The Root of The Constitution: The Magna Carta Turns 800 on June 15h

[whitehall]

The country formerly known as England had their best shot at self government by the people after Cromwell's revolution in the 1600's and Parlament actually ran the country for a while until they chickened out and called King Chuck's kid back from exile apparently saying "please rule us because we don't know what we are doing and we are afraid". Saying that the Magna Carta three hundred years earlier had anything to do with freedom is whistling in the dark. A little more than a hundred years after the Brits tearfully recalled King Charles, former subjects of the King told him to go to hell and created the greatest document ever written and the Magna Carta had nothing to do with it.

 

[boedicca]

Lincoln and the abolitionist were progressives....

Go away you Banal Blithering Boobie.

Come now. I get a chuckle out of him.

Not his jokes, mind you. His history.

He's so one note that any amusement value has long since worn off.

 

[whitehall]

The Magna Carta had nothing to do with independence and freedom. It was a series of petty little treaties between the monarchy and the Pope. Briton had no desire for self government in the 12th century anymore than they did when Cromwell beheaded King Chuck in the 1600's.

You're wrong...and persistently so.

If you think so little of the Magna Carta, I'm sure you'd find more pleasure in fixating on Dennis Hastert or Sarah Palin.

Toddle on!

Talk about one note. Why in the world would the sissie left bring up Sara Palin in a discussion of an 800 year old issue? Profound ignorance? The left's ongoing war on genetically authentic women? Some things are best left to the imagination.

 

[Kondor3]

Magna Carta was, indeed, obtained with the swords of the nobility pointed at the king's throat.

And, of course, it was largely a covenant between that same nobility and the king, for the benefit of that nobility, rater than the Commons.

Still, limitations on royal power had to begin someplace, and Magna Carta was where it all began.

It does not matter that it was repudiated and resurrected and amended after its signing.

What does matter is that it was the Starting Point for the rule of Constitutional Law.

 

[whitehall]

Magna Carta was, indeed, obtained with the swords of the nobility pointed at the king's throat.

And, of course, it was largely a covenant between that same nobility and the king, for the benefit of that nobility, rater than the Commons.

Still, limitations on royal power had to begin someplace, and Magna Carta was where it all began.

It does not matter that it was repudiated and resurrected and amended after its signing.

What does matter is that it was the Starting Point for the rule of Constitutional Law.

I submit that much too much is made of the Magna Carta being a "starting point" for freedom and tolerance. It was perhaps the first documented on paper agreement to petty concessions by the monarchy in a history of hundreds if not thousands of verbal or lost documented petty concessions agreed to by the monarchy and later reneged on but it had nothing to do with freedom or tolerance or self government. The Cromwell revolution three hundred years after the Magna Carta indicates that the people of Briton were afraid of self government and the Magna Carta had nothing to do with freedom.

 

[whitehall]

I submit that the fake concept of the Magna Carta was promoted by hundreds of years of (yawn) neo-academics for a couple of reasons. #1 it made the insane British monarchy seem reasonable and #2 it reinforced the alleged power of the Catholic church. The Magna Carta was promoted by the Church as a monumental breakthrough in government power when it was nothing but a set of trivial concessions by an all powerful and possibly inbred insane British monarchy.

 

[Pete7469]

Now that you know the meaning of progressive, Eat it chumps for your poor portrayal of what and when progressives appeared in American society....

Well bed wetter, I'm sure you love to ignore what "progressive" ideas led to in the rest of the world.
How about death toll totals 94 million.[4] The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows:

• 65 million in the People's Republic of China
• 20 million in the Soviet Union
• 2 million in Cambodia
• 2 million in North Korea
• 1.7 million in Ethiopia
• 1.5 million in Afghanistan
• 1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
• 1 million in Vietnam
• 150,000 in Latin America mainly Cuba
• 10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power."[4]

Your "ideas", or should I say the bullshit dogma you promote is anything but "progressive". It is a means to end towards a neo-feudalism where everyone is equally miserable except for the commissars who make sure there is no dissent, and their masters who manage their human resources as if they were cattle. The only reason it hasn't happened here is because the "resource" is armed to the teeth, and you don't like it.

BTW...

Eat my dung...

 

[Pete7469]

Talk about one note. Why in the world would the sissie left bring up Sara Palin in a discussion of an 800 year old issue? Profound ignorance? The left's ongoing war on genetically authentic women? Some things are best left to the imagination.

Because Sarah Palin lives rent free in the vast emptiness of moonbat skulls.

 

[Moonglow]

Now that you know the meaning of progressive, Eat it chumps for your poor portrayal of what and when progressives appeared in American society....

Well bed wetter, I'm sure you love to ignore what "progressive" ideas led to in the rest of the world.
How about death toll totals 94 million.[4] The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows:

• 65 million in the People's Republic of China
• 20 million in the Soviet Union
• 2 million in Cambodia
• 2 million in North Korea
• 1.7 million in Ethiopia
• 1.5 million in Afghanistan
• 1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
• 1 million in Vietnam
• 150,000 in Latin America mainly Cuba
• 10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power."[4]

Your "ideas", or should I say the bullshit dogma you promote is anything but "progressive". It is a means to end end of a neo-feudalism where everyone is equally miserable except for the commissars who make sure there is no dissent, and their masters who manage their human resources as if they were cattle. The only reason it hasn't happened here is because the "resource" is armed to the teeth, and you don't like it.

BTW...

Eat my dung...

Being progressive is not the same as being communist...

 

[Kondor3]

Magna Carta was, indeed, obtained with the swords of the nobility pointed at the king's throat.

And, of course, it was largely a covenant between that same nobility and the king, for the benefit of that nobility, rater than the Commons.

Still, limitations on royal power had to begin someplace, and Magna Carta was where it all began.

It does not matter that it was repudiated and resurrected and amended after its signing.

What does matter is that it was the Starting Point for the rule of Constitutional Law.

I submit that much too much is made of the Magna Carta being a "starting point" for freedom and tolerance. It was perhaps the first documented on paper agreement to petty concessions by the monarchy in a history of hundreds if not thousands of verbal or lost documented petty concessions agreed to by the monarchy and later reneged on but it had nothing to do with freedom or tolerance or self government. The Cromwell revolution three hundred years after the Magna Carta indicates that the people of Briton were afraid of self government and the Magna Carta had nothing to do with freedom.

I, for one, did not claim that Magna Carta was a 'starting point' for freedom and tolerance.

I merely cited Magna Carta as a starting point for Constitutional Law - at least within the framework of English Law, which we adopted and mutated and made our own.

 

[boedicca]

I submit that the fake concept of the Magna Carta was promoted by hundreds of years of (yawn) neo-academics for a couple of reasons. #1 it made the insane British monarchy seem reasonable and #2 it reinforced the alleged power of the Catholic church. The Magna Carta was promoted by the Church as a monumental breakthrough in government power when it was nothing but a set of trivial concessions by an all powerful and possibly inbred insane British monarchy.

And I submit that you are promoting Anti-Anglo spin.

 

[boedicca]

Today is Magna Carta's 800th Birthday! A major foundational event in the history of freedom!

...
Yet for all its medieval quirkiness, Magna Carta has a universalist heart that still beats today. It articulates the human desire for freedom so powerfully that some of its clauses sound as relevant, and urgent, to our ears now as they must have done to the barons, abbots and royals who witnessed the king’s sealing of Magna Carta in a field near Windsor on 15 June 1215. Indeed, these clauses would provide the foundation stone of the revolutions and constitutions that shaped the modern, democratic era, not just in Britain but in the US, France, and elsewhere. Even as far afield as China, democracy-seeking dissidents cite this dusty document sealed by an English king 800 years ago.

Consider Clause 38: ‘In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.’ Here, we have one of the earliest, and clearest, articulations of the importance of the rule of law, of letting citizens be, unless it can be proven, credibly, that they have committed an offence. Magna Carta says the arbitrary power of officialdom must be restrained by law.....

800 years on why Magna Carta still matters Magna Carta spiked

 

[boedicca]

As we can't post Long Excerpts, here is the key point:

The most important thing about Magna Carta is how it was interpreted, and acted upon, by future generations, particularly by the revolutionaries of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If Magna Carta planted the seed of an ideal that would radically reshape human affairs — that sometimes the state must be restrained in order to allow the flourishing of individual life and liberty — it was Magna Carta’s fans in subsequent decades who watered that seed, demanding that this ideal be spread beyond barons to all men, and eventually all people.

 

[SwimExpert]

Daniel Hannan has a lovely piece in the WSJ (worth reading in full if one has a paid subscription).

Given the executive overreach of our current President, this is a timely reminder that the basic principle of our government is to protect the Rights of the Indvidiual (especially in regards to PROPERTY), and not to sanction the Will of the Mob or the Whim of the Prince.

Long excerpt:

...The very success of Magna Carta makes it hard for us, 800 years on, to see how utterly revolutionary it must have appeared at the time. Magna Carta did not create democracy: Ancient Greeks had been casting differently colored pebbles into voting urns while the remote fathers of the English were grubbing about alongside pigs in the cold soil of northern Germany. Nor was it the first expression of the law: There were Sumerian and Egyptian law codes even before Moses descended from Sinai.

What Magna Carta initiated, rather, was constitutional government—or, as the terse inscription on the American Bar Association’s stone puts it, “freedom under law.”

It takes a real act of imagination to see how transformative this concept must have been. The law was no longer just an expression of the will of the biggest guy in the tribe. Above the king brooded something more powerful yet—something you couldn’t see or hear or touch or taste but that bound the sovereign as surely as it bound the poorest wretch in the kingdom. That something was what Magna Carta called “the law of the land.”

This phrase is commonplace in our language. But think of what it represents. The law is not determined by the people in government, nor yet by clergymen presuming to interpret a holy book. Rather, it is immanent in the land itself, the common inheritance of the people living there.

The idea of the law coming up from the people, rather than down from the government, is a peculiar feature of the Anglosphere. Common law is an anomaly, a beautiful, miraculous anomaly. In the rest of the world, laws are written down from first principles and then applied to specific disputes, but the common law grows like a coral, case by case, each judgment serving as the starting point for the next dispute. In consequence, it is an ally of freedom rather than an instrument of state control. It implicitly assumes residual rights.

And indeed, Magna Carta conceives rights in negative terms, as guarantees against state coercion. No one can put you in prison or seize your property or mistreat you other than by due process. This essentially negative conception of freedom is worth clinging to in an age that likes to redefine rights as entitlements—the right to affordable health care, the right to be forgotten and so on.

It is worth stressing, too, that Magna Carta conceived freedom and property as two expressions of the same principle. The whole document can be read as a lengthy promise that the goods of a free citizen will not be arbitrarily confiscated by someone higher up the social scale. Even the clauses that seem most remote from modern experience generally turn out, in reality, to be about security of ownership.

There are, for example, detailed passages about wardship. King John had been in the habit of marrying heiresses to royal favorites as a way to get his hands on their estates. The abstruse-sounding articles about inheritance rights are, in reality, simply one more expression of the general principle that the state may not expropriate without due process.

Those who stand awe-struck before the Great Charter expecting to find high-flown phrases about liberty are often surprised to see that a chunk of it is taken up with the placing of fish-traps on the Thames. Yet these passages, too, are about property, specifically the freedom of merchants to navigate inland waterways without having arbitrary tolls imposed on them by fish farmers.

Liberty and property: how naturally those words tripped, as a unitary concept, from the tongues of America’s Founders. These were men who had been shaped in the English tradition, and they saw parliamentary government not as an expression of majority rule but as a guarantor of individual freedom. How different was the Continental tradition, born 13 years later with the French Revolution, which saw elected assemblies as the embodiment of what Rousseau called the “general will” of the people.

In that difference, we may perhaps discern explanation of why the Anglosphere resisted the chronic bouts of authoritarianism to which most other Western countries were prone. We who speak this language have always seen the defense of freedom as the duty of our representatives and so, by implication, of those who elect them. Liberty and democracy, in our tradition, are not balanced against each other; they are yoked together.

In February, the four surviving original copies of Magna Carta were united, for just a few hours, at the British Library—something that had not happened in 800 years. As I stood reverentially before them, someone recognized me and posted a photograph on Twitter with the caption: “If Dan Hannan gets his hands on all four copies of Magna Carta, will he be like Sauron with the Rings?”

Yet the majesty of the document resides in the fact that it is, so to speak, a shield against Saurons. Most other countries have fallen for, or at least fallen to, dictators. Many, during the 20th century, had popular communist parties or fascist parties or both. The Anglosphere, unusually, retained a consensus behind liberal capitalism.

This is not because of any special property in our geography or our genes but because of our constitutional arrangements. Those constitutional arrangements can take root anywhere. They explain why Bermuda is not Haiti, why Hong Kong is not China, why Israel is not Syria.

They work because, starting with Magna Carta, they have made the defense of freedom everyone’s responsibility. Americans, like Britons, have inherited their freedoms from past generations and should not look to any external agent for their perpetuation. The defense of liberty is your job and mine. It is up to us to keep intact the freedoms we inherited from our parents and to pass them on securely to our children....


Magna Carta Eight Centuries of Liberty - WSJ

I beg to disagree. What is given is a romanticized glorification of the Magna Carta. Constitutional law existed well before. "Freedom under law" existed well before. Law that was not "just an expression of the will of the biggest guy in the tribe" existed well before. Even the Magna Carta itself scarcely portends to create any new, and instead merely affirms rights and principles that clearly were understood to already exist.

 

[Soggy in NOLA]

Leave it to MG to post a completely insipid comment that contributes nothing of value.

He's probably 5 joints in by now.... ignore.

 

[boedicca]

Daniel Hannan has a lovely piece in the WSJ (worth reading in full if one has a paid subscription).

Given the executive overreach of our current President, this is a timely reminder that the basic principle of our government is to protect the Rights of the Indvidiual (especially in regards to PROPERTY), and not to sanction the Will of the Mob or the Whim of the Prince.

Long excerpt:

...The very success of Magna Carta makes it hard for us, 800 years on, to see how utterly revolutionary it must have appeared at the time. Magna Carta did not create democracy: Ancient Greeks had been casting differently colored pebbles into voting urns while the remote fathers of the English were grubbing about alongside pigs in the cold soil of northern Germany. Nor was it the first expression of the law: There were Sumerian and Egyptian law codes even before Moses descended from Sinai.

What Magna Carta initiated, rather, was constitutional government—or, as the terse inscription on the American Bar Association’s stone puts it, “freedom under law.”

It takes a real act of imagination to see how transformative this concept must have been. The law was no longer just an expression of the will of the biggest guy in the tribe. Above the king brooded something more powerful yet—something you couldn’t see or hear or touch or taste but that bound the sovereign as surely as it bound the poorest wretch in the kingdom. That something was what Magna Carta called “the law of the land.”

This phrase is commonplace in our language. But think of what it represents. The law is not determined by the people in government, nor yet by clergymen presuming to interpret a holy book. Rather, it is immanent in the land itself, the common inheritance of the people living there.

The idea of the law coming up from the people, rather than down from the government, is a peculiar feature of the Anglosphere. Common law is an anomaly, a beautiful, miraculous anomaly. In the rest of the world, laws are written down from first principles and then applied to specific disputes, but the common law grows like a coral, case by case, each judgment serving as the starting point for the next dispute. In consequence, it is an ally of freedom rather than an instrument of state control. It implicitly assumes residual rights.

And indeed, Magna Carta conceives rights in negative terms, as guarantees against state coercion. No one can put you in prison or seize your property or mistreat you other than by due process. This essentially negative conception of freedom is worth clinging to in an age that likes to redefine rights as entitlements—the right to affordable health care, the right to be forgotten and so on.

It is worth stressing, too, that Magna Carta conceived freedom and property as two expressions of the same principle. The whole document can be read as a lengthy promise that the goods of a free citizen will not be arbitrarily confiscated by someone higher up the social scale. Even the clauses that seem most remote from modern experience generally turn out, in reality, to be about security of ownership.

There are, for example, detailed passages about wardship. King John had been in the habit of marrying heiresses to royal favorites as a way to get his hands on their estates. The abstruse-sounding articles about inheritance rights are, in reality, simply one more expression of the general principle that the state may not expropriate without due process.

Those who stand awe-struck before the Great Charter expecting to find high-flown phrases about liberty are often surprised to see that a chunk of it is taken up with the placing of fish-traps on the Thames. Yet these passages, too, are about property, specifically the freedom of merchants to navigate inland waterways without having arbitrary tolls imposed on them by fish farmers.

Liberty and property: how naturally those words tripped, as a unitary concept, from the tongues of America’s Founders. These were men who had been shaped in the English tradition, and they saw parliamentary government not as an expression of majority rule but as a guarantor of individual freedom. How different was the Continental tradition, born 13 years later with the French Revolution, which saw elected assemblies as the embodiment of what Rousseau called the “general will” of the people.

In that difference, we may perhaps discern explanation of why the Anglosphere resisted the chronic bouts of authoritarianism to which most other Western countries were prone. We who speak this language have always seen the defense of freedom as the duty of our representatives and so, by implication, of those who elect them. Liberty and democracy, in our tradition, are not balanced against each other; they are yoked together.

In February, the four surviving original copies of Magna Carta were united, for just a few hours, at the British Library—something that had not happened in 800 years. As I stood reverentially before them, someone recognized me and posted a photograph on Twitter with the caption: “If Dan Hannan gets his hands on all four copies of Magna Carta, will he be like Sauron with the Rings?”

Yet the majesty of the document resides in the fact that it is, so to speak, a shield against Saurons. Most other countries have fallen for, or at least fallen to, dictators. Many, during the 20th century, had popular communist parties or fascist parties or both. The Anglosphere, unusually, retained a consensus behind liberal capitalism.

This is not because of any special property in our geography or our genes but because of our constitutional arrangements. Those constitutional arrangements can take root anywhere. They explain why Bermuda is not Haiti, why Hong Kong is not China, why Israel is not Syria.

They work because, starting with Magna Carta, they have made the defense of freedom everyone’s responsibility. Americans, like Britons, have inherited their freedoms from past generations and should not look to any external agent for their perpetuation. The defense of liberty is your job and mine. It is up to us to keep intact the freedoms we inherited from our parents and to pass them on securely to our children....


Magna Carta Eight Centuries of Liberty - WSJ

I beg to disagree. What is given is a romanticized glorification of the Magna Carta. Constitutional law existed well before. "Freedom under law" existed well before. Law that was not "just an expression of the will of the biggest guy in the tribe" existed well before. Even the Magna Carta itself scarcely portends to create any new, and instead merely affirms rights and principles that clearly were understood to already exist.

Please go post your baleful ignorance somewhere else. This is a positive thread to celebrate an important aspect of Western Civilization.

 

[SwimExpert]

Please go post your baleful ignorance somewhere else. This is a positive thread to celebrate an important aspect of Western Civilization.

So only people who agree with you are allowed to post?

Since we're talking about the 800th anniversary, if we are going to talk about Magna Carta, we must do it within the context of the 1215 document. That document was, in effect, an attempted peace treaty to resolve open rebellion against the crown. It was also a failure. It was not until 1297 that Magna Carta became part of established law. The vast majority of it has been repealed between then and now.

 

[boedicca]

Please go post your baleful ignorance somewhere else. This is a positive thread to celebrate an important aspect of Western Civilization.

So only people who agree with you are allowed to post?

Since we're talking about the 800th anniversary, if we are going to talk about Magna Carta, we must do it within the context of the 1215 document. That document was, in effect, an attempted peace treaty to resolve open rebellion against the crown. It was also a failure. It was not until 1297 that Magna Carta became part of established law. The vast majority of it has been repealed between then and now.

It's clear you lack both the intellectual curiosity and honesty to read the sources at the links I provided.

Both address your historical ignorance.

 

[Roadrunner]

The "great charter" wasn't worth the vellum it was printed on and was revoked within a couple of years. It was merely a fleeting idea that never took root for 500 years of tyrannical monarchs until the U.S. Constitution changed the world.

Not true, and was later reinforced by English Bill of Rights.

Now, anywhere else on the planet where the definition of rights was going on?

Where are the great African, Asian and "Native American" charters of liberty?

Ain't none.

 

[boedicca]

The Anti-Magna Carta folks don't realize it was the enduring idea on the Limits of Government power that was so unique in human history. The Magna Carta isn't the final word, it's the start of an ongoing effort of individuals to have their persons and property protected by law from the Soveriegn-State-Party-Dictator...whatever.