This Is What the Media Forgot to Mention About Magna Carta

Dr Gillian Polack is a medieval historian, editor and novelist as well as a lecturer. She has been published in both the academic world and the world of historical fiction. Her most recent non-fiction book, released this June, is The Middle Ages Unlocked (Amberley 2015), co-written with the archaeologist Katrin Kania. The book explores a wide range of topics, revealing the complex tapestry of medieval England and the people who lived there.


This year has some major medieval milestones. In June, for instance, we celebrated the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. We make milestones, and they make us. We create them in order to reinforce something important to our culture. These things are not always what the original event was about. Take the Magna Carta, for instance. The emotional pull of the Magna Carta is far more than the sum of its parts. To the general public it’s a big and important document that still holds sway and reminds us of the society we dream of. It’s our cultural code for fundamental principles as due process and rule of law. It’s seen as a symbol of liberty and celebrated as one of the pivotal documents that enabled us to create our modern selves. The history of the document however, and the history of charters in general, is far more complex and interesting.

It was not the first written document of its kind.

After the Anarchy 1135-54, where Stephen and Matilda lived the Game of Thrones dream and, along the way, devastated England, there was a breakdown of the rule of law. It was so bad that when Henry II came to the throne, he undertook a great many reforms. Currency, tax, legal systems: he tried to make England as stable as possible as quickly as he could.

One of the easiest ways of doing this was to remind people that “We weren’t always the Anarchy. Once upon a time we had rule of law and stability and all the things we yearn after now.” So he did that. One of the ways he reminded people was through a single document, where he explained the king’s role, lucidly and in a way that reinforced the sense that civilization had returned. One of the techniques Henry used to establish this sense of a return to what was good in the past was by saying that this or that would be done as in the time of his grandfather, Henry I. It saved words, and explanations, and provided a sense that the unstable period was gone. This was the original grandfather clause, and when I was in the business of advising on legislative matters, I learned that Henry was the original grandfather. So many legal systems rely on grandfather clauses. We rely on assumptions that things can be the way they were. We rely on them for freedoms, for social pacts, for stability. We rely on them for so many things. Some of these things do not rest on the literal history of the document.


http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/159934