Download Magna Carta, also called Magna Carta Libertatum

Magna Carta, also called Magna Carta Libertatum (the
Great Charter of Freedoms), is an English legal
charter, originally issued in the year 1215. It was
written in Latin and is known by its Latin name. The
usual English translation of Magna Carta is Great
Charter.
Magna Carta required King John of England to proclaim
certain rights (pertaining to freemen), respect certain
legal procedures, and accept that his will could be
bound by the law. It explicitly protected certain
rights of the King's subjects, whether free or fettered
— and implicitly supported what became the writ of
habeas corpus, allowing appeal against unlawful
imprisonment.
Magna Carta was arguably the most significant early
influence on the extensive historical process that led
to the rule of constitutional law today in the English
speaking world. Magna Carta influenced the development
of the common law and many constitutional documents,
including the United States Constitution.[1] Many
clauses were renewed throughout the Middle Ages, and
continued to be renewed as late as the 18th century. By
the second half of the 19th century, however, most
clauses in their original form had been repealed from
English law.
Magna Carta was the first document forced onto an
English King by a group of his subjects (the barons) in
an attempt to limit his powers by law and protect their
privileges. It was preceded by the 1100 Charter of
Liberties in which King Henry I voluntarily stated that
his own powers were under the law.
In practice, Magna Carta in the medieval period mostly
did not limit the power of Kings; but by the time of
the English Civil War it had become an important symbol
for those who wished to show that the King was bound by
the law.
Magna Carta is normally understood to refer to a single
document, that of 1215. Various amended versions of
Magna Carta appeared in subsequent years however, and
it is the 1297 version which remains on the statute
books of England and Wales.
Contents
Background
One of the certified copies of Magna Carta made in
1215.
After the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and
advances in the 12th century, the English King had by
1199 become a powerful and influential monarch in
Europe. Factors contributing to this include the
sophisticated centralised government created by the
procedures of the new Norman systems of governance and
extensive Anglo-Norman land holdings within Normandy.
But after King John of England was crowned in the early
13th century, a series of failures at home and abroad,
combined with perceived abuses of the king's power, led
the English barons to revolt and attempt to restrain
what the king could legally do.
[edit] France
King John's actions in France were a major cause of
discontent in the realm. At the time of his accession
to the throne after Richard's death, there were no set
rules to define the line of succession. King John, as
Richard's younger brother, was crowned over Richard's
nephew, Arthur of Brittany. Since Arthur still had a
claim over the Anjou empire, however, John needed the
approval of the French king, Philip Augustus. To get
it, John gave to Philip large tracts of the Frenchspeaking Anjou territories.
When John later married Isabella of Angoulême, her
previous fiancé (Hugh IX of Lusignan, one of John's
vassals) appealed to Philip, who then declared forfeit
all of John's French lands, including the rich
Normandy. Philip declared Arthur as the true ruler of
the Anjou throne and invaded John's French holdings in
mid-1202 to give it to him. John had to act to save
face, but his eventual actions did not achieve this—
Arthur disappeared in suspicious circumstances, and
John was widely believed to have murdered him, thus
losing the little support he had from his French
barons.
After the defeat of John's allies at the Battle of
Bouvines,[2] Philip retained all of John's northern
French territories, including Normandy (although
Aquitaine remained in English hands for a time). These
serious military defeats, which lost to the English a
major source of income, made John unpopular at home.
Worse, to recoup his expenses, he had to further tax
the already unhappy barons.
The Church
The Pope and Magna Charta by Cardinal Manning
At the time of John's reign there was still a great
deal of controversy as to how the Archbishop of
Canterbury was to be elected, although it had become
traditional that the monarch would appoint a candidate
with the approval of the monks of Canterbury.
But in the early 13th century, the bishops began to
want a say. To retain control, the monks elected one of
their numbers to the role. But John, incensed at his
lack of involvement in the proceedings, sent John de
Gray, the Bishop of Norwich, to Rome as his choice.
Pope Innocent III declared both choices invalid and
persuaded the monks to elect Stephen Langton.
Nevertheless, John refused to accept this choice and
exiled the monks from the realm. Infuriated, Innocent
ordered an interdict (prevention of public worship —
mass, marriages, the ringing of church bells, etc.) in
England in 1208, excommunicated John in 1209, and
encouraged Philip to invade England in 1212.
John finally relented, and agreed to endorse Langton
and allow the exiles to return. To placate the Pope, he
gave England and Ireland as papal territories and
rented them back as a fiefdom for 1,000 marks per
annum. This surrender of autonomy to a foreign power
further enraged the barons.
[edit] Taxes
King John I needed money for armies, but the loss of
the French territories, especially Normandy, greatly
reduced the state income, and a huge tax would need to
be raised to reclaim these territories. Yet, it was
difficult to raise taxes because of the tradition of
keeping them unchanged.
John relied on clever manipulation of pre-existing
rights, including those of forest law, which regulated
the king's hunting preserves, which were easily
violated and severely punished. John also increased the
pre-existing scutage (feudal payment to an overlord
replacing direct military service) eleven times in his
seventeen years as king, as compared to eleven times
during the reign of the preceding three monarchs. The
last two of these increases were double the increase of
their predecessors. He also imposed the first income
tax, raising the (then) extortionate sum of £70,000.
Rebellion and signing of the document
John of England signs Magna Carta. Illustration from
Cassell's History of England (1902)
By 1215, some of the most important barons in England
had had enough, and with the support of Prince Louis
the French Dauphin and King Alexander II of the Scots,
they entered London in force on 10 June 1215,[3] with
the city showing its sympathy with their cause by
opening its gates to them. They, and many of the
moderates not in overt rebellion, forced King John to
agree to the "Articles of the Barons", to which his
Great Seal was attached in the meadow at Runnymede on
15 June 1215. In return, the barons renewed their oaths
of fealty to King John on 19 June 1215. The
contemporary chronicler, Roger of Wendover, recorded
the events in his Flores Historiarum.[4] A formal
document to record the agreement was created by the
royal chancery on 15 July: this was the original Magna
Carta. An unknown number of copies of it were sent out
to officials, such as royal sheriffs and bishops.
The most significant clause for King John at the time
was clause 61, known as the "security clause", the
longest portion of the document. This established a
committee of 25 barons who could at any time meet and
overrule the will of the King, through force by seizing
his castles and possessions if needed.[5] This was
based on a medieval legal practice known as distraint,
but it was the first time it had been applied to a
monarch. In addition, the King was to take an oath of
loyalty to the committee.
Clause 61 essentially neutered John's power as a
monarch, making him King in name only. He renounced it
as soon as the barons left London, plunging England
into a civil war, called the First Barons' War. Pope
Innocent III also annulled the "shameful and demeaning
agreement, forced upon the King by violence and fear."
He rejected any call for restraints on the King, saying
it impaired John's dignity. He saw it as an affront to
the Church's authority over the King and the 'papal
territories' of England and Ireland, and he released
John from his oath to obey it.
Magna Carta re-issued
Prince Louis invaded England in 1216, and was
proclaimed king in London in May of that year with the
support of the barons. However, John died from
dysentery on 18 October 1216, and this quickly changed
the nature of the war. His nine-year-old son Henry was
next in line for the throne. The royalists believed the
rebel barons would find the idea of loyalty to the
child Henry more palatable, so the boy was swiftly
crowned Henry III in late October 1216, Louis's support
for the English throne collapsed (he would go on to
reign in France as Louis VIII), and the war ended.
Henry's regent reissued Magna Carta in his name on 12
November 1216, omitting some clauses, such as clause
61, and again in 1217. When he turned 18 in 1225, Henry
III reissued Magna Carta, this time in a shorter
version with only 37 articles.
Henry III ruled for 56 years (the longest reign of an
English Monarch in the Medieval period) so that by the
time of his death in 1272, Magna Carta had become a
settled part of English legal precedent.
The Parliament of Henry III's son and heir, Edward I,
reissued Magna Carta for the final time on 12 October
1297, as part of a statute called Confirmatio cartarum,
reconfirming Henry III's shorter version of Magna Carta
from 1225.
Content
Magna Carta was originally written in Latin. A large
part of Magna Carta was copied, nearly word for word,
from the Charter of Liberties of Henry I, issued when
Henry I ascended to the throne in 1100, which bound the
king to certain laws regarding the treatment of church
officials and nobles, effectively granting certain
civil liberties to the church and the English nobility.
Magna carta cum statutis angliae, (Great Charter with
English Statutes) page 1 of manuscript, fourteenth
century.
The document commonly known as Magna Carta today is not
the 1215 charter but a later charter of 1225, and is
usually shown in the form of The Charter of 1297 when
it was confirmed by Edward I. At the time of the 1215
charter, many of the provisions were not meant to make
long term changes but simply to right the immediate
wrongs, and therefore The Charter was reissued three
times in the reign of Henry III (1216, 1217 and 1225)
in order to provide for an updated version. After this,
each individual king for the next two hundred years
(until Henry V in 1416) personally confirmed the 1225
charter in his own charter.
Rights still in force today
For modern times, the most enduring legacy of Magna
Carta is considered the right of habeas corpus. This
right arises from what are now known as clauses 36, 38,
39, and 40 of the 1215 Magna Carta.
As the most recent version, it is the 1297 Charter
which remains in legal force in England and Wales.
Using the clauses in the 1297 charter (the content and
numbering are somewhat different from the 1215
Charter): Clause 1 guarantees the freedom of the
English Church. Although this originally meant freedom
from the King, later in history it was used for
different purposes (see below). Clause 9 guarantees the
"ancient liberties" of the City of London. Clause 29
guarantees a right to due process.
* I. FIRST, We have granted to God, and by this
our present Charter have confirmed, for Us and our
Heirs for ever, that the Church of England shall be
free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties
inviolable. We have granted also, and given to all the
Freemen of our Realm, for Us and our Heirs for ever,
these Liberties under-written, to have and to hold to
them and their Heirs, of Us and our Heirs for ever.
* IX. THE City of London shall have all the old
Liberties and Customs which it hath been used to have.
Moreover We will and grant, that all other Cities,
Boroughs, Towns, and the Barons of the Five Ports, as
with all other Ports, shall have all their Liberties
and free Customs.
* XXIX. NO Freeman shall be taken or
imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or
Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled,
or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon
him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his
Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no
man, we will not deny or defer to any man either
Justice or Right.[6]
The Great Council only existed to give input on the
opinion of the kingdom as a whole, and it only had
power to control scutage until 1258 when Henry III got
into debt fighting in Sicily for the pope. The barons
agreed to a tax in exchange for reform, leading to the
Provisions of Oxford. But Henry got a papal bull
allowing him to set aside the provisions and in 1262
told royal officers to ignore the provisions and only
to obey Magna Carta. The barons revolted and seized the
Tower of London, the Cinque ports and Gloucester.
Initially the King surrendered, but when Louis IX of
France arbitrated in favour of Henry, Henry crushed the
rebellion. Later he ceded somewhat, passing the Statute
of Marlborough in 1267, which allowed writs for
breaches of Magna Carta to be free of charge, enabling
anyone to have standing to apply the Charter.
This secured the position
but its powers were still
originally only met three
subservient to the King's
unlike the Great Council,
went.
of the Great Council forever,
very limited. The council
times per year and so was
council, Curiae Regis, who,
followed the king wherever he
Still, in some senses the council was an early form of
parliament. It had the power to meet outside the
authority of the King and was not appointed by him.
While executive government descends from the Curiae
Regis, parliament descends from the Great Council,
which was later called the parliamentum. However, the
Great Council was very different from modern
parliament. There were no knights, let alone commons,
and it was composed of the most powerful men, rather
than elected citizens.
Magna Carta had little effect on subsequent development
of parliament until the Tudor period. Knights and
county representatives attended the Great Council
(Simon de Montfort's Parliament), and the council
became far more representative under the model
parliament of Edward I which included two knights from
each county, two burgesses from each borough and two
citizens from each city. The Commons separated from the
Lords in 1341. The right of the Commons to exclusively
sanction taxes (based on a withdrawn provision of Magna
Carta) was re-asserted in 1407, although it was not in
force in this period. The power vested in the Great
Council by, albeit withdrawn, Clause 14 of Magna Carta
became vested in the House of Commons but Magna Carta
was all but forgotten for about a century, until the
Tudors.
Tudor dynasty (1485 - 1603)
Magna Carta was the first entry on the statute books,
but after 1472, it was not mentioned for a period of
nearly 100 years. There was much ignorance about the
document. The few who did know about the document spoke
of a good king being forced by an unstable pope and
rebellious barons "to attaine the shadow of seeming
liberties" and that it was a product of a wrongful
rebellion against the one true authority, the king. The
original Magna Carta was seen as an ancient document
with shadowy origins and as having no bearing on the
Tudor world. Shakespeare's King John makes no mention
of the Charter at all but focuses on the murder of
Arthur. The Charter in the statute books was correctly
thought to have arisen from the reign of Henry III.
First uses of the charter as a bill of rights
This statute was used widely in the reign of Henry VIII
(1509 - 1547) but was seen as no more special than any
other statute and could be amended and removed. But
later in the reign, the Lord Treasurer stated in the
Star Chamber that many had lost their lives in the
Baronial wars fighting for the liberties which were
guaranteed by the Charter, and therefore it should not
so easily be overlooked as a simple and regular
statute.
The church often attempted to invoke the first clause
of the Charter to protect itself from the attacks by
Henry, but this claim was given no credence. Francis
Bacon was the first to try to use Clause 39 to
guarantee due process in a trial.
Although there was a re-awakening of the use of Magna
Carta in common law, it was not seen (as it was later)
as an entrenched set of liberties guaranteed for the
people against the Crown and Government. Rather, it was
a normal statute, which gave a certain level of
liberties, most of which could not be relied on, least
of all against the king. Therefore, the Charter had
little effect on the governance of the early Tudor
period. Although lay parliament evolved from the
Charter, by this stage the powers of parliament had
managed to exceed those humble beginnings. The Charter
had no real effect until the Elizabethan age. (1558 1603)
Reinterpretation of the charter
In the Elizabethan age, England was becoming a powerful
force in Europe. In academia, earnest but futile
attempts were made to prove that Parliament had Roman
origins. The events at Runnymede in 1215 were "rediscovered", allowing a possibility to show the
antiquity of Parliament, and Magna Carta became
synonymous with the idea of an ancient house with
origins in Roman government.
The Charter was interpreted as an attempt to return to
a pre-Norman state of things. The Tudors saw the
Charter as proof that their state of governance had
existed since time immemorial and the Normans had been
a brief break from this liberty and democracy. This
claim is disputed in certain circles but explains how
Magna Carta came to be regarded as such an important
document.
Magna Carta again occupied legal minds, and it again
began to shape how that government was run. Soon the
Charter was seen as an immutable entity. In the trial
of Arthur Hall for questioning the antiquity of the
House, one of his alleged crimes was an attack on Magna
Carta.
Edward Coke's opinions
Jurist Edward Coke interpreted Magna Carta to apply not
only to the protection of nobles but to all subjects of
the crown equally. He famously asserted: "Magna Carta
is such a fellow, that he will have no sovereign."
One of the first respected jurists to write seriously
about the great charter was Edward Coke, who had a
great deal to say on the subject and was influential in
the way Magna Carta was perceived throughout the Tudor
and Stuart periods, although his opinions changed
across time and his writing in the Stuart period was
more influential. In the Elizabethan period, Coke wrote
of Parliament evolving alongside the monarchy and not
existing by any allowance on the part of the monarch.
However he was still fiercely loyal to Elizabeth, and
the monarchy still judged the Charter in the same light
it always had: an evil document forced out of their
forefathers by brute force. He therefore prevented a
re-affirmation of the charter from passing the House,
and although he spoke highly of the charter, he did not
speak out against imprisonments without due process.
This came back to haunt him later when he moved for a
reaffirmation of the charter.
Role in the lead-up to the Civil War
By the time of the Stuarts (1603), Magna Carta had
attained an almost mythical status for its admirers and
was seen as representing a 'golden age' of English
liberties extant prior to the Norman invasion. Whether
or not this 'golden age' ever truly existed is open to
debate; regardless, proponents of its application to
English law saw themselves as leading England back to a
pre-Norman state of affairs. What is true, however is
that this age existed in the hearts and minds of people
of the time. Magna Carta was not important because of
the liberties it bestowed, but simply as 'proof' of
what had come before; many great minds influentially
exalted the Charter; by the seventeenth century, Coke
was talking of the Charter as an indispensable method
of limiting the powers of the Crown, a popular
principle in the Stuart period where the kings were
proclaiming their divine right and were looking, in the
minds of some of their subjects, towards becoming
absolute monarchs.
It was not the content of the Charter which has made it
so important in the history of England, but more how it
has been perceived in the popular mind. This is
something that certainly started in the Stuart period,
as the Charter represented many things, which are not
to be found in the Charter itself. Firstly it was used
to claim liberties against the Government in general
rather than just the Crown and the officers of the
crown, secondly that it represented that the laws and
liberties of England, specifically Parliament, dated
back to a time immemorial and thirdly, that it was not
only just but right to usurp a king who disobeyed the
law.
For the last of these reasons Magna Carta began to
represent a danger to the monarchy; Elizabeth ordered
that John Coke stop a bill from going through
Parliament which would have reaffirmed the validity of
the Charter, and Charles I ordered the suppression of a
book which Coke intended to write on Magna Carta. The
powers of Parliament were growing, and on Coke's death,
parliament ordered his house to be searched; the
manuscripts were recovered, and the book was published
in 1642 (at the end of Charles I's Personal Rule).
Parliament began to see Magna Carta as its best way of
claiming supremacy over the crown and began to state
that they were the sworn defenders of the liberties —
fundamental and immemorial — which were to be found in
the Charter.
In the four centuries since the Charter had originally
catered for their creation, Parliament's power had
increased greatly from their original level where they
existed only for the purpose that the king had to seek
their permission in order to raise scutage. They had
become the only body allowed to raise tax, a right
which although descended from the 1215 Great Charter
was not guaranteed by it, since it was removed from the
1225 edition. Parliament had become so powerful that
the Charter was being used both by those wishing to
limit Parliament's power (as a new organ of the Crown),
and by those who wished Parliament to rival the king's
power (as a set of principles Parliament was sworn to
defend against the king). When it became obvious that
some people wished to limit the power of Parliament by
claiming it to be tantamount to the crown, Parliament
claimed they had the sole right of interpretation of
the Charter.
This was an important step; for the first time
Parliament was claiming itself a body as above the law;
whereas one of the fundamental principles in English
law was that the law, Parliament, the monarch, and the
church held all, albeit to different extents.
Parliament was claiming exactly what Magna Carta wanted
to prevent the king from claiming, a claim of not being
subject to any higher form of power. This was not
claimed until ten years after the death of Lord Coke,
but he would not have agreed with this, because he
claimed in the English Constitution the law was supreme
and all bodies of government were subservient to the
supreme law, which is to say the common law, as
embodied in the Great Charter. These early discussions
of Parliament sovereignty seemed to only involve the
Charter as the entrenched law, and the discussions were
simply about whether Parliament had enough power to
repeal the document.
Although it was important for Parliament to be able to
claim themselves more powerful than the King in the
forthcoming struggle, the Charter provided for this
very provision. Clause 61 of the Charter enables people
to swear allegiance to what became the Great Council
and later Parliament and therefore to renounce
allegiance to the king. Moreover, Clause 61 allowed for
the seizing of the kingdom by the body which later
became Parliament if Magna Carta was not respected by
the king or Lord Chief Justice. So there was no need to
show any novel level of power in order to overthrow the
king; it had already been set out in Magna Carta nearly
half a millennium before. Parliament was not ready to
repeal the Charter yet however, and in fact, it was
cited as the reason why ship money was illegal (the
first time Parliament overruled the king).
[edit] Trial of Archbishop Laud
Further proof of the significance of Magna Carta is
shown in the trial of Archbishop Laud in 1645. Laud was
tried with attempting to subvert the laws of England
including writing a condemnation of Magna Carta
claiming that as the Charter came about due to
rebellion it was not valid (a widely held opinion less
than a century before, when the 'true' Magna Carta was
thought to be the 1225 edition, with the 1215 edition
being considered less valid for this very reason).
However, Laud was not trying to say that Magna Carta
was evil, and he actually used the document in his
defence. He claimed his trial was against the right of
the freedom of the church (as the Bishops were voted
out of Parliament in order to allow for parliamentary
condemnation of him) and, that he was not given the
benefit of due process contrary to Clauses 1 and 39 of
the Charter. By this stage, Magna Carta had passed a
great distance beyond the original intentions for the
document, and the Great Council had evolved beyond a
body merely ensuring the application of the Charter. It
had gotten to the stage where the Great Council or
Parliament was inseparable from the ideas of the Crown
as described in the Charter and therefore it was
potentially not just the King that was bound by the
Charter, but Parliament also.
[edit] Civil War and interregnum
After the seven years of the civil war (1642 - 1649),
after the king had surrendered and had been executed,
it seemed Magna Carta no longer applied, as there was
no King. Oliver Cromwell was accused of destroying
Magna Carta, and many thought he should be crowned just
so that it would apply.[citation needed] Cromwell had
much disdain for Magna Carta, at one point describing
it as "Magna Farta" to a defendant who sought to rely
on it.[10]
In this time of foment, there were many revolutionary
theorists, and many based their theories at least
initially on Magna Carta, in the misguided belief that
Magna Carta guaranteed liberty and equality for all.