AUTHOR EXAMINES THE STORIED HISTORY OF MAGNA CARTA
Unsure about visiting the Magna Carta exhibit, currently on display on the legislature grounds on the final stop in its four-date Canadian tour? Perhaps this conversation, overheard between two kids on a field trip during my visit earlier this week, will help convince you.
“Is this it?” one asked, rushing to the display case in the centre of the temperature-, light-, and humidity-controlled Borealis Gallery, and then looking a little crestfallen once he got there. “It’s a piece of paper.”
His classmate, frowning, swiftly corrected him: “It’s an 800-year-old piece of paper.”
Technically, the version of Magna Carta on display here in Edmonton is only 715 years old. It’s one of the seven surviving copies reissued by Edward I in 1300, 85 years after his grandfather, King John, sealed the original, and it has spent nearly all of those years inside Durham Cathedral. But you don’t keep a piece of parchment around that long unless it means something — and wrinkled old documents don’t come much more interesting than the Great Charter. Especially when you can see it with your own eyes.
“A lot of people find it fascinating to be in the presence of such historic documents,” agrees Carolyn Harris, author of the official tie-in volume to the exhibit, Magna Carta and Its Gifts to Canada (Dundurn). “It’s not often you have the opportunity to see Magna Carta on Canadian soil.”
In 2012, Harris, a historian and author who teaches at the University of Toronto, delivered a series of public lectures about British royalty, during which she was approached by a woman who was also co-chairperson of the group that was in the process of bringing Magna Carta to Canada. The woman asked if Harris would write an article for the group’s website.
From there, Harris says, “One article became a series of articles, which became an opportunity to write a book. So it’s been a pretty incredible process.”
The Magna Carta exhibit — which also features a copy of the similarly elderly and similarly influential Charter of the Forest
— includes a good primer on the charters, the circumstances under which they were drafted, and their unlikely influence on the modern world. For the full experience, however, I recommend delaying your trip by a couple of days, and first spending some time with Harris’s thorough and thoroughly enjoyable book.
It begins with the context in which the charter was first sealed by King John (you know, the thumb sucker from Robin Hood?), and the very limited application it was intended to have.
“English society, in 1215, operated according to a very strict social hierarchy,” Harris says. “The ideas of democracy were viewed with some degree of suspicion — democracy was seen as almost synonymous with mob rule.”
In other words, the barons who pressured King John to sign the charter weren’t imagining a utopian document that would guarantee universal human rights; they were gunning for a protection of their rights, as well as those of similarly privileged groups such as the clergy. It wasn’t until centuries later, after a long period of relative obscurity, that legal scholars such as Sir Edward Coke saw the potential of the Great Charter and began to argue its relevance for the general population: “Magna Carta,” Coke famously said to the British Parliament, “is such a fellow, that he will have no sovereign.”
Coke’s championing had a massive snowball effect, which Harris’s book also documents, influencing the American Declaration of Independence, France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, among others.
None of which was on anyone’s mind back in the 13th century.
“The barons, who envisioned the document as applying to a comparatively small social elite, would be surprised by the degree to which it’s become a touchstone for universal rights in various parts of the world,” Harris says.
Here in Canada, Magna Carta’s influence has been more symbolic than literal. Foundational documents such as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms are certainly inspired by it, and it has been cited in all kinds of court cases, but it’s no longer considered a legally binding document — as was made clear, Harris points out, by a ruling by the British Columbia Court of Appeal in 2003. Neither does the Canadian constitution contain language plucked straight from Magna Carta, or at least Coke’s interpretation of it, as happened in the United States (with clauses about arbitrary taxation and property law seeming particularly useful).
Precise legal applications are beside the point, anyway. Regardless of its original intent, Magna Carta has become international shorthand for human rights, and it remains one of a handful of pieces of legislation that pretty much everyone recognizes — even if they don’t know what’s written on the page (and not just because they aren’t fluent in Medieval Latin).
“What’s interesting is that many people have heard the name ‘Magna Carta,’ but they don’t necessarily know what was in the document,” Harris says. “They know it was historic, but not exactly how the origins of the common-law system came out of Magna Carta, or the fact that this was the first instance of a king of England accepting limits on his power imposed by his subjects.
“It’s become a cultural touchstone, as well as a political and legal touchstone.”
Carolyn Harris will be signing copies of Magna Carta and Its Gifts to Canada at Audreys Books (10702 Jasper Ave.) on Friday, Nov. 27 at from noon to 1:30 p.m.