In a sunny meadow in southern England stands a quiet monument commemorating a document signed there centuries ago: the Magna Carta. The monument is erected not by some English historical society, however, but by the American Bar Association. The Magna Carta, or Great Charter, has had a fascinating life, famed more in legacy than in its own day. Dan Jones’ Magna Carta is not simply a history of how the Great Charter came to be: his Realm Divided covered that fairly well. Instead, it is both a history of how the Charter came to be created and how it grew to be a legend in the annals of the Anglo-American world — regarded as the foundation of law beyond the king’s arbitrary authority. It’s a short book, with over half its physical body being composed of appendices. Interestingly, the story begins with John’s father Henry II, who created an increasingly efficient machine in the English state for conducting business and extracting money from the populace; this machine would be put to especially good use by Richard II, who I was surprised to learn spent vanishingly little time in England proper. John, too, would take advantage of it both for his own causes and when Richard was taken hostage and needed to pay off his European captors. A recurring theme here is the absolute faithlessness of monarchs to their people, family to family — John was trying to help the French undermine his brother, only to later be bitten by serpent he’d nursed when Phillip II seized all of the Angevin dynasty’s French holdings — and the barons and their king. One can understand the barons wanting to strike against the king, but soliciting the French who have already taken the barons’ “home” of Normandy? Frankly, if it weren’t for the very brief mention of Thomas Becket in this, there’d be no one to root for at all. The last twenty pages of the text concerns the ‘afterlife’ of Magna Carta: evidently in the 13th century it was continually modified and re-issued, and then fell into disuse, but then during the Enlightenment era when liberalism first became a political force, both Englishmen at home and in the American colonies seized on it as an ancestral inspiration for their own desire to reign in power via the law, and its reputation has been ballooning ever since.

This was in short a brief, but interesting little history.

Quotations

It is true that at times John was no less ruthless than his brother Richard, nor any less manipulative than his father, Henry. But if his relatives shared some of his worst traits, he shared almost none of their best. […] Ralph of Coggeshall lived through John’s reign and despaired of the king, pointing out his cruelty, his small-minded viciousness, his threatening manner and his childish habits of ridiculing his subjects and laughing at their misfortunes.