Did an 800-year old piece of parchment really change the world? Nicholas Vincent of the University of East Anglia talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the Magna Carta, the founding document of English law and liberty. The Magna Carta was repudiated just ten weeks after King John issued it. Yet, its impact is still with us today. In this conversation, Vincent explains what led to the Magna Carta and how its influence remains with us today in England and elsewhere.
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Readings and Links related to this podcast episode
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About this week's guest:
Nicholas Vincent's Home page
About ideas and people mentioned in this podcast episode:
Books:
Magna Carta: A Very Short Introduction, by Nicholas Vincent at Amazon.com.
Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John, with an Historical Introduction [1215], William Sharp McKechnie, ed. Online Library of Liberty.
Magna Carta Commemoration Essays. Henry Elliot Malden, Ed. 1917. Online Library of Liberty.
Articles:
"Discovering the Sandwich Magna Carta," by Professor Nicholas Vincent. Magna Carta Project, February 20, 2015.
"English translation of Magna Carta". Translation of the full text of the original 1215 edition of Magna Carta from Latin into modern day English. The British Library.
Rent Seeking, by David R. Henderson. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Friedrich Hayek. Biography. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Adam Smith. Biography. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Web Pages and Resources:
Making history: Four original surviving Magna Carta manuscripts are brought together for the first time. Magna Carta Special Exhibit at the British Library. Feb. 2, 2015.
The Magna Carta Project.
John, King of England. Wikipedia.
Richard I of England. Wikipedia.
Battle of Bouvines. Wikipedia.
Battle of Hastings. Wikipedia.
King George VI. Biography.com.
The Lion in Winter (1968 film). Wikipedia. King Henry II faces deciding on an heir, Christmastime 1183.
Becket (1964 film). Wikipedia. King Henry II versus the burgeoning Church.
"King John's Christmas", by A. A. Milne. Poetry reading by Nick Michelioudakis. Youtube.
"Herman's Hermits -- I'm Henry VIII, I Am. Youtube.
Podcast Episodes, Videos, and Blog Entries:
Magna Carta Club, Part 2, by Bryan Caplan. Part 1. EconLog, 2010. Contrasting views with James Buchanan.
Title-Deed of Liberty: Winston Churchill on Magna Carta by Justin D. Lyons. Library of Law and Liberty. April 7, 2015.
Richard Epstein on the Rule of Law. EconTalk. June 2009.
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0:33
Intro. [Recording date: May 11, 2015.] Russ: This, 2015, is the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, which was signed in June of 1215. And I have to confess, until reading your book, I knew an embarrassingly small amount about the Magna Carta, other than to suspect it was important. And I also worry that some of my listeners are in the same boat, which is why you are here. So, let's start with the basics. What was it physically? Who was there when it was issued? What was it about? How long was it? How big is it? How many copies are there? That kind of introduction. Guest: Okay. So, we are talking about a document of about 4000 words--so not a particularly long document by modern standards--written on a piece of sheepskin parchment about the size of an average not-particularly-huge television screen. So, it's about, oh, 2 feet tall by about a foot across. It's not a very large document. Four thousand words. And it's an attempt made between the King of England, a chap called King John, and his barons, with the bishops in there somewhere, to make peace after a period when the barons had revolted against the King, claiming that the King had gone against the liberties and customs of England and that they were going to use this document to reimpose that law on the King. Now, there's an awful lot that's said about Magna Carta, that people think is in Magna Carta, that isn't actually there. And I suspect we are going to come on to that in due course. But just to get one thing straight for a start, that the really important thing about this document, the really important thing about it--it didn't make peace between the King and his people; it didn't establish democracy; it didn't do this, it didn't do that. What it did do is state that the King is under the law. And it's that institution of the rule of law that I think is the thing we should be celebrating this year, in the 800th anniversary year. Russ: Well, that's one of the things that I think resonates throughout the last 800 years. But there are a number of other things that, even though they may not have been important in 1215 came to be important later, and we'll talk about them. One thing--let's put the history in context. Tell us about King John's father. Tell us about King's brother, Richard. And I suspect it's important that there was not an alternative king hanging around who would make an obvious choice for the barons to promote in a real rebellion, which is part of the reason I suspect this was issued, from what I've read. So give us that historical context. Who was King John's father? And why were they so mad at him. Guest: [?] if you've got a dynasty with three members, the first one is the founder of the dynasty. He tends to be pretty good. The second one can be good or bad, as the case may be. And you want to watch out for the third one. And I say that to you, Russ, because it's from where you are standing at the moment: I'm just giving you a small warning. Russ: Much appreciated. Yeah. Guest: Thanks a lot. Enter the second King of England, King John's father [King Henry II]. He came to the throne in 1154. He managed to hoover up [?] really as a result of a series of dynastic accidents and marriages, he hoovered up a huge territory that comprised not just England, the realm of England, but parts of Wales, parts of Scotland; he introduced English rule to Ireland; and above all in Western France, he came to control through marriage and inheritance all of the western seaboard of France, from Normandy in the North all the way down to the Pyrenees, down to Aquitaine in the South. So he was the founder of this great dynasty, and he was generally regarded as a phenomenon in his own times. He is seen as someone a bit like the Emperor Charlemagne, 400 years before; he's seen as one of the great centers of knowledge and learning and power and influence and majesty. Now, he, by the time of his death in 1189, was pretty close to defeating the King of France altogether. The King of France by this stage is being reduced to a small rump of territory around the city of Paris, what we call the Isle de France--the Island of France. There was a real prospect that the Plantagenet kings of England, also ruling in France, that they would seize control of all of these lands that belonged to kings of France. Henry died in the midst of a rebellion led by his eldest son, the future King Richard I, and that was one of the downsides of Henry's family. This was a family that fought amongst itself; it was a dysfunctional family, the Plantagenet dynasty. They were constantly rebelling against one another, brothers against brothers, sons against fathers. Richard I used this great collection of lands that Henry had acquired and all of the money that went with that, to pay for a Crusade in the Holy Land. And again, if we are thinking of more recent times, think of that dynastic founder whose first successor uses all that money to invest in a foreign war that wasn't necessarily seen by everybody as a great success. So during the course of that war, Richard failed to retake Jerusalem. He spent an enormous amount of money on it. And it got an awful lot of bad publicity internationally. Russ: This is Richard, the Lion-hearted, correct? Guest: This is Richard the Lionheart, the eldest surviving son of Henry II. He didn't retake Jerusalem. He did to some extent reestablish the position of the Crusader Kingdoms in the East, after a very shaky period when Saladin had seized most of them. But he didn't fully reestablish his dynasty. He certainly didn't retake Jerusalem; he didn't reestablish the kings in Jerusalem. Russ: And he's spending a great deal of money, I assume, as well. Guest: An enormous amount of money, largely based on taxation from England and from France. On his crusade, he made himself very unpopular with the Duke of Austria, so that as he was returning through Europe, on his way back to England, he was taken prisoner--basically kidnapped--by the Duke of Austria, was held captive; was sold to the Emperor of Germany. And in the longer term was forced to pay a massive ransom of 100,000 marks--that's 66,000 pounds, roughly twice the annual income of the King of England. All of that money to get Richard out of captivity in Germany. So, Richard went down in history as a military wonder who had lived this great campaign, who had achieved chivalrous deeds in the East, but who as a result had very heavily taxed England--had effectively bankrupted this vast treasure that Henry II had built up--in order to pay the foreign adventures. And it's in those circumstances that Richard died in 1199, and that his younger brother, the youngest son of Henry II, King John, came to the throne. Russ: I have to say, as you pause there, that this reminds me a bit of when a Shakespearean play gets set in, say, the 1940s or 1920s. I think you've put some modern clothing on some of these stories. Which I've enjoyed. So, he comes into office in 1199. And, how does it go for him? He doesn't--historically, he's got a bad rep. What went wrong? Guest: There's a view that says when John came to the throne, people were looking forward to it. They were optimistic about what he might do. He was young; he wasn't his father; he wasn't his elder brother. He was intelligent, he was literate, he had some experience of ruling, in Ireland. So there were some, maybe at time, who viewed this as a new beginning. Now, if that was the case, I suspect that in a matter of weeks, let alone months, they realized that they'd got a problem on their hands. Russ: The honeymoon was over. Guest: Very, very quickly. It's very easy in the longer term to say, 'Oh, well, the trouble is that John has a bad reputation, because his reign ended in disaster.' It's a story generally written backwards. We know that the reign ended badly, and therefore, perhaps it wasn't so bad at the beginning. It's just that in hindsight people think it was. Even at the time, even back at the beginning of John's reign, there were clearly people who thought he was an out-and-out rotter. He has already shown himself to be disloyal: he had rebelled against his brother while Richard was in captivity in Germany. He had ruled in an arbitrary way in Ireland. He was surrounded by a group of cronies, his own particular followers, who were not very popular. And he was not trusted, even at the time of his accession. So that he was a man that would stab you in the back as much as look at you. And this really did create problems more or less from the start. Russ: This is despite the fact that Henry and his sons, when they were coronated, would issue a proclamation that was basically an oath to be a really good guy. Correct? Guest: Yes. They would generally issue a charter, a Coronation Charter, saying that their predecessor ruled badly, but they would do well in future. It's standard policy. 'We do apologize for the mistakes of the previous regime, but we're going to rule much better in future.' That was true of Henry. It wasn't true of Richard. Richard issued no Coronation Charter, so far as we know. And John, when he came to the thrown, didn't issue a Coronation Charter. He issued a rather strange Administrative Order, involving the costs of getting letters from the King. It does all these sorts of things you'd expect it to do. It blackens the reputation of Richard; it blackens the previous regime. But it wasn't really a standard Coronation Charter.
10:54
Russ: So, tell us about the role of the courts at this point. And you make a point in your book of saying that the rise of just the basic existence of a legal system was important at this point. What would happen in a court of law in England at this time that was part of the problem for King John's baronial reputation? Guest: Okay. So, law in England is very, very old. It goes way back beyond the Norman Conquest in 1066. It's 400, 500 years old by the time that King John came to the throne. It's mostly custom [?]. It isn't written down. There isn't a book called 'The Laws of England' that you can go to in 1199 that you can go to when John came to the throne. But there is an understanding that law exists. And there is an understanding that the courts operate according to the law. The problem is, though, that the law at this time was also a major source of revenue to the crown. It was a revenue source in part because the people who lost their cases in court--if I sued you for some land and I lost, I then had to pay a fine. I had to pay the court's expenses. All of that money went to the King. It was also very important to the King as a symbol of his authority. So that the King, increasingly, from Henry II's time onwards, drew as much business as was possible into his courts. Because in doing so he deprived other Lords of the jurisdiction that they had previously exercised. So that the great barons of England found that people who had previously come to their courts to litigate, now took their business to the King's Court. So that made the King an economic [?] with the barons for the businesses of these various courts. And it also meant that when the King was short of money, he would use the fines of his court to wrack as much as he could from those whose cases were lost or, in the case of those who were prepared to pay lots of money to the King to win their case, what we would think of as bribery. But in the 12th and 13th century was merely a standard task[?] of the judicial process. Whatever happens, you were bound to pay the King. He began to greatly increase the size of those fines that he was charging for litigation and his court. Russ: And just to give a little background for old-time listeners, or new-time listeners: We make a distinction sometimes on this program between law and legislation, a distinction emphasized by Hayek. A 'law' being what people expect as the custom or norms of the day. Legislation being written down, statutes. So, people make a contrast between common law, the so-called British system, and statute law, which is more like legislation. You suggest in your book though that that distinction is somewhat misleading--in the case of the situation then, at the time. Guest: There was quite a lot of legislation around then, at the time. So, we're not in an entirely customary system [?]. We are in a system whereby both statute law and customary law are operating side by side. So, Henry the Second [Henry II], King John's father, had issued a series of assizes--a series of what we would call Acts, Statutes, Laws--written laws--particularly involved criminal jurisdiction. These existed. Whether they were very well publicized is another story. But, in other words, it's a mixed system. It's also a system--we talk about the Common Law System. We often use that term 'common law' to distinguish the laws of England or the Anglicine[?] tradition from law on the Continent, which operates according to Roman Law Tradition. Which actually goes all the way back to Justinian and beyond. Russ: The Napoleonic Code being an example of written down-- Guest: Precisely. So, it isn't about precedent. It isn't about what happens in the Courts. It isn't about pleadings. It's about what's written down in a code of law. Well, actually those Roman traditions do play a role in England. England isn't an entirely insular system cut off from all of that. It's also a system in which a lot of justices are themselves lawyers--but Church lawyers, canon lawyers. And the canon law tradition, which again derives from statutes issued by the Popes, that, too, is very important in England. So, we shouldn't at this stage be too picky about saying this is Common Law of England which is entirely distinct from Roman law or entirely distinct from canon law. Kings, Barons, whoever it might be, use whatever law they think they can get away with using in court. Russ: Just like today. Guest: They use it for their own advantage, and, as I say, there is also a significant financial advantage to the King here. Russ: But there are other things going on which are also hard for us to imagine in 2015. The King uses a lot of arbitrary power, particularly in death, in terms of the disposition of estates, the inheritance of a castle, a widow's control of castles. Talk about some of the ways that the King was bringing money in from everyday life events. Guest: Okay. England after the Norman Conquest in 1066 is placed in a very strange position. Elsewhere, people own their land outright. They don't really hold it from the King. But because in 1066 the Normans conquered England and seized all the land and gave it all to the King, and the King then distributed--in England, unlike France and unlike other parts of Europe, all land is ultimately held from the King. And it's generally held from the King via a great person, who we've all called a Baron or an Earl--these great persons hold their land directly from the King. Great estates. Which is then distributed among a series of knights. Now, every time a baron dies, his heir owes a sum of money to the King, called a 'Relief'[?]. It's not a very large sum of money. Or at least it doesn't need to be a very large sum of money. But it's significant, as demonstrating that as each generation, the King in theory has a right to step in an redistribute this land. If the baron dies whilst his son or heir is still a minor, is still under the age of 21, then the King acts as guardian, treating this heir as a ward. And can do pretty much what he likes with the estate of that young heir until the heir comes of age. So, he can use it to reward his followers. He can marry off the daughters of a baron to a particular follower and make that follower rich. He can use this large body of land that's held by the barons, really for the patronage of the crown. And there are whole theories of customary taxes that go with this system, what we would call the feudal system. There are a whole series of taxes and customs that go with this that mean the King's Lordship again has a very significant financial aspect to it. So, I don't know whether we could find a modern equivalent for that. We are talking about a combination of inheritance tax, but also really a system in which, if you die with no heir, not only can the King step in and grab your land, but he can actually grant your daughters away, or your sons away, in marriage, to the sons or daughters of his own particular followers. It's a very personalized system. It's a system in which marriages, and marriage alliances, are much, much more significant than they are today. Save perhaps today amongst the very, very super-rich. Amongst those who really want to build up a vast oligarchy of wealth--by their being heir to one great corporation they marry their heir to the heiress to another great corporation. We're in that sort of realm of the corporate oligarchs.
19:08
Russ: There's a certain--when you say, what's the modern equivalent--I think of the city of Chicago in the 1950s, actually. It's not quite that way. But the patronage aspect of it is clearly extremely important to the King. And the competition--what we would call rent-seeking in modern economics--the competition among potential favorites of the King must have been quite intense. And as a reader of Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments, when he decries people in the Court who are scurrying around for favor and fawning on the powerful, I always wondered what he had in mind. And this is part of what he had in mind, even though he was writing 500 years later in 1759. He's writing about the competition to get access to the 0-sum game of 'this castle is going to somebody and I hope it's me.' Guest: Yeah, exactly. And there is an enormous profit to be made there from people who are courtly, who can actually get on with this really very difficult ruling dynasty. Who can get access to this ruling dynasty. Because the dynasty also, like lots of dynasties, for the most part hides itself away. It's out hunting. It's out doing the things that Kings do. It's actually very difficult to get at the King. Russ: Well, he's traveling a lot. He doesn't hang out at one place, it seems. Guest: He's got this vast collection of lands in France and in England and the only way, really, of governing it at the time is to travel through it. Regularly to be seen in each place, regularly to be there to do justice. So the King is constantly in the saddle. It's why these kings don't live very long. None of them really live beyond their 50s. They spend their life in the saddle, day by day, traveling from one place to another. Russ: They are really the first, the pioneers of the management-by-walking-around theory. I'm teasing a little bit, but it's a serious concept in management: You get on the floor and you talk to the people. We're talking about a world with very limited communication. When the King was in France and you were in England, he was very far away. Guest: That's right. You've still got it today. The business of the face-to-face meeting is still terribly, terribly important. Today you could run the whole of the world economy on the [?] or through the Internet. And yet people don't do that. They are constantly jet-setting around the world. Because the face-to-face meeting is where things actually get done. Russ: So, get us to 1215. We've got a King, comes into power 1199. He's a bit rapacious. He seems to be very grasping at these opportunities for patronage and taxation and taking lands and money. And so, he doesn't build up a lot of love among the barons. What pushes them to what becomes the key in 1215? There's no real obvious--it seems to me, or is there?--example of what brings us to the confrontation of 1215. Guest: I think there are 3 or 4 things that bring us to 1215. And we've got a 15-year period so let's cover it in the next couple of minutes. Russ: Yeah--5 minutes. Guest: You are missing one very important thing there, Russ, which is the macroeconomics behind all of this. And for an audience who is interested in economics, I think this is significant. It's generally agreed that at this period Europe as a whole is going through a period of quite significant inflation. So, there's quite significant monetary inflation. The prices of hiring a knight, the prices of besieging a castle, are rising exponentially. The King's revenues at this time are to a large extent rented out. They are farmed out at fixed farms. So the Kings of England have a very large revenue from, say, the County of Yorkshire. Big county. And for that, they have an official [?] who pays them the same sum of money--200 pounds. And he paid them that in 1150; and he's still paying them that in 1220. The actual value of that rent has declined massively, as the cost of everything else has risen. So there is a strong argument that says the King, for a start, was in an impossible situation economically. He was forced to turn to these extraordinary fines, these extraordinary exploitations of wardships and heiresses and daughters: He has to do all of that to keep up with inflation. Because his main assets are locked away in a fixed return bond, if you like, in the form of land, rent that isn't actually going up. Are you with me so far? Russ: Carry on. Guest: So, against that background, King John himself behaved appallingly--I think that's the best way we can put it. In the Middle Ages, if you were a king, you were supposed to do two things. You were supposed to be just: you dispense justice. And you held onto your lands, and ideally expanded them. John failed in all those respects. He was seen widely as being unjust. And he failed to hold on to what his family had. And the first real key instance of that came in 1282. The King's nephew, Arthur of Brittany, rebelled against him. This was a dysfunctional family; people had always been rebelling against one another within it. John took Arthur prisoner. John is one real example of military genius. He managed to seize Arthur and all of Arthur's supporters in a lightning raid on the Loire[?]. And at that point, Arthur just disappeared. Now, nobody knows what happened to him. Some people say that John himself murdered him. Some say that John sent an assassin. Some say that Arthur died attempting to escape. But in the past, kings had faced rebellions; they'd locked away their brothers and cousins and so forth. But they hadn't murdered them. John not only murdered his nephew, but murdered a nephew who bore the name 'Arthur,' a legendary name in English history, a boy who was only 15 years old--Arthur was only 15 years old at the time of his taking by John. So, he is a child murderer. He is a tyrant who kills members of his own family. The result of that was a great rebellion. France--a rebellion against the King's injustice that led the King of France himself from Paris to invade Normandy, the whole of Normandy, the whole of Anjou, the whole of the King's territories north of the Loire fell to the King of France in 1204. So, John had not only shown himself to be a tyrant, but also lost his lands. He'd done two of the things that kings are not supposed to do in the Middle Ages. A third thing that kings are not supposed to do--they are not supposed to fall out with the Church. But in 1205, the year after the loss of Normandy, John had a major falling out with the Pope. The Pope did not want John's own candidate to be elected Archbishop of Canterbury. The Pope insisted that John take a particular individual, a man named Stephen Langton, as his archbishop. John refused. The Pope placed the English Church in effect under a [?interdict?] of strike. So the next 6 years there were no masses said; the dead went unburied at consecrated ground; there was no Christian marriage; the sacraments were denied to the Christian faithful. So John really [?] get much worse than that--you would think. Russ: Excuse me for interrupting--it was John's father under whose auspices was murdered. Correct? Guest: Thomas Becket. Yes, absolutely. Russ: So it was a family with troubled--movie fans will remember, it's The Lion in Winter if I remember correctly--which is a lovely film; I don't know if it's historically accurate--but they have a troubled, despite their dysfunctional relationship with each other, they don't do a great job with the Church. Guest: They do. This is a family in which there is an awful lot of shouting, in which there's an awful lot of throwing of plates. You know: the Katharine Hepburn version of this family, yeah, is not very far off in The Lion in Winter. And also, they are a family who rather delight in the idea that they came from the devil. They claim their ultimate ancestor was a she-devil called Melusine. They actually boast about it. And after the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170 in which Henry II did play a part--maybe innocent, maybe not, but certainly he was seen as having said the fateful words that led to Becket's murder, the family was widely regarded as the sons of Satan. They really were not very popular in the eyes of the Church, which is why the Pope could place the Church of England into interdict rather than have John have his own man made Archbishop. Russ: So, I interrupted. That's three of four. Three bad ones. What's left? Guest: We're almost there, Russ. One further thing. How much worse could this get? Well, John used that period of the Papal Interdict to seize the lands of the Church. He became immensely wealthy. Not only was he not taxing all his barons, but he was also taxing the Church directly. He built up a vast war chest, huge treasure. Probably he was the richest king in English history between William the Conqueror in 1066 and Henry VIII in the beginning of the 16th century, who closed down the monasteries and seized the band[?] of the Church and became very wealthy as a result of the Reformation. And John staked all that money on a bid to reconquer his lands in France. And that bid went horribly wrong. John's northern army was defeated on the 27th of July, 1214, just outside the city of Lisle in Northern France at a place called Bouvines. And that battle, the Battle of Bouvines, is as important in the history of France as the Battle of Hastings is in the history of England. It set the kings of France on the road to wealth and fortune thereafter. And in the aftermath of it, John had to slink back to England for the second time, totally defeated at war, having tried to reconquer his lands in France and failed. And that's really where the road to Runnymede begins.
29:17
Russ: And just to make it clear--again, having read your book I have an appreciation of this I otherwise wouldn't have--when we talk about taxes or fees, in modern terms we think about, oh, they raised the sales tax rate from 6.5% to 7%. Or the highest rate of income tax went from 29% to 40-whatever it is. Guest: Well, Russ, you're an American so you can talk in those terms. But if you're in Europe we would be very grateful for a raise of taxes at that level. But yes. Russ: But that's because you don't have--we have estate taxes on top of that, which people often forget. Guest: You do, yes. Russ: It can be about, it's about in the high 40s; and 50% when you include sales tax and the burden of the corporate tax. But anyway, that's not the point. The point I want to emphasize is the arbitrary nature of some of the fees that are going to the King that are not statutory or custom-driven. The King, he's throwing his weight around over this period for financial gain that must have really annoyed everybody who had to deal with him. Guest: Yes. The actual raise of tax is nothing like what the rich pay today. I mean, we--the rich, and I'm not the rich, and I suspect neither are you--pay a certain level of tax. People pay, as you say, up to 50% of their income in tax. No one is doing that back then, in the early 13th century. Russ: But, they don't have iPhones. So they are miserable, even with a lower rate of tax. Guest: Exactly. Precisely. And they are not accustomed to it. That's the most important thing. They are just not used to it. And the other thing, as you quite rightly say, is that it's arbitrary. So today, if they raise taxes in Idaho, you can actually protest against that. You can [?] out and say, 'No, I don't want to pay this.' And you can risk going to jail and everything else. In the 13th century, you don't have the choice. There isn't a higher authority. There isn't a Congress or any sort of body to which you can appeal. There isn't a debate: the King is completely sovereign with his own land. And if he says that taxes are to be charged at this rate, then that rate will be charged. Russ: But it seems to me he also would just make up situations where he just felt like he could get some more money out of folks. It's a human failing. I understand it, but it's not--it doesn't make friends or influence people. Guest: Yep. And when you were talking about walk-around management, this [?] King John, too--that up to that point in 1204 when John had lost all these lands in France, most of his reign, like that of his brother who was off in the Holy Land or like that of his father, who was off in France--these were absentee kings. They weren't there. But from 1204, John is parading around England, on the shop floor, looking for all the opportunities he can find to make more money. He is eyeing up the daughters and wives of his barons; he's seen widely as a lecher; he's the sort of really horrible boss who is there on the shop floor day after day looking for ways to make your life miserable. Russ: Even though it's a different media age, you are suggesting he's a little over-exposed in the public eye. I like that. That's very nice. Russ: So we come--I just have to mention in passing--I'm 60 years old. For those of you who are 68 and over in the United States, the mention of Henry VIII just brings to mind Herman's Hermits, and I'm just going to leave that there and let it sit there for those in the audience who appreciate that.
32:42
Russ: But let's talk about Runnymede, which you just mentioned. This is where this confrontation, or so-called peace treaty takes place. Where is that physically in England? And if you can, tell the-- Guest: It's on the Thames. Russ: Tell the King George VI story, which I really love, the WWII story. I thought that was utterly charming. Okay. So, it's on the Thames. It's between London and Windsor Castle. And it's a wonderful story, as you say. It's the end of the Second World War, just after D-Day landings[?]. The King wanted to go off and actually be with his troops. He wanted to be at the head of his troops, George VI, the King of The King's Speech. And Winston Churchill said, No, he couldn't do that. And the King was so cross that as they went driving back from London late at night to Windsor Castle, he put his fist out the window of the car and pointed at the field of Runnymede on the Thames, and said, 'That is the place'--and I think he said 'that is the something place'--'That is the place where it all began.' Because there, as it were, that kings began to be placed under the rule of law. Halfway between London and Windsor, a little bit closer to Windsor than to London. The key point there to bear in mind is that this was chosen because on the 17th of May, 1215, almost exactly 800 years ago from the time that you and I are talking--coming up on Sunday, the 800th anniversary of that--these barons, fed up with the King, seized the city of London, seized the King's capital, and forced the King into negotiation. So Runnymede is chosen because it's midway between the barons in London and the King, now, in his great fortress of Windsor. Russ: It's a perfect compromise spot. It's neutral territory. Guest: It's neutral territory. It lies on the frontiers between three counties. And it also lies on a river. Rivers have always been seen as liminal places, places where negotiations can take place. Russ: So, here's something--I don't remember from your book and maybe we just don't know. Because CNN [Cable News Network] wasn't there, or the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation]. So, what happened? Did somebody show up with this piece of parchment? Were there negotiations? How did the content come to be? I know there are disputes over who literally wrote it. I'm sure there are disputes over who inspired or dictated the text. What do we know about where the content may have come from? Guest: The content is in the air for quite a long time before the meeting at Runnymede. So, for a start, the barons, from the moment that the King came back to England in 1214, began saying that the King must issue a charter. He must do what his ancestor, Henry I, had done in 1100 and issue a charter actually with specific terms saying that he would limit the taxes and exactions and exploitation of his barons. So, there's clearly negotiation going on throughout the winter of 1214-1215. For 9 months before ever we get to Runnymede. And I've just been looking at the events of exactly 800 years ago this week, where we begin to get references, this week, to the King saying, 'Well, I will allow the barons to judge one another by their peers in my Court.' Now that idea of judgment by peers did eventually come out in Runnymede, 4, 5 weeks down the line from here. But it was clearly already in the ether at this stage. Another thing that makes things rather complicated here: People knew at the time that these were really important negotiations. They knew that they were participating in something of historic significance. We know that because they kept various of the bits and pieces of parchment that were flying around at this time. So we have early drafts of the Magna Carta that clearly escape from the negotiations. Not only were they taken away, but they were kept very carefully. They were kept almost as if they were holy relics of a very significant set of negotiations. And trying to fit those in to what we know came out of the negotiations is actually what keeps historians in business today. Nobody quite agrees who said what to whom at what particular point. But we do know that there was a very heated negotiation, a very sophisticated negotiation, between some pretty sophisticated individuals before ever we get to Magna Carta. Russ: It's pretty remarkable, because we have a similar debate about the American founding document, the Declaration of Independence--who actually wrote it? We have drafts, we have cross-outs, we have emendations. And it's of course a fascinating historical question. This is a long time before it. This is half a millennium before that. And it's a rather remarkable thing that we have anything at all. That any of it survived. Guest: That's right. Russ: Forget scraps--that we have the actual Magna Carta is--of course, there's more than one issue of it; we'll get to the various editions in a minute. But the fact that we have any of those is really quite extraordinary.
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Russ: So, let's go to the document itself. Again, as an ignorant person, I would have thought it was something like the Declaration of Independence--a set of grand principles. And there's a little of that. But it's actually quite remarkably detailed. It has 63 very specific clauses about how things should proceed from now on. So, talk about the general content and some of the specifics of the document. Guest: Okay. So we are talking about 4000 words, and at the time it was issued it wasn't broken down into these 62 points. That's something we've imposed on it. Russ: And it's in Latin. Guest: So it's a big block of Latin text. The negotiations can't have been done in Latin. They would have been done in French, which was the language of the King, the language of the elite. Even though they rule in England, these are Anglo-French barons. They speak French. So we've got to imagine problems of translation going on here, too. And, as I say, there's a quite heated negotiation that goes on before this, so they have to decide what to keep in and what to get out. There's only a certain amount of material that they can get onto one sheet of parchment. So, some things stay and other things sort of hit the cutting room floor. You are absolutely right though: Unlike the Declaration of Independence, it does not have really significant statements of principle built into it. A lot of it is not at all the hot air that you would expect it to be. It's nitty-gritty stuff about how much precisely should be paid when an heir inherits his lands if he is a knight, or if he is a baron, or if he is an earl. What, precisely, should be the circumstances in which a widow or the daughter of a baron should go into the King's custody? And so on and so forth. A lot of it actually is about the specific nitty-gritty of peace negotiations with the Welsh. With the Scots. Both of whom have joined the barons in 1215. They'd seen a good thing when it was coming, had actually jumped on the bandwagon and were part of this rebellion. Russ: And it's definitely not about the people, by the way. Which is also a romantic thought I might have had. It's about the barons. Guest: There's virtually nothing about the people. There is one reference to the people, if by the people we mean the persons. And it's a very, very specific reference. It says that villeins [free persons/serfs under the feudal system--Econlib Ed.] should not be so heavily taxed in the King's Courts that they lose the means of their subsistence. And it actually says that merchants shouldn't have their merchandise taken away. Villeins shouldn't have--persons shouldn't have their complete livelihood taken away. And free men should not actually lose their means of livelihood, either. Fascinating: That was later used by slave owners in America and Jamaica to say that Magna Carta actually institutes the idea of slavery. It allows the division of society between free men and merchants and peasants, each of whom has specific rights under this constitution. So, it definitely isn't directed to all people. Russ: No. The Devil can quote scripture. Guest: Precisely. The Devil can quote scripture. There is one rather fascinating point in it, though, which is of very great significance there, almost the last clause of the charter. Up to that point it's all been about the rich. It's all about the elite; it's all about the barons and the earls and their rights and privileges. And then almost at the end, it states that all of the liberties that are here granted to the barons, should be extended by the barons to their own subjects--to their knights and freemen. In other words, there is an idea at the very end that this thing is for everybody. And by the much later period, by the 16th century, by which stage there isn't really slavery in England, there isn't serfdom, there aren't peasants who are bonded to their land any more--by that stage it meant that the Charter as a whole could be used as a liberty document. Can I say one other thing that is in the Charter that is awfully significant and is often overlooked? Russ: Yes. Guest: The Charter begins with a grant of liberties not to the people of England, not to the barons, not to the earls, not to the peasants, but to the Church. It says that the Church in England is to be free and to have all its ancient liberties intact. Now, that's a rather odd clause to find at the very beginning of something that we think is all about the constitution. Think of the American Constitution as a deliberate writing out of any sort of established religion from the American Constitution. Magna Carta is the precise opposite of that. The reason the Church is there is partly because the Church and its leaders were crucial in these negotiations. They headed the peace negotiations. And this was their clause, that they made sure came in at the beginning. But it's also because the Charter, to begin with, is granted to God. The Charter begins: 'We have granted to God that the Church in England is to be free.' Russ: The 'we' there is the King. Guest: Is the royal 'we'--this is King John. This is basically, 'me,' I, King John. But he refers to himself in the first person plural. 'We '--we the King. 'We the King grant to God.' Now, the reason that's there at the beginning is that if you give God something, you can't ask for it back. Or you shouldn't ask for it back. Russ: Yes. Guest: You can't give God land to build a church but then on Thursday say, 'Can I have it back so that I can build a car park on it?' So the Church is there for a very strategic significant reason at the beginning. [more to come, 43:18]