Magna Carta is 800 years old today. On June 15, 1215, King John and a group of rebellious English barons reached agreement on a charter that limited royal authority with respect to the nobility in exchange for the nobles swearing their loyalty to the crown and ending their rebellion. In its original form, the charter preserved the peace and stability of the realm for an astonishing, ah, two months, I guess? The rebel barons who had seized London and were supposed to hand it back over to the king on August 15 decided they would rather keep the city after all, and as it turns out John spent those couple of months lobbying Pope Innocent III to annul the deal altogether, which he did via a letter dated August 24. The rebellion then turned into the First Barons War, which ended in 1217 with the defeat of the rebels and their French allies, but during which the charter (slightly modified) was reissued by John’s heir, Henry III (or rather by William Marshal, who was head of Henry’s regency council) twice, once in 1216 to try to win the rebels back over to the crown and once in 1217 as the war was coming to an end. It was altered and reissued numerous times over the following decades, and it’s actually the 1297 version of the charter that still exists in British statute today.
Magna Carta is glorified in the Western world as the foundational document of the Anglo-American democratic tradition, which seems a little odd for a charter that codified the rights only of a very few socio-economic elites and that wasn’t held in particularly high regard during the 15th-18th period when English monarchs kept insisting on their own absolute authority (though it was often referenced by those who resisted that authority). Oliver Cromwell, who obviously didn’t much like the crown but did prefer his own absolute authority, supposedly referred to it as “Magna Farta.” It holds virtually no real legal status in Britain today, most of its specific articles having (as you might imagine in 800 years) long since been overridden by other charters and laws, but it still has a powerful hold on how people talk about rights and freedoms in the UK and, to a lesser extent, here in the US (although there’s a good case to be made that most of the people who wax on about Magna Carta nowadays don’t really know what they’re talking about).
Regardless of how you feel about Magna Carta, it’s undoubtedly of great symbolic importance even if it’s actual impact on Western history may be a bit overblown. I think it’s an interesting example of the unpredictability of history; I mean, would any British writer in, say, the 17th century have predicted that this one royal charter would come to have such importance placed upon it? I doubt it, but here we are.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 
