In Our Time - The Magna Carta

Episode Date: May 7, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests Nicholas Vincent, David Carpenter and Michael Clanchy discuss the Magna Carta, the oft-proclaimed foundation of English liberties.The Magna Carta has been cited ever since its issue in 1215 as a foundation stone of English liberties. It includes clauses of universal justice, some of which are still on the statute book, but also sorted out the fishing rights in the upper Thames. Whether Magna Carta is a genuine proclamation of universal liberty or a hotchpotch of baronial self-interest has been debated ever since. Melvyn and his guests examine the ideas contained within it, assess their legacy and find out what really happened all those years ago in a tent in Runnymede.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, if you look at the English statute book, you'll find the following lines. No free man shall be seized or imprisoned or stripped of his rights or possessions

or outlawed or exiled or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force. against him or send others to do so except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. These words have been there for 794 years, their clause 39 of Magna Carta. Issued by King John in 1215, Magna Carta is seen as the foundation of English law and liberty. It includes clauses on universal justice, but it has 63 clauses, and one, for instance, on the fishing rights in the Upper Thames. Magna Carta is both a proclamation of law and and, as sometimes can seem to us, rather hotch-podge of baronial ambition.

With me to discuss Magna Carta, a David Carpenter, Professor of Medieval History at King's College London. Michael Clanchi, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the Institute of Historical Research, and Nicholas Vincent, Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia. Nicholas Vincent's, King John's a famous villain of English history in Magna Carta happened on his watch in 1215. Does he deserve the reputation he has?

Well, you see most villains in the past they're sort of found by modern historians to be good in parts and not good in others. John really was an absolute rotter through and through, the worst king in English history possibly. In the 14th century, 150 years or so after the events of 1215, the barons considered the possibility of promoting John of Gaunt,

the son of Ebert III as king. And one of the principal arguments against any such idea was the fact that he was called John. There could not be another King John. Matthew Paris, the chronicler of St. Albans, wrote, foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the foulness of John.

Yes, well, that's certainly a fairly damning judgment, isn't it? What did he do wrong? Yes, we'd quite like to know that. He, I suppose, he failed, in all the respects in which his father, had succeeded. He was the son of a very, very successful father, Henry the Second, who had built up this extraordinary plantagenet empire in France. Henry II had killed his Archbishop of Canterbury. Henry II had fathered endless illegitimate children, but had succeeded. John didn't do anything like crimes on those sorts of scales, and yet failed. He lost Normandy.

He killed his own nephew, Arthur of Brittany. He lusted after the wives of his courtiers, and those courtiers were able to object to that in such a way that eventually that led on to rebellion. He failed above all to reconquer the lands that his father had gained in France. He lost Normandy in 1204, and thereafter, despite accumulating huge sums of money, that money was wasted entirely on a campaign in 1214 that ended at a battle, the Battle of Bouvine, where King John's armies were decisively defeated. All of that, of course, contributing to this growing sense of unease against the king. We have to remember that he was a plantagenet, as you said, France, northern France was his real domain. I assume he was French-speaking. He was therefore sort of exile to England.

He was so uncomfortable here. He came here really to loot it to get money to go back and get what he thought he'd lost. What he had lost, sorry. Yeah, there's certainly a lot of truth in that. England had always been the milch cow of this empire. England that actually had the resources to pay for the maintenance of the King's armies in France. And the other thing, of course, to remember there is that kings since the Norman conquest had been resident on both sides of the channel. John is the first king in the past 50 years, who from Tuve 4 was permanently resident in England.

That meant that he was constantly on your doorstep. He was constantly calling around demanding money, eyeing up your daughter or your wife, in a way that previous Plantagenet kings had actually been healthily set aside in France. Now we're talking about a town in medieval history of great papal authority and some papal power. And again, in 1207 he fell out spectacularly with the church over Stephen Langton. Can you tell us who Stephen Langton is because he's important in the Magna Carta and why they fell out? Okay. Stephen Langton was Archbishop of Canterbury from 2012-7. He, for the previous 40 years, had been one of the leading expositors of biblical exegesis, the study of the Bible, in the schools of Paris.

And for 40 years, he had commented clause by clause on the meaning of scripture. Two consequences from that. First of all, a realization that God's laws were, to some extent, set out in the Bible. Particularly in these Old Testament books like Deuteronomy, where the laws of God to govern mankind were actually set out. And one theme in Magna Carta is this theme of binding the king to the law, the law of God. Secondly, in doing all of that, Lankton had been forced to reconcile passages in scripture that were seemingly irreconcilable, the distinctions, the differences within the various books of the Old Testament. And that, I think, is very important in imagining Lankton's position as a reconciler of the barons and the royal party in 1215.

someone who was accustomed to making peace. David Carpenter, we're going towards 1215 now, but we're looking for background here. A lot of talk of the barons and the uneasy relationship with the barons. You would have thought that they'd have been united behind him because they had lands in Northern France. You would have thought they wanted to say,

come on, John, we're back you all the way. We want our stuff back over there. But not a bit of it. They were a guinea, really. I've been very elliptical and vernacular in that. I do excuse. But please, can you develop that? Well, I think the Charter's essentially got two main themes, and one is money and the other is justice.

And clause after clause of the Charter is designed to restrict the money-getting operations of royal government. And I think the background there is that John had hugely increased his revenues. He tripled his revenues over the course of the reign. Now, that impacted on the realm as a whole, but it particularly impacted on some of the greatest barons, who found themselves having to pay their debts to the king. I mean, a good example is someone like Nicholas de Stuteville. who John demanded that he paid £10,000 to inherit his estates, where Magna Carta thought, sorry, £6,000 to inherit his estates,

when Magna Carta thought about £100 was reasonable. The other theme, I think, is justice. So we're talking about extortionate taxation of the powerful. It's hugely oppressive taxation, in which, you know, the revenue has increased two or three times. You can see that from the pipe rolls of John's reign, this gigantic financial pressure. I mean, the other side is justice,

and you were so right to read out at the start, You know, the most famous clause of the Charter 39, to no free man is to be outlawed and without lawful judgment of his peers, saved by the law of land. And also equally important was the one to no one, to no one will we sell, delay, right or justice. And, you know, John could absolutely be convicted of all of that. I mean, if you take Stuteville's case, I mean, Stutville couldn't pay the £6,000. And so John simply seized the Castle of Nersborough from him. And, you know, that was an act of arbitrary dispossession. Those are the sorts of feelings the Great Brown's had.

You know, financial pressure, denial of justice, arbitrary dispossession, all of that. And being interfered with because they had been, as Nicholas pointed out, they had been without a resident king for a very long time. So they were warlords, if we may use that in their own areas, and total rulers, I presume, in their own area. Sure. I mean, Nick was so right to say that. But you see, in a way, there's nothing new about grievances over money and over justice. So what's new?

And the difference is, is 1204. It's the loss of Normandy in 1204, which meant that John is now confined to England. Nick said he's on everyone's doorstep. And he's in the business of much governing England to raise gigantic sums of money to get Normandy back. I mean, I also think, though, Nicholas was completely right to talk about John's personality. I mean, John Gillingham once famously said, John was a shit. and he certainly was a shit of the first water I mean he was a murderer

he was a womanizer and he deeply sort of suspicious of everybody and I think one contemporary chronicler says about him that no one trusts anyone who distrusts all the world and John was like that and I think that the arbitrary treatment of individuals comes out of this flawed personality in 1215 the bands took drastic action

they took London the great fortified city of London, which was powerful in itself, extraordinary powerful, and powerful as a place. Can you tell us why they did that and how they did it? You would have thought that John would have defended it to the last, wouldn't you? Well, according to temporary accounts,

the barons actually took London through a ruse that a lot of the Londoners, perhaps with unaccustomed piety, were at mass, and so a faction of the city were allowed to, were able to let the barons in. I think, however, there was a lot of sympathy of the baronial cause in London. I mean, John had taxed London very heavily. In the last desperate measure earlier in May, 1215,

he'd allowed the Londoners to elect their own mayor, but that was too little too late. And as soon as the barons have got London, I mean, that absolutely transforms the military situation because it means John can't win the war. I mean, there's no way he could have got the barons out of London. But equally, the barons couldn't win either, because John had got, still got a large part of his army,

be intact, he got large numbers of castles. And so it was out of that stalemate, the barons, London, John, the castles that the charter emerges. Well, let's just leave that, as it is for a moment, to sort of leave it as a still frame. We've got the barons in London, and we've got John out of London with his castles and his power.

And Michael Clanchie, can I ask you, at that time, in the way that has been discussed so far, it would be easy for people to assume this is a time of anarchy, chaos and so on. But there were What was the status of the law? What was the status of justice?

I would say really very high, and that in many ways Magna Carta is not making innovations, but reinforcing legal norms, which already understood to exist, and that John's father, Henry II in particular, had reinforced the power of royal law across the whole country. And you can say, I've just been said here,

that the barons were warlords in their areas, but it is also true that they had to accept, before John came to the throne, that they had had to accept that the king's law and the settlement of disputes by and large had to be through legal process and not through war. it was becoming an exception that they should go to war with each other.

Can you give us some idea of the courts the way this was informed? Who, sorry, who, not informally forced, who enforced these laws were in place? And they'd been, we'd had laws in Anglo-Saxon, England. We had a very good set of extraordinarily well-written out, we know about it.

But we're talking about the 13th century, beginning of the 13th century, who's enforcing these laws and how? Certainly it had been much, it never been probably so strong, enforced before, particularly under Henry V. Second, that's from 50 years earlier, or even before that, the King sent out judges who were called justices, that is their actual name, because they embody justice, groups of judges to go from county to county to hear, please,

and resolve disputes in accordance with the fixed rules which had been laid down in writing of the royal law. Was there any sense of equality before the law? Was there any sense of justice as we have come to, wanted to be, to expect, to aspire to? Yes, the standard law book of the time, Glendville's book says in its prologue that no poor man will be rejected from the king's court.

It wasn't necessarily true in practice, but that is the ideal which they aimed at. And also it's very interesting, in English royal law, it doesn't regard ranks of the aristocracy, but every person before a king's law has to be a free man, but whether he is a great baron or a small, relatively small peasant, supposedly makes, they'll be treated equally. We just talked about men, obviously, but who is a free man,

and how do you get to be a free man? Yes, and that is what, and how many of them? And how many what percentage? portion of the population are freemen. Those are problematic questions. By the end of the 13th century, Chris Dyer now estimates, he says that the majority of males were free men, he reckons, by then. That can't be so, I think, in 1,200.

So it would be a considerable change. So what we're talking about? 1 in 3 in 1,200? Or I thought one in ten. And a freeman, just a second, I'm going to define. A free man is what do you have to do? Is it property? Yes.

You've got to be of that standing. Yeah. Just a second. Can you just, sorry? You've got to be of that free standing, and that means that you do not, you test whether you are a freeman, that you do not do servile work for your lord,

servile work such as bringing in the harvest annually or doing other menial, jobs, if you did such mean your jobs that demonstrated that you were not a free man. So the free men have equality in front of the law. Yes. And that's... Before the Kings thought, yes. That's one

man in ten, we think. I'd say. No women or two. So in that sense it's a restricted sort of justice really. You wanted to come in David? Oh well I think one in ten's wrong. I mean, I think it was much more like half the population would have been free. Of course the Charter says to no one will we deny right or justice

So that would include the unfree too I just want to say slightly the background In some ways of the Charter is that on the one hand The King is dispensing justice to everybody And through new legal procedures And if on the other hand he's denying it to the barons And so in a way what's happening in 1215 Is the Great Barons are demanding that the King

Abbey his own rules And you know the King has taught everybody that he must accept these legal procedures the Baron's saying we want it too So we've had a freeze frame Now let's go back to what's going on They're at Roney Mead Or they decide to meet at Roneymead

Because it's halfway between London And where the King's forces are And so they meet at Roney Mead on the Thames A wonderful plane It's had to turn that little hill there And so on John has plenty of castles And armies But there's a stalemate

Can you set the scene for us Nick, Nick Vincent Well I suppose at Roney Mead itself this follows the Caesar of London. It's the Caesar of London that forced the king to actually come to terms with the barons. And Roneymead, remember, is one of those wonderful liminal places. It's an island on a river.

And those were traditionally the places of peacemaking. And the document that we have, Magna Carta, although everybody thinks of it as a constitutional foundation stone, what it really is is a peace treaty between the king and the barons. And to that extent, it resembles

quite a lot of other negotiated documents between kings and the realm that had been undertaken before. Most obviously the coronation charge of Henry I. But we're talking here about a very, very powerful barrenual opposition. We're talking about King John on the back foot after the disasters of 1214, where his armies had been decisively defeated, where he had squandered the vast resources that he acquired over the previous 10 years, and where he, I suppose, above all, had shown that,

God was no longer on his side. Kings in the Middle Ages who lost battles weren't merely losers in war. They also demonstrated that they had lost the favour of God. And one of John's reactions to that, of course, was in March 12, 15, shortly before the Caesar of London,

he'd taken the cross. And he'd done that in order both to show that he was going to go on and, as it were, win back Jerusalem, but also to gain the protections that the church afforded to crusaders. And he brought back Langton. And, well, he'd already brought back Langton in 1213.

There'd been a settlement and there'd been a lifting of all the penalties that the church had imposed. But after Bovine, in 1214, he'd also granted liberties to the church, above all rights of free election. David Carpenter, can you give us briskly some idea of the numbers involved and then tell us about the key players? I brought Langton back in because of that. He was one of the key players. So how many people turn up of that? The king brings an army, half an army? What do the barons bring?

What are we talking about? Well, there are about 200 major barons in England at this time, and probably two-thirds of them were in rebellion. I wouldn't be too surprised if most of them were indeed camped at Rannimede. They would all have brought their own knightly retinues, 10, 20, 30, 40 people. So I think we can think of those still very evocative meadows at Rannimed by the Thames with lots of tents, about several thousand people there in rebellion.

John might well have had a force of equal size, a lot of it of mercenary captains. I think that's the sort of scene. From where? Which countries? Well, I mean, many of them came from Normandy, from further south, the Anjou, terrain, that sort of area. That was one reason why John was so powerful, because he did have this mercenary army, but also so unpopular. So can you just say the key players? We have John. We've talked about the Barons, and we've just mentioned Lankton. Who was doing the dealing here? Well, Lankton, I think, is playing a very important part, probably as a broker between the two sides.

But in the major baronial rebels, are people. like Eustace de Vesky, Nicholas de Stuteville, who I've mentioned, William de Mowbray, a lot of great barons from the north in particular, because John's rule had seemed to bear particularly heavily on the north. Rule often does. Yeah. True. Robert Fitzwalter. Robert Fitzwater, obviously.

Who was calling himself Marshal of the Army of God at this stage, which is an indication, too, that they thought God was on their third. Yes, they tried to. So can you give listeners some idea that they're there for a little while? Can I bring you in, Michael Clunchy, but can you do between the three? but just tell us that they've turned up those armies, there's a lot of tents, is that they're meeting every day and hammering this out, the scribes probably, well, obviously,

copying it down, copying it down in Latin, first of all, perhaps in French as well, certainly not in English. So can you just flesh that out a bit, please? Michael. Michael. So we don't have detail of what happened day to day, but what you said surely seems right, there must have been meetings over a number of days, and that King John and his people

very important are the royal officials, the King's judges, for example, because so much of Magna Carta concerns legal procedures, and its clauses are extremely carefully drafted. It's hard to find a redundant word in any clause in Magna Carta. So there are all these experts. Each side has got experts as well as strong men, negotiating and then as well as churchmen.

So one has to imagine that this went on day by day. And that's right, they're making some that they're putting in writing. They're speaking in French. I would, yeah. Actually, some of them probably are churchmen. There's no doubt that they spoke Latin among each other. Though if they knew each other, they would be speaking French if that's as like as not. I'm not, I think some of them might have been speaking English by then, too.

Yeah. As I can you say, there's that wonderful schedule of versions of various earlier settlements in the British Library that's both in Latin and in French, probably from Langton's own sort of private archive. And we also have those predecessor documents like the Articles of the Barons, like the so-called unknown charter, which are earlier drafts. It looks as if this negotiation had been going on since the winter at 12th. The barons is 10th of June, of course, and Magna Carta's the 15th. Can you just, I'm sorry to push this, but it's absolutely fascinating.

Is Lankton saying, you can't do this, you've got to do that? Do they go back and check with judges or justices? Well, there's a big debate about Lankton's role. I mean, one is that he is simply a broker between the two sides. He gets a very good deal for the church. Yeah, he does. Of course, he inserted that clause for the church. but there's a wider idea that

that the Charter is not just a selfish, baronial document, but reaches out to a much wider constituency is because Langton told the Barons that you can't just look after yourselves. I think that's actually quite wrong and I think that the Charter reaches out

reflected the balance of power in English society in which barons don't rule in law the isolation and have to consider other interests. You disagree? No, no, no. I think how Langton is equivalent of a university professor. Yes, yes.

Acustomed to holding meetings of all sorts, and accustomed to formalising disputes and finding resolution. A professor at the University of Paris, which was why John disliked him so much. Yes, but someone who can, as it were, chair negotiations, if we can think of that. Very experience. Can we come to the charge of self, Nick Vincent,

some of the actual clauses, There are 63, sometimes called chapters, sometimes called clauses. It's about 3,000 words long. It's a mixture of the local and the universal. The local now seems to us sometimes merely charming. The universal still resonates massively all around, and in much of the world and seems to resonate even more strongly, oddly enough as time goes on.

Right. Can you take a line on the content, please, Nick Vincent. Well, it is a hotch-potch, as you said in your introduction. It's a hotch-potch of particular. needs in 1215 and wider principles. Particular needs like Clause 33, we will remove all the fishwears from the Thames and the Medway. Well, that's for the interests of London.

It's also, incidentally, for the interests of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lankton himself, who has a bigger estate at Maidstone on the Medway. But it's to preserve those navigations for the Port of London. Other clauses, like the clauses on the sale of justice, on the rights of the free man, which have a universal application. Interestingly, too, a lot of these clauses had themselves

been the subject of debate. Wider principles like the rights of a guardian during a wardship. Those had precisely been debated in the schools of Paris before ever the barons came to run amade. And things that were used later, the clauses about widows, for instance.

The rights of widows and to their dire, the rights of minors to have their estates, properly protected during their minority so that a child whose parents die when he is young should inherit the full estate when he comes of age. All of those, of course, do have resonance in nature English law. But as I think perhaps people are not necessarily aware, very little of the Charter is still on the statutory book today. It's only that those clauses relating to the church, the freedom of the church, the very broad freedom to trial by jury or trial by one's peers. the clauses relating to the city of London, they're the

only things that remain. But the resonance is extraordinarily important on the iconic and mythic value. Indeed. It is something which has to be taken into account because it is there. It is absolutely totem. Michael Clanchie, what did this document say that hadn't been written down in this form before?

The writing before, principally was the royal legal system depended on your obtaining rits to proceed in any way, you have to obtain a letter from a king instructing a sheriff in a county to get together a jury, for example, to make a decision about whether you were the nearest heir, the next heir to an estate, for example. That's a kind of standard piece of writing. And that then

initiates an action in the king's court, which will be recorded on the justices roles which still exist their plea roles and so the legal system consisted of this primarily were things in writing

but not there was no sort of overall well Magna Carta gives much more of an overall view than you would have had before I mean just to develop that I think the Charter is entirely new it pretended

it was reasserting ancient law. But I mean, they're absolutely no equivalent to these huge detail in which royal government is now regulated, save perhaps the coronation charter of Henry I, in 1100, in which there are parallel. But apart from that, this great mass of regulation, nothing like it at all. It's entirely new. And it's this business of binding the king to a law,

the idea that the king must have a Deuteronomy, he must have a law that he himself observes. That's why it's granted not to someone who can, as it were, take it away, it's granted to God. The opening words of the actual dispositive clauses are we grant to God that the Church of England shall be free in order that nobody then can step in and say,

well, actually I have the authority to rescind this. How are they going to implement this? Well, that's a jolly good question because they had thought about that because they thought, you know, John is so tricky and so untrustworthy, we've got to think of enforcement and the way it was done was that 25 barons were to be set up

who were empowered to enforce the Charter so if you thought the Charter was being broken you could go to them and they were empowered to actually seize the King's property to make him abide. The only problem was that the names of the 25 were not in the Charter and I think that was because John was so clever

right at the end he issued the Charter on the 15th of June over the heads of the Baroneal negotiators and said take it or leave it and the Barons hadn't had time to choose the 25 so nobody knew who they were but that was how it was supposed to be enforced through 25 barons in power to force the king to abide by it.

To jump forward a bit, that was dropped. Yeah, it's impossible. Absolutely impossible. Remember that the king is under the law of the church. The Pope actually will step in at that stage, as he, as indeed did, and forbid any sort of constraint like that placed on a sovereign. No Pope, no sovereign in the Middle Ages,

could accept that sort of control from within their own power base. It was inconceivable. And that's dropped from all subsequent reissues of the Charter. And what happens is this is made, written out, sent to all the cathedrals, sent to shires, and John Reneges on it immediately. And gets the support of Pope Innocent III in doing so

for what Nick has just said, Pope Vincent III's statement says that this is contrary to all understanding of law. You can't do this. Fortunately, he died in 1216. I mean, the survival of the Charter is quite extraordinary because, you know, John Reneges on it, the Pope has quashed it, so what do the barons do?

They offer the throne to the eldest son of the King of France, Louis. And when John dies in that great gale round Newark Castle in October 1216, half of England is controlled by Louis, it looks as though John's nine-year-old son, Henry III, is going to just be swept away. And that's what ensured the survival of the charter because the minority government of John's son thought, you know, desperate situation,

we must pull support away from the opposition by actually reissuing the charter. Isn't that wonderful, that John had actually reneged on the charter, he'd hated it, he hated everything about it. It was obviously going to double cross them as soon as he could. But the only way his son survived was by calling on the charter. Exactly. Exactly. Remember, David, that these clauses actually relating to wards

to minors are directly applicable, course in the case of Henry III, too, to the wasting of a miner's resource. Yeah, yeah. And so they were successful in that manoeuvre. Yes, and of the people would negatinate. The French person, but it controlled half of France.

So we had a foreign king. I mean, the consequence is if Louis had won, England and France would have come under the same ruler. So goodness knows what the future structure of Europe would have been. But yes, to win the war and then secure the peace, the charter is reissued. And then the final definitive reissue is the 1225 one in return for a great tax. So, you know, throughout the rest of the Middle Ages and today, what's still on the

statute book, a clause is from the 1225 charter of Henry III, not John's Charter of 1215. So that carries forward. And it is, the Charter we are really dealing with from then on is brought together again in 1225. And the only fundamental difference is, the only fundamental difference there is that they've taken away 24 barons shall control the king in this. Otherwise it's as hammered out as running me. Pretty well, yes. And

also important is the Charter of the Forest, which we haven't mentioned. That is that the part of England up to a quarter of England was designated as Forest had slightly even more arbitrary laws than the

normal royal law. And so there are also rules made about that as well. So let's talk about the legacy in the short term. There we are, 12, 25. It's played an important part in getting Henry. But we know how they're in nag on things. So they've used it to get him to get this boy, and they've got control of the boy, those barrens.

They've got him on the throne. Away we go there. But did it have its great, great life, which we look back on and think, did it start then, or did it go into desuetude for a few years? decades or so. We didn't go into dissuery to at all. It was on everybody's lips from the 1220s

onwards, from 1225 onwards. People were copying it, it was being read out in the county court. It was absolutely central to English politics throughout the rest of the 13th century. The question whether it made a difference is more debatable because everyone constantly said the king is breaking the charter. Of course, if you break it,

if he breaks it, nothing you can do. I think it did make a profound difference though. I think it did limit the king's revenues. It meant justice wasn't sold as it had been before and above all it just asserts the fundamental principle the king is subject to the law and cannot act in a tyrannical way and that

makes tyranny more difficult did it play in politics when was it called on we I know when to get to the Civil War yet because that's very important and we'll get that a minute but in the 1340 century was it brought in to the argument to the high political arguments

of the time? From time to time yes in 1237 for example but I think actually more important is that one way of showing how important it is, is that there are these little books but still exist of the earliest statutes, which landowners, large and small, seem to have had by 1250,

and they begin with Magna Carta. So it shows how copies of this had circulated all around, and everyone knew this was the basis of law. It's used now as a great sort of lever, touchstone. Was that, around in a 13th century. Yes, very much. When the counties want, as it were, their liberties,

when the men of Devon are at odds with the king, it's the reissue of Magna Carta, the reissue of the Forest Charter that goes with it. At every moment of constitutional crisis in the 13th century, the Charter is reissued. And as Michael says, it then becomes law number one in the statute books. Can we just then switch to the 17th century?

We have the Civil War when, well, before that we have Cook, the great lawyer and MP Jewish, who makes Magna Carta, almost he reintroduces it as the centre and bedrock of English law and he builds on that and in the Civil War this is taken up

and people, wonderful descriptions I was dragged off, they tried to wrench Magna Carta out of my hands but I fell on it and they dragged me through the mud still clutching my copy of Magna. It becomes tremendously important in that tremendous argument which ends in Regislight, an extraordinary event

in our history. Right. How do did he get to that proportion at that time? There's an irony in all of that, of course, which is partly to do with the dissolution of the monasteries and the closure of the church in the 16th century. The actual texts of the charter begin to circulate. So these antiquaries like Robert Cotton in the early 17th century actually have access to original copies of McNacarta. Remembering here, of course, that the thing that was in the statute book is the 1225 Charter, not the 1215 Charter. 1215 in Charter is a great deal more radical than the document of 2012-25. But those antiquaries are directly in touch with the sort of people within Parliament

who are opposing James and then Charles I, the Stuarts in general. And many of the Stewart's problems, lack of money, arbitrary taxation, lack of success in foreign war, all of those are directly linkable to the reign of John himself. So in a sense, history comes full circle. They feel that the time has come to revive this. How important, Michael Clanchier, was Cook's revision, revisiting and putting the Magna Carta so prominently into English law? So Cook and these people, they have to justify what they're doing

and they have to say their opposition to the king is lawful and therefore Magna Carta has built up this mythic quality as being a fundamental, unchangeable. law of England, which is in writing you can see it, we can show it to you, this is what you have to abide by. And it's very interesting that in Shakespeare's King John, there's no mention of Magna Carta.

That's from Elizabeth's reign, but now... I mean, what's fascinating about Cook is that it's the way in that his commentary on Magna Carta was actually published by order of the long Parliament. And it is fascinating to say, see the way in which they sort of manipulated the charter to deal with current grievances,

almost as though one might manipulate it today to prevent the reduction of funding to arts programmes. I mean, it got into that sort of area. So that ship money is against Magna Carta. Because of Magna Carta, the king must accept any bills passed by Parliament. I mean, Magna Carta was brilliantly manipulated by Cote, Cooke, Pry and all these people in order to make it relevant. And it began, sorry, I was just going to see also, then of course,

that leads on to later preterts as well, things like the Chartists, the whole idea of the Charter. In the 1840s. In the 19th century, all of that too, you can trace straight back to this idea of a Charter of Liberties. And that popular sense that somewhere somebody has

a document that is actually the guarantee of your rights. If you go to the National Archives in Washington today, people actually queue up and in all, they can't read the document, but Well, neither can we. To prefer Mr.

Anyway, you three can. But they see here this totemic symbol of their liberties. Because that's, oh, I was going to come to that, thank you very much. Because what happened in 1630s and 40s is the Pilgrim fathers and others

went to America. These were very independent-minded, very strong-minded, well-educated people. And one of the things they took with them was Magna Carta, which resonated right through American history. And you could say it went up to the United Nations,

the Universal Declaration of human rights, and Eleanor Roosevelt called a Magna Carta for all humanity. And it was very important. And it began the exporting of Magnicata. And then, of course, as the British Empire,

it went to Australia. Well, the Chief Justice Brennan talked about it. It's incarnation of the spirit of liberty. And he went to India, where Rao, when he came to Prime Minister Rao, when he came to Ronnie Me, he praised Magnacati. It went to New Zealand.

He went to Canada. And so on. And it began, and it was one of the big things that the British people carried, especially the English people, carried around the world. Is that right? And that they... It's partly coincidence, isn't it?

The people who went to America or exiled, usually in opposition to the royal government in England, and that's why they went. And that in the foundation documents of the 13 first states of America, the state of Massachusetts, 1640 or something, You're the professor. I never interested in date. Specifically

cites Magna Carta and then it gets referred to again in Maryland and so on. Do you think that the perception so it did, it went right. We're coming to an end now unfortunately but do you think the perception of Magna Carta now, David Carpter,

is a huge distance away from what he was in 1215, 12, 15, 12, 15, what it actually was. was because the perception is enormous. People reach, you saw headlines in various newspapers when the 42 days thing came out, Magnicata.

You see, Poltac's Magnicarta. You see, and we use it. We use it. We're very proud of it, and we use it all over the place, for freedoms and so on. How far is that consonant with what happened at Runnymede? Well, I think it's absolutely consonant. I mean, I think people at the time

were very aware that they were asserting fundamental principles that ruler is subject to the law, that he can't individuals in an arbitrary fashion. The detail may no longer be relevant and was quickly not relevant. But those fundamental principles were there at the time

and that they've endured and resonate down the ages. You could say what it doesn't have, it doesn't have habeas corpus, it doesn't have necessarily trial by jury, it doesn't have Parliament, it doesn't have all of those things stated

but the basic ideas there you could say are present. that basic idea that any ruling authority must be subject to law. Still a very vex question today. And any citizen can only be punished by due process of law. Indeed. By due process of law. A ruler has subject to law and the citizen has the protection of the law. Absolutely.

And these two things are in law. Indeed. That the law is our protection against government. And so it is so important in the Constitution of the United States and that Magna Carta, I think probably is more studied in the United States in law schools of the United States than it would be in England now, at a guess, by lawyers, taken more seriously by United States American lawyers than by English lawyers. It's a rather anarchicot to think what those barons would have made of what's happened to in,

those de wotsitz and de wotsits and what they would have thought that, what have they let us in? They would say, what did we let them all in for? No, I think they would have. been very proud of it. And I think Lankton in particular would have perhaps foreseen that sort of future. I think some of the great barons would have foreseen it too. Nobody reads Lankton's commentaries on the Bible today. Nobody says three or four scholars, but everybody in a sense has heard of Magna Carta. That's quite an achievement.

Well, a lot of people have heard about it this morning. Thanks very much to you three. And that's to Nick Vincent, to Michael Clanchi and to David Carpenter. And next week we'll be talking about the siege of Vienna in 1683. and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.