Magna Carta – was it all that?

Eight-hundred years – well, how the time flies. It seems like only yesterday my slippery supper was stuck the wrong side of royal fish weir, while I was arrested on the say-so of a mere woman; some Jew wanted the money he lent my dad back, and this jumped-up git was stopping the Church doing exactly what it liked.

As people in law and government, by turns, fight over the ownership of Magna Carta, or celebrate its legacy, I felt inspired to go back to the original. (Well, a British Library-endorsed translation of it.)  

And I have to say, it’s not all ‘to no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice’. The fish weirs, Jewish money lenders, and women being taken at their word – these were among the problems that Magna Carta’s authors set out to fix.

Magna Carta set some limits on royal power – and in doing so set us on a bumpy journey to today’s constitutional setup. But unless it is quoted selectively, it can’t be claimed as the root of all that’s good in our ‘ancient’ rights.

I admit the fish aren’t front-of-shop (two mentions) – but the Church certainly is: ‘The English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired.’ That’s ‘in perpetuity’, by the way. Remember that up to the age of Jane Austen, church courts remained in close competition with other courts – one reason Austen doesn’t like lawyers, but is pretty keen on vicars.

And from a certain angle the earls and barons were behaving like our largest modern-day corporations – pretty much setting out how much tax they had decided they should pay.  

There’s a fair bit about minors, and their protections against evil guardians. The hazards they are protected against don’t have a terribly right-on ring to them, though: ‘Heirs may be given in marriage, but not to someone of lower social standing.’

Jewish money lenders found their terms and conditions arbitrarily changed overnight. ‘If anyone who has borrowed a sum of money from Jews dies before the debt has been repaid, his heir shall pay no interest on the debt for so long as he remains under age.’ Recovering money from widows was also made trickier.

‘Earls and barons shall be fined only by their equals,’ is not unlike the argument parliamentarians deployed during the expenses scandal when the police took an interest.

In another part, whole named families are barred from office.

And women aren’t really reliable witnesses are they? Well, not for a while post-Runnymede, when King John signed up to this: ‘No one shall be arrested or imprisoned on the appeal of a woman for the death of any person except her husband.’

There are better bits I could have quoted – of course there are. Courts should be held at fixed times and places, justices should be qualified for the job, weights and measures should be consistent, and so on.

But historians and lawyers should beware of any celebration that requires the party-goers to leave their critical faculties in the cloakroom.

The past, after all, is not a series of charming stories conveniently furnished by providence to support views we happen to hold about the world today. To treat it as such is fairly dangerous.

Eduardo Reyes is Gazette features editor