Magna Carta Commentaries: 48 Stories Celebrating Little-known Facts about the Great Charter

By Luan Hanratty

The Magna Carta has been called the most important document in history. This book highlights the contexts and characters around its creation, as well as the people and events that reiterated its principles, keeping alive a political tradition protecting rights and freedoms that is still in force today.

Magna Carta Commentaries is not a long boring academic book, yet contains a great deal of thorough research and original conclusions. The 48 stories provide detailed insights into medieval life, intriguing profiles of the characters involved, and overviews of the Charter's legal and constitutional ramifications down the centuries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen Bal Publishing
• Release date: Feb 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311771346

Book preview

1. Parties Protected in the Magna Carta

The Magna Carta was a seminal document because for the first time, in somewhat the chivalric spirit, it legally conferred rights and thereby dignity on many disadvantaged factions in society.

Peasantry: Villeins (16, 20) as well as people dwelling on the fringes of forests (44, 48) and those falling within recently created new forests (47), as well as those who lived off the rivers (47, 33). In 1354 the Charter was reissued to include all men of whatever estate or condition he may be.

Free Men:

Convicts (32)

Owners of horses, carts and wood (30, 31)

The indebted and those owing feudal services (9, 10, 11, 16, 28, 30, 37, 43)

Widows (7, 8)

Heirs (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 26, 27)

Knights (29)

Crusaders (52, 53, 57)

Travellers in and out of the kingdom (42)

Foreign merchants (41)

Traders in wine, ale, corn and cloth (35)

Towns and builders (23)

The City of London (13)

Wales and the Welsh royal family (56, 57, 58)

Scotland and the Scottish royal family (59)

The Church of England (1, 22, 63)

The accused, the imprisoned, and all those requiring justice (16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 34, 36, 38, 39, 40, 45, 52, 53, 54, 55, 60, 61, 62)

The Barons (in terms of taxation: 12, 14, 15, 25, 46, 55, hostages: 49, removal of foreign mercenaries: 50, 51) — in reality most of the clauses served to preserve their property

2. Demographics & Land in the 13th Century

England at the time of the Magna Carta would have had a population of around 3 million people, most of whom would have been clustered in the southern counties. It is difficult to put accurate numbers on the cities because they fluctuated so much during the Middle Ages. However, London would have been home to around 30,000 people and was approximately three times bigger than York and Bristol.

Under the feudal system everything had its place and everything flowed from the supposed order of nature. Society was split along the following lines. Villeins (serfs, peasants) who were tied to the land but not slaves as had been the case in Saxon times, would have made up around 80 percent of the population. The nobility: royalty, dukes, earls (shared root with 'elders' and 'aldermen'), various lords and knights, in other words: the baronage, would have been less than 2 percent. The clergy and other free men constituted around twenty percent between them. In the towns and cities common trades of free men would have included alehouse keepers, brewers, coopers, beer and wine traders, tanners, mercers, weavers, drapers, tailors, shoemakers, barbers, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, carpenters, masons, butchers, pepperers, bakers, chandlers, fishmongers.

Land was divided along various complex and overlapping lines including the following distinctions. Militarised borders with Scotland and Wales were known as marches (sharing a root with 'margin', 'mark', 'merge', 'marquis' and the ancient region of 'Mercia'). The Shires (hence 'sheriff') and later counties (or 'ridings' in Yorkshire & other old Danelaw areas) were divided into parishes (church land) and 'hundreds'. Hundreds were called that because in theory they could sustain 100 households. The hundreds had their own courts composed of 12 free men. Barons had their own manors divided into knights' fees (fiefs) and farms, while the Crown reserved not only areas of forest but also 'demesne' or surplus royal estates. These larger categories were the legacy of William the Conqueror, who first claimed all of the land for himself and subsequently parcelled it out to his allies. As we see from clauses 24 & 25, the Magna Carta preserved these districts and the rents therein, halting royal encroachment and extortion as well as demarcating the judicial boundaries between them.

3. Manumission and the Masses: Amending Magna Carta

Serfs and villeins were the lowest social class and were essentially chattel property owned by a local lord and to whom poverty was the accepted way of life. Unable to own property or pay rents, serfs gave feudal services to their superior as well as an annual tithe to the Church. These were mostly in the form of food but also extra days' work as well as occasional and peripheral military service. Above the serfs were the smallholders, semi-peasants who rented some personal land and could also provide works of craftsmanship such as pottery, knives, arrows, and armour.

To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, who justified the need for strong government to act as an overlord, life for a serf would have been quite wretched and filthy, often short and racked with tragedy and injustice. The Magna Carta did grant a few meagre rights to serfs such as the right to implements of husbandry and the forest clauses that were all part of reining in royal abuses of property and rationalising rents and rates. Despite this the prospects for serfs remained grim and justice was still largely beyond their reach.

Yet through the thirteenth century life gradually improved and one hundred years after the first Magna Carta the proportion of serfs had fallen from three quarters to half the population. This was coupled with the steady rise of the Commons as a political power since de Montfort's Parliament of 1265. The 1354 reissuance of Magna Carta also altered the opening statement to include all men of whatever estate or condition. This was a necessary concession that came in the aftermath of the Black Death when serfdom was becoming defunct as there were simply not enough people to farm the land and not enough wealth for the King to tax and pay for his army. By the time of Wat Tyler's Peasants' Revolt in 1381 they were bold enough to demand the complete end of serfdom in their negotiations with Richard II.

4. Common Concerns: Free Men vs. All Men

Easily the most widespread myth relating to the Magna Carta is that it applied to free men exclusively. The idea that serfs were completely excluded I hope I have disproved in chapters 1, 34 and 40. However, if you read the Magna Carta closely for nuance and subtext, the contrast between free men and all men is regularly made, and it is through a more subtle analysis that we see the profound nature of the text.

The Magna Carta follows an elegant structure with a logical flow and extremely considered wording. The initial clauses do indeed explicitly apply to the free men as well as the knights, barons and earls. But as the document progresses and becomes more wide-ranging; taking on the national and civic issues of weights, measures, fish weirs and bridges, payments for corn, ale, carts, horses, wood and the law surrounding forests, we see the edges start to blur between free men and all