You may think a library is a library is a library. It’s not. The Inuit have forty kinds of snow. We have libraries. My first was in the little East Midlands town where I grew up. It was a pair of rooms converted from an old shop and smelled of floor polish. Its battered brown shelves held no more than a couple of thousand books, and there was nowhere to sit. In the 1970s it was replaced by a new, slightly larger library with glass and PVC walls, aluminium shelf stacks, and an ‘Information Centre’ in one corner. Then there was my university’s law library, whose echoing acoustics ensured that a single cough could simultaneously shatter the concentration of a thousand students. So when I switched subjects to history I was happy to find myself cocooned by books in what looked like a gentleman’s club.
The British Library on London’s Euston Road doesn’t resemble any of these. For a start, there’s its gargantuan size. It’s home to 150 million books and other documents, a figure which is growing at the rate of 3 million a year. And just in case you can’t imagine that, it means an extra 6 miles of shelving every twelve months. As well as quantity, it also has world-class quality, Magna Carta being among its many treasures. And that’s why we’ve come here.
From the outside, the British Library, with its windowless walls of dark red brick, could be the lair of some introspective monster. ‘Books,’ it seems to say, ‘are for the mind, not the world outside.’ Above its flat rooftop, I can see the Disneyesque neo-Gothic spires of St Pancras Station, in frivolous contrast to the British Library’s deeply serious demeanour.
But inside, there’s a surprise. It’s as though I’ve accidentally wandered into a giant modern hotel, the sort that caters for business people in Dallas or Detroit. I’m in a huge atrium foyer rising over my head to a glass ceiling through which the sun pours down to be reflected off marble floors. Ahead to the right are what look like the hotel reception and concierge desks. There’s a shop to the left. Ahead, a wide flight of steps alongside two escalators rises to a mezzanine level. There are some of those little indoor trees, so beloved of hotel architects, as well as overly fancy hanging lights. I mount the up-escalator, and at the top come upon a large cafeteria, every table occupied by earnest people having impromptu meetings, or stroking their iPads, or laughing and chatting too loud into their smartphones. And looking down on us are six levels of interior balconies from which presumably, guests reach their suites. Or they would do if it were a hotel, instead of a library.
It’s only when I go up close to the lowest of these balconies that I see there are no doors with room numbers and key-card slots. Instead there’s a glass wall that extends all the way up to the top of the atrium. And behind the glass, there are endless shelves packed with millions of books. Not paperback novels, but the sort of volumes you sometimes see in the corner of a snug bar in a country hotel, with titles like A Gentleman’s Compendium of Hedgehogs and Other Creatures of the Field, Volume 28, all leather bound in faded gold and green, and then when you try to take one out, you find they’re just book-spines glued together for decoration. I’m sure the ones I’m looking at now in the British Library aren’t fakes. But I do wonder how, if I requested one, the librarian could get at it in its glass prison.
I wander up another flight of stairs and push open a door beneath a sign announcing ‘Humanities, Floor 1’. The sudden silence makes me realise how noisy the foyer-cafeteria-atrium was. Inside here, there are hundreds of studious souls working at long ranks of desks, surrounded by a couple of miles’ worth of books, real ones, the sort people read. I whisper to the young woman in black-framed glasses at the entrance counter, ‘Could you tell me where to find Magna Carta, please?’ Without replying, she flits round from her eyrie and leads me out again through the door, then directs me back down the stairs to the Sir John Ritblat Gallery.
Inside the aforementioned gallery it’s dark. Like a cinema auditorium when the film’s showing. The flickering of light is caused by my fellow visitors moving past the dimly illuminated display cases. These, it turns out, contain the pick of the nation’s bibliographical treasures. Here, a first folio of Shakespeare’s plays. There, a manuscript in Leonardo da Vinci’s own hand describing with illustrations how to construct a ‘snail staircase’. Then, England’s oldest document, a parchment issued in the year 679 in the name of King Hiothhere of Kent. And, nearby, a bit of paper with a few lines scribbled on it in pencil by George Harrison giving directions to Brian Epstein’s house in Sussex. Has the curator gone mad? Or is an out-of-control marketing department responsible? I search for Mick Jagger’s Tesco shopping list or the Sex Pistols’ apple pie recipe. In vain. But I do stumble on a small doorway beneath a sign reading ‘Magna Carta’. It’s between a pictorial account of the Buddha’s life and a drawing of two Indian Flapshell Turtles.
So here I am at last, face to face with the central subject of this book. The most famous document in English history, regarded for 800 years right across the democratic world, by civil rights campaigners, constitutional lawyers and by those who’ve struggled against oppression, as the very foundation of the principles of freedom under the law and constitutional government. The trump card to beat tyranny. Magna Carta. The Great Charter of Liberties.
I’m afraid there’s no way to break this news gently. It’s a let-down.
In the tiny darkened room inside a glass cabinet is what looks like a grubby piece of paper, about the size of the front page of the Sun newspaper turned on its side, with tiny brown wiggly lines across it. No wax seal even.
That’s it. Magna Carta.
I suppose that since I bought for £4.99 in the Magna Carta Tea Room at Runnymede that so-called copy of Magna Carta, with all those brightly coloured, baronial coats of arms around the outer margin and with a picture of the king’s large round dark red seal at the bottom, I’ve imagined the Great Charter as a physically impressive document. Perhaps a little faded and maybe dog-eared from all that veneration, but nonetheless presenting a certain majesty of design and lettering as would befit the hallowed role centuries have bestowed upon it. But it’s like discovering, after years of archaeological excavation, that the lost temple of the Mayan civilisation was a shed. According to a small information plaque on the Charter’s display cabinet, it’s thought to have been discovered in a tailor’s shop, which is entirely believable, since it could easily have been mistaken for an order in a foreign language for a couple of suits.
There is in fact no single 1215 Magna Carta. During the days following the Runnymede agreement, the Great Charter was written out at least thirteen times, and maybe as many as forty-one, and these documents were then distributed around the country. Only four of them have survived. As well as the two at the British Library, there’s one in Lincoln and one in Salisbury. The word ‘survived’, though, is not 100 per cent accurate. The second of the British Library’s two Magna Cartas is in another display case alongside the first. It looks as though a full pot of coffee has been spilt all over it, completely obliterating all the writing. According to the information plaque, the brown-grey colour-wash that covers it is a burn mark. It was rescued from a fire in 1731.
But I soon start to feel guiltyabout these disparaging thoughts. A video screen in the corner of the small gallery suddenly comes alive (a boy of about 10 is kneeling in front of a small console and has pressed the right button) and the curator, Dr Claire Breay, appears. She puts me right, and explains the extraordinary process that went into making Magna Carta as I see it before me now.
In our own age, when pen-written documents have largely given way to electronic digits, it’s hard to imagine communications technology as it was in 1215. Producing each copy of Magna Carta was a laborious business. The parchment was manufactured from sheepskin. It first had to be soaked in a bath of lime. It was then stretched on a frame and once dry was scraped with a crescent-shaped knife until it was smooth enough to be written on. Because one little piece of parchment was such a valuable item, Dr Breay explains, the small writing on Magna Carta is in an abbreviated form of Latin in order to save space. The ink itself had special qualities. The key to its production lay in the stings of thousands of wasps. These insects lay their eggs in the bark of oak trees. The tree then reacts to the stings by producing nut-like blisters, called oak galls, whose sap is acidic. The ink makers used to gather tiny quantities of this sap and mix it with soot. The acid in the ink meant that, when applied with a quill pen, it would bite into the surface of the parchment, rather like an etching. The chancery clerks who did the actual writing – they were known as scriveners – would have had to sharpen their pen-nibs every few lines. Each copy of Magna Carta would have taken one scrivener a full working day to write out.
Most of us now take for granted the process which at the tap of a button or two transforms our thoughts into words on a screen and then instantly transmit them to the other side of the globe, a process so effortless that, as a species, we waste trillions of words every day. So there’s something admirable about the ingenuity and thoughtfulness of medieval writing, where each written word was a handcrafted gem.
Humbled, I look again at the British Library’s Magna Carta, with its oak gall script in abbreviated Latin, still translatable just as it was on the day it was written 800 years ago, and I give it respect.
The writing on the document is continuous, without breaks between paragraphs – again to save space on the valuable parchment. The traditional division of the text into sixty-three separate clauses is a device of later historians to help analyse the Charter’s significance.
At the far end of Magna Carta’s little gallery is an interactive screen that allows us to zoom in on an image of the text, discover that it’s unintelligible to a lay person and then turn to the translation into modern English alongside it.
The first thing that strikes the general reader scanning Magna Carta is that it’s peppered with feudal jargon, even in its modern English translation. Words like ‘amercement’, ‘trithings’, ‘halberget’, ‘sevedges’, ‘socage’, and ‘darrein presentment’ pop up. Mumbo jumbo to most of us, though we might have an inkling that ‘mort d’ancestor’ has something to do with the death of a parent. It’s risky, however, to make guesses, because some of the other terms that crop up time and again, such as ‘aid’, ‘fee’ and ‘relief’ are what linguists call ‘false friends’ and have little to do with help, payments to accountants, or emotional reassurance. This is not to say that the Charter is entirely unreadable. It isn’t. You don’t have to be a medieval specialist to understand clause 33, for instance:
All fish-weirs shall be removed from the Thames, the Medway.
But if what you’re looking for is some resounding statement of political principle, such as, ‘The king must always act in the best interests of his subjects’, or ‘All political power ultimately resides with the people’, you’ll be disappointed. Even its full name, Magna Carta Libertatum, The Great Charter of Liberties, is misleading in the twenty-first century. It was not the Great Charter of Liberty, meaning ‘freedom’ in the sense of that most cherished of prizes for which freedom fighters and freedom lovers have fought and died over the centuries. ‘Liberties’ in 1215 were something more mundane. The word meant specific acts which were permitted to individuals or groups. So for instance, the peasant farmers in a certain village might be allowed by their lord to graze their sheep on one of his meadow. That was a ‘liberty’. Or, the lord himself might have been granted by the king the ‘liberty’ to build a castle on his land. Liberty in the thirteenth century had little to do with that resounding word ‘freedom!’ in the sense of freedom from slavery, or freedom from oppression.
Magna Carta is full of very specific detail. The reason is clear. It was a practical solution to a political crisis, a clash between the king and the most privileged echelons of thirteenth-century society. It’s not surprising then that, in the main, it protected the interests of those highest rankers. For example, clause 21 states:
Earls and barons shall be fined only by their equals, and in proportion to the gravity of their offence.
Magna Carta tells us about the nitty-gritty of what irked the barons. For instance, they didn’t want low-life foreigners muscling in on their traditional rights. The barons believed they had the exclusive privilege of acting as the king’s advisors, generals and tenants-in-chief. John should not be entrusting lands and castles to foreign mercenary soldiers but to his customary lieutenants, the barons. And, as we discovered on our visit to South Wales, Magna Carta specifically names the foreign upstarts whom King John put in charge there following the crushing of William de Briouze and states that they must now be turfed out.
The Great Charter also makes it clear that the barons’ quarrel isn’t just with John. The picture that emerges from the clauses is not of an evil misfit monarch suddenly breaking with a more beneficent era in which his father Henry and his brother Richard ruled. Roughly a third of the clauses aim to block loopholes in feudal custom that kings Henry, Richard and John had all successfully exploited to the benefit of the crown. There are, for instance, clauses that aim to stop the king’s interference in the decision about whom a baron’s widow can marry or about the guardianship of an underage heir. In other clauses, John promises to restore to the barons any lands, castles or rights that he, his father or his brother had seized without justification.
So from one point of view, Magna Carta is just the latest round in the king-versus-barons tug-of-war, the Charter being the barons’ attempt to win back some of the power they’d lost during the reigns of Henry II, Richard I and John.
But clearly there must be more to Magna Carta than this. It can’t be just a charter for aristocrats, blocking the king from undermining their power. If it were, how could it possibly have become such a potent symbol of justice and freedom over the centuries? This brings us to by far the most influential and time-honoured clause in Magna Carta.
Clause 39 has been quoted, reinterpreted, at times misunderstood, more than the sixty-two other clauses in the Great Charter put together. It’s both at the heart of the myths about Magna Carta, and at the same time has become its most concrete abiding strength, the inspiration to generations of freedom fighters. How, you may ask, can it be both?
Here’s what clause 39 says:
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 [i.e. the king] proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.
In the words of one historian, this clause has ‘echoed down the corridors of history’. It appears to state a fundamental legal principle: that ordinary citizens shall not suffer arbitrary punishment; that they have a right to a fair trial; and what’s more, to trial by jury.
Resounding stuff. But is this what the authors of Magna Carta intended? The answer is a mixture of ‘up to a point’ and ‘not at all’.
The first thing to notice about clause 39 is that it says ‘no free man’. As we discovered back in the fields at the village of Laxton, ‘free men’ made up a very limited section of the population. Once we’ve stripped out all women, and all those villeins and other serfs, we’re left with 12 to 15 per cent of the population. So the clause has a very limited application. It’s not a statement of universal civil liberty. The barons inserted clause 39 and made it apply to ‘free men’ as a favour to their knights and their retainers – the mainstays of baronial military power. They couldn’t be forgotten in the Great Charter.
What did ‘except by the lawful judgement of his equals’ mean? On the face of it, this looks like Magna Carta is enshrining the right to trial by jury. In fact it was doing nothing of the kind. In the complex arrangement of feudal relationships and feudal law that had applied in England for at least 150 years before the Great Charter, legal cases had sometimes involved oath-taking by twelve men who were the social equals of the party involved. For a knight, that would be twelve knights, for a baron twelve barons. But they were more like witnesses than verdict-givers. In certain circumstances, an accused could be acquitted if these witnesses swore to his innocence. In the feudal system, there were few consistent rules about how or when these twelve men should get involved. Often, they were only called in when there was an argument about which kind of court should try a case. Clause 39 has nothing to do with trial by jury.
It’s easy to see how later generations could mistakenly see the clause as the foundation-stone of universal freedom under the law, and we shouldn’t entirely dismiss this interpretation as ridiculous. The clause may in 1215 have applied only to a privileged few, and it may not have had anything to say about trial by jury, but it was undoubtedly a step in the right direction. Let’s not forget its final words – that the king cannot punish a free man ‘except … by the law of the land’.
Clause 39 may not have laid the foundations of the temple of justice, but it was – if you like – an architect’s model of what came to be built at a later date. And that has been enough – particularly given Magna Carta’s great age – to make clause 39 the most important paragraph in English legal history. Exactly how over the centuries it achieved this star status we shall discover further on our journey.
Closely linked to clause 39, and almost as important, is the next one. Clause 40 states:
To no one will we [the King] sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice.
These fifteen words are particularly fascinating to the historian. They show the barons in something of a muddle in their attitude towards the king. With Magna Carta, they of course wanted to clip the king’s wings. But at the same time, they seem to recognise that the strengthening of royal power that had begun with Henry II and continued under his two sons, Richard and John, wasn’t all bad. Clause 40 says that royal justice is such a good thing that it should be available to all without any delays. Of course, Henry II had realised that impartial justice was an attractive product in the marketplace, and had started the system of charging a fee to those who wished to take advantage of it. Now, in Magna Carta, the barons were saying, ‘Yes, we like royal justice. We just don’t want to pay for it.’
However, leaving this thirteenth-century background to one side, clause 40 is genuinely valuable. It establishes a right to prompt justice.
And while we’re looking at clauses which would come to have a long and fruitful life, there is one more that it would be easy to overlook. At first glance clause 12 seems like just another piece of feudal exotica, but it was to find a new role 3,000 miles away and more than five centuries later. Here’s its wording:
No scutage or aid [an ‘aid’ was a theoretically voluntary gifts of money to the king to assist him with unusual expenses; however, it was traditional to pay up and not argue] may be levied in our kingdom without its general consent, unless it is for the ransom of our person, to make our eldest son a knight, and to marry our eldest daughter. For these purposes only a reasonable aid may be levied.
You may recognise the word ‘scutage’ from what we discovered at Bouvines. This clause was inserted, of course, to satisfy those barons who, in the build-up to the Battle of Bouvines, had refused John’s call for scutage, the payment of cash to the king in lieu of military service. However, 558 years later, Magna Carta – and specifically this clause – was cited by the American colonists in their fight against British rule. They used it to justify their revolutionary call to arms: ‘No taxation without representation!’
Magna Carta was a rag-bag of solutions to thirteenth-century problems. Later generations, in regarding it as a beacon of justice and freedom, have had to be highly selective in the clauses they’ve chosen to revere.
Many, like the ones that deal with darrein presentment, trithings, halberget and other feudalia, soon became irrelevant. Conversely, Some clauses seem to be well ahead of their time. Number 35 for instance, demands:
There shall be standard measures of wine, ale, and corn … throughout the kingdom
This would have required a bureaucracy of weights and measures far beyond the capabilities of thirteenth-century government. However, you can’t help but admire its ambition.
Other clauses were inserted by the barons as pay-offs to their political allies. The citizens of London, whose support had been so vital in tipping the balance against John, had their ancient customs confirmed in Magna Carta. This privilege was extended too to Lincoln and other towns in England. It’s unlikely that John would have had any argument with that. As we saw at Lincoln, he’d granted many of those liberties in the first place in return for cash payments and other support, and like the barons he wanted the towns on his side. Nevertheless, this clause was an important written statement about the status of towns, which was to be cherished by their citizens over the centuries.
The only other party – apart from the aristocracy – to get its self-interest recorded on the Charter’s parchment was the Church. The man who brokered the deal between the rebels and the royal party was Archbishop Stephen Langton, and he made sure he got his own finger in the pie straight away. The Charter states at the outset that:
The English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired.
In other words, no more arguments about who had the right to appoint the Archbishop of Canterbury.
By far the longest clause in Magna Carta is number 61, but it had a very short life indeed. The barons had a problem, and it wasn’t a new one. The feudal system had always recognised it. What do you do when a king fails to follow the rules? The feudal answer was that you formally renounce your allegiance to him and go into open rebellion. Not very subtle. The barons at Runnymede produced pretty much the same answer, except with more formality.
Clause 61 said the barons should elect twenty-five of their number, who in turn would nominate four of their leaders. If the king or any of his officials were to break any of the terms of the Charter, these four would come to the king and give him forty days to set it right. If he failed to do so, then all the king’s subjects throughout the kingdom – the Charter says ‘the community of the whole land’ – were supposed to get together and strip the king of his castles and other property till he was considered to have made amends. After that, says the Charter, everything goes back to normal, and the king’s subjects are supposed to obey him again as though nothing had happened.
You can almost hear John, when he first saw this clause, smiling to his advisors and saying with a cynical shake of the head, ‘I don’t think so.’
The most fanciful of the myth-makers have claimed that Magna Carta’s council of twenty-five barons somehow represented the birth of parliamentary democracy. We can recall that the entry sign at Runnymede suggested this was the Great Charter’s legacy. But the barons at Runnymede represented no more than a quarter of the country’s aristocracy – in other words a quarter of less than 1 per cent of the people, never mind the whole kingdom. In fact the baronial council was dead in the water as soon as it was born. Even contemporaries recognised it as an impractical fantasy, and when Magna Carta was reissued after John’s death, just two years later, the clause was quietly dropped from the text. The best that can be said about it is that it spotlighted a conundrum that would take many centuries to resolve – how do you force a king to comply with the law?
So if Magna Carta had nothing to say about democracy, did it make any mention of the common people and their rights? What about the 85 per cent or more of the population below the level of free men in the social hierarchy? Villeins, those unfree serfs we met at Laxton, make one appearance. Clause 29 says that they should not be ‘amerced’ (have to pay a monetary fine) except in proportion to the offence they have committed. So, no heavy fines for minor misdemeanours, and even when they are amerced, the villeins shouldn’t be deprived of their ploughs, carts or other means of livelihood. But before leaping to the conclusion that here is proof that the rebel barons had the interests of the most vulnerable in society at heart, we need to pause. Present-day historians point out that the ultimate foundation of aristocratic wealth lay in hundreds of poor peasant farmers working on the vast baronial estates. The barons were deeply concerned that their property was being ruined by the constant amercements (fines) of their villeins by royal officials. With clause 29, the barons made it clear they didn’t want the king to exploit their property (i.e. the near-enslaved men, women and children on their estates) and wreck their wealth; they wanted to do that themselves.
But you’ll notice that this clause has nothing to say about the legal process by which to establish the guilt or innocence of a villein. The hallowed clause 39 still does not apply. So if you, as a lowly serf, are wrongly accused of some, by thirteenth-century standards dire, crime, you can still be imprisoned or exiled or have your leg chopped off purely on the say-so of a bent royal official, with no trial, just as easily after Magna Carta as before.
And while we’re talking about how little Magna Carta had to offer the downtrodden of society, we had better get to clause 54. What an embarrassment that is. Nobody likes to mention it these days. But in the interests of historical truth, I think you should know about it. Clause 54 reads:
No one shall be arrested or imprisoned on the appeal of a woman for the death of any person except her husband.
In other words, Magna Carta lays down that if a woman’s father or sister or her best friend are stabbed to death before her eyes, she has no recourse herself to the law. She has to get a man to see to it for her. It could be suggested that if Islamic fundamentalists wanted to do what we’ve been doing for the past 800 years, that is pick the bits of Magna Carta that we like and ignore the rest, they could cite Magna Carta in support of sharia law on the role (or rather lack of role) of women in society. The Great Charter’s long history would make a great subject for the study of selective memory.
So what is the real significance of this delicate little piece of parchment, no bigger than a table napkin, lying in the British Library beneath a soft protective light in a security-strength glass cabinet with humidity and temperature closely controlled? What is it in reality, rather than in later myth? Magna Carta recognises the logical conclusion to what had been happening in England for the previous fifty years. If you are going to introduce a legal system which is attractive to the citizenry because it delivers fair and just decisions – which is what Henry II had done, partly with the less than high-minded motive of raising cash for the crown – then sooner or later, the king too has to be subject to it. Otherwise there can be no guarantee of justice. That’s what Magna Carta implicitly recognises.
The Great Charter is not a constitution. It’s not democracy in the making. It’s not a beacon of freedom and justice for all. The document was never intended to be any of those things.
Magna Carta’s greatest accomplishment is to put down in writing, not a principle, but examples of how a medieval king is subject to the law. And let’s be clear. That is no mean achievement. It’s one that sometimes gets forgotten among all the other froth that has often surrounded this little patch of parchment. The very fact that it stated that the king was not above the law meant that Magna Carta could become a treasured symbol for later generations when they felt themselves unjustly oppressed – not only by kings, but by presidents, dictators and, in fact, by any form government which human beings have devised.
It’s highly doubtful that either John or the barons, on that June day in 1215, saw Magna Carta as anything more than a short-term stalling tactic while they each gathered their forces for the fight they expected to come. The rebel barons renewed their oaths of allegiance to the king before both sides departed from Runnymede, leaving the Charter for the scriveners to deal with. After being written out, the copies were all checked word by word for accuracy by representatives of both barons and king before the royal seal was pressed into hot wax and attached to the bottom by means of a twisted cord or a ribbon. Each copy was then carried on horseback by a king’s messenger, under escort, to one of the principal cathedrals or cities of England, where it was read out, perhaps with an Anglo-Norman French translation.
And that was it.
Within three months, Magna Carta was a dead letter. Despite promises on both sides, its fine words were ignored by both king and rebels, and they resorted instead to old-fashioned solutions to their differences, the sword and the crossbow. Full-scale civil war broke out.
The Great Charter itself might then have been relegated to a footnote in the history books, forgotten by all but a few specialist medieval scholars, if it hadn’t been for one unfortunate little happening. The king ate a bad bit of fish, or some other equally noxious food that upset his stomach. It killed him. But it put new life into Magna Carta.
John’s luck ran out as he journeyed along the stretch of the east coast of England known as the Wash. And that’s where we’re heading next.