Magna Carta

The Places that Shaped the Great Charter

Derek J. Taylor, Derek Taylor

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780750994750, 9780750962292
• eBook ISBN: 9780750964579
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

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.

In Magna Carta: The Places that Shaped the Great Charter, Derek J. Taylor embarks on a mission to uncover the 'golden thread of truth' that runs through the story of the Great Charter, travelling to 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. The real history of Magna Carta is far more engaging, exciting and surprising than any simple fairy tale of good defeating evil.

1

The Royal Exchange, City of London

A Magnificent Myth

Across the road from the Bank of England stands what looks like a vast temple with eight pairs of massive Corinthian columns along its front rising 90 feet into the air. You could imagine the entrance was built this high so that giants, or gods, could stride in without ducking. When TV economics correspondents want to ‘go live’ in the City of London and tell us on the six o’clock news about the latest GDP figures or the shrinking fiscal deficit, they ask their camera crews to set up so we’ll see it in the background. The building exudes dignity and reliability. It says ‘this is where weighty matters are decided.’ It’s called the Royal Exchange. And it makes the nearby Bank of England in Threadneedle Street look by comparison like a warehouse with a church on top, or a Las Vegas shopping mall pretending to be Grecian.

But the Royal Exchange isn’t a temple, not in the religious sense, though you could argue that what goes on inside is a cult. There’s a 10-foot-high statue of a crowned goddess at the top of its facade. She represents Commerce, and from the street we can see her right elbow leaning – implausibly – on the prow of a ship, while a beehive, positioned dangerously close to her left armpit, signifies how very busy her adherents are down below. Charles Dickens knew the Royal Exchange simply as The Change, and in A Christmas Carol, Scrooge sold debts here, and was taken by the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come to see its merchants as they ‘hurried up and down, and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully with their great gold seals.’

But the reason we’ve come to the Royal Exchange is neither to trade nor to admire the architecture. We’re here to look at a painting commissioned by the Exchange’s governors at the end of the nineteenth century to commemorate the freedom without which the goddess Commerce couldn’t function. The picture shows the birth, in the year 1215 on the banks of the River Thames at Runnymede, of Magna Carta, also known as the Great Charter of Liberties, when King John was backed into a corner by the mightiest barons of England and forced to issue the document that’s come to be regarded down the ages and over much of the planet ever since as the foundation of civil liberty and the rule of law.

***

At the top of the wide flight of steps leading to the Exchange’s entrance, I pass between the towering columns, then through a pair of glass doors. It turns out that, if the Bank of England is a solid institution that looks like a shopping mall, the Royal Exchange only looks like a solid institution but is in fact a shopping mall. The interior of the building is formed as a single room, that’s ‘room’ in the sense that a cathedral nave is a room. It rises to a glass ceiling 80 feet above its marble floor. As shopping malls go, it’s the uppermost of the upmarket variety. All along its sides, extravagantly lit windows between stone archways show off the sort of necklaces and watches royalty might wear on gala night at the palace. There are only two or three of these sparkling items in each showcase, which tells you all you need to know about their price. Discreet illuminated signs announce that Bvlgari, Tiffany & Co., Agent Provocateur and Lulu Guinness feel at home here. The whole floor of this well-ordered Aladdin’s cave is filled with small round tables and ladderback chairs, most of them occupied by men and women in sharp dark suits, leaning forward, neglecting their lattes and croissants, and looking intently at each other or at their laptop screens. I feel like an alien in my jeans and dark green thorn-proof country-style jacket. But I pull out my camera, zoom it back to a wide angle and have just snapped the glittering scene when the viewfinder is blocked by a blurred face which is speaking.

The Royal Exchange, temple of commerce. Its governors commissioned Ernest Normand’s painting of the sealing of Magna Carta in the 1890s.

‘Sorry, sir,’ it says, ‘photography is not allowed anywhere in the Royal Exchange.’ It’s a man in dark grey trousers rising to a buttoned-up black overcoat. His tie is golden. He points at the camera, and, perhaps assuming I’m a bumpkin, slow on the uptake, says, ‘It’s prohibited.’

‘Why’s that then?’ I ask.

‘Security,’ he replies, and I’m expecting him to escort me from the premises. ‘But you may walk around and look,’ he concedes, just in case I think I’ve a right to order a cup of peppermint tea and sit down.

The Royal Exchange, as you might imagine, has been a target for jewel thieves. In one recent heist, two figures in motorcycle gear and armed with axes broke through the outer wrought iron gates on a Saturday night when the place was closed. They smashed display cabinets and snatched watches worth £300,000 (at a guess, that’s about four watches). Their accomplices were waiting outside on motorbikes. They all sped off and lost their police pursuers. This particular mob were ‘dubbed’ (as tabloid newspapers put it) ‘the Fagin’s Kitchen gang’, because the thieves, though not quite as young as Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger, were teenagers.

I said the place is now an upmarket shopping mall, and so it is, but nevertheless it still serves its original purpose. The first Exchange on this site was opened by Queen Elizabeth I in 1570 as a meeting place for merchants. That building burned down in the Great Fire of London in 1666, and its replacement too went up in flames in the early nineteenth century. The monumental structure we’re visiting today was inaugurated by Queen Victoria in 1845 ‘for the convenience of merchants and bankers’. The merchants and bankers are still here, though nowadays they insist on fresh ground coffee and waitress service for their client meetings, in a place where, when the deal’s done, they can blow their bonuses at Bvlgari or Tiffany’s.

In some senses, Magna Carta itself, back in 1215, was a business deal. When hostilities had broken out between King John and the rebel barons earlier that year, the City of London – already a thriving trade centre – saw a commercial opportunity. The canny burghers of the city pitched their support behind the barons. It was a game-changer. It tipped the balance away from John, who now saw he had to reach an agreement with his opponents, if only to buy time. Charters granting certain concessions to towns were commonplace in the early thirteenth century. And in return for backing the rebels, Londoners got a neat little clause inserted into Magna Carta. It said that the city should ‘enjoy all its ancient liberties and free customs, both by land and by water’. So we can see why the Victorian governors of the Royal Exchange would commission a painting of ‘King John and the barons’.

***

The picture of the momentous event that took place on the meadow at Runnymede is up on the mezzanine level, which runs like a wide balcony behind decorated columns around the interior of the whole building. There are twenty-four murals you can admire from the restaurant up here. They were produced during the 1890s to illustrate episodes in the history of England which were important to the Royal Exchange and to the City of London as one of the world’s great trading centres. The paintings are all huge, approximately 12 feet high and 8 feet wide. When the Exchange’s governors commissioned the one of Magna Carta, they decided they wanted something expressive, dramatic and colourful. And that’s what they got. Truthful – well, that’s another matter.

In the centre of the picture is King John, wearing his crown and sitting on a throne beneath swirling banners. The Archbishop of Canterbury at his left shoulder is advising him. Below, to the king’s right, is a clerk holding a parchment, presumably the Charter. And in front of him are ranged the barons, some of them in battle dress, one leaning on a broadsword. In the right foreground of the picture is what looks like an old-fashioned printing press. In fact, it’s the machine that was used to make an imprint of the royal seal in a lump of wax, which would then be fixed to a ribbon or cord appended to the bottom of the document. Contrary to popular notions, King John did not ‘sign’ Magna Carta. Not that he was stupid or illiterate. Far from it. But, just as he enjoyed food though wouldn’t have dreamed of cooking it himself, so he could read and write, but usually had a man – or men – to do the manual work for him with pens and parchment. And anyway, the idea of authorising a document by writing your name on it in a distinctive way, i.e. signing it, was virtually unknown in the thirteenth century.

But what we’re interested in is not whether the painting is an accurate record of the event. No handy contemporary sketch, or even detailed description of the scene at Runnymede, has come down to us. What is significant for our investigation is the way the artist has tried to manipulate our feelings by bringing out the character of the protagonists and their reactions to the momentous event in which they’re participating. The painter was Ernest Normand, a notable Victorian who worked in the style of the Pre-Raphaelites. He completed the picture in 1900. Most of Normand’s other work is of sensual nudes or Old Testament scenes, all with characters whose emotions are conveyed through their ostentatious gestures. The wistful, the adoring, the betrayed, the angst-ridden, the lascivious are all revealed by a delicately positioned hand on the forehead, by yearning eyes, or a dissolute posture of the body. So Normand was the ideal choice to reflect on canvas the adoration, the pride, the hatred of tyranny which the story of King John, the barons and Magna Carta stirred in Victorian hearts.

Take the way he portrays the king, for instance. Beneath his golden crown, John has a furrowed brow. He’s a worried man. Then his eyes, staring off stage left, are shown as cold and calculating. At the same time they’re cowardly: he can’t meet the stern gaze of the barons who have beaten him and now confront him. His full lips are those of someone who’s more interested in the pleasures of the flesh than in the routine of good government. John doesn’t sit upright as a monarch should, but is lounging like a sulky schoolboy. In a bizarre touch, Normand has given him what look like ballerina’s shoes, perhaps to show that John is effeminate, not a rough, tough soldier like his brother Richard the Lionheart. The overall impression is not of a king – despite his crown – but of an untrustworthy, impetuous, shifty wimp who’s abused his position of power, in fact a thoroughly bad lot who’s rightly been brought to heel. The courtier just behind his right shoulder knows the game’s up. He’s doing what today’s politicians on media-handling courses are taught never to do: move your eyes sideways while still facing the camera. It makes you look devious and uncertain.

Contrast this image with those of the barons. There are four of them visible. Unlike the slouching king, their backs are all ramrod straight. The one at the front has his left foot planted on the steps leading up to the king’s throne, as if to show that he’s not cowed by the trappings of an unworthy king. He’s gripping his sword and looks like a man who will use it if necessary. But most striking, his facial expression is one of steely determination. He’s not to be trifled with. He knows he has right and the weight of history on his side. He’s a man you’d trust to lead you in the battle against the forces of tyranny. Behind him are two other barons. One is in full mail, with what looks like the hilt of a battleaxe tilted at the ready over his shoulder. The other is an older man, with white hair and beard, but again his back is firm and straight. It’s clear the wisdom of old age is also on the side of the barons. All three of these opponents of the king are skewering him with undeviating glares. They don’t trust him an inch. The fourth of their colleagues is turning, as though to look back at an unseen host of mighty men following up, ready to do what’s right.

In the background of the painting, at the side of the king’s tented pavilion, we can just see what appear to be the heads of hundreds of men crowding forward. The nation is watching, perhaps waiting to be liberated.

When Normand painted the picture, he was reflecting mainstream opinion. The great Victorian historian William Stubbs wrote of John that he was, ‘the very worst of all our kings, a faithless son, a treacherous brother, polluted with every crime’. Stubbs saw John’s father Henry II as a good and strong monarch, and King Richard the Lionheart, John’s brother who followed Henry, as a brave soldier. By contrast, John was tyrannical and cowardly. And the barons who rose up against him were regarded as early champions of civil liberty, battling on behalf of all the people of England for democracy, freedom and justice, principles thus enshrined in Magna Carta.

This uplifting picture has been guaranteed to stir hearts in England and wherever in the world there are folk who love freedom and abhor dictatorship, and are prepared to fight for what they know is right.

The trouble is that, in almost every respect, it’s wrong. It’s a myth.

The true story is rather different.

King John, according recent evidence, wasn’t entirely the ‘bad’ monarch of popular imagination. One renowned historian has described him as ‘a ruler of consummate ability’.

The rebel barons are even less like Normand’s picture of them. They weren’t the straight-backed, look-you-in-the-eye, idealistic, altruistic Honest Joes that he would have had us believe. As far as we can generalise, they were a self-serving bunch led by manipulative thugs.

And the commonly held view that Magna Carta is the guarantee of everything we in a free and democratic country hold dear is even wider of the historically accurate mark. It’s a view, however, that does have a long and respectable tradition. In the eighteenth century the British Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder described Magna Carta as ‘The Bible of the English Constitution’. A hundred years later, Stubbs could make the sweeping statement that, ‘The whole constitutional history of England is little more than a commentary on Magna Carta.’ And in the twentieth century, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared in his inaugural address to the American people that, ‘the democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history … It was written in Magna Charta [sic].’ In 2012, a poll of British adults carried out for the Daily Telegraph found that 85 per cent of us have heard of the Great Charter; of those, 60 per cent believe it guaranteed the rule of law, half think it safeguards our right to trial by jury and 38 per cent are convinced that without it there’d be no democracy.

But the plain fact is that Magna Carta, as sealed by King John in 1215, was not what later generations made of it. For a start, it contains no high-sounding statement guaranteeing freedom, justice and democracy. Most of its clauses deal with the technicalities of thirteenth-century feudal law, and were largely aimed at protecting the rights of the upper classes: 1 per cent or less of the population. In 1215 the Charter wasn’t even regarded as being particularly important. It’s called Magna, or Great, only because it was written on a piece of parchment slightly bigger than that of another charter issued soon afterwards. It might even have been consigned to the dustiest archives of history and forgotten if King John had managed to survive its birth by more than a year or so and re-establish his control over the country.

The Great Charter was not an early constitution. It wasn’t a proclamation of universal freedom under the law. And it certainly wasn’t the foundation of democracy. That’s a myth.

But of course, this is not the whole story. Far from it.

Myths have always been important throughout the history of humankind. Great nations are often founded on them. Take the United States of America, for instance, often said to be founded by the puritans arriving on the Mayflower to establish a country with freedom of worship. A myth because these early settlers wanted nothing of the sort. Yes, they were fleeing persecution back in England. However, their dream was not of a nation based on religious liberty, but of a country where the only sect permitted would be theirs. Or take ancient Rome, founded on the myth of Romulus and Remus suckled by a she-wolf. Not true in itself, but a sign that Romans were brutal, relentless fighters. Though its facts may be jumbled, a myth will have a golden thread of truth running through it. So it is with the story of John, the barons and Magna Carta.

The Great Charter couldn’t have exerted the power over our minds that it has for eight centuries if there were nothing to it but a list of feudal customs. It’s true the majority of its sixty-three clauses were just that. But through much of the document there’s a whiff of something different, something which hinted that ideas about freedom and justice have a vital role to play in the way that people living together organise themselves. Something that later generations could seize on and develop, so that the Great Charter could become a powerful, all-enduring watchword for our most cherished political, legal and civil rights. It deserves our reverence, though not for the reasons that Ernest Normand presented to us when he painted his picture of John and the barons at Runnymede in the year 1900. The real story of Magna Carta is what we shall pursue on our journey.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 The Royal Exchange, City of London: A magnificent myth
• 2 The Fens, Cambridgeshire, England: The barons on top
• 3 Clarendon Palace, Wiltshire, England: The flying monarch
• 4 Acre, Israel: Lionheart’s legacy
• 5 Angoulême, France: The child witch
• 6 Mirebeau-en-Poitou, France: The warrior queen
• 7 Château Gaillard, Normandy, France: Lost!
• 8 The Marches, South Wales: Rule by vendetta
• 9 Laxton, Nottinghamshire, England: The serfs in the fields
• 10 Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England: The smell of money
• 11 Temple Ewell, Kent, England: A triumphant humiliation
• 12 Bouvines, Northern France: A battle for three empires
• 13 Runnymede, Surrey, England: The line-up
• 14 The British Library, London: The deal
• 15 The Wash, Lincolnshire, England: Agony in the wasteland
• 16 Worcester Cathedral, England: The man laid bare
• 17 The Internet: A bad press
• 18 The Palace of Westminster, London: A charter for all seasons
• 19 Jamestown, Virginia, USA: The gentlemen cannibals
• 20 Washington DC: Temples and tyrants
• 21 Back to Runnymede: Magna Carta’s future
• Appendix: The text of Magna Carta
• Picture Sections