There are only two original copies in existence, in Lincoln and Salisbury Cathedrals, although the British Library does have two copies and whilst most people can have a vague stab at what the Magna Carta is and who the King was who signed it, the relevance of it is very much overstated because for the vast majority of the country it wasn't much use at all.
The story goes that King John of England was forced to sign The Magna Carta so he and whoever followed him onto the throne could no longer ride roughshod over their subjects but in reality, the Magna Carta provided plenty of personal rights and freedoms if you were wealthy because it was the landowners and Barons who wrote the document and forced the King to sign it because they were outraged that he kept putting up their tax and rents to pay for his wars against the French, and war isn't cheap.
Not so much motivated by a sense of great injustice at King John’s acts of cruelty and murder against his subjects then, more because he was trying to squeeze more money out of them.
King John may have signed it but he dissolved it almost as soon as he left Runnymede Forest that day and it wasn't even an original piece, it was a dusted off copy of the Charter of Liberties that Henry I signed in 1100 promising to respect certain rights of the Church and the Barons.
Far from being the basis of all English law, of the original 61 clauses, only 3 remain which are the freedom of the Church of England, the continued ancient liberties of the City of London and that no free man shall be denied Justice or Right.
There's nothing in the charter corresponding to the rights of the citizens and Oliver Cromwell dismissed it, noting that it merely: 'Tied one sort of people to be slaves to another; Clergy and Gentry have got their freedom, but the common people still are, and have been left servants to work for them.'
We hear it mentioned time after time that the signing of the Magna Carta was when the common man gained his rights but actually, the only beneficiaries of it were the richest people who were able to continue oppressing the common man while being freed of paying their share of taxes and from where i am sitting, 808 years on, that hasn't really changed.
2 comments:
i saw the magna carta at the US national archives. old piece of paper with old ink written in very sloppy penmanship
It is and not even proper Latin but pig Latin.
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