Magna Carta in 20 Places

By Derek Taylor

The only book to tell Magna Carta's story through places associated with it, through England and France to the United StatesThe Magna Carta has undergone an extraordinary journey from the palaces and villages of England, through the castles and towns of France, via the Middle East, and ending in the United States today. Along the way, the book dispels the popular notions that King John was an unredeemed tyrant, the baron's champions of civil liberty, and that Magna Carta was the foundation of democracy and universal freedom. The true story is much more intriguing than a simple fiction of good defeating evil, and the author tries to answer one of the great mysteries about the Charter: why today is it much more enthusiastically revered in America than it is in the country of its origin? But myths can be powerful. And the account of how this largely technical medieval document became an inspiration to those who have struggled over centuries to win democracy and freedom under the law reveals a great deal about our need for symbols and our inclination to believe what we want to believe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: May 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9780750964579

Book preview

1

The Royal Exchange, City of London

A Magnificent Myth

Across the road from the Bank of England stands what looks like a vast temple with eight pairs of massive Corinthian columns along its front rising 90 feet into the air. You could imagine the entrance was built this high so that giants, or gods, could stride in without ducking. When TV economics correspondents want to ‘go live’ in the City of London and tell us on the six o’clock news about the latest GDP figures or the shrinking fiscal deficit, they ask their camera crews to set up so we’ll see it in the background. The building exudes dignity and reliability. It says ‘this is where weighty matters are decided.’ It’s called the Royal Exchange. And it makes the nearby Bank of England in Threadneedle Street look by comparison like a warehouse with a church on top, or a Las Vegas shopping mall pretending to be Grecian.

But the Royal Exchange isn’t a temple, not in the religious sense, though you could argue that what goes on inside is a cult. There’s a 10-foot-high statue of a crowned goddess at the top of its facade. She represents Commerce, and from the street we can see her right elbow leaning – implausibly – on the prow of a ship, while a beehive, positioned dangerously close to her left armpit, signifies how very busy her adherents are down below. Charles Dickens knew the Royal Exchange simply as The Change, and in A Christmas Carol, Scrooge sold debts here, and was taken by the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come to see its merchants as they ‘hurried up and down, and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully with their great gold seals.’

But the reason we’ve come to the Royal Exchange is neither to trade nor to admire the architecture. We’re here to look at a painting commissioned by the Exchange’s governors at the end of the nineteenth century to commemorate the freedom without which the goddess Commerce couldn’t function. The picture shows the birth, in the year 1215 on the banks of the River Thames at Runnymede, of Magna Carta, also known as the Great Charter of Liberties, when King John was backed into a corner by the mightiest barons of England and forced to issue the document that’s come to be regarded down the ages and over much of the planet ever since as the foundation of civil liberty and the rule of law.

***

At the top of the wide flight of steps leading to the Exchange’s entrance, I pass between the towering columns, then through a pair of glass doors. It turns out that, if the Bank of England is a solid institution that looks like a shopping mall, the Royal Exchange only looks like a solid institution but is in fact a shopping mall. The interior of the building is formed as a single room, that’s ‘room’ in the sense that a cathedral nave is a room. It rises to a glass ceiling 80 feet above its marble floor. As shopping malls go, it’s the uppermost of the upmarket variety. All along its sides, extravagantly lit windows between stone archways show off the sort of necklaces and watches royalty might wear on gala night at the palace. There are only two or three of these sparkling items in each showcase, which tells you all you need to know about their price. Discreet illuminated signs announce that Bvlgari, Tiffany & Co., Agent Provocateur and Lulu Guinness feel at home here. The whole floor of this well-ordered Aladdin’s cave is filled with small round tables and ladderback chairs, most of them occupied by men and women in sharp dark suits, leaning forward, neglecting their lattes and croissants, and looking intently at each other or at their laptop screens. I feel like an alien in my jeans and dark green thorn-proof country-style jacket. But I pull out my camera, zoom it back to a wide angle and have just snapped the glittering scene when the viewfinder is blocked by a blurred face which is speaking.

The Royal Exchange, temple of commerce. Its governors commissioned Ernest Normand’s painting of the sealing of Magna Carta in the 1890s.

‘Sorry, sir,’ it says, ‘photography is not allowed anywhere in the Royal Exchange.’ It’s a man in dark grey trousers rising to a buttoned-up black overcoat. His tie is golden. He points at the camera, and, perhaps assuming I’m a bumpkin, slow on the uptake, says, ‘It’s prohibited.’

‘Why’s that then?’ I ask.

‘Security,’ he replies, and I’m expecting him to escort me from the premises. ‘But you may walk around and look,’ he concedes, just in case I think I’ve a right to order a cup of peppermint tea and sit down.

The Royal Exchange, as you might imagine, has been a target for jewel thieves. In one recent heist, two figures in motorcycle gear and armed with axes broke through the outer wrought iron gates on a Saturday night when the place was closed. They smashed display cabinets and snatched watches worth £300,000 (at a guess, that’s about four watches). Their accomplices were waiting outside on motorbikes. They all sped off and lost their police pursuers. This particular mob were ‘dubbed’ (as tabloid newspapers put it) ‘the Fagin’s Kitchen gang’, because the thieves, though not quite as young as Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger, were teenagers.

I said the place is now an upmarket shopping mall, and so it is, but nevertheless it still serves its original purpose. The first Exchange on this site was opened by Queen Elizabeth I in 1570 as a meeting place for merchants. That building burned down in the Great Fire of London in 1666, and its replacement too went up in flames in the early nineteenth century. The monumental structure we’re visiting today was inaugurated by Queen Victoria in 1845 ‘for the convenience of merchants and bankers’. The merchants and bankers are still here, though nowadays they insist on fresh ground coffee and waitress service for their client meetings, in a place where, when the deal’s done, they can blow their bonuses at Bvlgari or Tiffany’s.

In some senses, Magna Carta itself, back in 1215, was a business deal. When hostilities had broken out between King John and the rebel barons earlier that year, the City of London – already a thriving trade centre – saw a commercial opportunity. The canny burghers of the city pitched their support behind the barons. It was a game-changer. It tipped the balance away from John, who now saw he had to reach an agreement with his opponents, if only to buy time. Charters granting certain concessions to towns were commonplace in the early thirteenth century. And in return for backing the rebels, Londoners got a neat little clause inserted into Magna Carta. It said that the city should ‘enjoy all its ancient liberties and free customs, both by land and by water’. So we can see why the Victorian governors of the Royal Exchange would commission a painting of ‘King John and the barons’.

***

The picture of the momentous event that took place on the meadow at Runnymede is up on the mezzanine level, which runs like a wide balcony behind decorated columns around the interior of the whole building. There are twenty-four murals you can admire from the restaurant up here. They were produced during the 1890s to illustrate episodes in the history of England which were important to the Royal Exchange and to the City of London as one of the world’s great trading centres. The paintings are all huge, approximately 12 feet high and 8 feet wide. When the Exchange’s governors commissioned the one of Magna Carta, they decided they wanted something expressive, dramatic and colourful. And that’s what they got. Truthful – well, that’s another matter.

In the centre of the picture is King John, wearing his crown and sitting on a throne beneath swirling banners. The Archbishop of Canterbury at his left shoulder is advising him. Below, to the king’s right, is a clerk holding a parchment, presumably the Charter. And in front of him are ranged the barons, some of them in battle dress, one leaning on a broadsword. In the right foreground of the picture is what looks like an old-fashioned printing press. In fact, it’s the machine that was used to make an imprint of the royal seal in a lump of wax, which would then be fixed to a ribbon or cord appended to the bottom of the document. Contrary to popular notions, King John did not ‘sign’ Magna Carta. Not that he was stupid or illiterate. Far from it. But, just as he enjoyed food though wouldn’t have dreamed of cooking it himself, so he could read and write, but usually had a man – or men – to do the manual work for him with pens and parchment. And anyway, the idea of authorising a document by writing your name on it in a distinctive way, i.e. signing it, was virtually unknown in the thirteenth century.

But what we’re interested in is not whether the painting is an accurate record of the event. No handy contemporary sketch, or even detailed description of the scene at Runnymede, has come down to us. What is significant for our investigation is the way the artist has tried to manipulate our feelings by bringing out the character of the protagonists and their reactions to the momentous event in which they’re participating. The painter was Ernest Normand, a notable Victorian who worked in the style of the Pre-Raphaelites. He completed the picture in 1900. Most of Normand’s other work is of sensual nudes or Old Testament scenes, all with characters whose emotions are conveyed through their ostentatious gestures. The wistful, the adoring, the betrayed, the angst-ridden, the lascivious are all revealed by a delicately positioned hand on the forehead, by yearning eyes, or a dissolute posture of the body. So Normand was the ideal choice to reflect on canvas the adoration, the pride, the hatred of tyranny which the story of King John, the barons and Magna Carta stirred in Victorian hearts.

Take the way he portrays the king, for instance. Beneath his golden crown, John has a furrowed brow. He’s a worried man. Then his eyes, staring off stage left, are shown as cold and calculating. At the same time they’re cowardly: he can’t meet the stern gaze of the barons who have beaten him and now confront him. His full lips are those of someone who’s more interested in the pleasures of the flesh than in the routine of good government. John doesn’t sit upright as a monarch should, but is lounging like a sulky schoolboy. In a bizarre touch, Normand has given him what look like ballerina’s shoes, perhaps to show that John is effeminate, not a rough, tough soldier like his brother Richard the Lionheart. The overall impression is not of a king – despite his crown – but of an untrustworthy, impetuous, shifty wimp who’s abused his position of power, in fact a thoroughly bad lot who’s rightly been brought to heel. The courtier just behind his right shoulder knows the game’s up. He’s doing what today’s politicians on media-handling courses are taught never to do: move your eyes sideways while still facing the camera. It makes you look devious and uncertain.

Contrast this image with those of the barons. There are four of them visible. Unlike the slouching king, their backs are all ramrod straight. The one at the front has his left foot planted on the steps leading up to the king’s throne, as if to show that he’s not cowed by the trappings of an unworthy king. He’s gripping his sword and looks like a man who will use it if necessary. But most striking, his facial expression is one of steely determination. He’s not to be trifled with. He knows he has right and the weight of history on his side. He’s a man you’d trust to lead you in the battle against the forces of tyranny. Behind him are two other barons. One is in full mail, with what looks like the hilt of a battleaxe tilted at the ready over his shoulder. The other is an older man, with white hair and beard, but again his back is firm and straight. It’s clear the wisdom of old age is also on the side of the barons. All three of these opponents of the king are skewering him with undeviating glares. They don’t trust him an inch. The fourth of their colleagues is turning, as though to look back at an unseen host of mighty men following up, ready to do what’s right.

In the background of the painting, at the side of the king’s tented pavilion, we can just see what appear to be the heads of hundreds of men crowding forward. The nation is watching, perhaps waiting to be liberated.

When Normand painted the picture, he was reflecting mainstream opinion. The great Victorian historian William Stubbs wrote of John that he was, ‘the very worst of all our kings, a faithless son, a treacherous brother, polluted with every crime’. Stubbs saw John’s father Henry II as a good and strong monarch, and King Richard the Lionheart, John’s brother who followed Henry, as a brave soldier. By contrast, John was tyrannical and cowardly. And the barons who rose up against him were regarded as early champions of civil liberty, battling on behalf of all the people of England for democracy, freedom and justice, principles thus enshrined in Magna Carta.

This uplifting picture has been guaranteed to stir hearts in England and wherever in the world there are folk who love freedom and abhor dictatorship, and are prepared to fight for what they know is right.

The trouble is that, in almost every respect, it’s wrong. It’s a myth.

The true story is rather different.

King John, according recent evidence, wasn’t entirely the ‘bad’ monarch of popular imagination. One renowned historian has described him as ‘a ruler of consummate ability’.

The rebel barons are even less like Normand’s picture of them. They weren’t the straight-backed, look-you-in-the-eye, idealistic, altruistic Honest Joes that he would have had us believe. As far as we can generalise, they were a self-serving bunch led by manipulative thugs.

And the commonly held view that Magna Carta is the guarantee of everything we in a free and democratic country hold dear is even wider of the historically accurate mark. It’s a view, however, that does have a long and respectable tradition. In the eighteenth century the British Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder described Magna Carta as ‘The Bible of the English Constitution’. A hundred years later, Stubbs could make the sweeping statement that, ‘The whole constitutional history of England is little more than a commentary on Magna Carta.’ And in the twentieth century, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared in his inaugural address to the American people that, ‘the democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history … It was written in Magna Charta [sic].’ In 2012, a poll of British adults carried out for the Daily Telegraph found that 85 per cent of us have heard of the Great Charter; of those, 60 per cent believe it guaranteed the rule of law, half think it safeguards our right to trial by jury and 38 per cent are convinced that without it there’d be no democracy.

But the plain fact is that Magna Carta, as sealed by King John in 1215, was not what later generations made of it. For a start, it contains no high-sounding statement guaranteeing freedom, justice and democracy. Most of its clauses deal with the technicalities of thirteenth-century feudal law, and were largely aimed at protecting the rights of the upper classes: 1 per cent or less of the population. In 1215 the Charter wasn’t even regarded as being particularly important. It’s called Magna, or Great, only because it was written on a piece of parchment slightly bigger than that of another charter issued soon afterwards. It might even have been consigned to the dustiest archives of history and forgotten if King John had managed to survive its birth by more than a year or so and re-establish his control over the country.

The Great Charter was not an early constitution. It wasn’t a proclamation of universal freedom under the law. And it certainly wasn’t the foundation of democracy. That’s a myth.

But of course, this is not the whole story. Far from it.

Myths have always been important throughout the history of humankind. Great nations are often founded on them. Take the United States of America, for instance, often said to be founded by the puritans arriving on the Mayflower to establish a country with freedom of worship. A myth because these early settlers wanted nothing of the sort. Yes, they were fleeing persecution back in England. However, their dream was not of a nation based on religious liberty, but of a country where the only sect permitted would be theirs. Or take ancient Rome, founded on the myth of Romulus and Remus suckled by a she-wolf. Not true in itself, but a sign that Romans were brutal, relentless fighters. Though its facts may be jumbled, a myth will have a golden thread of truth running through it. So it is with the story of John, the barons and Magna Carta.

The Great Charter couldn’t have exerted the power over our minds that it has for eight centuries if there were nothing to it but a list of feudal customs. It’s true the majority of its sixty-three clauses were just that. But through much of the document there’s a whiff of something different, something which hinted that ideas about freedom and justice have a vital role to play in the way that people living together organise themselves. Something that later generations could seize on and develop, so that the Great Charter could become a powerful, all-enduring watchword for our most cherished political, legal and civil rights. It deserves our reverence, though not for the reasons that Ernest Normand presented to us when he painted his picture of John and the barons at Runnymede in the year 1900. The real story of Magna Carta is what we shall pursue on our journey.

***

Back outside the Royal Exchange, on the triangle of pavement in front of the towering columns, there are no BBC reporters today testing their microphones. Instead there’s a tight-packed bunch of kids in their mid teens gathered halfway between a statue of the Duke of Wellington on his horse and another – rather less arrogant – stone figure with his raincoat over his arm, a Mr J.H. Greathead, according to the plaque, inventor of the ‘travelling shield’ which enabled tunnels to be cut for London’s underground railway. There’s something odd about these schoolkids. As they huddle against the cold, in beanie hats and anoraks and strapped into small rucksacks, I suddenly realise what it is. They’re all listening. Whatever the small, bald bespectacled chap in their midst is saying, presumably their teacher, it has grabbed them. Nobody’s chatting or giggling or fooling about. I edge closer. It sounds like he’s speaking Russian, or some other Slavic language. He opens his shoulder bag, and pulls out a sheaf of £20 notes. They look crisp, straight out of the Mint. He hands them out among the students closest to him, then holds one up where they can all see it. At first I think he’s showing them the picture of the queen on the note, but then realise it’s the image next to her that he’s pointing to. I hear him say something like ‘Banka z Anglie’ several times, and I seize on the few seconds’ silence that follow, to tackle him.

‘Excuse me,’ I say, ‘could I ask where you’re from?’

I quickly realise that I should have opened up with a softer approach, something about the weather maybe, because the chap steps back, his eyes wide in fright. So to put him at his ease, I assume an excessively broad smile. And as his expression changes from that of a man facing a secret policeman to one dealing with a lunatic, he replies, ‘We are here from the Czech Republic. It is our first visit,’ then he turns and marches off down Cornhill, with his obedient brood at his heels. I make a mental note to remember that freedom from oppression is a relatively new concept to some of our East European allies.

And it’s time we set off on our journey too. It will take us to the places where the ghosts of those who made Magna Carta, or who worshipped it later, still lurk. In palaces and villages, around the streets of bustling towns, in the shadows of ruined castles and the nooks of ancient churches, along desolate mountainsides and remote shorelines. To reach them, we shall travel through England and Wales, via France and the Middle East, until finally we arrive in the United States of America and discover that the Great Charter’s long and glorious – though often misrepresented – story isn’t finished yet.

One of the delights of Magna Carta is that its real history is much more engaging, exciting and surprising than any simple fairy tale of good defeating evil. On our travels, we shall see how lawlessness, violence, betrayal and the smack of firm government led to the birth of the Great Charter of Liberties in 1215. And we shall try to discover why Magna Carta, for all the misunderstandings about it (or maybe because of them), has continued to inspire its later followers to risk torture, imprisonment and death for what they believed it represented – through civil war, the fight for parliamentary democracy, and the colonisation of ‘new worlds’ – until today, 800 years later, people have even been known to brush away a tear when they speak of it.

***

Our next destination is an isolated spot in eastern England seventy-two years before King John sealed Magna Carta. Trouble between king and barons was nothing new in 1215; the tug of war between them had started decades before John came to the throne. In the mid-twelfth century, the balance of power was so heavily weighted in the barons’ favour that any form of effective central authority had collapsed and there was a near total breakdown in civil order over much of the country. Historians have called this period quite simply ‘the Anarchy’. In the Cambridgeshire Fens, where we’re heading, the lawlessness and savagery – both arbitrary and calculated – were so terrifying that ordinary people conjured up a diabolical image to describe their sense of helplessness. They said that Christ and his saints slept.

2

The Fens, Cambridgeshire, England

The Barons on Top

Anywhere less anarchic today than the first villages we come across on the edge of the Cambridgeshire fenlands would be hard to imagine. Little places with names full of old English charm like Abbots Ripton, Wennington, Kings Ripton. They must be a roof thatcher’s cash flow paradise. The ancient cottages here are all kept exquisitely pretty. Their reed-thatched roofs, thick and neat, patterned with chevrons and semicircles, droop like monks’ cowls around the faces of tiny upstairs windows. Below the eaves, smoothed plaster walls are coloured soft pink or a light shade of fresh buttermilk. In Wennington, all is serene. A patriarchal gentleman, with trimmed moustache, tweed jacket, knotted tie and upright stance – a veteran soldier perhaps – is walking his spaniel. A middle-aged woman with shopping bag approaches him, and he touches his hat with old-time courtesy. Some of the house-owners here have got so carried away with the cuteness of it all that they’ve had their thatchers model from reed a fox or a pheasant to grace the rooftops of their homes. No dwelling here is spoiled by the faint damp stains, hairline cracks or raggedy moss that you expect on old cottages. These dwellings are so perfect – set off by a well-mown lawn and a shady fruit tree or two – that they don’t look real. They have the rounded, sugar candy appearance of fairy-tale houses in Disneyland.

But imagine. Eight and a half centuries ago, Wennington, Kings Ripton, Abbots Ripton and many surrounding villages and towns were the scene of some of the most savage, unchecked gang violence ever seen in England.

Sudden outbreaks of widespread lawlessness were endemic in the hierarchical structure of medieval Europe. Feudalism didn’t work. Not as a means to a peaceful society anyway.

The system was based on contract. The greatest men in the land – the barons or the tenants-in-chief, as they were also known – swore allegiance to the king and were obliged to provide him with a certain level of military support. In return, the king, who received his authority from God, granted them title to their lands and offered his vassals a degree of protection. That at least, in a nutshell, was the theory. The reality was often very different.

Since the Norman Conquest in 1066, the relationship between king and barons had been a continual power struggle. On the one hand, the barons’ constant objective was to run their own territories as independent fiefdoms, as free as possible from royal interference. And the more aggressive of these aristocrats would seize any opportunity – a weak king, or one distracted by an overseas war or a disputed claim to the throne – to try to minimise any governmental or judicial role for the monarchy in their own vast and often remote territories. The king, on the other hand, was constantly worried that, if enough of the barons got their way, he would be reduced to no more than a symbolic figurehead: a monarch with God’s blessing, but with very little real power beyond his own castles and their immediate surrounds. So if the king wanted to prevent this, he had to assert his royal rights throughout the realm whenever and however he could. The result was often what amounted to a bare-knuckle contest and no quarter given. Whenever tensions rose, the king would attempt to suppress his baronial opponents, calling them traitors. And they in turn would hit back claiming that he was overstepping the mark laid down by tradition, and would accuse the king of abusing the office granted him by God.

By the time John came to the throne, cataclysmic events over the previous seventy or so years had rocked the system. Both sides had challenged the other’s feudal status. Magna Carta can be understood only in the context of the violent swings in the balance of power between monarchy and baronage during the reigns of John’s immediate predecessors. And in the middle of the twelfth century, sixty years before John came to the throne, the man who called himself king was distracted by civil war and frankly was not very bright. A weak king was an opportunity for barons to feather their nests, fortify their castles and, for some of them, to run amok. This was what happened in the Cambridgeshire fens.

The most violent episodes began in the year 1143 with the arrival of one man, Geoffrey de Mandeville.

For eight years, following the death of Henry I, the country had been torn by a civil war between competing candidates for the throne: King Stephen, who was William the Conqueror’s grandson, and the Empress Matilda, who was the late king Henry’s daughter. Stephen was king solely by virtue of getting himself crowned first ahead of his rival. Contemporaries wrote that, apart from his prowess as a fighter, he ‘was almost an imbecile’. Matilda, described as haughty, tactless and grasping, was called empress because she was the widow of the German ruler of the Holy Roman Empire (which cynics have observed was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire). Stephen and Matilda were each desperate to win over to their own cause as many of the barons as they could. They did this by creating lordly titles and then handing them out, with the appropriate lands, to anyone with a decent army of knights and bowmen who had come over to their side. Before the civil war began, England had seven earls. Seven years later the number had shot up to twenty-two. For the barons, this was a winning game. The past master at it was Geoffrey de Mandeville.

De Mandeville at first backed Stephen and was given the earldom of Essex as a reward. But when the king was defeated at the Battle of Lincoln in 1141, he figured the empress was a better bet and switched sides. Then, as her fortunes declined, he swapped back to the king’s camp. Each of these shifts delivered him more high-flown ranks, land and cash till he ended up in control of the counties of Middlesex, Essex and Hertfordshire as well as the City of London. But he then got to be a bit too clever for his own good and, while publicly supporting Stephen, he began plotting in secret to put Matilda on the throne. By now, de Mandeville was himself almost as powerful as a monarch.

At this point, even the king stirred from his imbecility and at last got wise to de Mandeville’s double dealing. In 1143, while the royal court was at St Albans, Stephen decided to arrest him. But the job was botched. The king’s men tried to jump de Mandeville in the street; there was a scuffle, during which one of the king’s supporters, the Earl of Arundel, was rolled on the ground, horse and all, and almost drowned when he fell into the abbey’s sacred pond. De Mandeville managed to make it to the altar of the nearby chapel, where he claimed sanctuary. But Stephen’s men ignored the earl’s claim to God’s protection, dragged him out, bound his hands and hauled him before the king. Stephen accused him of treachery, and offered him a straight choice: either regain his freedom by surrendering all his castles including the Tower of London, or be hanged.

De Mandeville was beaten. He had no option but hand the lot over to Stephen. However, once freed, he exploded with rage, gathered together a couple of loyal relatives and their men, and headed for Cambridgeshire. There, he chose as his headquarters the Benedictine abbey in the little town of Ramsey. It was now December, and de Mandeville and his gang burst into the monastic house at dawn. They grabbed hold of the monks – some at prayer, some in bed – and threw them out into the fields with nothing more than the clothes they had on. De Mandeville stabled his horses in the cloisters, plundered the church of its sacred treasures, and then set about fortifying the abbey. A chronicler wrote that he ‘made of the church of God a very den of thieves’. But this was only the start. Ramsey was to be the base from which he would terrorise by robbery, rape and torture every living person, rich or poor, cleric or lay, young or old, for a distance of 30 miles around.

***

Ramsey today, in its buildings and people, still reflects a range of class, age and faith, though now according to twenty-first-century definitions.

A sign on the road as you enter welcomes

Reviews for Magna Carta in 20 Places

[drmaf-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This may be the best book I have ever read on Magna Carta. Rather than a worthy, but dull account of John's reign and the missteps that led to Runnymede, the author goes out and travels to a variety of places around England and Europe where events happened that shaped Magna Carta, and then to places where Magna Carta materially affected the lives of people. His travelogue includes Laxton, a tiny village which uniquely practices land allocation as it was done in John's time, Lincoln, a typical English town that benefited enormously from liberties given to it by John for supporting him, Bouvines, an obscure French village where a battle between the armies of the French king Phillip Augustus and John's ally Otto of Brunswick effectively ended John's chances of regaining his lost territories in France, and of course Runnymede itself, where Taylor discovers the site which commemorates Magna Carta is actually nowhere near where the historic signing, and where a monument erected by American lawyers is the only visible commemoration of the event, which lead's into Taylor's trip across the Atlantic to discover that the American reverence for Magna Carta is possibly greater than Britain's. In between, Taylor dissects Magna Carta honestly and discovered most of it is completely irrelevant today (only 3 clauses are still enforced as British law), and very little of it has anything to do with grand notions of freedom. nevertheless, as a symbol and an inspiration for what was to come, its value remains undiminished. This is an entertaining, informative and thoughtful work. For anyone who was bored to death by learning about Magna carta at school, I highly recommend this as a pleasant antidote