MAGNA CARTA ON TOUR
Sophie Campbell reports on the 800th anniversary of a document which is a foundation stone of democracy
I N the north transept of St Albans Cathedral, north of London, is a 15th-century wall painting of Doubting Thomas putting his hand into Christ’s side.
Over the next few weeks, Thomas won’t be able to believe his eyes again as below him appears a 3m x 3m x 2m “dark box”, so secure that it acts as a giant safe. Inside it will be dim lighting and reinforced glass and throughout August it will hold a travelling copy of Magna Carta, normally kept in Lincoln Castle and now touring like a rock star in the run-up to its 800th birthday in 2015.
The questions that immediately spring to mind are: “What’s all the fuss about?” and “Why St Albans?” — which is just what a new exhibition in the town’s museum sets out to explain. Magna Carta (or “Great Charter”) was an agreement between King John and the powerful English barons, made in 1215 — grudgingly, in the king’s case — at Runnymede, near Windsor. It was one of the earliest attempts to limit sovereign power and many of its clauses survive in English law today. It was not, as is often claimed, an early version of the Bill of Rights, nor a written constitution: the barons were worried about themselves, not the people, and John largely ignored it and went back to doing much as he pleased. But it was a key initial step.
The first meeting between the barons and the king’s representatives took place two years earlier than that, probably on August 4 1213, in what was then St Albans Abbey, now the cathedral. At the time,
this was one of the largest and richest monastic complexes in Europe, partly because of pilgrimage income generated by the shrine of Britain’s first Christian martyr, St Alban. Alban lived in the AD 300s in the Roman city of Verulamium, now a public park below the modern town, and was beheaded for his conversion to Christianity. His execution site evolved into a shrine and then expanded into the abbey and town. Geography also counted: the town was an important trade and transport hub on the Roman road from Dover to Chester.
The museum’s exhibition, Magna Carta
1213-1215: The Journey Starts Here, is already open, while the document in its box will be visible in the cathedral during August, when the town stages a Magna Carta Festival in Verulamium Park. The exhibition is small but fun: you can dress up as a medieval character, and while one wall explains the genesis of the charter, the other looks at modern human-rights achievements that, in a broad sense, it engendered. Under an arch filled with quotations from the local community on injustice in Britain today, there is a magnificent 13th-century Red Book of the Exchequer.
“This was when they moved from oathgiving to document-keeping,” explained the keeper of archaeology, David Thorold. “It was when concepts such as trial by combat or trial by fire began to give way to government by bureaucracy. They started writing everything down.”
He went on to explain that King John — forever condemned by AA Milne as “not a good man” — was no worse than any other ruler of the age. He was, David considered, “an early king who behaved quite like a modern politician: he took his chances when they came along and he moved on a sixpence if there was something in it for him”. So he affixed his seal to the charter but later made several changes to it, given confidence by his improving relationship with the Pope.
There are four existing copies of the Magna Carta — of the others, which never travel, one is in Salisbury Cathedral and two are in the British Library — and they are really worth seeing, in part for the exquisite penmanship on parchment, the ink browned and the words tiny, but still legible if you can read medieval Latin. One of the British Library copies was the last to have the king’s seal, but it was almost destroyed in a fire long before the library bought it.
The events in St Albans offer a wonderful chance to see Lincoln’s copy — for which, while it is on the road, a fine new vault is being constructed — but I can’t recommend St Albans Cathedral itself too highly. It has Saxon arches and a Norman tower, built using Roman bricks from the lost city in the valley. Its Gothic arches are decorated with ochre wall paintings, including a double portrait of Alban and the priest who converted him, Amphibalus. It has a timber “watching loft”, vividly carved with humans and animals and used by the monks to make sure pilgrims behaved and didn’t swipe anything from the shrine; and it has a wonderful Lady Chapel.
Time your visit for the Magna Carta weekend in early August and you can see all of it, plus re-enactments, cooking of medieval food, music and other 13thcentury jollities.