Stuff You Should Know - How the Magna Carta Worked

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

In 1215 at Runnymede (doo dah, doo dah) the nobles and the king agreed to end a rebellion against the power of the English throne. While the treaty that emerged contained all sorts of arcane Medieval details, it also contained the seeds of Western liberty and civil rights. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the PergCast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there somewhere and this is Stuff You Should Know.

The PergCast? Did I say that? I think so. You sounded like Kristen Wiig's target lady character. I'm not familiar. Welcome to the PergCast. Oh, no wait, that's a different character. What character was that? I don't know. I think that was Mike Myers Scottish guy. No, not that jerk. I don't know who then. Oh, I'm blanking. People are screaming at their radio. I get it. Oh, is that well known of a character? They're AMFM radio. How is this coming through? It's like when a 50-year-old podcasts. It's true a 50-year-old is podcasting before a very years right now. That's right. That's me. You can't de-age me, Martin Scorsese. Running circles around the younger ones,

Chuck. So hats off to you. So Chuck, have you ever seen The Simpsons? Oh boy, you got one for me? Did you ever see the one about the murder house where Marge becomes a real tour? You mean a certified real tour? Yes, of course. What are the kinds of... I don't know. Remind me. Oh, so anyway, Marge becomes a real tour. I think with Lionel Hutz's Realty Company. Oh boy. And it's like a kind of like a Glenn Gary Glenn Ross spoof is like that little subplot. But she tries to sell a house that like a multiple murder was committed in to Flanders and his family back when Maude was still alive. And she doesn't tell him it's a murder house and feels like a tremendous amount of guilt.

And then finally like confesses and I don't think they end up buying the house anyway. I don't remember, but it's a pretty good one. That has almost nothing to do with anything. I could have just stopped right there where Marge became a real tour because she's taking the realty test. And Lisa comes along and teaches her how to remember things using mnemonic devices. And in one example she gives, she says, you can put like something you're trying to remember to a song like in 1215 at Runny Me, Doodah, Doodah, the nobles and the king agreed, Oh, doodah day. That's great. That is one of my go to references for the Magna Carta. You know what? Mine is funny enough. Man, that was a tortured intro.

No, I thought it was great. Hmm. Simpsons reference that's flayed alive is what it was. I thought it was fantastic. Well, thank you. And I've never heard that. I don't remember that episode and I've never heard that little jingle. So it's a great vintage classic Simpsons. When I think of Magna Carta, I think of Johnny Dangerously, the movie with Michael Keaton, the very funny spoof movie, because at one point, I think the someone is on death row and they're being read fake last rites by a fake priest as they walk down the Green Mile. And they're just sort of making up Latin terms. And he goes, Magna Carta, Master Charger. And I saw that in the theater when I was whatever, like 10 or 11.

And I've remembered that ever since. Yeah. It gets in your head. Those two words, they go really well together. They have a tendency to stick around. And then also, you get the idea when you kind of like perk your little ears up about this Magna Carta thing, that it was kind of pretty important. People tend to put a lot of stock into it. Yeah. And jeez, I know I'm looking and I can't even see what Magna Carta, what does it mean? A great charter. The great charter, of course. Yeah. And technically, the name the Magna Carta, what we're talking about, we'll get into all the little details and everything in a second, but it's called the Magna Carta Libertarium. Right.

So it's the great charter of liberties is what it really is. And a lot of people, like I was saying, they put a lot of stock into it. They basically say that this is the wellspring, at least in the UK and America, and by extension, Australia and Canada, of human rights, of civil rights, of the basic rights that every citizen has, that all kind of came from this document, and that before that, there really wasn't that kind of stuff. And you have to really narrow your focus here, because in this time period, we're talking about around the 12th and 13th century CE. England was still kind of figuring out which way it was going. At the same time, if you went to the Arab world, you would find half a million people living in some cities.

Well, there was like 10,000 people living in London. If you went to the west to modern-day St. Louis, the Cahokia Mound civilization, had like 15,000 people living there. China had been running a bureaucracy for a good 1,000 years by this time. So this is new to England and the English and their descendants and ancestors around this time, this era. But if you narrow it like that, then yeah, you can make a pretty good case that for you and me, and those of us born in America, you can trace your civil liberties pretty directly back to this document. Yeah. And even if the document itself, as we'll learn, wasn't necessarily honored initially or even later, it was that seed that was planted that it had to be at least, and we'll see later

on. Once it was in place, you kind of couldn't go backwards from there, even though some people did try later on, some royalty. It just didn't happen. So it sort of drew a line in the sand and said, all right, from this point forward, at least, things for people, any people other than not every person, but people other than royalty at least won't go backwards from here. No. And like you said, they tried. They definitely wanted to. But when you lay down something like people have rights that are basic to them from the moment they're born, that's a tough one to repeal. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Once that's out there, that's tough to put it back in the box. And good, that's good for us. Bad for despotic absolutist monarchs, though.

So should we get into a little background here? Yeah, I think we should, because we got some ground to cover. Yeah. So the Grabster helped us with this. And I love it. You can tell when our writers are really into something by sort of how much background they give us on stuff before they get to the stuff. Yeah. I think that was into it. I think he was wearing chain mail while he was writing. He may have been, but Ed did a great job with the setup. And we we have to point out that this was a time, like you said, where there was a king that ruled the land and everyone had to do what the king said, basically. And then you had, you know, you had people that ruled over smaller fiefdoms throughout the land, but they still answered to the king,

but they had their subjects as well. But it was it was a bit of a mess. Like, even though the king could kind of do what they wanted, the king usually knew like, hey, I can't push things too far. Otherwise, it gets really bad for me. Right. So let me see if I can walk right up to that line as often as I can in many cases, as far as royalty is concerned, and sort of push things as far as like, you know, ringing money out of people for bribes or quote unquote taxes or, you know, trying just ruling with a harsh hand, but not necessarily a hand that will be so bad that the people revolt. Yeah, that was a fine line. And so some kings in the history of England were we're really good at being kings. I get the impression that the more lands you conquered

in the name of England, the more people you brought under your rule, the happier you could keep the like the the barons, the people who own the land that that, you know, kind of all collectively made up your kingdom, the better off you were. But yeah, you still were going to need money to run things. So you're going to have to extract that stuff. So you had to just push it just as far as you could. That was a good king. There were also plenty of bad kings who would go way past the line. And they were, they could be allowed to do that because in England, kings were divinely decreed by God. Their authority was derived directly from God. So whatever they did, no matter how unhappy that made you, God said it. So this king is allowed to do it in practice that didn't

actually like work out all the time. Like it's not like the barons were like, what are you going to do? God said. But there was still kind of that air, that aura around it. And at the very least, even if you didn't buy into that directly, that was the custom and had been for a really long time. And that's hard to buck. So you had good kings who still went up the line. You had bad kings who crossed the line. And when you put it all together, more often than not, that line was being really kind of made to feel claustrophobic. And so the barons would be unhappy. And they were the ones with the power. So if you push the barons too far, they would push back. And then you would end up with things like written laws and customs and decrees that said, the king won't do this

anymore. Right. And there's also a third group in there of kings that just weren't very good at their job. Yeah. Like, I think history often like they often overlook sheer incompetence in favor of, you know, like this person did all these great things or this person was an evil tyrant. And like some of them just weren't too good at it. Yeah. The like the day to day. The Franklin pierces of the English. Oh, king lineage. So we'll skip up to Henry the first in 1100 created the Charter of Liberties. And this was sort of if the Magna Carta was the seed of liberty for people like you and me later, the Charter of Liberties may have been the pre seed to that seed. Yeah. In a way, because it was the first kind of official thing that limited the king's power just

a bit. And in this case, there were other things, but it did limit the king's power to appoint church offices, guaranteed that any like inheritances would be carried forth. And there were no bribes necessary. So just sort of like cleaned up the act of the royals in the sort of smallest of ways. Yeah. Because before it was like you could, if you were the king, you could be like, yeah, I don't care. Give me some money if you want to be legally married or give me some money if you want to be promoted in your church ranking. Like you could just extract money for anything. And so this is the first time where it was kind of like, okay, we'll go, we won't do that. We won't keep pushing things like you were saying. Like it just kind of cleaned up the monarchy and limited

their ability. And it was kind of a big thing. And again, that came out of a bad king. That was Henry I who had to clean up the mess left by his successor or his predecessor, William II, his brother, who'd been a bad king, had overtaxed, overstepped the boundaries. And now there had to be some sort of document created to say, we won't do that again. This is where laws came from in England, like people overstepping bounds and being pushed back on. Right. Or the king just arbitrarily deciding things. Yeah. So Henry I dies, succeeded by Stephen I. And this one was a little dicey because Stephen I ascension to the throne was contested and resulted in a civil war called the Anarchy. And the Anarchy was a mess. It was a pretty brutal, lawless time. And Stephen,

I think, he wasn't around too long, but he was quickly followed by Henry II, who ruled for about 35 years. Yeah. I think right at 35 years. And this was at the end of the Anarchy. But Henry II comes in and basically says, all right, the Royals are back, baby. And there are going to be a bunch of reforms here. We're going to centralize our power. Things have gotten out of hand with this Anarchy. And it's all under my control now. And in a way, this was, it was good and bad. It's never great when someone assumes this absolute authority. Right. But it's also better just to have a more structured codified system than all these weird arbitrary laws that were kind of all over the place and scattered about before. Exactly. Yeah. So and one of the reasons why

Henry II did that is because he was very much into adventurism. He would, he would go out of England and try to conquer more lands. And that was his big thing. Parasailing. That was his thing. Yeah. So he needed, he needed some, basically some, some structure that he could set in place that didn't require him to be there all the time to oversee it. And some of that, like actually kind of benefited people in part because like you said, it was, it wasn't arbitrary anymore. And there were like some real reforms. Like he set up a panel of judges that would go around and basically carry out criminal trials rather than just people getting away with crimes or maybe being subject to mob justice. They were trying to apply some sort of actual justice to it.

You could now, if you were a serf or a peasant, you could complain to the king and go over the Lord of the manner that you worked on's head if he was mistreating you. Like that was brand new. And so there was like some good things that were set in place by Henry II. He wasn't like some benevolent guy or anything like that, but he, he did leave that legacy. And it was a, it was a big deal. A lot of people point to his code as the beginning of English common law. Yeah, he was, he was not a great guy. He was in fact a pretty brutal person on the battlefield. And he would, a brutal leader, he would, and he, and he did a good job leading on the battlefield and he loved going to war, but he would cut the feet off or the genitals from his enemies.

He would lock people in the dungeons. He was known supposedly for gouging out the eyes of a young messenger boy one time who delivered bad news. So he wasn't some great guy. And he was also like, he had to finance all of these travails in wars all over the place. And that cost a lot of money. So a lot of what he did when he, when he brought all this under his order was made a lot of money and raised a lot of revenue and was kind of just squeezing every last bit he could out of these landowners. Again, with those kind of fees, like you were talking about like, hey, if you're a widow and you want to remarry, pay me. If you want to inherit some land or a title, pay me. Maybe you can even bribe me. I'm, you know, I'm open to that.

Right. Which is arbitrary in and of itself because the person doesn't necessarily deserve whatever it is they're bribing the king for in exchange for. And that's, you know, that's not good. It's also in direct violation of the Charter of Liberties that Henry I had laid out. And now that there was that, now that that had been established by Henry I, the nobility could point to that and be like, you're not honoring this stuff. Like this is something we can hold your feet to the flames over. It didn't necessarily work with Henry II because he was such a strong king, but it was something that they could point to and they could say like, this is wrong and here's why. Yeah. And, you know, there's something I meant to point out at the beginning that I'll

bring up here that's really kind of integral to how all of this worked back then is it was sort of a three-way dance between nobility, these really wealthy influential barons, and then the church. And like those are the three big pieces of the puzzle that like everyone kind of had to be happy among that group to a certain degree, or there were big problems. And it was always sort of that dance with the royalty to sort of make sure that like they were extracting money from the barons, but they didn't want to make them too unhappy because I said they would revolt. But you also had to satisfy the church, which technically was a separate entity, which we'll get to in a minute, but the push and pull among these three groups was really a pretty key thing to how everything

operated back then. Yeah. And that was an excellent point because the church was like a state unto itself, right? It could make its own money. And this was at a time when the prevailing economic theory was that there was like a finite amount of money in the world. So when you were extracting money from like the barons, whether you were the church or whether you were the king, that really hurt. Hurt more than it does paying taxes today because there's this idea that that was it. There's like a zero sum game. Everybody was taking and exchanging from the same pot. So yeah, if you could kind of balance all those three together, you had a pretty stable monarchy. But more often than not, it was like we were saying people kind of push things over the edge. Henry II

definitely did that with the bribery, but again, he was a strong monarch. And then he was succeeded by a couple of people that are kind of studies in contrast as far as kings of England go, don't you think? Yeah, maybe let's take a break. That's a great cliffhanger. Okay. Who could these two people be? Laurel and Hardy? CC DeVille. Could it be the Hardy Boys? Which like with Parker Stevenson and what's his other name? I bet you that's who it is. The other guy. Poor other guy. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show

about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. Parker Stevenson and Fred Noonan. We're the two hearty boys. No, you're talking about Richard and then John. We'll start with Richard. Henry the second died in his son. Richard the lionhearted inherited the throne and he was beloved. And he did a lot of crusades as well and had a lot of great military successes and had to spend a lot of money to do

so, of course. But he died unexpectedly. And then Henry the second, his dad was Henry the second. His son John took over the throne. And remember when I mentioned earlier that some people just were not good at their job? Yes. This was John. He was just not good at being a politician, not good at being a king, not good at getting along with the barons in the church. He was just not cut out for it. Yeah. And he's the main bad guy. I think I wondered if Richard the third was the main bad guy or the king in the Robin Hood legend is King John. Oh, is it really? Yeah. Because I remember Richard the lionheart is like off fighting the crusades and King John's running the show in a mean and incompetent way. That's who Robin Hood's fighting and the Sheriff of Nottingham.

But in real life, John was just, he was not meant to be a king. He was Richard's brother. He was the younger brother. And Henry the second, their father, for one, he didn't even name John after a king and he didn't give him any land. So there was no area for him to rule. He was sent off to like study with scholars. That's what he was supposed to be. So he was never bred to be a king and he wasn't a very good one regardless because of that or just naturally. But his first nickname among the nobility was John Lackland because he didn't have any land. Yeah. Because he lacked land. It must have really burned him, you know? That's pretty funny. But he was terrible. But more to the point, like not only was he like bad with money and like he was a despot in a lot

of ways too, he lost land. Remember I said the kings that were most beloved were the ones that like added to the kingdom. Sure. The ones that were the most despised were the ones who lost land from the kingdom. And that was what John did almost out of the gate. Yeah. He was losing land to King Philip II of France. And Ed points out, and it's important to know here that England and France back then were, it's not like it is today. They were very intertwined. England held a lot of land in the north of France and they were constantly kind of going back and forth about like winning and taking land from one another. So you got to have to kind of deprogram yourself from how you think of those two countries today to think about

how it was back then. So he was losing land to King Philip II. And Philip liked John's cousin, Arthur of Brittany. And he had a competing claim to the throne. So Philip was in Arthur's court. And, you know, John just wasn't doing a good job. He was blowing through money, which meant he had to get more money out of the barons than even his predecessors did. Right. And he was not winning land with this money. So he was just going down the tubes fast. Yeah. And one thing I saw, Chuck, I just wanted to mention, the English were so intertwined with the French at the time that these kings that we're talking about, Henry II, Richard the Lionhearted, John Lackland, they all spoke French. Isn't that interesting? The English king spoke French at the

time. Oh, sure. Like when you go to, if you look at any of the old movies that are historically accurate, it's really hard to make sense of any of it when like people from France are sending their daughter to England, to Mary, and to, it's like, it's, it's really confusing. And I don't know if it's about the family lines, but it's, it is super confusing. Like the, the, oh, like Catherine the Great. And some of this comes from watching TV, I'll admit. But that TV show, The Great is really good because I think, wasn't Catherine the Great Russian? Yes. Or she was married off to the Russians. I'm not sure if she was a born Russian. I don't know. It's all just very confusing. Oh, yeah. But I mean, that was a really good

way to consolidate power and to gain even more land would be to, to marry like another royal family and just put your stuff together, make yourself, make yourselves even harder to, I might have gotten that all wrong, by the way, but it was off the dome, as the kids say. Hey, that's all right, man. Off the dome is pretty great. All right. So John is, you know, I talked about the sort of three-pronged thing, John is not doing well. He is ticking off the barons because he's having to squeeze more money out of them. So it's like, oh, well, surely he at least did okay with the church, right? To keep that stool stable. Not true at all. Pope Innocent III was in charge at the time,

and he appointed a new bishop of Canterbury named Stephen Langton, who would turn out to be a big thorn in John's side. John did not want Langton. And so he got mad and basically took his ball and went home. He took control of Canterbury, all the church's possessions, and said, Langton, you can't even come in the country. And so Innocent III said, oh, yeah, you know what, I'm going to issue a papal degree that basically all church services in England aren't valid anymore, and you can't hold them. And, you know, if it was you and me, we'd be like, sweet, we don't have to go to church anymore. But it wasn't like that back then. It was a really big deal. Ed said this was like dropping an ecclesiastical nuclear bomb onto Britain. And that's kind of

true. Yeah, because also the church was a huge employer in England at the time too. So now all the people who work in the church's jobs are like, well, are we valid? What's going on here? Do we have the same protections that we used to? It was a big, big deal. And yeah, for all intents and purposes, England under King John was at war with the church under Innocent III. And it stayed that way for a little while. And they just put John, that was it. That was the last box to be checked. Like he was at odds with absolutely everybody. And was a very unpopular king by anybody's, anybody's measure, whether you were a commoner or whether you were a nobility, or whether you were a bishop, you did not like King John very much. And then add to that that the

guy that Innocent III appointed to the Archbishop of Canterbury. And this is also, by the way, after the last Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, had been murdered at the behest of John's father, Henry II, murdered brutally too. I read a first person account of it. It's one of more ghastly murders I've ever heard. But the guy who came in, Stephen Langton, he was like a progressive. He was basically writing about things that question the divine authority of the monarchy, how some people or not some people, but people had some natural rights, like all people had some natural rights that even a king couldn't violate. Like really progressive stuff. And this guy's coming into England at a time when it has one of its weakest kings in its history and basically set

the stage for the Magna Carta to kind of be written. Full stop. What else did you want me to add? Could I have dressed it up more? Put a little fruit on it, Ted? No, just your voice went up, so I thought that was more. I was using upspeak. I was using upspeak. So you might be asking yourself like, kind of what's the big deal? Because things were a mess at various points in history and there were revolts before and there was unrest before between the church and the royals. And it was like, why was this the big one that kind of made everything change? And there are there are a few reasons for this, one of which, you know, I talked about France and England being so intertwined. John lost land, but he lost Normandy, which was a really big deal. The Normans, England had a lot

of land in northern France, like I said earlier, since William the Conqueror got control of Normandy at the Battle of Hastings. And the Normans were a tight group, and they were very influential in England. And then when John lost Normandy, it was it was more than just losing land. It was it was a big deal. Yeah, they started calling him John soft sword after that. Did they really? Yeah, that was his second nickname. John Lachlan and John soft sword. The church at the time, like we said, was was separate. And so they had their own set of laws even they didn't have to they had their ecclesiastical laws. So if the church official ran afoul, they were, you know, they could say, no, no, no, the king isn't going to declare judgment on you.

You come over here with us. We have our church law. It's probably not as stiff, to be honest. And and basically John said, you know, forget that tradition. You guys are under my rule and my decrees. And again, this just sent him further down the toilet. Yeah. And then like I was there were no toilets back then, though, to be clear into the privy, the bedpan. Yes. And then add to that also that the the just the way that people thought about the monarch, like thanks to people like Stephen Langton, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and the fact that the Henry, the first document of liberties, a charter of liberties had already been established, like just people were just thinking about things differently. And all of this stuff kind of came together at this vortex.

And there was there was a point where finally John was like, okay, at the very least, I need to be in with the Pope, and basically knelt before the Pope and said England is is a vassal state to the church again, which is a big deal. But it put it put John and England back in Pope innocent, the Third's good graces, and they were fine again. But that did nothing to help the barons. And as a matter of fact, the barons were just as put upon as before, but now John was even more emboldened by having the full support of the Pope again. And so the baron said, you know what, forget this, enough of this, it's 1214, and it's time for some change. So they actually cobbled together a fighting force and took London by by by force, they stormed it and occupied London

in open rebellion against King John. It's only 10,000 people, though. Yes, that's true. It really was. Well, it's funny to think of now, I mean, like 10,000 people living in London, but that's just the way it was at the time. So yeah, you and I could probably take London with 10,000 people, but it's still significant to mention. Yeah. And our smartphones, it's all we'd need. Yeah, look at this. Boomstick. Have you ever seen a dog say, I love you? Well, I've got a video of it. Oh my God, they're bowing. So yeah, it wasn't a civil war, but it was it was a big deal. It was an open rebellion. John knew this was not a good thing. So in 1215, he said, all right, I got to make peace with these people too. So let's get together. We'll get that Langton guy

that I didn't like at all. This shows you how much I'm coming with my hat in hand. Yeah, really. He can act as the mediator. The baron said, here's what we want. We'll call it the article of barons and handed that to Langton. And Langton said, all right, I got to whip this into something that that John is going to actually live with. And so he drafted this initial document, which included a lot of the stuff from the Charter of Liberties that dealt with a lot of this, the, you know, the laws that were sort of on the books, but also had some had some big ideas, like you were talking about, about just general rights at birth of humans. And they met Ask Lisa Simpson, where they met? Where? Running Mead, 1215 at Running Mead.

June 19th, 1215. And they signed over fealty to John. And they made copies of this thing, applied that royal seal on it. And that was it. It was the Magna Carta, even though they didn't call it the Magna Carta yet. No. And I was like, why Runny Mead? And it turns out there's actually a few reasons why Runny Mead had a history of being an ancient kind of council meeting spot. It was also nice place. Well, it was a bulky meadow, which is another reason why it was chosen, because it would be a terrible place to fight a war or a battle. And then also like you could see basically in every direction from it. So you couldn't do a surprise attack either, even if you wanted to fight in a bulky meadow. So I thought it might have been like a really nice picturesque

thing, but it was done out in the middle of nowhere where you could see everything. Yeah. Well, I get the impression that it was picturesque still as well, but that had a lot of strategic assets to it too. Okay. Well, that makes sense. All right. Well, I guess, well, before we take our break, let's just talk about the fact that this first Magna Carta that was not even called the Magna Carta yet was ignored. John ignored it. Innocent the three said it's not even legal. John was under duress to agree to this thing. And then a real full civil war called the First Baron's War broke out. And John died of dysentery in 1216. That's kind of what ended the First Baron's War.

But this is all sort of preamble to the real Magna Carta, which we'll talk about in just a sec. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking,

this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird.

It got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. So let's talk in a second about how the Magna Carta was applied shortly after John died of dysentery. But first you have to, we should talk a little bit about what it actually looked like originally. Because like you said,

it wasn't even what we think of the Magna Carta today. It had a lot of stuff in it that has nothing to do with nobody alive today. There is basically the King's strong arm guy who went around and like extracted money and tortured nobles if they didn't pay up. He and his cohorts are named specifically by name as like they got to go. There was stuff about, you know, if you were a widow, you didn't have to marry immediately. But if you did end up wanting to get married later, you still had to go to the King. There was about like land inheritance, all sorts of stuff like that that really would have mattered to a baron, you know, a noble person, a nobleman or woman in England at the time. There were concessions. But then like you said, there were big ideas too.

But if you were like the average peasant working the land to surf, working the land in the feudal system in England at the time, you could automate heads or tails of this. Because number one, it was written in abbreviated Latin, which would have made it very hard to understand. But then number two, it was also written as one long, I think about 3,300 word paragraph. That I don't even think had punctuation in it either. It was written like it was, you know, by a mad man. Yeah, it was like written on a big long piece of roll of toilet paper. And that was rolled up. It is now like if you read the Magna Carta now, it is separated into two different clauses. But this was not the case at first. This happened years later. Who was the

historian? I think it was William Blackstone in the late 18th century. Yeah, basically said like, I got to organize this thing. We can't put this thing in museums. It's embarrassing. Like people got to be able to make heads or tails of this. So that happened later on. At first, it was like you said, just this big long scrawl. And there wasn't just one of them. It's not like you can go to, you know, if you go to see the Declaration of Independence and at the archives in DC, like that's the one. That's the master copy. That's the master charger, the master copy. There were 13 known copies in 1215 of the Magna Carta. And it's not like they had one. And then they ran it through the Xerox machine. They just wrote it down 13 times. They're all originals,

I guess. Maybe it's wrong to say there isn't an original when there are 13 originals. There's not a soul original. Four of these have survived. And there are little variations because they were written by hand and transcribed, but nothing that like cancels anything out is just sort of, you know, how somebody might transcribe something. And they're all considered for like legit, correct originals. I think two of them are at the British Library of London, one at Salisbury Cathedral and then one at Lincoln Castle. Yes. And then if you go research how many Magna Carta copies are there today, you'll find that there's a lot more than four. And here you start to get into just how muddy the history of the Magna Carta is. Because like you said,

when they first wrote this Magna Carta, it wasn't exactly like what we think of Magna Carta today. It had a lot more provisions in it that had to do with the forest. And there were so many rules and regulations about how to treat the forest, how you can act in the forest. If you live in the forest, who do you go, you know, claim a grievance to that kind of stuff, that a separate charter of the forest was created. Like those were basically moved out. And then the document became the Magna Carta that we understand it today. Right. And that was, I think, in 1217, when that finally happened. Yeah, 1217, the Charters of the Forest was moved out. And then little by little, this document kept getting like adjusted, added to, as a new king came along,

they would basically be like, I love the Magna Carta. I'm going to adhere to it and slowly but surely over the next couple of decades, it became accepted and respected as the law of the land in England. Like it was a lot more than just concessions to end the civil war, the war of the barons. It became established law in England. Yeah. And just those words are very, like it's easy now to sort of not think too much about what law of the land means. But back then, that was a very big deal in that this was the first time that laws came about that weren't directly from the king. It wasn't royalty just saying, here's how everything is, everybody, fall in line. It was the people and albeit it was, you know,

if you were a baron, you had a lot of money and you had a lot of political sway. It's not like it was, it's not like these were the serfs, you know, like slinging hay in the hayfields that had any kind of input. So we do need to point that out. But they were not royalty. So it was a big deal for the very first time. Actual subjects of the king were weighing in and successfully weighing in on what the law should be. Yeah. And there were like the seeds to things that would become really important later, like the idea that a council of barons, I think 25 barons could basically hold the king to account. And it was like the seed that eventually grew into the parliament. There was

another one, there were some other really big ones in there that over time, one of the things that happened over time, I guess, Chuck, is it got extended to everybody in England, not just what they called freemen, which were landed nobility. It got extended to everybody in England, at least by 1297 when it was encoded into law in England, at the latest by like the 1400s, the 15th century. It became just commonly understood that like those rights, those laws in the Magna Carta applied to everybody in England. Yeah. I mean, it was like this sacred document. And again, when you kind of had no choice when you came in there as a new king, you may try and alter and change some things, but you couldn't

refute the Magna Carta at that point. It became too important even if other laws superseded it later on to the point where its actual laws in the Magna Carta were rendered useless in a lot of circumstances. It was a symbol. And like Ed said, it had this really powerful aura about it because it was the first laws not decreed directly from the king's voice. So you couldn't go back anymore. You could only move forward even if it was by tiny increments. We're talking about I mean, the 13, 1400s. This is a long time ago and it's going to take a long time. And Ed points out that like humanity has always been creeping toward more rights for more people, even if it's very slow and very clumsy at times. And the Magna Carta was sort of the foundation on what a lot

of the modern rights that we have sort of lay. Yeah. There's a couple that are actually still in English law. Part of one, the first clause, which gives freedom to the church, number 13, which basically says that towns and municipalities have the ability to decide their own matters, like electing a mayor, that kind of stuff. Right. And then the big ones, the two big ones that were really huge when they were codified in the Magna Carta back in 1215 was Clause 39, which basically says that you cannot be just thrown in prison. You can't be exiled. You can't have your land taken away. None of those things can happen to you unless it's through the lawful judgment of your peers or the law of the land. Yeah. So it took away the king's arbitrary ability to throw somebody

in the dungeon until they starved to death because they didn't pay him some bribe that he wanted. That was enormous. And that today constitutes due process under the law and then also habeas corpus, where you can't just like put someone in prison for no reason or never giving a reason. And those are really, that's really huge. And that is directly where we get that from in America and the West. Yeah. And the other one is Clause 40. You cannot sell and you also cannot deny or delay the rights that people have as citizens. Right. You can't do that. So that was a big deal. And then the idea that the Magna Carta directly led to the Bill of Rights is not an understatement at all at the Constitutional Convention when they were thinking of whether they needed any kind of

Magna Carta shout out because it had a mythical quality in America by this time too to kind of keep the King of England at bay. Right. They thought, well, we're not going to have a King here. We don't need a Magna Carta. And somebody very wisely pointed out, no, we don't have a King, but the government still acts at the behest of the majority of the people. What if the majority of the people try to infringe on the rights of others? We need something. And so they came up with the Bill of Rights directly descended from the Magna Carta. So it is very much an important document for sure. Totally. Still relevant. Still relevant as ever. So everybody go out and get a Magna Carta copy, maybe a poster or a t-shirt and rock it proudly.

You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right. Well, Chuck said he's got nothing else then. That means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this kind correction on Jackalopes. I can't believe we walked right past this. Okay. Hey, guys, longtime listener and super fan of the show. I feel like we are friends since I listen to you every day as I get ready for work and very much look forward to your conversations. So as your friend, I can say that I absolutely love all your content, but found myself cringing throughout the Jackalope episode. You see, I am a the historic preservation officer for the city of Las Vegas, Nevada. And while the Jackalope floor is not prevalent

throughout Nevada, I still feel the need to weigh on a bit of misunderstanding about our Southwestern fauna. The Jack and Jackalopes is for the Jackrabbit, of course, very large species of hair, not a rabbit, is in the cute little cottontail rabbit. The lope is for the pronghorn antelope, not a deer, you guys. These are two different families. Gentlemen, the clue is right there in the name of antelope. How did we miss that? It's not a jack of deer. I think we were so jazzed about even talking about jackalopes that we stopped seeing the forest for the trees. Maybe so. However, a pronghorn is not a true antelope even, but that's another story. And further, pronghorn have horns, hence the name, which are affixed to the skull, which of course means

that to put horns on the jackrabbit, the pronghorn must be deceased as well. However, deer antlers shed annually with no harm done to the deer. You can walk in any area where deer live and find antlers on the ground. Therefore, deer does not necessarily have to die to give up as antlers. Okay, that's good. Yeah, that's good. While there certainly are taxidermy rabbits and hares with deer antlers affixed to their heads, a jackalope by definition is a jackrabbit with pronghorn horns. I see. Just wanted to give a little general correction on all that, but in no way diminishes my love for the show. Thank you for all you do. All my best. Dr. Diane C. C. Brant, Historic Preservation Officer Las Vegas, Nevada. Excellent. Dr. C. Brant. Dr. Diane C. C. Brant.

Oh, okay. C. C. Brant. Thank you, Dr. C. Brant. We appreciate that big time hats off to you for that gentle correction. That was really something. If you want to get in touch with us like Dr. C. Brant did, you can via email. Wrap it up, spank it on the pronghorn, and send it off to StuffPodcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot,

sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about

to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.