இதுகுறித்து நேற்றைய எனது தினமணிக் கட்டுரை அடங்கிய இரண்டு பதிவுகளோடு இதையும் பகிர்ந்துள்ளேன்.
மகாசாசனத்தைப் பற்றி எட்டாவது வகுப்பில் ஆக்ஸ்போர்டு பல்கலைக்கழகம் வெளியிட்ட வரலாற்று நூலில் படித்த காலத்திலிருந்து அதன்மீது ஆர்வம் உண்டு. அதனால் மகாசாசனம் பற்றி படிக்கவும், அறியவும் விருப்பம் ஏற்பட்டது.
எட்டு நூற்றாண்டுகளுக்கு முன்னால், ஜான் அரசன் ரன்னிமேட்டில் உள்ள தேம்ஸ் நதிக்கரை அருகில்மகாசாசனத்தைப் பிரகடனப் படுத்தியதாக தகவல். நேற்றைக்கு (15-06-2015) பிரிட்டன் ராணி எலிசபத்தும், அந்நாட்டின் பிரதமர் டேவிட் கேமரூனும், கேண்டர்பரி ஆர்ச் பிஷப் மற்றும் உலகநாட்டுத் தலைவர்களும் கலந்துகொள்ள 800வது ஆண்டு நிகழ்வு நடைபெற்றுள்ளது.
1215ம் ஆண்டு மகாசாசனம் எழுதப்பட்ட இந்த இடம் இன்றைக்கு “தேசிய ட்ரஸ்ட் பார்க்” என்று அழைக்கப்படுகின்றது. இதே இடத்தில் நடந்த பிரம்மாண்ட்மான நிகழ்ச்சியில் கலந்துகொண்ட பிரிட்டன் ராணி எலிசபெத் தன்னுடைய செய்தியில், ‘ மகாசாசனம் பிரிட்டனுக்கோ, காமன்வெல்த் நாடுகளுக்கோ மட்டுமில்லாமல் உலகத்துக்கே அரசியல் அடிப்படைக் குறிக்கோள்களை உருவாக்கித் தந்தது” என்று எழுதியுள்ளார்.
இலத்தீன் மற்றும் ஆங்கிலத்தில் மொத்தம் 3,500 வார்த்தைகளில் மேக்னகார்ட்டா சாசனத்தை கேண்டர்பெர்ரி ஆர்ச் பிஷப் எழுதிய வரைவு ஜான் அரசரைக் கவர்ந்தது. பின் ஜான் அரசர் மகாசாசனத்தை இறுதி செய்து அரசு முத்திரை இடச் செய்தார்.
16ம் நூற்றாண்டில் ஜூரி.சர்.எட்வர்ட் கோக் மகாசாசனத்தை படித்து மறுபரிசீலனை செய்தார் என்றும் அப்போது, ஸ்டூவர்ட் வம்சம் ஆட்சியில் இருந்தது என்றும் செய்திகள் உள்ளன.
18ம் நூற்றாண்டில் பாராளுமன்ற ஜனநாயகம் தளைத்தோங்கிய காலத்தில் பிரிட்டனில் மேக்னகார்ட்டா முக்கியத்துவம் பெற்று, அதனைச் சீர்படுத்தவும் துவங்கினார்கள் ஆட்சியாளர்கள்.
1797ல் மகாசாசனத்தின் பிரதி இலண்டன் தேசிய அருங்காட்சியகத்தில் வைக்கப்பட்டது. மகாசாசனத்தைப் போன்று பிரிட்டன் காலனி நாடுகள் சில சாசனங்களை தங்கள் நாடுகளில் உருவாக்கத் துவங்கின. ஜான் ஆடம்ஸ், பெஞ்சமின் பிராங்க்ளின் போன்றவர்கள் மகாசாசனத்தின் மீது ஆய்கள் மேற்கொண்டனர்.
இதன் பொருட்டு, சட்டம் தன் கடமையைச் செய்யும், "Due process of law " என்ற கோட்பாடு அமெரிக்க அரசியல் சாசனத்தில் சேர்க்கப்பட்டது.
1908ம் ஆண்டு உட்ரோவில்சன் இந்த சாசனம் அரசியலமைப்புக்கு அடித்தளம் என்று குறிப்பிட்டார்.
இரண்டாவது உலகப்போர் முடிவுற்றவுடன் மகாசாசனத்தின் பிரதியை, அமெரிக்க அதிபர் ரூஸ்வெல்ட்டுக்கு, பிரிட்டன் பிரதமர் வின்ஸ்டண்ட் சர்ச்சில் வழங்கினார்.
நேற்று ரன்னிமேட்டில் நடந்த நிகழ்ச்சியை பழைமையும் புதுமையுமாக கலந்து எழுச்சியுடன் பிரிட்டிஷ் அரசு கொண்டாடியது. மேக்னகார்ட்டாவைப் பற்றி ”Magna Carta Holy Grail Lyrics” என்ற இசைப்பாடலும் வெளியிடப்பட்டது. பிரிட்டனில் நாட்டுப்புறத் தரவுகளாக மகாசாசனம் பற்றி பல்வேறு செய்திகள் உலாவருகின்றன. அவ்வாறு உலவும் செய்திகளும் ஒருமுகப்படுத்தி ஆவணப்படுத்தப்பட்டுள்ளது.
For centuries Magna Carta, or “The Great Charter,” has been held up as an enduring symbol of freedom and democracy.
It was signed, or more accurately sealed, by England’s King John on June 15, 1215, in a field 20 miles outside London. By all accounts the move was a capitulation, not a heartfelt act of good will. The monarch was pressured into it by barons unhappy with his reign, and in particular with the taxes he levied on them to pay for his disastrous military campaigns in France.
Though initially created to appease only a select few, today the document is considered influential in the establishment of democratic governments and legal systems worldwide — an affirmation that no man, not even a king, is beyond the rule of law. But are the celebrations and the hype surrounding the 800th anniversary warranted? Many scholars argue that the Magna Carta’s importance through the centuries has been greatly exaggerated. Yet for others, its status as a symbol of freedom and a check on absolute power is undeniable.
Elizabeth Papp Kamali ’97, J.D. ’07, sees merit in both arguments.
“When it was first issued in 1215, Magna Carta was really about the 1 percent, to put it in modern parlance,” said Kamali, a scholar of medieval law who will join Harvard Law School in July as an assistant professor. The document largely addressed property rights for “very elite individuals,” she said. One had to dig to find the clauses “we now associate with due process and the things that we value.”
Complicating its legacy is the fact that King John quickly turned to Pope Innocent III to help him revoke the document, which led to civil war. But in the years that followed, the Magna Carta was repeatedly reissued. Though over the centuries it has become distanced from its roots, with large sections removed, “people just kept coming back to it,” said Kamali.
“People came to see it as all about due-process rights and all about limitations on the power of the monarch. Or later, when the American colonies took it up as something important, it was about the limited role of government and the inherent rights of the people.
“And so in that sense, I think Magna Carta has come to represent the importance of the 99 percent vis-à-vis the 1 percent. And for that reason I think, even if the meaning has drifted from its original import, it’s totally appropriate that we make a big fuss.”
The notion of trial by jury is often traced to the charter’s 39th clause. One look at the words and it’s easy to see why. An English translation posted on the British Library’s website reads: “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights and possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.”
Those foundational principles have not lost their power, said Kamali.
“As a country we are dealing with issues of continuing racial injustice and the problem of mass incarceration. To the extent that Magna Carta calls us back to our first principles — even if, again, it’s at a remove from what the charter was originally about — I think that’s something really valuable.
“If the ‘myth’ of Magna Carta helps bring clarity and urgency to issues of current concern, reminding us of fundamental principles,” she added, “then maybe Bad King John will have inadvertently left a worthwhile legacy.”
The Harvard Law School Library has approximately 30 copies of the document, almost all of which are included in compilations of English statutes dating from around 1300 to 1500.
The Magna Carta turns 800
This small copy of the Magna Carta, circa 1300, is embellished with color and vivid illustrations.
Karen Beck, manager of historical and special collections at the Harvard Law School (HLS) Library, holds a sheriff’s copy of an abbreviated Magna Carta, circa 1327. According to Beck, the document would have been read aloud four times a year in the town square. “This is my favorite Magna Carta of all,” said Beck, “because you can really see how it was used.” The HLS Library has a large collection of manuscript copies of the famous political text, which is celebrating its 800th anniversary. Unlike the sheriff’s copy, most versions of the HLS Magna Cartas are contained in early English statutory compilations dating from about 1300 to 1500. Photos by Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer
Included in the Harvard Law School Library’s collection are miniature compilations of English statutes such as this one, circa 1300. Only five inches long, this small book begins with the Magna Carta, and would have been typically tucked into a lawyer or judge’s sleeve and carried into court.
Many of the HLS Library’s statutory manuscript pages are ornately decorated, like this one, circa 1300, which features bright colors, illustrations, and gold leaf embellishments.
The inside of this small book of English statutes, circa 1300, reveals the intricate original binding.
This small copy of the Magna Carta, circa 1300, is embellished with color and vivid illustrations.
Karen Beck, manager of historical and special collections at the Harvard Law School (HLS) Library, holds a sheriff’s copy of an abbreviated Magna Carta, circa 1327. According to Beck, the document would have been read aloud four times a year in the town square. “This is my favorite Magna Carta of all,” said Beck, “because you can really see how it was used.” The HLS Library has a large collection of manuscript copies of the famous political text, which is celebrating its 800th anniversary. Unlike the sheriff’s copy, most versions of the HLS Magna Cartas are contained in early English statutory compilations dating from about 1300 to 1500.
The library is planning an exhibit to coincide with the anniversary and to highlight its copies, which include those found in a small volume only 3.5 inches long, as well as a sheriff’s copy that would have been read aloud yearly in a public square.
Those unable to make it to Cambridge can browse the library’s online material. Early this year staff members completed the digitization of the collection with help from the Ames Foundation, which is also supporting a project to fully describe the contents of the various statutes.
Reflecting on the anniversary, Karen Beck, manager of Historical and Special Collections at the library, said that the best part of working with the rare documents is the chance to bring them to a wider audience.
“For me, the most exciting thing has been to digitize all of these to make them available,” said Beck. “It feels like … a present, a present that we are giving to the world.”
(Courtesy - News Harvard )
2. The Magna Carta at 800 The uses of history.
How did a failed treaty between medieval combatants come to be seen as the foundation of liberty in the Anglo-Saxon world?
The great bronze doors of America’s Supreme Court are decorated with eight panels depicting seminal moments in legal history. One of them shows a cross-looking King John in a face-off with a determined baron who is leaning threateningly on his sword (right). Between them is a document onto which the king is pressing his seal.
The relief is a fair representation of the making of Magna Carta. King John was indeed angry, and the barons threatening. But both parties would surely have been astonished to know that a treaty between feudal antagonists—designed to avert civil war in the 13th century—would be celebrated 800 years and an ocean away from the moment immortalised on those doors.
It happened on June 15th 1215, in a field at Staines, now a less than lovely suburb west of London. The deal that was done there was yet another stage in a long tussle for power between feudal strong-men and their overlord. John had spent most of his financial and political capital trying and failing to hold on to bits of France. He had alienated the clever, ambitious Pope Innocent III by refusing to accept the pope’s nominee for Archbishop of Canterbury. He expelled the monks from Canterbury and the pope excommunicated him.
He had alienated the barons, too, by fleecing them and, when they resisted, did much to deserve the bad press Shakespeare subsequently gave him. When one baron, William de Braose, failed to cough up and fled to France, John took his wife and son hostage, locked them up in Corfe castle and left them there. According to a contemporary chronicler, when their corpses were eventually removed, the woman was discovered to have been chewing on her son’s cheek.
England thus became a rogue nation. The clergy were not allowed to celebrate mass. Dissidents were persecuted or fled. Big powers near and far—France, Wales, Scotland, Rome—conspired to overthrow the oppressive regime.
Faced with the threat of invasion, John made a clever move: he sued for peace with the pope. He accepted Innocent III’s nominee for archbishop and, in a scene of exquisite triumph for the pope and humiliation for the king, John knelt before the papal nuncio in St Paul’s Cathedral as the instrument of his surrender was read out before assembled barons and clergy. That did not, however, answer the barons’ grievances. The rebels gained ground and soon took London. John realised that he had to make terms with them: those terms were Magna Carta.
There was not much reason, at the time, to suspect that the document would make history. It was not a revolutionary idea for the king to issue a charter promising to play by certain rules. Henry I, William the Conqueror’s son, had published the Charter of Liberties when he came to the throne in 1100, to persuade the barons that he would behave more reasonably than his horrible brother William Rufus had done.
Moreover, Magna Carta was a failure. It had an enforcement clause that no self-respecting monarch would have stuck to—establishing a council of 25 barons with the right to seize all the king’s possessions if he broke any of the other clauses—and John evidently had no intention of doing so. A month after it was sealed, he wrote to his new friend the pope to ask for its annulment. The tactical humiliation in St Paul’s Cathedral paid off, and the pope promptly obliged.
Nor was there much in the document to interest people beyond the time and place in which it was born. John had been swindling the barons through abuse of his royal rights, so the bulk of it concerns such matters as the tax they had to pay the king in lieu of sending knights to fight for him, and the king’s rights over the barons’ heirs and widows, plus practical issues of great import in medieval times but of limited interest to subsequent generations, such as the dismantling of fish-weirs on the Thames.
A pretext for regicide
Buried beneath the “scutage”, “novel disseisin” and “darrein presentment” there were, however, some grander notions, which many historians attribute to the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, a theologian trained in Paris who later sided with the barons and was sacked by the pope. Certainly, there is evidence of a sharp intelligence at work, using a propitious moment to delineate more broadly the relations between a sovereign and his subjects. Scutage—a tax to pay for war—was to be levied only with “the general consent of the realm”. And chapter 39 in the original (29 in later versions) asserts that “no free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.” That prohibition earned Magna Carta its place on the Supreme Court door.
This passage did not establish the right to trial by jury, for juries were already used extensively; nor is it clear what “the law of the land” meant, since there were no statutes, only customs. The language is not original—a similar phrase appeared in the Edict of Conrad II, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1037, and another in the second Treaty of Constance between the Emperor Barbarossa and the Lombard League in 1183. But on the European mainland the phrase disappeared into the murk of the Middle Ages, whereas in the Anglo-Saxon world it survived, to be revived and revered by subsequent generations. Why?
John “surfeited himself with peaches and drinking new cider, which greatly increased and aggravated the fever”
One reason may have been a batch of cider newly brewed by monks at Swineshead Abbey in Lincolnshire. After John reneged on the charter, Louis, son of the king of France, came to England at the barons’ invitation to take the throne. John marched towards the north, where the estates of many of the rebel barons lay. On the way, he lost his treasure crossing the Wash. The “grief of mind” this caused made him ill, according to Roger of Wendover, a contemporary chronicler; the king then “surfeited himself with peaches and drinking new cider, which greatly increased and aggravated the fever.” Shakespeare reckons the monks poisoned him. Either way, he died a week later.
John’s son Henry was nine, so one of the barons who had remained loyal to the throne, William Marshal, became regent. Unlike his newly deceased liege, he was a remarkable soldier and statesman. Already pushing 70, he led the royal troops into battle against the French at Lincoln, and defeated them. He then reissued the Charter, largely in its original form, turning a document designed to weaken the king into the monarchy’s most powerful weapon. The rebels no longer had a cause, and the rebellion died. When Henry III reissued the Charter once again on his coming of age in 1225, most of the witnesses to it were former rebels.
William Marshal: the man who saved Magna Carta
The second reason for the treaty’s survival was Sir Edward Coke, a 17th-century lawyer. The charter had largely disappeared from view for four centuries, but in the run-up to the English civil war it proved useful to the Stuarts’ opponents, who were keen to portray themselves as traditionalists rather than terrifying revolutionaries. In a brilliant piece of early spin, they dreamed up the “Norman Yoke”—the idea that William the Conqueror had destroyed a Saxon Eden which first the barons, and now they, were trying to revive. “The Charter of our liberties, called Magna Carta…was but a renovation and restitution of the ancient laws of this kingdom,” as Sir Harbottle Grimston put it.
Leader of the pack of parliamentary lawyers was Coke, James I’s chief justice before he turned against the monarchy. Magna Carta was one of his principal tools. Some of his claims about it—that it had been ratified by an ancient parliament, for instance—are nonsense. But he successfully argued that the crucial chapter 39/29 established the precedent of limits to monarchical power: “Upon this chapter, as out of a roote, many fruitful branches of the Law of England have sprung”. He used Magna Carta as the basis of the Petition of Right, the proto-constitution that Parliament forced Charles I to sign.
Decapitation and a further, more peaceful, revolution tamed the English monarchy; once Parliament was top dog, its members lost interest in constitutions. Except among radicals, who waved it despairingly through the 18th and 19th centuries, Magna Carta went out of fashion in England. But it found new life in America.
The first colonies were established just at the time that Coke had turned to needling James I, and the spirit of that argument shaped them. Coke wrote the first Virginia charter, guaranteeing the settlers’ rights as free English subjects; William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, first published Magna Carta in America. The title of his book—“The Excellent Privilege of Liberty and Property Being the Birth-Right of the Free-born Subjects of England”—made his point pretty clearly.
The spirit of Coke strode through the incipient nation. Lawyers were over-represented among America’s Founding Fathers, and as students they were made to read him. They did not always find his prose inspiring—the young Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I do wish the devil had old Coke for I am sure I was never so tired of an old dull scoundrel in all my life”—but they recognised the importance of his vision to their cause. A more mature Jefferson was to write later to James Madison that “a sounder whig never wrote…nor of profounder learning…in what were called English liberties.”
The rebellious colonists quoted Magna Carta against the British Parliament just as the 17th-century parliamentarians had quoted it against the king. The Massachusetts Assembly, protesting against taxation without representation, said that the Stamp Act was “against the Magna Carta and the natural rights of Englishmen and therefore according to Lord Coke null and void”. When rebellious Massachusetts needed a new state seal, because the royal governor held the existing one, Paul Revere—he of the legendary Ride—engraved a replacement depicting a militiaman with a sword in one hand and Magna Carta in the other. The first Continental Congress in 1774 justified its rebellion on the ground that the colonists were doing “as Englishmen, their ancestors in like cases have usually done, for asserting and vindicating their rights and liberties”. And the echoes of that crucial chapter are clearly audible in the American Bill of Rights.
Home of the free
These days Magna Carta seems to belong to the Americans more than it does to the British. The memorial to it in a soggy Thames-side meadow was put up by the American Bar Association. American jurists still refer to it in legal cases: a federal district court judge ruled against delaying Paula Jones’s sexual-harassment suit against Bill Clinton, then America’s president, on the ground that “our form of government…asserts as did the English in Magna Carta and the Petition of Right, that even the sovereign is subject to God and the law”. When David Letterman, a chat-show host, quizzed David Cameron about it, Britain’s prime minister was unable to tell him what the words “Magna Carta” meant. In August 2014 the Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Roberts, said that “our American experiment has not reached a third of the age of Magna Carta, but we have given Magna Carta’s core concepts concrete meaning…in our constitutional framework.” The contrast with the English, who produced a document that inspired 800 years of idealism but failed to follow up with a modern constitution, was implied rather than stated.
This is only one of the many contradictions embedded in this revered piece of sheepskin inscribed with oak gall and sealed with beeswax and resin. A failure at its conception, it has shaped the course of human history at two of its most significant turning points. Designed to uphold feudal rights, it has been used by radicals to portray themselves as conservatives, the better to overturn the status quo. And, ultimately, a paradox lies at its heart: it speaks to the urge, felt most strongly in the Anglo-Saxon world, to justify the present by calling up the past—to change everything while pretending that everything remains the same.
(Courtesy : The economist )
-கே.எஸ்.இராதாகிருஷ்ணன்.
16-06-2015.
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மகாசாசனத்தைப் பற்றி எட்டாவது வகுப்பில் ஆக்ஸ்போர்டு பல்கலைக்கழகம் வெளியிட்ட வரலாற்று நூலில் படித்த காலத்திலிருந்து அதன்மீது ஆர்வம் உண்டு. அதனால் மகாசாசனம் பற்றி படிக்கவும், அறியவும் விருப்பம் ஏற்பட்டது.
எட்டு நூற்றாண்டுகளுக்கு முன்னால், ஜான் அரசன் ரன்னிமேட்டில் உள்ள தேம்ஸ் நதிக்கரை அருகில்மகாசாசனத்தைப் பிரகடனப் படுத்தியதாக தகவல். நேற்றைக்கு (15-06-2015) பிரிட்டன் ராணி எலிசபத்தும், அந்நாட்டின் பிரதமர் டேவிட் கேமரூனும், கேண்டர்பரி ஆர்ச் பிஷப் மற்றும் உலகநாட்டுத் தலைவர்களும் கலந்துகொள்ள 800வது ஆண்டு நிகழ்வு நடைபெற்றுள்ளது.
1215ம் ஆண்டு மகாசாசனம் எழுதப்பட்ட இந்த இடம் இன்றைக்கு “தேசிய ட்ரஸ்ட் பார்க்” என்று அழைக்கப்படுகின்றது. இதே இடத்தில் நடந்த பிரம்மாண்ட்மான நிகழ்ச்சியில் கலந்துகொண்ட பிரிட்டன் ராணி எலிசபெத் தன்னுடைய செய்தியில், ‘ மகாசாசனம் பிரிட்டனுக்கோ, காமன்வெல்த் நாடுகளுக்கோ மட்டுமில்லாமல் உலகத்துக்கே அரசியல் அடிப்படைக் குறிக்கோள்களை உருவாக்கித் தந்தது” என்று எழுதியுள்ளார்.
இலத்தீன் மற்றும் ஆங்கிலத்தில் மொத்தம் 3,500 வார்த்தைகளில் மேக்னகார்ட்டா சாசனத்தை கேண்டர்பெர்ரி ஆர்ச் பிஷப் எழுதிய வரைவு ஜான் அரசரைக் கவர்ந்தது. பின் ஜான் அரசர் மகாசாசனத்தை இறுதி செய்து அரசு முத்திரை இடச் செய்தார்.
16ம் நூற்றாண்டில் ஜூரி.சர்.எட்வர்ட் கோக் மகாசாசனத்தை படித்து மறுபரிசீலனை செய்தார் என்றும் அப்போது, ஸ்டூவர்ட் வம்சம் ஆட்சியில் இருந்தது என்றும் செய்திகள் உள்ளன.
18ம் நூற்றாண்டில் பாராளுமன்ற ஜனநாயகம் தளைத்தோங்கிய காலத்தில் பிரிட்டனில் மேக்னகார்ட்டா முக்கியத்துவம் பெற்று, அதனைச் சீர்படுத்தவும் துவங்கினார்கள் ஆட்சியாளர்கள்.
1797ல் மகாசாசனத்தின் பிரதி இலண்டன் தேசிய அருங்காட்சியகத்தில் வைக்கப்பட்டது. மகாசாசனத்தைப் போன்று பிரிட்டன் காலனி நாடுகள் சில சாசனங்களை தங்கள் நாடுகளில் உருவாக்கத் துவங்கின. ஜான் ஆடம்ஸ், பெஞ்சமின் பிராங்க்ளின் போன்றவர்கள் மகாசாசனத்தின் மீது ஆய்கள் மேற்கொண்டனர்.
இதன் பொருட்டு, சட்டம் தன் கடமையைச் செய்யும், "Due process of law " என்ற கோட்பாடு அமெரிக்க அரசியல் சாசனத்தில் சேர்க்கப்பட்டது.
1908ம் ஆண்டு உட்ரோவில்சன் இந்த சாசனம் அரசியலமைப்புக்கு அடித்தளம் என்று குறிப்பிட்டார்.
இரண்டாவது உலகப்போர் முடிவுற்றவுடன் மகாசாசனத்தின் பிரதியை, அமெரிக்க அதிபர் ரூஸ்வெல்ட்டுக்கு, பிரிட்டன் பிரதமர் வின்ஸ்டண்ட் சர்ச்சில் வழங்கினார்.
நேற்று ரன்னிமேட்டில் நடந்த நிகழ்ச்சியை பழைமையும் புதுமையுமாக கலந்து எழுச்சியுடன் பிரிட்டிஷ் அரசு கொண்டாடியது. மேக்னகார்ட்டாவைப் பற்றி ”Magna Carta Holy Grail Lyrics” என்ற இசைப்பாடலும் வெளியிடப்பட்டது. பிரிட்டனில் நாட்டுப்புறத் தரவுகளாக மகாசாசனம் பற்றி பல்வேறு செய்திகள் உலாவருகின்றன. அவ்வாறு உலவும் செய்திகளும் ஒருமுகப்படுத்தி ஆவணப்படுத்தப்பட்டுள்ளது.
For centuries Magna Carta, or “The Great Charter,” has been held up as an enduring symbol of freedom and democracy.
It was signed, or more accurately sealed, by England’s King John on June 15, 1215, in a field 20 miles outside London. By all accounts the move was a capitulation, not a heartfelt act of good will. The monarch was pressured into it by barons unhappy with his reign, and in particular with the taxes he levied on them to pay for his disastrous military campaigns in France.
Though initially created to appease only a select few, today the document is considered influential in the establishment of democratic governments and legal systems worldwide — an affirmation that no man, not even a king, is beyond the rule of law. But are the celebrations and the hype surrounding the 800th anniversary warranted? Many scholars argue that the Magna Carta’s importance through the centuries has been greatly exaggerated. Yet for others, its status as a symbol of freedom and a check on absolute power is undeniable.
Elizabeth Papp Kamali ’97, J.D. ’07, sees merit in both arguments.
“When it was first issued in 1215, Magna Carta was really about the 1 percent, to put it in modern parlance,” said Kamali, a scholar of medieval law who will join Harvard Law School in July as an assistant professor. The document largely addressed property rights for “very elite individuals,” she said. One had to dig to find the clauses “we now associate with due process and the things that we value.”
Complicating its legacy is the fact that King John quickly turned to Pope Innocent III to help him revoke the document, which led to civil war. But in the years that followed, the Magna Carta was repeatedly reissued. Though over the centuries it has become distanced from its roots, with large sections removed, “people just kept coming back to it,” said Kamali.
“People came to see it as all about due-process rights and all about limitations on the power of the monarch. Or later, when the American colonies took it up as something important, it was about the limited role of government and the inherent rights of the people.
“And so in that sense, I think Magna Carta has come to represent the importance of the 99 percent vis-à-vis the 1 percent. And for that reason I think, even if the meaning has drifted from its original import, it’s totally appropriate that we make a big fuss.”
The notion of trial by jury is often traced to the charter’s 39th clause. One look at the words and it’s easy to see why. An English translation posted on the British Library’s website reads: “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights and possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.”
Those foundational principles have not lost their power, said Kamali.
“As a country we are dealing with issues of continuing racial injustice and the problem of mass incarceration. To the extent that Magna Carta calls us back to our first principles — even if, again, it’s at a remove from what the charter was originally about — I think that’s something really valuable.
“If the ‘myth’ of Magna Carta helps bring clarity and urgency to issues of current concern, reminding us of fundamental principles,” she added, “then maybe Bad King John will have inadvertently left a worthwhile legacy.”
The Harvard Law School Library has approximately 30 copies of the document, almost all of which are included in compilations of English statutes dating from around 1300 to 1500.
The Magna Carta turns 800
This small copy of the Magna Carta, circa 1300, is embellished with color and vivid illustrations.
Karen Beck, manager of historical and special collections at the Harvard Law School (HLS) Library, holds a sheriff’s copy of an abbreviated Magna Carta, circa 1327. According to Beck, the document would have been read aloud four times a year in the town square. “This is my favorite Magna Carta of all,” said Beck, “because you can really see how it was used.” The HLS Library has a large collection of manuscript copies of the famous political text, which is celebrating its 800th anniversary. Unlike the sheriff’s copy, most versions of the HLS Magna Cartas are contained in early English statutory compilations dating from about 1300 to 1500. Photos by Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer
Included in the Harvard Law School Library’s collection are miniature compilations of English statutes such as this one, circa 1300. Only five inches long, this small book begins with the Magna Carta, and would have been typically tucked into a lawyer or judge’s sleeve and carried into court.
Many of the HLS Library’s statutory manuscript pages are ornately decorated, like this one, circa 1300, which features bright colors, illustrations, and gold leaf embellishments.
The inside of this small book of English statutes, circa 1300, reveals the intricate original binding.
This small copy of the Magna Carta, circa 1300, is embellished with color and vivid illustrations.
Karen Beck, manager of historical and special collections at the Harvard Law School (HLS) Library, holds a sheriff’s copy of an abbreviated Magna Carta, circa 1327. According to Beck, the document would have been read aloud four times a year in the town square. “This is my favorite Magna Carta of all,” said Beck, “because you can really see how it was used.” The HLS Library has a large collection of manuscript copies of the famous political text, which is celebrating its 800th anniversary. Unlike the sheriff’s copy, most versions of the HLS Magna Cartas are contained in early English statutory compilations dating from about 1300 to 1500.
The library is planning an exhibit to coincide with the anniversary and to highlight its copies, which include those found in a small volume only 3.5 inches long, as well as a sheriff’s copy that would have been read aloud yearly in a public square.
Those unable to make it to Cambridge can browse the library’s online material. Early this year staff members completed the digitization of the collection with help from the Ames Foundation, which is also supporting a project to fully describe the contents of the various statutes.
Reflecting on the anniversary, Karen Beck, manager of Historical and Special Collections at the library, said that the best part of working with the rare documents is the chance to bring them to a wider audience.
“For me, the most exciting thing has been to digitize all of these to make them available,” said Beck. “It feels like … a present, a present that we are giving to the world.”
(Courtesy - News Harvard )
2. The Magna Carta at 800 The uses of history.
How did a failed treaty between medieval combatants come to be seen as the foundation of liberty in the Anglo-Saxon world?
The great bronze doors of America’s Supreme Court are decorated with eight panels depicting seminal moments in legal history. One of them shows a cross-looking King John in a face-off with a determined baron who is leaning threateningly on his sword (right). Between them is a document onto which the king is pressing his seal.
The relief is a fair representation of the making of Magna Carta. King John was indeed angry, and the barons threatening. But both parties would surely have been astonished to know that a treaty between feudal antagonists—designed to avert civil war in the 13th century—would be celebrated 800 years and an ocean away from the moment immortalised on those doors.
It happened on June 15th 1215, in a field at Staines, now a less than lovely suburb west of London. The deal that was done there was yet another stage in a long tussle for power between feudal strong-men and their overlord. John had spent most of his financial and political capital trying and failing to hold on to bits of France. He had alienated the clever, ambitious Pope Innocent III by refusing to accept the pope’s nominee for Archbishop of Canterbury. He expelled the monks from Canterbury and the pope excommunicated him.
He had alienated the barons, too, by fleecing them and, when they resisted, did much to deserve the bad press Shakespeare subsequently gave him. When one baron, William de Braose, failed to cough up and fled to France, John took his wife and son hostage, locked them up in Corfe castle and left them there. According to a contemporary chronicler, when their corpses were eventually removed, the woman was discovered to have been chewing on her son’s cheek.
England thus became a rogue nation. The clergy were not allowed to celebrate mass. Dissidents were persecuted or fled. Big powers near and far—France, Wales, Scotland, Rome—conspired to overthrow the oppressive regime.
Faced with the threat of invasion, John made a clever move: he sued for peace with the pope. He accepted Innocent III’s nominee for archbishop and, in a scene of exquisite triumph for the pope and humiliation for the king, John knelt before the papal nuncio in St Paul’s Cathedral as the instrument of his surrender was read out before assembled barons and clergy. That did not, however, answer the barons’ grievances. The rebels gained ground and soon took London. John realised that he had to make terms with them: those terms were Magna Carta.
There was not much reason, at the time, to suspect that the document would make history. It was not a revolutionary idea for the king to issue a charter promising to play by certain rules. Henry I, William the Conqueror’s son, had published the Charter of Liberties when he came to the throne in 1100, to persuade the barons that he would behave more reasonably than his horrible brother William Rufus had done.
Moreover, Magna Carta was a failure. It had an enforcement clause that no self-respecting monarch would have stuck to—establishing a council of 25 barons with the right to seize all the king’s possessions if he broke any of the other clauses—and John evidently had no intention of doing so. A month after it was sealed, he wrote to his new friend the pope to ask for its annulment. The tactical humiliation in St Paul’s Cathedral paid off, and the pope promptly obliged.
Nor was there much in the document to interest people beyond the time and place in which it was born. John had been swindling the barons through abuse of his royal rights, so the bulk of it concerns such matters as the tax they had to pay the king in lieu of sending knights to fight for him, and the king’s rights over the barons’ heirs and widows, plus practical issues of great import in medieval times but of limited interest to subsequent generations, such as the dismantling of fish-weirs on the Thames.
A pretext for regicide
Buried beneath the “scutage”, “novel disseisin” and “darrein presentment” there were, however, some grander notions, which many historians attribute to the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, a theologian trained in Paris who later sided with the barons and was sacked by the pope. Certainly, there is evidence of a sharp intelligence at work, using a propitious moment to delineate more broadly the relations between a sovereign and his subjects. Scutage—a tax to pay for war—was to be levied only with “the general consent of the realm”. And chapter 39 in the original (29 in later versions) asserts that “no free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.” That prohibition earned Magna Carta its place on the Supreme Court door.
This passage did not establish the right to trial by jury, for juries were already used extensively; nor is it clear what “the law of the land” meant, since there were no statutes, only customs. The language is not original—a similar phrase appeared in the Edict of Conrad II, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1037, and another in the second Treaty of Constance between the Emperor Barbarossa and the Lombard League in 1183. But on the European mainland the phrase disappeared into the murk of the Middle Ages, whereas in the Anglo-Saxon world it survived, to be revived and revered by subsequent generations. Why?
John “surfeited himself with peaches and drinking new cider, which greatly increased and aggravated the fever”
One reason may have been a batch of cider newly brewed by monks at Swineshead Abbey in Lincolnshire. After John reneged on the charter, Louis, son of the king of France, came to England at the barons’ invitation to take the throne. John marched towards the north, where the estates of many of the rebel barons lay. On the way, he lost his treasure crossing the Wash. The “grief of mind” this caused made him ill, according to Roger of Wendover, a contemporary chronicler; the king then “surfeited himself with peaches and drinking new cider, which greatly increased and aggravated the fever.” Shakespeare reckons the monks poisoned him. Either way, he died a week later.
John’s son Henry was nine, so one of the barons who had remained loyal to the throne, William Marshal, became regent. Unlike his newly deceased liege, he was a remarkable soldier and statesman. Already pushing 70, he led the royal troops into battle against the French at Lincoln, and defeated them. He then reissued the Charter, largely in its original form, turning a document designed to weaken the king into the monarchy’s most powerful weapon. The rebels no longer had a cause, and the rebellion died. When Henry III reissued the Charter once again on his coming of age in 1225, most of the witnesses to it were former rebels.
William Marshal: the man who saved Magna Carta
The second reason for the treaty’s survival was Sir Edward Coke, a 17th-century lawyer. The charter had largely disappeared from view for four centuries, but in the run-up to the English civil war it proved useful to the Stuarts’ opponents, who were keen to portray themselves as traditionalists rather than terrifying revolutionaries. In a brilliant piece of early spin, they dreamed up the “Norman Yoke”—the idea that William the Conqueror had destroyed a Saxon Eden which first the barons, and now they, were trying to revive. “The Charter of our liberties, called Magna Carta…was but a renovation and restitution of the ancient laws of this kingdom,” as Sir Harbottle Grimston put it.
Leader of the pack of parliamentary lawyers was Coke, James I’s chief justice before he turned against the monarchy. Magna Carta was one of his principal tools. Some of his claims about it—that it had been ratified by an ancient parliament, for instance—are nonsense. But he successfully argued that the crucial chapter 39/29 established the precedent of limits to monarchical power: “Upon this chapter, as out of a roote, many fruitful branches of the Law of England have sprung”. He used Magna Carta as the basis of the Petition of Right, the proto-constitution that Parliament forced Charles I to sign.
Decapitation and a further, more peaceful, revolution tamed the English monarchy; once Parliament was top dog, its members lost interest in constitutions. Except among radicals, who waved it despairingly through the 18th and 19th centuries, Magna Carta went out of fashion in England. But it found new life in America.
The first colonies were established just at the time that Coke had turned to needling James I, and the spirit of that argument shaped them. Coke wrote the first Virginia charter, guaranteeing the settlers’ rights as free English subjects; William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, first published Magna Carta in America. The title of his book—“The Excellent Privilege of Liberty and Property Being the Birth-Right of the Free-born Subjects of England”—made his point pretty clearly.
The spirit of Coke strode through the incipient nation. Lawyers were over-represented among America’s Founding Fathers, and as students they were made to read him. They did not always find his prose inspiring—the young Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I do wish the devil had old Coke for I am sure I was never so tired of an old dull scoundrel in all my life”—but they recognised the importance of his vision to their cause. A more mature Jefferson was to write later to James Madison that “a sounder whig never wrote…nor of profounder learning…in what were called English liberties.”
The rebellious colonists quoted Magna Carta against the British Parliament just as the 17th-century parliamentarians had quoted it against the king. The Massachusetts Assembly, protesting against taxation without representation, said that the Stamp Act was “against the Magna Carta and the natural rights of Englishmen and therefore according to Lord Coke null and void”. When rebellious Massachusetts needed a new state seal, because the royal governor held the existing one, Paul Revere—he of the legendary Ride—engraved a replacement depicting a militiaman with a sword in one hand and Magna Carta in the other. The first Continental Congress in 1774 justified its rebellion on the ground that the colonists were doing “as Englishmen, their ancestors in like cases have usually done, for asserting and vindicating their rights and liberties”. And the echoes of that crucial chapter are clearly audible in the American Bill of Rights.
Home of the free
These days Magna Carta seems to belong to the Americans more than it does to the British. The memorial to it in a soggy Thames-side meadow was put up by the American Bar Association. American jurists still refer to it in legal cases: a federal district court judge ruled against delaying Paula Jones’s sexual-harassment suit against Bill Clinton, then America’s president, on the ground that “our form of government…asserts as did the English in Magna Carta and the Petition of Right, that even the sovereign is subject to God and the law”. When David Letterman, a chat-show host, quizzed David Cameron about it, Britain’s prime minister was unable to tell him what the words “Magna Carta” meant. In August 2014 the Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Roberts, said that “our American experiment has not reached a third of the age of Magna Carta, but we have given Magna Carta’s core concepts concrete meaning…in our constitutional framework.” The contrast with the English, who produced a document that inspired 800 years of idealism but failed to follow up with a modern constitution, was implied rather than stated.
This is only one of the many contradictions embedded in this revered piece of sheepskin inscribed with oak gall and sealed with beeswax and resin. A failure at its conception, it has shaped the course of human history at two of its most significant turning points. Designed to uphold feudal rights, it has been used by radicals to portray themselves as conservatives, the better to overturn the status quo. And, ultimately, a paradox lies at its heart: it speaks to the urge, felt most strongly in the Anglo-Saxon world, to justify the present by calling up the past—to change everything while pretending that everything remains the same.
(Courtesy : The economist )
-கே.எஸ்.இராதாகிருஷ்ணன்.
16-06-2015.
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