Magna Carta: The Places that Shaped the Great Charter

By Derek J. Taylor

For 800 years, Magna Carta has inspired those prepared to face torture, imprisonment and even death in the fight against tyranny. But the belief that the Great Charter gave us such freedoms as democracy, trial by jury and equality beneath the law has its roots in myth. Back in 1215, when King John was forced to issue Magna Carta, it was regarded as little more than a stalling tactic in the bloody conflict between monarch and barons. Here, Derek J. Taylor embarks on a mission to uncover the ‘golden thread of truth’ that runs through the story of the Great Charter. On a journey through space and time, he takes us from the palaces and villages of medieval England, through the castles and towns of France and the Middle East, to the United States of the twenty-first century. Along the way, the characters who gave birth to the Charter, and those who later fought in its name, are brought to life at the places where they lived, struggled and died. As he discovers, the real history of Magna Carta is far more engaging, exciting and surprising than any simple fairy tale of good defeating evil.

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

Derek J. Taylor

Derek J. Taylor is a best-selling history writer and former international TV news correspondent. He studied law and history at Oxford before joining Independent Television News of London. As an on-screen correspondent, he reported from Northern Ireland, Rome, South Africa and the United States, and reported on five wars in the Middle East. He is the author of Magna Carta: The Places that Shaped the Great Charter (The History Press, 2015), Who Do the English Think They Are? From the Anglo-Saxons to Brexit (The History Press, 2017) and Fayke Newes: The Media vs the Mighty, From Henry VIII to Donald Trump (The History Press, 2018).

Reviews for Magna Carta

[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