"It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them..."We essentially take it for granted.
Saturday, 15 June 2013
Magna Carta Day
June 15th 1215 was the day the Magna Carta was signed (in English "The Great Charter" in case Cameron is reading this blog and still doesn't know what it means). To celebrate, the Freedom Association organised a day long river trip on Saturday up the Thames from Windsor to Runnymede which I happily partook in. To my slight shame I'd never been before so here was an opportunity to see the historic spot for myself. Here's a couple of personal photos from the day:
Disappointingly it's made clear that the memorial was erected by the American Bar Association. It begs the sad question why a monument to mark such a important moment in English history was not funded by ourselves. At times like this one has sympathy with Bill Bryson's view in his book; Notes From A Small Island:
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David, I think it's worse than taking it for granted; many of us have forgotten our history (those of us who perhaps are old enough to have been given some proper history of these isles) and the rest have never been taught it.
ReplyDeleteAgree there's also an element of that. I was never taught about the Magna Carta (I had proper socialist history lessons - rise of Labour, unions, Match girls strike etc) yet a chap I was speaking to who was somewhat younger than me was taught about MC.
DeleteI do think Bryson has a point though, which reveals itself with the ongoing casual destruction of historically significant buildings infamously embodied by the disgrace that was the Euston Arch. We have so much of it we don't get so exercised by one or two bits going missing.
Interestingly Bryson is another example of an American trying to protect our heritage as he used be President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England
Worse still, the memorial is almost certainly in the wrong place; the Charter itself is not a starting point for our liberties, but a restatement of previous documents with added remedies for contemporary grievances; the JFK memorial is far superior and the information boards don't even mention chapters relevant to liberty.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately I didn't get to see the JFK one, it was raining quite heavily by that point. Agree about the information boards, though we were given free booklets which did highlight the relevant bits.
DeleteFunny how bad King John is always regarded as bad and weak for signing his name on the Big Cart (and hence, of course, the expression about putting the Cart before the whore).
ReplyDeleteOf course, it was all about shifting power from King to Barons - as ever, the plebs were irrelevant!
The first and last chapter both grant the freedom of the church. The remainder is addressed to 'All free men of our kingdom'. Who is classed as free man then and now is open to debate.
DeleteThe point is not so much what Magna Carta did at the time as the constructions which succeeding generations placed upon it - from the 17th century parliamentarians and whigs to the American revolutionaries and the Chartists of the 19th century.
ReplyDelete"A free man" was a fairly rare creature in 1315
By the 17th century it meant almost everybody.
"1066 and All That" gave a list of supposed freedoms, each of which ended "except the common people" and added that barons could only be tried by other barons "who would understand"!
Nonetheless the charter established (or re-established) the principle that the King too ( what we would call the government) was also under the law. The Crown could not bring cases on the unsupported evidence of one of its own officials and (interestingly in view of the European Arrest Warrant) nobody could be exiled arbitrarily.
Much of the rest was to do with things like the rights of fishing weirs and fees and fines paid for wardships ( where the crown collected a great deal of income from the estates of minors who were not of an age to inherit) - all important stuff, equivalent to abuses by the Inland Revenue today.
The Americans had it spot on when they marked their commemoration of Magna Carta as being a symbol of freedom under law.
ReplyDeleteMagna Carta is just that, a symbol. With only a few clauses not since repealed by the accepted law-making chambers of this country, the document is only symbolic.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people fail to understand that Magna Carta was nothing more than the landed gentry protecting itself from the Monarch. The common people were irrelevant and remain so today.
What Magna Carta does is underline the hunger among people for a genuine, modern and codified written constitution that clearly enshrines our individual rights and our freedoms from the excesses of an overbearing State. Just consider how many people declare themselves 'freemen' on the land by calling upon ancient rights that have long since been superceded by the establishment, but they refuse to accept as having been repealed.
That the establishment refuses to deliver such guarantees and continues to use of a 'flexible' unwritten constitutional framework tells us all we need to know about the intended relationship between the people and those who are supposed to serve them.
Completely agree AM. Given that there are only 3 clauses left and a substantial number of the original clauses would be irrelevant nearly 800 years later (some of them were irrelevant just months after it was signed) its power is in the idea. It gives us a precedent on what needs to be done.
DeleteOn a similar vein, there are many who say (correctly) that no Parliament may bind its successor but then argue that our membership of the EU is illegal because of statues passed hundreds of years ago. I fail to see how an Act of Parliament of 1688 can bind its successor of 1972.
40 years of EU membership shows that the uncodified constitution came across the ultimate test and failed. As noted above "the Charter itself is not a starting point for our liberties, but a restatement of previous documents with added remedies for contemporary grievances". Thus in this case we need history to (sort of) repeat itself with a modern genuine codified constitution.
P.S. AM I seem to be having problems commenting on your blog, they seem to be disappearing into the ether. Have you got any from me that need approving?
DeleteNo, there's nothing pending and nothing from you in spam either. Have you the same problem on other Wordpress sites?
ReplyDeleteThanks for your response, I've no problem with other sites like WfW's so I'll give it another go and see how I get on
Deleteautonomousmind,
ReplyDeleteI agree that the American constitution (which can be carried in your jacket pocket for reference) was and is a splendid achievement. Yet it has been grievously undermined by the growth of federal power, judicial activism and such. Its binding power is not in its provisions, paper and ink but in its position in the hearts and minds of sufficient people of sufficient spirit and intelligence to defend it. Don't forget that Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and even threatened to lock up the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court!
The same was generally true of our uncodified arrangements when we had an educated political class and a sufficiently large body of reasonably educated public opinion to keep them mostly up to the mark. Popularisers like the late Sir Ivor Jennings could write pocket-sized accounts for a wide audience.
Fifty years or so of dumbed down education has seen off the possibility of a reasonably deeply informed public opinion. "Rights" are conceived of as entitlements to this or that service, conferred by the state.
Oh my goodness - missed it.
ReplyDeleteAs is frequently the case, I have only just seen this... better late than never :)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I am a big fan of Magna Carta and I would just like to point out, that since it was a treaty between the King and the Barons, and it was signed by the king (government) at the barons' behest and at a place assigned by them... It is not for government to repeal any of it... I accept that much of it is pretty much irrelevant, because we live life differently these days.... But none of it has been repealed.
Secondly, the memorial in Runnymede is a symbol, it wasn't signed there, it was signed about two-hundred yards away across the River Thames in the priory gardens of Ankerwycke beneath the ancient and genuinely symbolic Yew tree that still grows there (just about).
This was the custom of the time... People gathered by the ancient yew tree to hold their moot, to celebrate the seasons, and indeed the Christian church built their churches close by, because they understood the importance... which is why old churches from that era frequently have a yew tree or sometimes the remains of one, that pre-date the foundations of the church.
...As you point out TBC, the shysters that claim to be our democratic leaders, wouldn't know about our traditions and our lore, if it smacked them in the face, they are only interested in lining their own pockets.