Appendix 1

The Magna Carta 2015 Exhibition

“All of this innocently began as one of many items on our list of ‘empty nester’ activities, yet it quickly elbowed aside all other considerations and succeeded in capturing our combined imaginations and energies for the better part of the last four years of our lives.” So wrote Len and Suzy Rodness of Toronto in 2014, describing the genesis of the idea of bringing Magna Carta to Canada four years earlier. They began by consulting a friend at their son’s school.

“A friendship with Bernadette Toner, a gracious, transplanted English bursar at our son’s school afforded us the opportunity to spearhead a venture to bring the priceless piece of parchment that is Magna Carta to Canada in celebration of its eight-hundredth birthday.”

To their delight, this dedicated couple were able to gain the agreement of Durham Cathedral, home of several Magna Carta documents, to lend two of these treasures for exhibition on a limited tour of Canada on the eight-hundredth anniversary in 2015, if sufficient museum-quality venues could be found to display, protect, and preserve them, and if the necessary funding could be raised. The exhibition would not only benefit Canadians but would contribute toward the cost of the continuing conservation of these precious historic documents.

So Magna Carta Canada was founded as a not-for-profit charitable organization dedicated to meeting these conditions and making the tour possible. Len and Suzy served as its co-chairs and began encouraging others to join them and to contribute to their fundraising campaign, an experience that taught them a lot about Magna Carta and about Canada.

“Our figurative journey back in time to an English meadow on a summer’s day in 1215 has served to not only enhance our knowledge of the parry and thrust of mediaeval politics and society but it has sharpened our awareness of the gift that is our country today. Each and every boardroom pitch and cocktail party conversation that were met with the remark ‘I remember something about Magna Carta from school but what it is exactly, I cannot say’ propelled us to lean harder into our endeavour.”

With fundraising underway, Magna Carta Canada engaged Lord Cultural Resources, the Canadian firm that is a world leader in museum exhibition planning, first to secure potential venues for Magna Carta and then to plan and design the exhibition. As Len and Suzy explained their objective to Co-Presidents Gail and Barry Lord and the company’s Vice-President for Exhibitions Maria Piacente, “Bringing Magna Carta to our shores to us meant providing all Canadians with a tactile, tangible, teachable moment. What an extraordinary opportunity to be able to stand squarely before the document that is arguably the quickening moment of our fully developed democratic ideals, rule of law, and human rights standards.”

Drawing on their experience in planning, designing, or assisting museum-quality venues across Canada, Lord Cultural Resources was able to find four venues that were eager to display Magna Carta (see appendix 2).

While this outstanding series of venues for Magna Carta was being lined up, Len and Suzy Rodness and their steering committee continued their campaign to raise the funds to make their dream a reality. Although many generous donors contributed, the breakthrough moment came in 2014 when Magna Carta Canada was successful in obtaining federal government funding for the tour. Len and Suzy were able to proclaim, “2015 will be Canada’s moment to fix our collective national gaze on this transformative instrument whose notes echo through the centuries and continue to serenade us to this day.”

Lord Cultural Resources could then continue with the detailed design and tendering of construction of the exhibition, placed in a setting suggesting Runnymede, the meadow where on June 15, 1215, a group of British barons forced King John of England to affix his seal to the original version of Magna Carta. The exhibition featured figures of the barons, commoners, and King John, along with banners, panels, and touch screens that related the roles of each in the struggle against the king’s imperious demands for everyone to sacrifice their lives and their resources for his interminable (and unsuccessful) wars with France. Throughout the exhibition, written and spoken quotations about Magna Carta reminded visitors that the principles advanced in these Great Charters have been a subject for many fine minds for centuries. The displays included the following six outstanding clusters of exhibits.

The Precious Documents

In 1300, John’s grandson, Edward I, voluntarily reissued Magna Carta to show that it would apply to every ruler of England thereafter. The two main display cases in the exhibition featured the two precious documents on loan from Durham Cathedral — one of Edward’s authorized 1300 versions and the 1300 Charter of the Forest. The 1300 Great Charter was shown in a tent symbolizing the one in which King John would have received the barons, while the Charter of the Forest was nestled in a forest-like setting. In order to ensure preservation of these precious documents, they had to be exhibited in climate-controlled cases with subdued light.

The “Digital Charter”

The charters are written in medieval Latin, the legal and clerical language of the day, but the exhibition used twenty-first-century technology to enable visitors to read them both in English, exploring key themes that explained why these documents were and remain so important. Habeas corpus, for example, the requirement that the Crown cannot incarcerate anyone unless it can produce evidence of his or her wrongdoing, trial by jury, and the right of a widow not to be forced to remarry, thereby giving up her property, are just a few of the rights and protections that began with Magna Carta. Key words throughout the exhibit — Rights, Privileges, Liberties, Justice, and Law among them — reminded visitors of some of the fundamental concepts that originated in Magna Carta.

A Global Legacy

A large three-dimensional globe in the exhibition helped visitors to appreciate the impact of these historic documents all around the world over the past eight hundred years. In the United States, of course, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are all direct descendants of Magna Carta. In France, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man that sparked the French Revolution is the best-known example, but the French Charter of 1814 that limited the rights of King Louis XVIII when he was restored to the throne after the fall of Napoleon was equally important as the basis of the rule of law and due process that continues in France to this day. On the other side of the globe, the Indian Constitution of 1947 includes a vital section on all Indian citizens’ fundamental rights of equality before the law that follows the model of Magna Carta. Australia and New Zealand are among other former British colonies similarly affected. And, of course, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 gave us what many see as the most important long-term legacy of Magna Carta, extending the concept of human rights to everyone regardless of their citizenship, ethnic origin, or country of residence. We are still struggling to live up to its intention, which was to ensure that atrocities like the Holocaust would never happen again.

The Great Charters and Canada

“Responsible government” — a concept that was first advanced in Magna Carta — was the goal of both William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau in the rebellions they led against the British colonial administration in 1837–39. Canadians enjoy responsible government and the rule of law today, based on principles that were first advanced — albeit in limited form — in these Great Charters. Many sections of the act that created the Confederation of Canada in 1867 manifest the legacy of the charter. Even more so our 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms is directly modelled on it. The connections of these and other documents with Magna Carta were shown in an exhibit that linked the heritage of Magna Carta to Canada, including the controversies and struggles in our history to preserve the spirit of the documents. Canada’s First Nations, for example, maintained a culture of stewardship of their lands comparable to the vision of the Charter of the Forest, but colonial settlement seldom respected it. A large-scale reproduction of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which has been called “the indigenous people’s Magna Carta,” showed that it was indeed the first recognition by the British Crown that Canada’s Native population had rights. The proclamation has been invoked in land claims disputes ever since.

The Rights of “Free Men” (Only?)

Although it affirmed the right of widows to refuse to be ordered to remarry and thereby forfeit their property, Magna Carta did not otherwise recognize women as persons, since they were considered to belong to their fathers or husbands. Three or four centuries later when the slave trade made some men rich, no one extended rights to this human merchandise. Colonized peoples were similarly not recognized as people with equal rights. In the exhibition, excerpts from historical documents described these limitations of the original concepts and the ongoing struggle to extend these rights to all, in England and around the world, over the past eight centuries.

The Media Wall of Justice Today

More twenty-first-century technology lit up the final section of the exhibition with a touch-screen Media Wall that encouraged visitors to explore contemporary struggles for justice and human rights. Visitors were asked to vote for the most important clauses in Magna Carta, to draft a contemporary charter, and to design a seal for it.

The Magna Carta Canada 2015 exhibition tour enabled Canadians to appreciate all the more keenly how important the principles of these documents are, and how important it is for us all to protect them.