The British Library is now holding a range of exhibitions titled “Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy” that will last from March 13 to Sept. 1 to mark the 800th anniversary of the granting of the Magna Carta.

 

Telling the story of the Magna Carta and its impact on the world, an exhibition commemorating the 800th anniversary of the historic documents is now being held at the British Library.

The Magna Carta, one of the world’s most treasured documents, was originally a peace treaty between King John of England and some barons in 1215. Over the past eight centuries, the Magna Carta has evolved from an agreement to place modest restraints on a monarch’s abuse of power into a symbol for rule of law and protection of human rights.
 

Laying the foundation for British constitutional tradition and the parliamentary system, the Magna Carta would play a cucial role in the English Civil War. It ultimately influenced the development of civil liberties in the United States, France and the rest of the world. But, the Magna Carta also had its limitations.
 

King John was one of the most notorious monarchs in the British history. Under his reign, England lost most of its territories in Normandy to France, and met with failures in the consequential wars. In order to finance his armies, King John demanded heavy taxation from the nobles and the ordinary people. In 1215, a group of barons rebelled and forced him to sign the Articles of the Barons, later known as the Magna Carta, Latin for the “Great Charter.”
 

The Magna Carta established laws requiring the monarch to have the consent of the kingdom for certain forms of taxation as well as the legal principle of due process. Over the years, the charter would be renewed by each monarch, amended and sometimes abandoned temporarily.
 

“The Magna Carta’s historic significance is the acceptance by English rulers of significant restraints on their power and how it could be exercised in the future. It did not render them answerable to a wider national community for the powers that they possessed but did impose legal controls over them,” said Paul Brand, emeritus fellow from the All Souls College at the University of Oxford.
 

Nicholas Vincent, professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia, said the Magna Carta’s most fundamental contribution was putting the monarchy under the rule of law.
 

David Carpenter, a professor of Medieval History at King’s College London, concluded that the Magna Carta was crucial for the birth and development of the parliament in the UK, laying the foundation for tax-based parliamentary states.
 

The Magna Carta was also brought to the American colonies and enshrined in some local laws. When the American War of Independence broke out, the Magna Carta became the spiritual banner for America’s struggle for liberty, exerting influence on the Declaration of Independence and the American Bill of Rights.
 

Despite its historic significance, the Magna Carta still had certain limitations. The 1215 Magna Carta was aimed at the “free men” who accounted for a small portion of the kingdom’s population. It was drafted mainly in favor of the nobility and scarcely mentioned the rights of the peasants, the demographic majority of the kingdom at that time.

In addition, the Magna Carta failed to restrain the monarchy over the several centuries following its signing. However, Vincent argued that the Magna Carta’s significance lies in its concept rather than its practicality as a political tool.
 

While some people tend to see the Magna Carta as a document of its time constrained by the environment of the early 13th-century England, others would rather explore how it was understood and interpreted by later generations over the past eight centuries, Brand concluded.

 

 

Jiang Hong is a reporter at the Chinese Social Sciences Today based in London.