying, well, this is the way things have always been done. Everybody knows this. I mentioned in the opening that this was not the first time or the last time that this kind

of thing happened. And in fact, the Magna Carta did not work out well. It was violated almost immediately by King John, right? He goes over their heads straight to the Pope and says, they made me do this, come to my side, and they nullify this thing, right? Yeah, absolutely, because the Pope can. And it establishes a difficult relationship, right? Because kings can go directly to the Pope, because that's the boss of kings. We could all agree that there's one guy more important than the king, and that's the Pope. Well, he works for the king of kings. Exactly. And he's the one, if God is the reason why you get to be king, then you're going to have to go talk to the mediator of God, right? But it also makes sense from a church standpoint that you don't really want individuals

on the lower positions saying, oh, we get to write down what rights are and who has what rights because the church, again, the Pope wants to be the king of all the church, right? What if your local archbishops start trying to pull this and say, oh, actually, we don't really want Rome looking in on what's happening in Canterbury. So it's a kind of existential crisis for the Pope as well. And so that's quite interesting, right, because we tend to say, oh, yeah, and Magna Carta came in and then it established that everybody has rights. It was like, well, one, not everybody has rights, to basically off the books almost immediately from a real legalistic standpoint. And that means a lot coming from the church as well because it's the best legal structure

in the Middle Ages. Like really the way to think about the church is, sure, it's a moral standpoint, but actually what it's doing is establishing the laws of what it means to be a Christian. So the thing that really binds Europe together is this concept of Christendom and a concept that the Pope really does have a say in these things. So to us, it's kind of shocking. that you say, how can the Pope come in and nullify a legal document? And the answer is pretty easily. He's got the means to do it. We're edging into a very interesting conversation that has to do with

more European history than anything else, which I find fascinating in that you basically have the parade of empires through the centuries. And Christendom is one of those empires. I mean, it has a different sort of gestalt to it, but it's definitely the biggest one of all that ever comes along. But let's tie this back to American history in a sense. The Magnicarta is cited, as I mentioned, opening by none other than Benjamin Franklin. But more in a document, it's on the front page of the 1774 Journal of the Continental Congress, the first Continental Congress. It's the record of what happened in that first meeting in which grievances were laid out towards the British Empire. And at the bottom of that page, if you just Google it up, you'll see this, is a nice little logo,

a little stamp that has the picture of a sort of pillar. And then weirdly, it looks like a kind of animal. It's got all these legs. Indeed, the legs are actually arms and hands that are are holding on to this pillar. The saying that's there refers to the fact that all of these different hands, all these different agents, will be leaning on this central pillar, that pillar being the Magna Carta, which indeed is even cited at the bottom of the pillar. So the new Congress, the Continental Congress, is citing that particular document at the time already hundreds of years in the past as a central tenant of what they were complaining about. Was this a propaganda idea, or was this actually true?

I think that it's a little bit of both. I think that what they are doing. I mean, this is a really clever bunch of guys, especially Ben Franklin. I love his ways, right? And so what they want to do is they want to say, okay, well, this is the legal idea that we want. How do we go about establishing that? Right. And these guys have legal training.

They know exactly what's going on. And so they're like, well, what we have to do is we've got to reach back into law and find where we can go to back us up, back up our positions. And so the natural place that you flow to from that is going to be Magna Carta. You know, you could make an argument for English common law, for example, which is more like the law for every man. But Magna Carta has big sweeping ideals. And it's about governance more specifically.

And that's what matters to them, right? Because if what we're doing is we're establishing that there is a relationship between powerful people who make laws and enact the law. and a king, then Magna Carta is the obvious place to go. But it's also quite interesting because one of the things about this is they've, in a way, gone and found something that was really obscure at the time. Because people in England were like, what? Who's got Magna Carta?

And Ben is in here reaching out like, ha, ha, I've got here I am with Magna Carta. And English people are like, I haven't seen that in centuries. So they actually kind of revive what is a pretty obscure document at the time, which I absolutely love it's such a particularized lawyer move, like such a way of outflanking. So I do think that they say, oh yeah, and that's great because we can draw off of this. But I think that they had the idea in the first place and went back to go find something. Maybe I'm just a historian and that's what I want to see, right? No, I totally agree with you. And that actually came to me doing some reading on this subject, poking around trying to figure out why the Magnappana even mattered at this point.

How could it have been so popularly known when they didn't have the resources? People are illiterate everywhere. And suddenly this thing that's written down on parchment matters as much as it does. It had to have been a maneuver. It had to have been a move done by this bunch of lawyers, as you say, to say, uh-huh, hold on you guys. You're treating us unlike English citizens. You're treating us in such a way that we have reasons to complain, reasons to meet, reasons to write down our grievances. And here, look at your own document that actually instates these very rights in your own history. So take that, King. We're throwing it right back at you with your own stuff.

And this was really a gotcha moment, wasn't it? Or at least intended to be. Oh, God, absolutely. They've pulled this out and they're just saying, look, everything that we're complaining about, you can see it right here. Plus, it's got this amazing kind of modern gloss, a real enlightenment move.

Because they're saying, okay, well, here we are. We're free men. And by this time, everyone can kind of agree that there's such a thing as a free man. And you are not acting in this particularized way. Whereas medieval people would be like, oh, sorry, I wasn't talking about you. I was talking about these 12 guys, the barons, and what their rights are. We were talking about fishing weirs.

I don't know what does this have to do with some kind of sure, wealthy lawyer in America, but that doesn't interest me. And so it's a real brilliant gotcha, you know, saying, well, I think we've all agreed that we've moved on. We all agree that there are free men and that's this is what we are. And yet you have misapplied these things. It's a masterful dig, I have to say. I know it was obscure. I know most people couldn't read in England, and so why would they be familiar with this hundreds-year-old document at the point? My question is, though, so much of what is in the Magna Carta is later cited as part of the Enlightenment, this new philosophy that was in the 16th and 70-100s being pulled upon by the very thinkers we're talking about, Ben Franklin, etc., as their reason for creating this new country eventually. But there's this whole groundswell of ideas of the Enlightenment.

Was the Magna Carta part of that as well? Interestingly, Magnacarta, in terms of its influence on enlightenment thinkers outside of America, was almost nil until the Americans is seized upon it. And this kind of makes sense if we're thinking about the sort of milieu of the philosophes and everything coming from the standpoint of Americans. We find England to be very important. But for French people, especially in the Middle Ages, it was a bit of a backwater. It was a sort of place that you had wars with constantly, but half the reason the English kings

were starting a war with France is because France had a lot more money and they want to be the king of that instead and everyone agrees that it's got more influence. So having a working knowledge of what would be the legal rights and customs of the barons in the 13th century, this is not going to be something that is like Hugh Jean-Diderot's list or something like that. But it becomes very interesting and important to them after it's cycled through the Americans. And once you get the kind of American mania going on over in France, after the Declaration of Independence, after the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, when Lafayette and all of his friends are hanging out helping to fight the war, and the French go, hang on, wait a minute, how come you're rebelling against your terrible king? And now we've got a

terrible king. And they start looking towards these same ideas. And then they find it very compelling, obviously. But most French people don't speak English at the time. You know, English speak French. It's the lingua franca for a reason. So it has to come through the American consciousness and then back out again in order to be absorbed into the Enlightenment. And then you see the very same things be reinterpreted as the universal rights of man in all these other ways. But it's this kind of very specific framework of it. And it's something that America really did. It's not an English thing. That is a fascinating subject. The dynamic between the French and the Americans at this point and how we kind of leapfrog them in terms of revolution,

and then they can do their own just afterwards. But the truth is, the two are part of the same dynamic that's happening in the world at the time. Boy, there's a lot of strands to this conversation that I would love to spend hours discussing. But really what's interesting to our audience, I think, is the fact that the Americans who are making this new country are really the ones who are promoting this idea

most dramatically in the world. But we might be confused as to why, It wasn't necessarily to break from the English crown. It was to defend themselves in the argument that the English crown was misunderstanding their relationship to the American colonies, that they had warped this relationship in such a fashion that it needed to be corrected and straightened out. That's all really the biggest thinkers were trying to do in 1774. There were a lot of radicals who were thinking otherwise. That would certainly happen pretty quickly.

But nonetheless, there was a lot of impulse to say, hey, hey, we can fix this problem. and let's show them that they have wandered, that they're wayward from their own path. Yeah, absolutely. I don't think that when this is first seized upon as a method of doing this, it wouldn't make sense to say, and now we are looking for a definitive break from England, and it's because of documents like Magna Carta, right? You pull out Magna Carta in order to say, this is the traditional way that these things work. We are as English as you are. We have an understanding of what that means.

We have an understanding of our history, and we have an understanding of obscure legal codes and the rights that pertain to them. So it's really, in an ideal world for them, it would have just made the crown simmer down. You would get some representation in parliament, something along these lines. It was never meant initially as the wedge that it would become. And I think it's quite interesting now because we find it now as a bridge between our two cultures as a thing that we kind of agree on and say, oh yeah, that was really cool. Magnicardo, don't we all love it? But at the time, that was exactly the thing that it was meant to be. But it ends up being an inflection point instead of something that brings them together. Right. I mean, there's a list of things that are cited in the Magnicarta.

And let's just go through the people's reassertion of rights against an oppressive ruler, which is a legacy that captured American distrust. They understood this very well. The Virginia Charter of 1606, which comes over with Raleigh and all that time frame of Jamestown and so forth, promised English settlers all the same liberties, franchises, and immunities as people born in England. That's a Magna Carta idea. The Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter acknowledged the rights of the settlers to be treated as free and natural subject. I'm just trying to make a strong point that people got on a ship, sailed across the ocean, understanding that this was baked in to this relationship, that they would be treated the same way.

way they were treated back then. That's the seeds of revolution. And that's what's trying to be articulated here by using this sacred document, the Magna Carta, because it's something that predates all of this current politics and goes back to the beginning of English governance. That's their argument. Yeah, absolutely. And there's something about it that is emblematic of being an English person, as it were, being an English citizen or an English free man at the very least. But, you know, women, what have you, we'll get to them later. But certainly that's not who anyone was having in mind when Magna Carta was written either. But it does make perfect sense. You know, you've got a document here that say, here are the taxable things for individuals. You shouldn't be imposing them willy-nilly. And there should be some check-in and some buy-in with the people that you're taxing before you levy these things. This is how laws work. And these are the ways that we can say, this punishment is accurate and good. And that makes sense that one isn't. And also saying that people, people who are on the ground in the actual locale that they are in are the ones who are best placed to understand what those legal liabilities should be, not some king who's off doing

God knows what else, right? So these are all really, I think especially as Americans, these things all really make a lot of sense to us now because it seems like a lot like states' rights is a good way of thinking about it. I think you're absolutely spot on with likening the barons to governors. It's kind of like, you know what's going on on the ground in your state. And what is true for Washington isn't the same for Texas, and you kind of need to understand the differentiations there. That's all the barons we're saying, and that's exactly what the founding fathers are saying with this. We're here. We are English. This is an English colony, sure, but we know what we should be taxed for. We know the best things in order to run these things. And you should be acting like we're any other

free British person, right? What interests me is that it's, as we mentioned, there were several versions of this kind of thing done. I mean, this is a normal push and pull between barons and regions. And so you would have thought over 100, 500 years for sure, other documents would be out there. But for some reason, they reached all the way back to 1215. I don't understand why that happened when it was something that was immediately nullified. But never mind. So in 1687, William Penn, who goes on to found Pennsylvania, publishes a pamphlet on freedom and religious liberty. He includes a copy of the Magna Carta and discusses it as a source of fundamental law. it starts popping up and being popularized. And I think that was as much a kind of result of a process

that had been begun throughout these years. But it was kind of a general idea that was referring to many, many treaties that the English probably had done. But this was the best one they had. Yeah, I think that there's also kind of a thing going on here where this is a very exciting document. It literally just has a huge seal on it, which is, you know, very exciting. If we are going to be like reaching in and pulling out a charter, here's something very very. grand indeed, right? But you might also not know that the Pope was also like, absolutely not. And especially if you are talking to people who are, for example, Protestant, as opposed to Catholic, they don't care if the Pope nullified something. For them, if the Pope nullified it, that means that it was

good, right? And if you're applying ideas of nationalism or ideas of what it means to be English, right, and saying, oh yeah, and then the Pope stepped all over our toes. But if you let us alone naturally, quote unquote, we would have done this wonderful, righteous thing. We would have established these laws. So it's a weird one to reach all the way back to, but they probably don't know that. You found the big cool document. And if you can say it's that old, there is the thing, too, about antique rights being more particular, basically having more gravitas because they've been around for a while. And more natural. We're not just thinking something up that's artificial, is not part of our rebellious, rowdy ways. We're actually doing something here that's very

scholarly and were able to cite it. It's like footnoting their rebellion in the real scholarly work. That carries on in the creation of the Constitution. The Fifth Amendment guarantees, quote, no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process of law, a concept that comes from Magna Carta. There are guarantees of a speedy trial, as found in the Sixth Amendment, also founded in the political thought that grew from Magna Carta. Bear with me here. The Constitution's guarantee of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, Article 1, Section 9, also a concept from the Magna Carta. It's all throughout this thing, but what we are doing here is we're not debunking the Magna Carta.

We're explaining that it was part of a process of selling the idea as legit, that these rebellious colonists needed to underscore what they were doing with something very real and documented that would appeal to the English heart. That was always interesting to me. How much of a sales job were these comments doing beyond the crown? I mean, how much did the English people figure into this in terms of pressuring their government? So interestingly, again, much in the way that Magnacart was essentially brought to the attention of the French as a result of this, this is what brings it back in the English mind as well, almost entirely forgotten about nobody really cares.

It's only sort of brought up if you need to talk about fishing rights and fishing weird. and management of forests. There's only sort of like four things that are still on the books from Magna Carta. And everyone was like, wait, what? So they do this great job of bringing it up to everyone's attention here. And people here like it.

There is sympathy, especially among common people, towards the American cause here. Because again, they're sort of like, yeah, that makes sense because also, well, I want some of that, right? It's not exactly the easiest world out here for the average subject in England either.

So it's kind of an interesting one, because basically the lords are all like, oh, no, when it gets out, you know, right? Well, that's the thing. England is from the 1600s onward, even before, going through their own process of a revolution, literally. But there's also a lot more philosophical thought being given to representative governance.

And all of that is very much brewing. Always a big question to me, how much of what happened in America came ironically from England. But that's for another conversation. Magna Carta keeps going. That's the thing. That's the thing about it. It's amazing. Here we are talking about it. So evidence right here. But in the present day, in the aftermath of September 11th, attacks, intelligence agencies gained greater powers to investigate terrorist activities. Sometimes at the expense of civil liberties, Magnacarta became an important reference point in that conversation. I mean, literally, you know, discussed as such. Also used as arguments by many thinkers, progressive thinkers like Nome Chomsky as an argument against using drone strikes and so forth. And you're crossing that barrier that was laid out in the Magna Carta. It is just like used as that go-to place for anyone who's making a very basic argument about individual rights. Exactly. And that's

what I find quite interesting about it, because at first glance, when the Founding Fathers pull this out to make arguments, it seems strange to us. But we're doing the same thing because it does the same thing, but when we want to use it, right? When we can say, yeah, I don't think that that's a great example of what governance should be. We can say, look, even in the 13th century, people didn't agree. And then that's like a dagger to everyone's hearts. And so there is that same sort of thing about what is natural. What can people reliably expect from a government? And if people were able to say this to a literal king in the 13th century, then what is it that is stopping anybody else from being able to call upon it now? I love this stuff because I love the

nuts and bolts of history. I love nuts and bolts of American history, especially because we seem by so many popular versions to be born out of nothingness. We are the great new idea. And there's a lot of new about America that matters, but it comes from sources elsewhere. And it's really cool to try to put together this jigsaw puzzle and find the little pieces. My great fantasy is this podcast goes for years and years. And therefore, you know, eventually by the third year, we're like, anyway, so when Thomas Jefferson got up that day, like really detailed stuff? Because that's really what interests me about how cooked up this idea was. I don't mean that in a bad way.

I mean, like, it was a real recipe of lots of ingredients. And all of these guys were these amazing chefs in a kitchen who were trying to figure this thing out as they go along. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks to Dawn for having me. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit. And if you want to know more about the context of Magna Carta, you can check out our episode at 235 all about it.

If you enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to rate and review it in your podcast app. It really helps bring new listeners into the show. And of course, you can always tell your friends about it. If you fancy suggesting an episode, you can always get a hold of us at Gone Medieval at HistoryHit.com. My co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on Friday with more medieval goodness. And as always, I'll see you again next Tuesday. Until next time.