Blink!

Last Thursday, Moe and I coached a husband-and-wife team in the British countryside near Salisbury, England. My host, Nic, took me to the famous Salisbury Cathedral.

The Magna Carta has inspired and encouraged freedom movements worldwide for 14 centuries. Salisbury Cathedral’s Magna Carta is one of only four original documents from the year 1215.

The Magna Carta, issued in June 1215, was the first document to express the principle that the King and his government were not above the law.

It sought to prevent the King from exploiting his power and placed limits on royal authority by establishing law as a power in itself.

The Magna Carta (“Great Charter”) was a historic document that further guaranteed English political liberties. It was drafted at Runnymede, a meadow by the River Thames, signed by King John of that same year under pressure from 200 rebellious barons.

The Magna Carta stated four fundamental and history-changing ideas:

1. Limits on Government. The idea is that a government can only govern so long as it has the agreement and support of the people.
2. Rule of Law applies to all. 
3. Justice is everyone’s right.
4. It also recognized that all men were free and equal.

Pope Innocent III annulled the Magna Carta in August 1215, three months after it was issued at Runnymede.

The Pope’s reasons for the annulment included: 

• He said it was sealed under duress 
• He described it as “shameful, demeaning, illegal and unjust.” 

Another reason was that he did not want an uprising to impact the Pope’s war of the Crusades negatively.

The annulment led to the First Barons’ War, as the English barons rejected the disenfranchisement. The rebels also renounced their allegiance to the King and invited the son of the King of France to take the crown of England. The Magna Carta only applied to Barons and other elites.

King John died in October of 1216, with many of the barons again in rebellion, and a French army had invaded England. AND with a new 9-year-old king, Henry III, on the throne, a revised version of Magna Carta was issued to get the barons back on side, reviving the document in a single stroke.

The Magna Carta provided the foundation for individual rights in Anglo-American jurisprudence. It has been rewritten and changed over the centuries.

But, of enduring importance to people appealing to the charter over the last 824 years are the famous clauses 39 and 40: “No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgment of his peers and the law of the land."

Blink if you see a similarity between the struggle for freedom over eight centuries ago and the struggles you see worldwide today.

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