Magna Carta

Magna Carta is a charter agreed by King John of England with a group of rebellious barons at Runnymede, a meadow beside the River Thames, in June 1215.^[1] It was written in Latin, which is why so few people at the time could complain about the small print.

The charter was not called Magna Carta at first. The name, meaning "Great Charter", came into use in 1217, when it was needed to tell it apart from a shorter document, the Charter of the Forest. Historians agree this makes it one of the few things in history to be named great purely for being longer.

Paperwork

Magna Carta was sealed, not signed. Several copies were made and sent around the kingdom, and four of the original 1215 copies survive: two in the British Library, one at Lincoln and one at Salisbury. Archivists note that this is an excellent survival rate for a document that most of its readers could not read.^[2]

The original text was one continuous block, with no numbered clauses. The numbers used today were added by later scholars, centuries afterwards. The charter therefore spent over five hundred years without a clause 39, despite clause 39 being in it the whole time.

Contents

Alongside its famous promises about lawful judgement, the charter also dealt with matters closer to home:

• One standard measure of wine, one of ale and one of corn throughout the kingdom, an early triumph for the field later perfected by the Standard of Lumps.
• The removal of fish-weirs from the Thames and the Medway, making it one of the founding documents of English liberty and of English rivers.
• Rules on inheritance, debts, forests and bridges, because a charter that sets out to fix everything has to start somewhere.

Afterwards

Pope Innocent III annulled the charter in August 1215, about ten weeks after it was agreed, and the First Barons' War followed.^[3] The charter was reissued in revised forms in 1216, 1217 and 1225, setting a pattern of second, third and fourth drafts that legal documents have followed ever since.

Only three of its clauses remain part of the law of England and Wales today. The meadow at Runnymede remains entirely a meadow.

See also

• Standard of Lumps – a later attempt at standard measures
• Meeting – Runnymede was a very important one
• Water – what the fish-weirs were in

References

1. Parchment, P. (2015). Great, Because It Was Longer. Quill & Seal. (Fictional.)
2. Archive, A. (2003). Four Copies and a Meadow. Vellum Books. (Fictional.)
3. Clause, C. (1999). "Waiting for Clause 39". Journal of Late Numbering 39: 39. (Fictional.)