Spotlight on History Enthusiast Jon Marshall – actor, director, producer - History Roadshow

Jon Marshall has been interested in cinematography since his early years, having been a member of an 8 mm club in his home city of Sheffield, Yorkshire. His artistic expression in film and an insatiable love of history led to the creation of History Roadshow, providing video tours of English Heritage and National Trust properties showcased on YouTube.

Initially, chosen locations held personal memories of past visits, but public interest expanded his vision to include the myriad of sites throughout the United Kingdom. His membership with English Heritage and the National Trust gave him access to every location in the country, comprising a large catalog of famous and not so famous places of interest.

Recently, Jon decided to leave directing, embarking on an actor’s career to narrate the series personally. His work includes Conquest, Crown, and Charter. A trilogy of videos starting with the reign of William the Conqueror through that of King John and Magna Carta.

Jon’s latest endeavor includes another trilogy of videos, The Six Mothers in Law of Henry VIII.

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What is the oldest law in England?

History Extra

Habeas corpus is, indeed, one of the most distinctive features of English law and may well be the oldest in force. The law means literally “you shall have the body”, but in practice allows any court of law to demand that any person is brought before it. Historically it has been used to stop a person being held in prison unlawfully or without a fair trial.

 Habeas corpus is often said to originate in Magna Carta, signed by King John in 1215. The habeas corpus provisions in Magna Carta were codifying an already existing procedure that dates back to the 1130s and probably to pre-Norman England.

Although habeas corpus is still on the statute book, the version now in force dates from the amended Magna Carta issued by Edward I in 1297. The oldest formally written law still in force in England is therefore the Distress Act of 1267. This made it illegal to seek ‘distress’, or compensation for damage, by any means other than a lawsuit in a court of law – effectively outlawing private feuds.

Answered by Rupert Matthews, historian and author.

Medieval English law in the time of Magna Carta

History Extra

A king and his minister doing justice, c1050. Original publication from an 11th-century manuscript. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
  

English law in the time of Magna Carta was based on two traditions, one going back to the time before the Norman Conquest of 1066, the other created in the 12th century. The older tradition had roots in old customs and in texts, one of which is thought to have been written between 601 and 604 AD.
A wide range of issues was covered by these early laws, including punishment for criminal activity and compensation payments for injuries. One of the kings who contributed to this legal system was Alfred, king of the West Saxons (c849–899), who laid the foundations for a united kingdom of England. The counties into which England was divided, probably since the ninth century, were administrative units under royal officials – ‘shire reeves’ – who were also entrusted with the task of jurisdiction. They convened the county courts, and it was here and in the subdivisions of the counties (of which there were hundreds) that most trials took place.
The law dispensed here was ‘customary’ law. It had been developed further through written royal laws, which are often attributed to individual rulers of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Most people had to take their litigation to the county court and only members of the social elite had direct access to the king.
The second tradition, created by the legal changes in the 12th century, generated a new legal system based on royal justice. It was enforced by royal judges who were sent into the counties, where they used the traditional county courts as a forum for a gradually developing new royal law.

The jury system

Among the legal innovations was the jury, which was introduced in civil cases – mostly those about the possession of land as well as in the criminal law. Juries were supposed to be composed of well-informed people who would provide information with the promise – made before God – to speak the truth. This obligation gave them their name: jury, from Latin ‘jurare’, meaning to give an oath.
In the evolving land law, juries were used to determine questions of fact, answerable simply by ‘yes’ or ‘no’, in proceedings about inheritance or in disputes about ‘seisin’, a form of direct control of land and buildings. Was the claimant’s ancestor really the last person to be seised and is the claimant really that tenant’s heir? Had a person who had been seised of a specific piece of land been forcibly evicted without judgement?
These – and similar – procedures were popular, and part of the beginnings of a common law that was based on royal authority and which applied to all parts of the kingdom in the same way. The mechanisms of this law were first described by Ranulf de Glanvill, one of the administrators of Henry II (king of England from 1154–89), who also served as a military leader and diplomat, his career culminating when he obtained the highest office in royal service, that of justiciar.
Glanvill’s treatise, On the Laws and Customs of the Kingdom of England, reveals a pragmatic and in many ways modern legal system. During Henry II’s reign royal justice was made available to all free subjects, and since the king and his court tended to be mobile (not merely in England but also in other territories, notably Normandy), a royal law court independent of the royal household was set up in England.

_{The seal of King Henry II of England, 12th century. From the original in the British Museum. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)}
However, elements of the older legal tradition continued to be part of the law, for example in the criminal law. Up to 1215 proof of guilt or innocence was still by ordeal, a procedure that invoked divine intervention to determine whether the accused was responsible for the crime or not. Invariably this was a public ceremony involving a short period of fasting, a religious service and the subjection of the defendant to the actual test. In the 12th century this was very likely the ordeal of cold water: the accused would be submerged in water to see whether he would float (a sign of guilt) or sink (a sign of innocence).
Two other ordeals involved the ritual infliction of injury: that of the hot iron and that of boiling water. The first saw the defendant carry a hot iron over a distance, while the second ordeal forced the defendant to retrieve items from a cauldron filled with boiling water. In these forms the healing process determined the guilt or innocence of the accused. These ordeals required the participation of a priest, a precondition that could no longer be met when the Church decided to prohibit the involvement of priests in these ceremonies in a council held at the Lateran in Rome in 1215. The council’s decision made it impossible to continue with the traditional ordeals and an alternative had to be found. In England this led to the creation of the trial jury for criminal cases.

Magna Carta

These changes to the criminal law were not reflected in the 1215 Magna Carta, although the document contained frequent references to the law. Tenants-in-chief, those major landowners who held their property directly from the crown and their heirs, were protected from arbitrary royal demands when an inheritance was due.
Another form of protection for this elite group was King John’s promise not to grant the marriage of the heirs – and especially heiresses – of crown vassals to people below their social rank. As feudal lord the king had the right to do just that and John is known to have kept lists of heirs and heiresses whose marriage could he sold to the highest bidder.
Another clause of Magna Carta concerned the location of the royal court for pleas between private parties (common pleas) established during the reign of Henry II. It was important that litigants were able to find the venue and this was to be in a place known to all, according to baronial demands. However, the charter did not only deal with the social elite, although a baronial faction had been instrumental in forcing the king to agree to the demands. The opposition consisted of a broader spectrum of society and the interests of other groups were also considered in the document.
The privileges of London were confirmed and the commercial interests of wider communities were taken into consideration. There were to be no changes to the communities’ obligations to repair bridges – no arbitrary increase of traditional requirements to bear the costs – and royal bailiffs were not to put anyone on trial unless there were credible witnesses to the charge.

_{View of a copy of Magna Carta and seal of King John, 1900s. (Photo by Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)}


Merchants were to be secure in their business and they were to be granted free access to and from the country. The charter went even further in extending the range of social groups involved. It introduced changes to the forest law. The royal forest consisted not necessarily of woodland but of areas in which the king’s hunt was protected by imposing restrictions on landowners. This subject was so sensitive that in 1217, when a third version of Magna Carta was granted, the original document was accompanied by a separate charter only dealing with forest issues.

Modern historians emphasise that Magna Carta was an attempt to find a resolution for an acute political crisis rather than an effort to introduce long-term constitutional reform. Nevertheless the charters (Magna Carta versions of 1215, 1216, 1217 and 1225 as well as the Charter of the Forest of 1217) were an important element in the evolution of a distinctive English common law. The inclusion of specific and rather technical issues shows that the development of this law was part of a political process, a form of negotiation between a crown (with its power based on a modern and centralised administration) and different social groups who wanted a protection of their interests.


Dr Jens Röhrkasten is a lecturer in medieval history at the University of Birmingham who specialises in medieval criminal law.

History Trivia - Magna Carta sealed

June 19

1215 Magna Carta sealed: Following a revolt by the English nobility against his rule, King John puts his royal seal on the Magna Carta,  or "Great Charter."

Retaining the royals: why has the British monarchy survived – and thrived?

History Extra

Queen Victoria with Prince Albert and their children in 1846. After a painting by F Winterhalter. Victoria’s husband Albert “carved out for the crown a moral kind of authority as the nation’s first and model family,” says Sarah Gristwood. (Culture Club/Getty Images)

The royal family (so the theory used to go) ride into the 21st century atop a tidal wave of British tradition. They represent, for better or for worse, the nation’s love affair with the past. Every time we see the Queen wearing a centuries-old crown, walk through the Houses of Parliament to celebrate the even older deal struck between Commons and Crown, we reach for another digestive biscuit to dunk in our mug of English Breakfast tea.    

 

In recent years the theory has been modified, to acknowledge the changes that have come to the British monarchy. The strength of our royals – so this theory runs – is that they are prepared to change when necessary. Yes, even their head, a queen who has just celebrated her 90th birthday. She pays taxes, she sends a token tweet, she joins her grandson Harry to play a prank on the Obamas. Remember the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games? She even took part in a James Bond movie.  

 

^{A performer dressed as the Queen parachutes into the Olympic Stadium during the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012. (Press Association)}

 

There is, of course, much truth in both these theories. We love tradition, especially when it is softened by a little flexibility. But maybe the real secret to the long success of the British monarchy is its connection, not to the stodgy old ways of the stately home, but to the aggressive, thrusting, young nation that we used to be.  

 

By this theory, the reason we’ve never had a lasting revolution [against the monarchy] is that we got there so early. We executed King Charles I at a time, 1649, when the major states of Europe hardly knew an alternative to monarchy. After that we were immunised against revolution, and the immunity has lasted until the present day. 

 

Magna Carta

 

Looking back, of course, one sees a long chain of events that have shaped – curbed, coloured – the British monarchy. We’ve celebrated one just recently – King John’s sealing of Magna Carta in 1215, requiring the king to rule only under law. (Scotland in 1320 saw the Declaration of Arbroath, which while primarily a declaration of the nation’s independence seemed also to suggest that a monarch might be made by popular choice.)  

 

And although in many ways the kings of England actually assumed more authority during the few centuries that followed, this is an idea that has never gone away. Even in the days of that earlier, authoritarian, Queen Elizabeth I, the bishop John Aylmer could write that England was governed by a ‘rule mixte’ of prince, peers and people – assuaging fears of a female monarch with the assurance that she did not in any case rule autonomously.

 

The Stuart kings tried to assert their ‘divine right’ – and the end of that story is very well known. Except, of course, that the execution of Charles I was not the end. This was an age that could see little alternative to the hereditary principle: even Oliver Cromwell, while publically refusing the role of king, tried to arrange that his own descendants should succeed him. Then in 1660, little more than a decade after his father’s death, Charles II was invited once more to take up Stuart rule.

 

^{Oliver Cromwell, circa 1645. (R Walker/Getty Images)}

 

All the same, a line had been crossed. In 1688 the country’s ruling class and ruling body could decide that the unpopular and Catholic James II and VII should be replaced by his daughter Mary; and when it was clear not only Mary but her sister Anne would die without a living child, it was parliament’s voice that invited Anne’s third cousin, the Elector of Hanover, to become George I, ignoring a host of heirs closer in blood. 

 

The 1689 Bill of Rights placed strict limits on the monarch’s power, which continued to dwindle under successive Hanoverian kings as parliamentary reforms saw their rights of patronage whittled away. But though the French Revolution may have scared, it could not really shake the British monarchy. And after all, Britons wouldn’t want to do anything our ancient French enemy had done – not in the days of Napoleon’s threat, certainly.

 

The model family

 

William IV and Victoria after him were horrified to learn they could not even choose their own prime minister. It was the great Victorian Walter Bagehot who wrote provocatively that Britain was “a secret republic”. But that was the secret of the royal family’s survival, perhaps. And it was Victoria’s husband, Albert, who carved out for the crown another, a moral, kind of authority as the nation’s first and model family – one which, in spite of any evidence to the contrary, they have retained almost until the present day. 

 

But the royal family has embarked on several major changes even more recently. It was in 1917 that the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha changed its name to the less ‘Hunnish’ House of Windsor, the same summer that saw the Tsar of Russia swept from power (to be subsequently killed, with his family). Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey all lost their monarchies with the First World War – a side effect of their having been on the losing side, maybe. 

 

But other monarchies went, too, in the first half of the 20th century – those of Italy, Yugoslavia, Portugal, followed later by Greece. King Farouk of Egypt declared that by the turn of the century there would be only five kings left in the world – “the king of hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades – and the King of England”. He was wrong about the monarch’s gender, and Europe still boasts a handful of other monarchies, notably in Scandinavia and the Low Countries. (And in Spain, which first replaced and then recalled their monarchy.) But his basic point holds good, and there is no easy single answer as to why. 

 

The royal family in the 20th century has seen some real downturns in its popularity, many of them during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, however eager we may be to celebrate that reign today. But somehow, whether by good judgement or good luck, the ‘firm’ (as Prince Philip has called it) retains as its trademark a blend of change and consistency that keeps it bobbing along, indomitably. 

 

The popularity game

 

The dawn of the 20th century had brought a new readiness among the royals to be seen – though not necessarily heard – as often as required. Before the First World War, for example, royal weddings had long been private ceremonies. After the war all that changed, and such occasions became valuable crowd-pleasers – while, conversely, its detachment from party-political affairs allowed the monarchy to remain above the Westminster fray. It allowed it to provide, in the words of the Buckingham Palace website “a focus for national unity”. 

 

^{Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon leaves her home for her wedding to the future King George VI, in 1923. After the First World War, royal weddings became "valuable crowd-pleasers" says Sarah Gristwood. (Central Press/Getty Images)}

 

Not that the royals won’t change the tradition and trim the privilege, when necessary. The Queen’s decision to pay taxes and to cut down the Civil List is only part of that readiness seen in 1917 to play the popularity game. To try to be whatever we want them to be. The change in tone that followed Diana’s death may be the ultimate example – and, indeed, she may have played a role she never intended in reshaping the monarchy. While the furore around Diana’s death finally proved to the royal establishment the need to adapt, she also gave us, in her sons and now her grandson and granddaughter, royals better equipped to give the institution a successful 21st century.  

 

Sarah Gristwood is a best-selling Tudor biographer, novelist, broadcaster and commentator on royal affairs, and the author of Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses (HarperPress, 2013). Her forthcoming book, Game of Queens, will be published in the UK and the USA in autumn 2016.

History Trivia - Rebel barons renounce allegiance to King John

May 5

1215 Rebel barons renounced their allegiance to King John of England, which led to the signing of the Magna Carta

10 things you (probably) didn't know about the Middle Ages

History Extra

It is one of the most fascinating periods in history, popularised by Magna Carta, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years War. But how much do you really know about the Middle Ages? Here, kicking off our medieval week, John H Arnold, professor of medieval history at Birkbeck, University of London, reveals 10 things about the period that might surprise you…

1) They weren’t all knights or serfs or clergy

Although certain medieval writers described their society as divided into 'three orders' – those who prayed, those who fought, and those who laboured – that became an increasingly inaccurate picture from after about 1100.
The population of Europe increased hugely across the 12th and 13th centuries, with cities and towns getting much larger. Paris grew about ten-fold (and London nearly as much) in this period. In the cities, people had all kinds of jobs: merchants, salesmen, carpenters, butchers, weavers, foodsellers, architects, painters, jugglers...
And in the countryside, it was not at all the case that everyone was an impoverished ‘serf’ (that is, ‘unfree’ and tied to the land). Many peasants were free men – and women – and owned their own land, while others who were to some degree ‘unfree’ in fact bought and sold land and goods, much like other free men.
There certainly were poor, oppressed serfs, but it wasn't a universal condition.

 

2) People had the vote

Well, some people at least. Not a vote for national, representative government – because that really wasn't a medieval thing – but a vote in local politics. In France, in the 12th and 13th centuries and beyond, many towns and villages were run at a local level as a commune, and there were often annual elections for ‘consuls’ and ‘councillors’, where most of the male inhabitants could vote.
A more complex form of election and government was used in the city states of north Italy, with more tiers of elected officials. Women could not usually stand as officials, nor vote, but some of them were noted in the agreed charters of ‘liberties’ that French towns proudly possessed.

 

3) The church didn't conduct witch hunts

The large-scale witch-hunts and collective paranoid response to the stereotype of the evil witch is not a medieval, but rather an early modern phenomenon, found mostly in the 16th and 17th centuries. There were some witch trials in the Middle Ages, and these became more widespread in German-speaking lands in the 15th century, but those doing the prosecuting were almost always civic authorities rather than ecclesiastical ones.
For much of the Middle Ages, the main message that churchmen gave in regard to magic was that it was foolish nonsense that didn't work. When Heinrich Kramer wrote the infamous Malleus Maleficarum in the late 15th century, his motive was to try to persuade people of the reality of witches. In fact, the book was initially condemned by the church, and even in the early 16th century, inquisitors were warned not to believe everything that it said.

4) They had a Renaissance, and invented experimental science

When people talk about ‘the Renaissance’, they usually mean the very self-conscious embrace of classical models in literature, art, architecture and learning found at the end of the Middle Ages. This is usually taken to be one of the ways in which we moved from ‘medieval’ to (early) ‘modern’ ways of thinking.
But in fact, medieval intellectuals also had a ‘renaissance’ of classical learning and rhetoric. This was in the 12th century, and depended particularly on the transmission of works by Aristotle and other classical authors via Arabic philosophers and translators.
One of the outcomes was to prompt an enquiring and reflective approach to the physical world, and it led Roger Bacon (c1214–94), among others, to think about how one might observe and experiment with the physical world to learn more about it.

 

5) They travelled – and traded – over very long distances

It may be the case that the majority of medieval people – particularly those who lived in the countryside – rarely travelled very far from where they lived. But that would be the case with quite a lot of people in much later ages also.
It is not the case, however, that medieval people never travelled. Many went on pilgrimage, sometimes journeying thousands of miles to do so. And those involved in trade certainly travelled, linking parts of the world together via merchandise across extraordinary distances.
Even in the early Middle Ages, all kinds of high-status goods were transported from very distant shores to various European lands: silk from China; spices from Asia, brought to Europe via the Middle East; amber and furs from the Baltic. A few intrepid travellers even wrote journals charting their journeys: William of Rubruck’s Journey to the Eastern Parts of the World describes his three-year journey, which began in 1253, through the lands we now know as Ukraine and Russia.

6) They had some great ‘folk’ customs

Much of the public culture of the Middle Ages was shaped, or at least informed by, Christianity. But there were also some quite curious customs, usually tolerated by the church, but which may have had older roots.
One was the practice – found in many different parts of Europe – of rolling burning barrels down a hill on Midsummer’s Eve. Another was to throw wheat over the heads of a newly married couple. It was also common to raise money for charity by holding a ‘help ale’: brewing up a batch of ale, having a big party to drink it, and collecting donations.
There were undoubtedly a number of things that look to us like ‘superstitions’, often to do with invoking supernatural protection against disease or failure of harvest. But the Midsummer festivals, and the ales, also sound like they were a good laugh.

7) You didn't have to get married in church

In fact, you almost certainly didn’t get married in church: those who wanted their marriage ‘solemnised’ would usually do so at the gate to the churchyard. But in any case, couples didn’t need a church, or a priest, or the banns being read, or any other religious paraphernalia.
The church certainly wanted people to do these things: since around the 12th century it had started to argue that marriage was a formal sacrament (that is, that it involved God enacting a change within the world). But in practice, and in law, people got married by declaring clearly that they wanted to marry each other.
There had to be consent, and ideally there should be witnesses (in case either party later had a change of mind). But you could marry very simply.

8) Most great medieval authors didn't write

We tend to think of literacy as one thing, but in fact it combines various different skills, of which the physical act of writing is only one. For much of the Middle Ages, working as a scribe – writing – was seen as a kind of labour, and was not something that tremendously clever, important people like theologians and intellectuals would bother doing themselves.
Instead, they would use the medieval equivalent of voice recognition software: a scribe who would write down what the author dictated.

9) Some people weren't very religious

The Middle Ages famously features great examples of extreme religiosity: mystics, saints, the flagellants, mass pilgrimage, and the like. But it would be wrong to assume that people were always very focussed on God and religion, and definitely wrong to think that medieval people were incapable of sceptical reflection.
There is solid evidence of some ordinary people who looked askance at particular beliefs – at the miracles performed by saints, or the nature of the Eucharist, or what was said to happen after death. A number of ordinary people decided that the soul was ‘nothing but blood’, and simply disappeared at the point of death. Others thought that there was no reason to think that it was God who made plants and crops grow, but just the innate properties of working and feeding the soil.
There is also ample evidence of people just not bothering very much with religion – most of all not going to church on a Sunday. One Spanish priest, in the very early 14th century, reported to his bishop that hardly anyone came to church on Sundays, but rather larked about in the streets playing. Other records give the sense that at least a sizeable minority enjoyed themselves elsewhere on Sunday mornings.

10) They didn't believe the world was flat

Most people probably know this already, along with the fact that Viking helmets did not have horns. Both are bits of Victorian myth-making about the period, along with the idea that the lord had the right to sleep one night with any newly-wedded woman.
What makes studying medieval history fascinating is that you have to grapple with both the puzzle of extracting information from difficult and often fragmented surviving records, and the challenge of constantly checking your own thinking for assumptions and inherited stereotypes.

John H Arnold, professor of medieval history at Birkbeck, University of London, is the author The Oxford Handbook to Medieval Christianity (OUP, 2014). He is also the author of What is Medieval History? (Polity, 2008) and Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (Bloomsbury, 2005).

Why ‘Bad King John’ was actually Good

History Extra

 

 

King John wasn't so 'Bad', argues Graham E Seel. © North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy

After a great political struggle, King John was forced to accept the terms of his rebellious barons and seal Magna Carta at Runnymede in June 1215 – an anniversary marked both in Britain and the United States earlier this week. But was ‘Bad King John’, as he has been famously nicknamed, really as ‘bad’ as history has made him out to be?

Here, writing for History Extra, author Graham E Seel considers John’s governance, and asks whether it is time to change our opinions of him.
One might have hoped that the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta would have provided at least some oxygen to the argument that ‘Bad King John’ was perhaps not too ‘Bad’ after all; and – whisper it – that in some ways this traditionally most maligned of monarchs was perhaps really rather Good.
Instead, the anticipated tsunami of popular and learned articles collectively assert, inter alia, that John was at once cruel and coercive, treacherous and tyrannical, pusillanimous and pitiful, lazy and lackluster. For the large part it seems that, 800 years later, opinion has broadly backed Matthew Paris, the 13th-century chronicler who alleged that John’s greatest achievement was, by dying, to make yet more foul the existing foulness of Hell: John was not only Bad; he was diabolical.
Popular understanding of Magna Carta has significantly stunted debate on the nature and achievement of John. Magna Carta, we are told, stands for the rule of law. Invoked by those in 17th-century England who sought to thwart the allegedly despotic tendencies of Charles I, and latterly employed by the American Revolutionaries in their making of the United States Bill of Rights in 1789, Magna Carta has become totemic of the liberties by which western societies identify themselves.
Indeed, this tendency has travelled so far that Magna Carta has, according to G Hindley, “acquired an almost mystic incantatory quality”. This, he claims, is partly evidenced by the fact that the government sponsored the Magna Carta 800th anniversary website, which currently asserts that Magna Carta “is the foundation stone supporting the freedoms enjoyed today by hundreds of millions of people in more than 100 countries”.
These are powerful words, and it follows that if John ignored Magna Carta – which he did – then it must surely be the case that he was indeed malign. The ever-growing extent to which Magna Carta is celebrated and elevated necessarily means that, in equal and opposite degree, the reputation of John is tarnished and diminished. In this context, to argue that John was anything other than ‘Bad’ seems inappropriate and somewhat unbelievable.
However, the Magna Carta that John chose to ignore did not purport to be a constitutional document adumbrating and guaranteeing liberties to all English people. The Magna Carta of 1215 (it is important to realise that there were many reissues of Magna Carta after the reign of John, each different to the one presented to John) is better understood as a set of flawed peace terms designed to heal the incipient civil war between John and an element of rebellious barons.
In order to try and bind John to their terms, the barons insisted that John accept a committee of 25 of their number empowered to police and enforce Magna Carta by seizing John’s castles and assets when he was judged – by them, and against criteria put forth by them  – to have transgressed.
No medieval monarch could have accepted for any length of time the Magna Carta of 1215, for it clearly rendered the king a phantom of a monarch. Indeed, so extreme was this impact that it is not beyond sensible contemplation that the ambition of the rebel barons was not to obtain a lasting peace, but instead absolutely to provoke John to break the newly agreed terms so that they could seize his largesse. John did indeed overturn Magna Carta, but arguably any medieval monarch would have done the same. The Magna Carta of 1215 is not the Magna Carta of popular imagination. 

_{(Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)}
Popular representations of events at Runnymede in June 1215 would also have us believe that leading rebel barons such as Eustace de Vesci and Robert Fitzwalter were revered freedom fighters. In fact, they are better understood as tight-knuckled, low browed feudal reactionaries kicking against John’s increasingly efficacious administration.
A considerable body of evidence in the form of pipe rolls, charters and letters patent indicates strongly that John was highly effective – perhaps too effective – in mobilizing the resources of his kingdom and in imposing the royal will upon the population at large. This apparently incontestable evidence shows John to have been possessed of vigour and vim, constantly on the move enforcing Angevin aspirations. Ironically, the very fact that John faced rebellion in 1215 is itself indicative of the fact that his government had bite as well as bark.
Moreover, even though chronicle sources allege that the whole of the baronage was united against John, this was clearly not the case – not least because there would have been no possibility of civil war if there had not been two sides, each with the wherewithal to resist the other. Indeed, by the spring of 1215, it has been estimated that of England’s 197 baronies only 39 were in active opposition to the king, with perhaps the same number acting in his support.
Nor is it true that John antagonized elements of the baronage because he was lacking in martial prowess, or that the king was ‘Softsword’, as the chroniclers assert. His reluctance to commit to pitched battles was entirely conventional in an age when all leaders preferred to avoid them – John’s arch-enemy, Philip Augustus, King of France (r1180–1223) shied away from a setpiece battle at least as frequently as his protagonist. We should not mistake John’s military caution for cowardice. Instead, John prosecuted siege warfare with the sort of energy, determination and success that is usually only spoken of in reference to Henry II and Richard I.
Thus, we see him, for example, razing the walls and castle of Le Mans in 1200, assaulting the forces besieging Mirebeau in 1202 (having covered a distance of 80 miles in 48 hours), marching upon Montauban in 1206 and pressing the siege of Rochester castle in 1215 – an event that the leading authority of castles and castle warfare in this period considers was “the greatest operation in England up to that time” (RA Brown).
John was also an effective strategist. His plan to relieve the siege of Chateau-Gaillard in 1203 by arranging a simultaneous assault from land and amphibious forces has been described as “a masterpiece of ingenuity”by K Norgate. Even John’s much-criticised twin-pronged invasion of France in 1214 (which culminated in the disastrous battle of Bouvines on 27 July 1214) achieved its basic aim of dividing the Capetian forces.
John’s alleged lasciviousness and acts of cruelty have been presented as further character traits that antagonised the barons and thus prevented him from delivering strong kingship. Lusting after the wives and daughters of those men he relied upon to deliver the royal command was no doubt a problem in a world where private relationships were the stuff of high politics. Yet nearly all medieval kings took mistresses. Indeed, William the Conqueror’s loyalty to his wife, Matilda, was the subject of perplexed comment.
If John was indeed a “smutty minded groper” (CJ Tyerman), he remained a rake rather than a rogue. His marriage to Isabella of Angouleme when she was unlikely to have been more than 15 and quite possibly as young as nine has prompted a flood of accusations that John was a 13th-century Humbert Humbert. Yet marriage at an early age was commonplace at the time – a survey of the marriage arrangements of John’s contemporaries leads to the conclusion that the Angevin king had an eye for an older women!

_{Isabella of Angouleme, queen consort of King John. (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)}
Further contextual analysis also diminishes the charge that John was a perverted purveyor of acts of cruelty. The evidence does not permit John to be charged definitively with killing his nephew, Arthur, but the king nevertheless had arguably legitimate reasons to undertake such an act since Arthur (a 16-year-old boy) had put himself at the head of a rebellion sponsored by Philip Augustus.
Similarly, it is not proven that John starved Matilda de Braose and her son to death in Corfe Castle, but if he did so it was because of her refusal to offer her sons as hostages in order to trim the rebellious behaviour of their father. Yet hostage taking was part-and-parcel of medieval government, and as such it follows that they sometimes paid the ultimate price. Indeed, King Stephen was seen as weak for refusing to hang the son of Marshal when the latter broke the terms of an agreement with the king.
If John is guilty of cruelty, then what of Richard I in 1191 when, following a dispute about the terms upon which Acre had been surrendered, he ordered the killing of 2,700 Muslim prisoners? What of Henry V, who during the battle of Agincourt in 1415 ordered the killing of several thousand French prisoners? What of John’s father, Henry II who, having taken 22 hostages from the Welsh in 1165, ordered that the males among them – some of them sons of princes – be blinded and castrated, and that the females should have their noses and ears cut off? Medieval monarchs were expected to be fierce, and John fulfilled those expectations.
The Barnwell annalist, Walter Of Coventry, concluded that John “was indeed a great prince but less than successful [and that]…he met with both kinds of luck”. John was certainly unlucky in that his reign coincided with probably the two most accomplished leaders of the Middle Ages – Philip Augustus and Pope Innocent III (r1198–1216) – and he was certainly unlucky in that the Angevin ‘empire’ he had inherited in 1199 was increasingly ungovernable and assaulted by fissiparous tendencies. Yet, I argue, he was not “less than successful”. John’s achievement is that he held things together for as long as he did.
Graham Seel is head of history at St Paul’s School in London. He is the author of King John: An Underrated King (Anthem Press, 2012). He has recently released ‘King John’, an app version of the book available on iPad.
Click here to listen to our King John podcast.

History Trivia - Magna Carta sealed

June 19

 
1179 The Norwegian Battle of Kalvskinnet outside Nidaros. Earl Erling Skakke was killed, and the battle changed the tide of the civil wars..

1215 Magna Carta sealed: Following a revolt by the English nobility against his rule, King John puts his royal seal on the Magna Carta,  or "Great Charter."

1306 Wars for Scottish Independence: The Earl of Pembroke's army defeated Robert Bruce's Scottish army at the Battle of Methven.

 

Magna Carta's legacy lives on 800 years later

USA Today

Photo: Joseph Kaczmarek, AP

LONDON — Eight centuries ago this Monday, a peace treaty came into being that would become a pillar of English law and the basis of constitutional democracies in the United States and around the world hundreds of years later.
Rebel barons made King John of England seal the Magna Carta — the Great Charter — on June 15, 1215 in a bid to limit the power of the monarch, who they viewed as cruel and greedy.
The document set out the principle that everybody was subject to the law, even the king, for the first time on written record.
Some of its key principles influenced the U.S. Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many legal systems around the world.
On Monday Queen Elizabeth II, her husband Prince Philip, Prince William and other dignitaries will mark the anniversary in Runnymede in the county of Surrey, near London, where King John sealed the charter.
A statue of the Queen was unveiled near the site Sunday, and the royal barge Gloriana was leading 200 boats along the River Thames to Runnymede over the weekend.
Surrey County Council, one of the organizers of the ceremony, said: "Magna Carta was a milestone in world history and its birthplace at Runnymede deserves a lasting legacy."
The four known surviving copies of the charter are kept at the cathedrals of the cities of Lincoln, northeast England and Salisbury in the south, and two are housed in the British Museum.

A library employee points at the Salisbury Magna Carta in The British Library in London, Britain, February 2, 2015. (Photo: Facundo Arrizabalaga, European Pressphoto Agency)

So how has a document that began almost a millennium ago become such a profound part of life as we know it today?
Historians say Magna Carta is even more revered in the United States than it is in England.
"The basis of the Magna Carta is a bastion against tyranny and against over-mighty government," Derek Taylor, the author of the book Magna Carta in 20 Places, told USA TODAY. He said the charter's importance in the U.S. "can't be under-estimated."
"There's something about the Magna Carta that rings a bell and chimes with the fundamental American belief about the way society should organize itself," he said.
However, the brutality against Native Americans and slaves and the treatment of women and slave descendants as second-class citizens for generations after the signing of the Constitution, show that "it took a long time for those words to have any meaning," he added.
Due process can be traced to Chapter 39 of Magna Carta, and is incorporated into the Fifth Amendment, which includes the provision that that no person shall be " deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
In an article called Magna Carta in the United States, Ralph Turner, emeritus history professor at the University of Florida, says: "For America's founding fathers, Magna Carta symbol­ized the "rule of law," the precept that a government is bound by the law in deal­ing with its people.
"This view was set forth first in the Declaration of Indepen­dence, then in the state constitutions of the former thirteen colonies, and in the fifth and fourteenth amendments to the federal Constitution."
Sir Robert Worcester, chairman of the Magna Carta 800th Anniversary Commemoration Committee, which is coordinating events to mark the milestone, told the Telegraph: "It is probably the most important document that sets out a legal basis upon which to act other than the whim of the monarch King John in 1215."
"The relevance of the Magna Carta in the 21st century is that it is the foundation of liberty, some say the foundation of democracy, not counting Athenian (ancient Greek) democracy of course," he said.
"All of those things are relative today, all of them in law in one way or another today. And not only here (Britain) but in over 100 countries affecting the lives of over a billion people in the world today in the 21st century."

History Trivia - Rebel barons renounce their allegiance to King John of England

May 5,

 984 Gerberga of Saxony, Queen of Western Francia died.

1215 Rebel barons renounced their allegiance to King John of England, which led to the signing of the Magna Carta.

1640 King Charles I of England dissolved the Short Parliament.

8 things you (probably) didn’t know about Magna Carta

King John signs Magna Carta. © GL Archive / Alamy
History Extra
Magna Carta, which this year celebrates its 800th anniversary, is perhaps the best-known document in world history. Yet much of it is either misunderstood or clouded in myth. Here, Nicholas Vincent, a professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia, reveals some lesser-known facts about the iconic document…

Whenever and wherever it is exhibited, thousands queue to view what Lord Denning described as “the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot”. King John, the monarch who put his seal to Magna Carta, is widely regarded as the worst king in English history precisely because it was his particular acts of tyranny that led his barons to demand the charter. But did you know…

 

1) Magna Carta never once refers to the concept of democracy

Its principal beneficiary, named at the beginning of its opening clause, is not the freemen of England or the barons and knights, but ‘God’. The charter was granted first and foremost to God in order that the king could not, as he might have done with a charter granted to any of his subjects, simply repeal the charter by his own arbitrary will. Gifts once made to God could not lightly be rescinded.

 

2) In later centuries, it was argued that Magna Carta lay at the roots of such principles of English justice as Habeas Corpus and the jury system, but Habeas Corpus is a 15th-century invention, devised 200 years after Magna Carta…

… and only incorporated into Act of Parliament in the 17th century. The jury goes unmentioned in Magna Carta, which speaks merely of trial ‘by peers, and by the law of the land’. In any case, as established in the 12th and 13th centuries, juries were not supposed to decide guilt or innocence, but instead to report (‘to present’) crimes in court, with judgment delivered by the king's justices.

 

3) Far from establishing equal justice for all, Magna Carta draws clear distinctions between classes, nationalities and peoples

The charter distinguished freemen (a minority of the population) from the peasant majority. Knights are distinguished from barons, and barons from the even higher ranks of the earls.
Individual clauses of the charter distinguish between the laws of England and the laws of Wales. Two clauses call for the expulsion from England of all foreign knights and soldiers. Another imposes limits on the profits that that could be made from Jewish moneylending. Another clause, still in theory operative into the 19th century, placed a ban upon any woman accusing a man of murder, save in a case where the murder victim was the woman's husband.

 

4) As the king who granted Magna Carta, King John is sometimes described as author of the oldest legislation still in force in England. In reality, the charter sealed by John at Runnymede was a dead letter, repudiated by king and church within a matter of only 10 weeks of its issue

The version of Magna Carta received in English law was that issued a decade later, in 1225, by King John's son, Henry III. This represents a heavily abridged version of Magna Carta, shorn of more than a third of the text granted at Runnymede.
Out went various clauses that the king considered most obnoxious, including those establishing a committee of 25 barons to sit in judgment over the king. Out too went the clauses limiting Jewish enterprise and demanding the expulsion of foreigners. Most surprisingly, out went clause 14 of the 1215 charter, which in theory established the principal of ‘No taxation without representation’ by calling for a representative assembly (a forerunner to parliament) to assent to all significant new taxes.

_{A view through a magnifying glass of part of an original Magna Carta from the issue made in 1300 by King Edward l to the borough of Sandwich in Kent, which was earlier this year discovered in the archives at Kent County Council's Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone. (Gareth Fuller/PA Wire)}

5) Even the text of the 1225 Magna Carta as received into English law was modified towards the end of the 13th century – when recited from a faulty copy – and it was reissued by the ministers of Edward I

It is this reissue that, technically speaking, became the official law of the land. Only three clauses of it remain in force today. The remaining 34 have been repealed as redundant, as a result of acts of parliament from the 1820s onwards.
Of the three clauses that still survive, one grants freedom to the church (in theory, at least, placing the church outside the normal operations of English law). The second recognises the special liberties of the City of London and other towns (no doubt of comfort to those who believe that the City and its institutions should remain self-governing oligarchies).
The third, and easily the most famous, forbids arbitrary arrest and demands trial by peers and the laws of the land. However, no definition is supplied either for the concept of ‘peers’ (ie equals) or ‘the laws of the land’ (in 1225, in most cases still unwritten). From the 1780s onwards, the newly independent United States of America looked to the 1225 Magna Carta as a guarantee of their liberties and freedoms. Beginning with South Carolina in 1836, and ending with North Dakota as recently as 1943, some 17 of the individual states voted fully to incorporate Magna Carta 1225 within their statute books. As a result, far more of Magna Carta survives in American than in English law.

6) As early as the 1290s, large parts of Magna Carta were considered either unenforceable or archaic

The charter was last renewed and reissued, county by county, in 1300. Thereafter, kings of England made regular promises to abide by the charter, but without reissuing it clause by clause. Magna Carta itself was transformed from practical law into political totem. It is as totem and symbol that it enjoyed greatest significance, underpinning the attempts by 17th-century parliamentarians, 18th-century revolutionaries, and 19th-century constitutionalists to argue that the sovereign authority, and ultimately the state itself, must abide by the rule of law.

7) Visitors to England expect to view the ‘original’ Magna Carta in one or other of the great national collections of manuscripts, most often in the British Library in London. In reality, the charter sealed by King John at Runnymede has long ago vanished

What we have instead are 23 original exemplars, each of them hand written for delivery to a particular county or town. Only four of these come from the issue of 1215 (today preserved in the archives of Lincoln and Salisbury cathedrals, and in two instances in the British Library).
Far more survive from the subsequent reissues: a single original from 1216; four from 1217; four from 1225; four from 1297, and at least six from 1300. As a result, no less than a dozen institutional collections possess original Magna Cartas – two of them outside the United Kingdom. A 1297 Magna Carta was sold to Australia (in 1953) and another to the United States (in 1983). The American original, resold in New York in 2007, fetched $21.3 million – the highest price ever paid at auction for a single sheet of parchment.

8) Despite the immense fame of Magna Carta, many aspects of the document have been little studied

In particular, between 1810 and very recent times, no attempt was made to assemble a list of its originals, let alone of the many hundreds of copies that survive. Work undertaken over the past few years has revealed many new things (for the absolutely latest discoveries see the website magnacartaresearch.org).
As recently as December 2014, an entirely unknown original of the 1300 Magna Carta was brought to light in the archives of the borough of Sandwich in Kent. At much the same time, researchers proved that one of the originals of the 1215 Magna Carta – today in the British Library – previously supposed to have come from Dover Castle, in fact originated in the archives of Canterbury Cathedral.
Documents in the National Archives have revealed that in 1941 Winston Churchill seriously entertained the possibility of gifting Lincoln Cathedral's Magna Carta to the people of America. As late as 1976, a similar proposal was raised – this time by Winston Churchill's grandson, and in respect to one of the British Library's Magna Cartas – intended as a ‘centre-piece’ for British celebrations of the bicentennial of America's declaration of Independence.
Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy is on show at the British Library, London, from 13 March–1 September 2015. For more information, and to book tickets, visit www.bl.uk

Magna Carta exhibition is an 800-year-old lesson in people power

The Guardian

 

British Library showcase highlights value of enduringly popular document still relevant to everything from control orders to European integration

Demonstrators attack police vans during a protest against the poll tax in 1990. The British Library exhibition shows the Magna Carta as a call to stand up for your rights by any means necessary. Photograph: REX/REX

The most powerful work of art in the gripping Magna Carta exhibition portrays a king being attacked by peasants. They come at Henry I with scythe, fork and shovel, turning the tools of their daily work into crudely effective weapons.
This surreal masterpiece of medieval art is a depiction of a royal nightmare: uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. There was no revolution against Henry I, although a few generations later, in 1215, the reviled King John would be forced at swordpoint to grant freedoms to his people and the Magna Carta would be born.
Yet this superbly drawn illumination from the Chronicle of Worcester, dating from about 1140, portrays Henry menaced by the peasants in his sleep. It is said that he was plagued by nightmares after he broke promises to his people. In other scenes in this sinewy cartoon strip, Henry’s knights loom over his bed with their swords, and bishops raise their croziers threateningly over his unconscious form.
It is a startling window on early medieval Britain. Who knew that British kings so long ago had nightmares about revolution?

 

A 14th century scroll illustrating the geneolagy of King John 1199-1216 on show at the British Library. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, is not an art exhibition, though it has these terrific works of art in it. It is an exhibition about language and power, full of words, most of them written in a hand indecipherable by the untrained eye, on ancient pieces of parchment or paper. Somehow these manuscripts, charters, seals, declarations and statutes are as moving as any art. The Magna Carta, it turns out, still packs a mighty emotional punch.

Two teeth and a finger bone belonging to John, extracted by antiquarians from his tomb in Worcester Cathedral, are this exhibition’s strangest relics. Together with a cast of his tomb effigy they testify to the enduring charisma of kingship. And yet this king was so hated for soaking his subjects for cash that in 1215 his own barons forced him to put his royal seal on a document limiting his power.
The Magna Carta is a document and a myth. But what is its real message? The wondrous array of materials here, which include an original copy of the US Bill of Rights lent by Congress, as well as a French revolutionary painting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, made me think that far from a venerable relic of the British middle way, the Magna Carta is a call to stand up for your rights by any means necessary.
Generations of jurists and libertarians have revered it as an ancient guarantor of freedom and justice. In a South African courtroom in 1964, Nelson Mandela stated his respect for the document. Yet the true lesson of Magna Carta’s history as revealed here is that rights have to be fought for and the roots of democracy are bloodsoaked.

 

A section of the Magna Carta that was found in a London tailor’s shop in the early 17th century. Photograph: Ray Tang/REX/Ray Tang/REX

Why has the document to which John put his seal at Runnymede 800 years ago proved so uniquely enduring and rich as a political text? In this exhibition you can see the draft version that he agreed to: “King John concedes that he will arrest no man without judgement”. The words, surely, have endured because they are so simple and forthright – so medieval. We can scarcely imagine, the great historian Johann Huizinga pointed out, how simple, passionate, and rawly expressive people were in the middle ages. Such great simplicity makes the Magna Carta special: it is the great gift of the medieval mind to modern ones.

We do not base modern politics on Plato’s Republic or Machiavelli’s Discourses but the Magna Carta is still quoted against everything from control orders to European integration. This bald document has more bite than all the classics of political thought. That is because it is not an abstract philosophical meditation on the nature of justice and freedom, but a blunt assertion of what rulers cannot do. The barons of 13th-century England gave human rights a tough, no-nonsense, visceral force.
A medieval sword, with an occult inscription on its blade, is on display among the illuminated manuscripts and royal seals to remind us that the Magna Carta was obtained through violence. The 13th-century Melrose Chronicle recognised that the Magna Carta turned the world upside down. It said: “The people desired to be masters of the king.”

British Library to display King John's teeth and thumb bone in Magna Carta celebrations

The Guardian

Exhibition commemorating the 800-year anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta will feature royal relics

Two molars and a thumb bone belonging to King John, the medieval monarch, who granted the charter of Magna Carta. Photograph: Claire Kendall/British Library/PA

King John is coming to the British Library for the exhibition celebrating the most famous event of his reign, the sealing of Magna Carta at Runnymede 800 years ago.
The king will be represented by two extraordinary loans; two teeth are coming from Worcester city museum, where they have only occasionally been on display, and a thumb bone which was also taken as a souvenir from his tomb but returned to Worcester cathedral 160 years later. The cathedral is also lending its original copy of John’s will.
They will be on display in the British Library’s Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy opening on March 13, the largest exhibition mounted on the charter that inspired centuries of declarations of human rights.
The teeth and bone were taken when John’s splendid tomb at Worcester cathedral was opened in 1797 – supposedly to verify it held the king, but part of a late 18th century antiquarian craze for opening royal tombs. The tomb stayed open for almost two days and the cathedral was heaving with sightseers until the authorities were forced to close it to keep order.
John had a particular affection for Worcester: two of his favourite hunting grounds were nearby, and he visited the shrine of the Anglo-Saxon Saint Wulfstan at the cathedral several times. When the king died in October 1216 at Newark castle, probably of dysentery rather than the poison or “surfeit of peaches” of contemporary sources, he requested to be buried there near the saint.
His splendid tomb was opened at least twice, in the 16th century and in 1797 when only rotting scraps remained of the fabulous embroidered robe of crimson damask recorded 200 years earlier. Various fragments of fabric and bits of bone were taken as souvenirs, including the teeth and the thumb.
A local surgeon, Mr Sandford, was present when the tomb was opened and recorded what hapened. The body was found lying in the same position as the effigy, but the bones had been disturbed, with the jaw lying by the elbow.

All but four of the teeth, and most of both hands, had vanished, presumably to earlier souvenir hunters. A note preserved with the teeth says: “These are two teeth taken from the head of King John by William Wood, a stationer’s apprentice, in 1797.”
The skull was wrapped in a monk’s cowl rather than the crown shown on the effigy, and a sword in a leather scabbard lay by the side of the remains. The bones were measured, and John’s height in life estimated at 5 foot six inches. The textiles were interpreted as parts of socks, some shoe leather, as well as the shreds of the damask shroud – scraps of surviving embroidery, including a lion’s head, showed it had once been a truly regal garment.
The will is the earliest surviving English royal example. It was dictated just before John’s death, and is thought to indicate how weakened he was because, instead of spelling out exactly how his possessions should be distributed, he left the decisions to his group of close advisers.
Worcester cathedral is also mounting an exhibition and events programme about Magna Carta.

Early edition of Magna Carta discovered in Victorian scrapbook

A close-up view of one of four remaining copies of the original Magna Carta, a document written in 1215, is seen at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston June 30, 2014. (REUTERS/Gretchen Ertl)

An early edition of one of the world’s most famous documents, the Magna Carta, was unearthed in a pretty unexpected place – a scrapbook. Mark Bateson, a Kent, U.K.-based archivist, was tasked with looking for a charter from the town of Sandwich when he stumbled upon the rare find. He came across Sandwich’s Charter of the Forest in a Victorian-era scrapbook in the Kent County Council archives that just happened to also contain an edition of the groundbreaking document that dates back to 1300, the BBC reports.

This edition could be worth up to $15 million and is a very significant find, according to experts.

 

The find comes months before the 800^th anniversary of the sealing of the document that established the principles of the rule of law. The first copy of the Magna Carta was drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury on June 15, 1215. It was written to establish peace between King John of England and a group of rebel barons. Among the sanctions established by the law the Magna Carta ensured protections of church rights and limited feudal payments to the king.
The document found in Sandwich is not pristine – it was ripped and about a third of it was missing. Despite this, it is a rare and valuable find. The only other copy that dates back to 1300 is owned by Oriel College at Oxford University.
According the BBC, there are 24 known editions of the Magna Carta in existence
Fox News

British Library reunites Magna Carta copies for 800th anniversary

Mark Brown

The Guardian

 

 

The four surviving copies of the Magna Carta being prepared for display at the British Library. Photograph: Clare Kendall/British Library/PA

 

Four copies of groundbreaking document to be assembled at British Library – but only 1,215 people who won a ballot can see them


         

          

The only remaining original copies of Magna Carta, one of the world’s most enduringly influential documents, are to on Monday be brought together for the first and probably only time.

Two copies in the British Library’s collection will be joined by one from Lincoln Cathedral and one from Salisbury Cathedral to mark the 800th anniversary of an agreement that has become a symbol of liberty and law.
The four copies will remain at the British Library for three days. On Tuesday 1,215 people who won a ballot to see them – randomly selected from 43,715 applicants from 20 countries – will be given access.
The following day, the world’s leading academic experts on the document will get their turn, part of a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
On Thursday, the manuscripts will travel to the House of Lords before being returned to their separate homes and exhibitions. The British Library’s display, Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, runs from 13 March to 1 September. All four copies have differences, including their shape, with one of the two at the British Library and the Salisbury version being in portrait format, while the Lincoln copy is square and the other British Library version is landscape.
Claire Breay, head of medieval manuscripts at the British Library, said: “Magna Carta is one of the most famous documents in the world, let alone one of the most important things we have in the collections at the British Library. We’ve been working towards this with Lincoln and Salisbury since 2010, so it is very exciting to see it come to fruition.”King John agreed the terms of the charter at Runnymede in 1215, sealing it on 15 June. Most of Magna Carta’s clauses dealt with specific grievances England’s barons had with the king, but buried within the document are agreements that have become totemic across the world, not least the 39th article giving all “free men” the right to a fair trial.
At least 13 copies were made on sheepskin parchment and sent out to bishops. The two copies in the British Library came into the national collection in 1753 as part of the enormous library of the MP and antiquary Sir Robert Cotton.
Seeing Magna Carta is an almost spiritual event for many visitorsto the Library . Breay said: “People really want to have stood in front of this incredibly famous document. Even though it is written in medieval Latin and in medieval handwriting and most people can’t actually read it, people recognise its historic and symbolic importance as a symbol of freedom and rights and liberties.”
She said it seemed a fitting start to the Magna Carta anniversary. “It is a unique opportunity, a never-to-be-repeated opportunity, to see them side by side.”