Disclaimer before hundreds of wroth barristers descend on me in a twitchy-eyed swarm: Please take the following skeptically since I am not a legal expert.
*
UPON THIS DAY in 1215, King John of England placed his seal to the Magna Carta, which is a set of 61 laws which have roots in the old jurisprudence which predates the Norman invasion. Its name means Great Charter and it was agreed upon at Runnymede on the Thames.
The barons had arm-wrestled him into ceding some of his powers. When you read it, the scope is very broad, and the greetings at the beginning to "the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justiciars, foresters, sheriffs, stewards, servants, and to all his bailiffs and faithful subjects" hint at what follows.
As the little clauses are clasped in the whole, the realm of England is pointillistically rendered. The powers and obligations of the church, inheritors, guardians, widows, debtors, creditors, moneylenders, London, cities and boroughs and towns and ports, greater barons, clerks, justices and knights, villeins and merchants, constables and coroners, counties and hundreds and wapentakes and trithings, orphans, winemakers and alemakers and corn merchants, clothiers, Wallingford and Nottingham and Boulogne and Lancaster, foresters, warrens and riverbanks, foreign knights and crossbowmen and serjeants and mercenaries, Wales and its hostages, Scotland and its hostages, and many more are sketched through each concise sentence. It seems to be literally a constitution as much as a code of law.
Habeas corpus evolved from Clause 39: "No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled in any way victimised, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." It seems to mean that the king, or one of his representatives in town or country, cannot simply throw someone in jail or confiscate someone's farm because he dislikes that person; a good reason must be alleged and due process followed to probe it.
(In the previous sentence, it is declared that "No bailiff shall in future put anyone to trial upon his own bare word, without reliable witnesses produced for this purpose," and in the following sentence it is declared that "To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay right or justice," which sounds like a pledge against corruption.)
***
IN FACT the king did not respect the Magna Carta and it was more a sop to his foes than a policy map; when he died the year after, it was in an England disordered by strife. Secondly, the charter was not kept intact as the original version, but thrice changed materially in the following decade; the Magna Carta as republished in 1297, during the reign of John's grandson Edward the First (Longshanks), is what still forms a binding fragment of English constitutional law. Thirdly, as one hears more often, it was seemingly inspired not so much by a lofty ideal of civil liberties as by the aristocrats's wish to block the king from meddling in their affairs.
(It looks to me like it governed the actions of the king's men toward ordinary citizens, while the actions of a baron toward ordinary citizens were not proscribed. It is rather like the modern idea that companies are forgiven for far more than local, state, or federal governments are, since what is termed big government and repression in the second case is excused as reasonable economics in the first.)
The Magna Carta looks extremely humiliating for the king, even if he didn't mean a word of it. It is barely an exaggeration to say that, where the charter explains how its enforcement will be, he extends an engraved invitation to the barons to overrun his castles and steal his property if he doesn't comply with the provisions. A group of twenty-five barons chosen amongst themselves was charged with adjudicating this. If it sounds improbably masochistic, it is also because the barons wrote the draft of the charter together with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Lastly, the charter was not unprecedented and part of its text was borrowed from a century-old text under Henry I, but for some reason its provisions stuck unusually well. There are four copies left to us from 1215.
*
KING JOHN is known to us, by grace of the popularity of Robin Hood legends and of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, as a cruel traitorous wimp who extracted taxes like a vampire and whose sorrow at the imprisonment of his brother the king, Richard Lionheart — who had gone to the trouble of battling in the Crusades only to be sidetracked on the homeward journey in Austria — was insincere. Since England truly belonged to Richard until 1199, he received the epithet "Lackland." Whether these tales are strictly accurate is doubtful but the grain of truth seems large; I suspect that he would not appreciate the irony that the Magna Carta, pushed it seems by everybody except him, is his greatest legacy.
***
Tip of the hat to "June 15" [Wikipedia]
Magna Carta 1215 [Middleages.org] Warning: pop-up window for ad.
"Magna Carta" Encyclopaedia Britannica, pp. 673-6 Highly useful translation of entire charter.
Additional information taken from diverse entries in the Oxford English Reference Dictionary, 2nd Ed., Edited by Judy Pearsall and Bill Trumble, (Oxford: 1996)
***
Appendix: For no particular reason, all the zeitgeisty names appearing in the Magna Carta
Stephen, Henry, William of London, Peter of Winchester, Jocelyn of Bath and Glastonbury, Hugh of Lincoln, Walter of Worcester, William of Coventry, Benedict of Rochester, Pandulf, Aymeric, William Marshal, William of Salisbury, William of Warenne, William of Arundel, Alan of Galloway constable of Scotland, Warin fitz Gerold, Peter fitz Herbert, Thomas Basset, Alan Basset, Philip de Aubeney, Robert of Ropsley [my favourite; alliteration gone a bridge too far], John Marshal, John fitz Hugh; Llywelyn, Alexander king of the Scots, William his father, formerly king of the Scots
Gerard de Athée, Engelard de Cigogné, Peter de Chanceaux, Guy de Chanceaux, Andrew de Chanceaux, Guy de Cigogné, Geoffrey de Martigny, Philip Marc
***
Further reading:
"Magna Carta" [Wikipedia] Read June 15, 2011
"King John and the Magna Carta" [BBC], by Dr Mike Ibeji (Feb. 17, 2011)
Magna Carta (1297) [UK Legislation] Sections I, IX, XXIX still in effect in Britain
No comments:
Post a Comment