The Real Magna Carta

The Magna Carta of 1215 is celebrated globally as the foundation of modern liberties and rights for its stipulation of equality before the law and its placing of monarchs and rulers under it. However, significant as the 1215 charter is, the document sealed in June of that year between King John and his rebellious barons was a prototype, far from the final version set out in law. That came ten years later in 1225.

The 1215 text was not even named Magna Carta, but the Articles of the Barons. Its 63 clauses agreed between John and the barons arrayed against him did not survive much beyond two months, as the opposing forces were soon back at war with each other. Capitalising on the civil war in England a French invasion followed. John’s death in October 1216 did not end the conflict, though a revised Articles of the Barons – with one-third of the original causes dropped – was issued in Bristol in November by the new king, Henry III, then only nine years old. It was only after the defeat of the barons and the expulsion of their French allies a year later that we arrive at ‘Magna Carta’, the ‘Great Charter’, when in November 1217 a further four clauses related to forest laws and rights were transferred to a new Charter of Forest Liberties. What was left, the larger part, became the Great Charter, marking the peace settlement at the end of the civil war. But Magna Carta still had one more stage in its evolution before achieving its final form. That came on 11 February 1225.

With the barons quelled and the French driven out, why did Henry III feel the need to reissue Magna Carta? His reasons were not so different from his father’s: he needed the consent of his subjects to impose new taxation on them, in order to fund war against the French. (In 1215 John’s punitive fiscal demands that caused so much backlash arose from the need to finance military campaigns in a vain attempt to win back the lands he had lost in France.) Although in the preamble to the last version Henry III declares that he is reissuing it ‘of our own spontaneous good will’, once again, the reason was French military pressures.

Prince Louis, the invader of England in 1216-17 and now King Louis VIII, was conquering English lands in France; he had already taken Poitou. Henry urgently required money to hold Gascony. The final clause of the 1225 Charter states:

For the concession and gift of these liberties and the other liberties contained in our charter of liberties of the forest, the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, knights, free tenants, and all of our kingdom, have given us a fifteenth part of all their movables.

This ‘fifteenth’ raised £40,000, enough to secure victory for the English through a major expedition later that year which retook Gascony. The magnates had agreed to this not only ‘for the tranquillity and protection of the kingdom’, but also in exchange for the permanence of the liberties in the Great and Forest Charters. Magna Carta was thereby ensured and enshrined as part of England’s ill-defined constitution. As both 1215 and 1225 show: no French, no Great Charter.

This final Charter was much the same as the 1217 one, although 47 clauses had become 37. The document is considerably less radical than the 1215 one, especially in terms of consent for taxation and restraints on monarchical power. Yet, beyond the dominant feudal and economic concerns of its age – such as inheritance, wardship, knights’ service, castle-guard, and scutage – the Charter contains powerfully enduring concepts such as the liberty of the Church, no arbitrary legal punishment for anyone ‘except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land’, and no legal corruption: ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay right or justice.’

In one key aspect the final Charter of 1225 is more radical than its predecessors: it was granted to ‘all of our kingdom’, and not just its ‘free men and women’; over half the people of England previously excluded from the liberties of Magna Carta were now included – primarily all villeins and serfs.

Henry reissued his final Magna Carta nearly a dozen times during his long reign; in the 1250s it appeared not only in Latin and French but also English, to ensure all understood it, thereby embedding it further into the consciousness of the people. Edward I granted his own reissue in 1297 – for war taxation to fight the French again. By the time of its final reissue in 1300, Magna Carta had become a permanent feature of England’s constitutional landscape.

However, under the increasingly strong and centralised government of the Tudors in the 16th century, Magna Carta lost its relevance; it does not even merit a mention in Shakespeare’s The Life and Death of King John (c.1595). It owed its return to relevance and fame to lawyers responding to what they perceived as the tyranny of a new John: King Charles I in the clash between Crown and Parliament. In 1628 the jurist Edward Coke declared: ‘Magna Carta is such a fellow, that he will have no sovereign.’ The rebelling colonies in America felt the same way, deeming the Charter to be fundamental law that took precedence over both Crown and Parliament.

By 1970 UK legal reforms had whittled Magna Carta down to just three-and-a-half clauses from 1225, concerning the liberties of the Church and London and due process of law. Nonetheless, it is the Magna Carta of 1225 that has been enacted and invoked down the centuries – a truth worth remembering on its 800th anniversary.

Sean McGlynn is author of Blood Cries Afar: The Magna Carta War and the Invasion of England, 1215-1217 (2015) and Lecturer in History at the University of Plymouth at Strode College.