Eels, widows and basic rights: It’s all in there
1. King John was not a good man, And no good friends had he. He stayed in every afternoon... But no one came to tea.
It’s just a tiny bit heart-softening, the way A. A. Milne styled “bad King John” into the friendless monarch who wanted nothing more for Christmas than an India-rubber ball — and signed his letters to Father Christmas “very humbly, JACK.”
2. Salmon, carp, eel. The rivers Thames and Medway were piscatorial breadbaskets, and so Magna Carta in Article 33 ordered the removal of all fish weirs, often massive structures of wooden stakes and fencing that impeded merchant navigation.
3. Marrying Henry Plantagenet was wedding No. 2 for Eleanor of Aquitaine. After rising up in revolt against the king, in league with her older sons, Eleanor lived a life of semi-imprisonment, a doleful existence captured by Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter: “What family doesn’t have its ups and downs?”
4. Good news for widows: Magna Carta decreed — Articles 7 and 8 in the original charter — that after her husband’s death she would receive her inheritance “at once and without trouble.” More good news: “No widow shall be compelled to marry.”
5. Confusing: the 1215 Magna Carta states “there shall be standard measures of wine, ale, and corn (the London quarter), throughout the kingdom.” The 1225 version is so much clearer: “Let there be one measure for wine throughout our kingdom, and one measure for ale, and one measure for corn, namely the London quarter.” Thank goodness for copy editors.
6. “There shall also be a standard width of dyed cloth, russet, and haberject, namely two elles within the selvedges.” King John would not have been caught dead in russet (coarse, drab wool) or haberject for that matter (humble cloth, albeit with some colour). But Magna Carta’s standardization of measurement said a lot about the growth of the merchant class.
7. Habeas corpus? Not in so many words. But the principle? Yes. Article 39: No free man shall be imprisoned nisi per legale iuditium parium suorum vel per legem terre. Without, that is, the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. Checkmate.
8. Leading the rebel barons against King John, Robert FitzWalter was the selfstyled “Marshal of the Army of God and Holy Church.” The powerful barons were at the top of the pecking order, the villeins, or peasants, at the bottom.
9. “You know, we Saxons aren’t going to put up with these oppressions much longer.” With that, a swashbuckling Errol Flynn as Robin Hood pledges his devotion to imprisoned King Richard and his opposition to evil Prince John. Thus are film legends born.
10. Richard the Lionheart was heroic. He also didn’t spend much time in England. “He viewed England as a source of revenue for his crusades,” says Carolyn Harris, author of Magna Carta and its Gifts to Canada. “He apparently commented that he would have sold London itself if he could have found a buyer.”