15 June: Boreham on the Magna Carta

The Foundation
It is good at times to glance at the sturdy foundations on which our civilisation rests, and in celebrating today the anniversary of Magna Carta we have a theme worthy of a moment's contemplation.[1]

We have all paid an imaginary pilgrimage to that insignificant islet between Staines and Windsor on which the memorable conference between King John and his barons was held. On opposite banks of the Thames, the two parties were drawn up like hostile camps. The river divided the king and his friends from the marshy flats on which the angry barons had taken up their stations. In midstream a small island broke the force of the current; and it was upon this unpretentious mud-flat that the delegates met; it was here that the historic parchment was finally sealed and completed.

A copy of the Charter, damaged by fire and withered with age, is to be found among the jealously guarded treasures of the British Museum; and the glass case in which it reposes is curiously and admiringly inspected year by year by thousands of visitors. "It is impossible," as Green observes, "to gaze without reverence on the earliest monument of English freedom which we can see with our own eyes and touch with our own hands."

We may smile at the antiquated and obsolete phraseology of the venerable deed; we may pity the pettiness that prompted some of its minor provisions; but no serious student can trace the evolution of our national life without ascribing to this classical instrument a place of the very highest importance.

The Establishment Of Massive Principles
Yet a careful perusal of the text fills the mind of the average modern reader with the keenest disappointment. He brings to it a distorted and exaggerated conception of its contents; and, as an inevitable consequence, he is disillusioned.

In "Our Mutual Friend," Dickens tells us that Silas Wegg's fruit stall was the hardest little stall of all the sterile little stalls in London. On a grim little heap of very hard nuts, the very sight of which gave the passerby the toothache, there lay a little wooden measure which had no discernible inside, but that was understood to represent the penn'orth of nuts prescribed by Magna Carta.

The reader will, however, find in the monumental document nothing concerning the number of nuts to be sold for a penny; very little, indeed, that aims at fixing the standards of weights, measures, or values. Instead of this, he will find a wilderness of arid phraseology relating apparently to a variety of local and temporary matters then in dispute between a grasping monarch and his recalcitrant lords.

But if, instead of flinging aside the mellow parchment in disgust, the patient reader will condescend to peruse the dry-as-dust sentences a second time, he will discover that, although the ponderous and dreary clauses deal primarily with a state of things which has completely passed away, they nevertheless commit the unhappy sovereign who accepted them to vital constitutional principles of paramount importance and perennial value.

The Charter established for all time, for example, the relationship which must exist between the monarch and the law of the land. In the old days the king did pretty much as he liked; and, since he was superior to the law, it was almost literally true that the king could do no wrong. The Charter destroyed for ever this pernicious principle. Sir Frederick Pollock regards this as the greatest service that it has rendered us. Yet this is but one of its many priceless and epoch-making provisions.

The Charter On Which All Other Charters Rest
It is the glory of Magna Carta that it has led, little by little, to the erection of a system of government that is honoured as a model in every civilised land. The British Parliament is commonly described as the Mother of Parliaments. But neither the parent Parliament nor the daughter Parliaments in other lands could have attained to the degree of excellence that philosophers and historians so much admire but for the strong foundation afforded them by that imposing instrument the anniversary of whose creation we mark today.

In his "Constitutional History of England," Hallam becomes almost lyrical whenever the Charter comes under review. "From that era," he says, "a new soul was infused into the people of England. Liberties became a tangible possession. The strong man, in the sublime language of Milton, was aroused from sleep and shook his invincible locks." An ancient seer once predicted that a nation should be born in a day; and, on the day on which Magna Carta came into being, that audacious forecast was actually fulfilled. Pitt, with thankfulness and pride acclaimed the Charter as the Bible of the British Constitution.

It is not too much to say that from it all our other great charters have sprung. In it, the Atlantic Charter, with its Four Freedoms, was implicit; and it depends entirely upon ourselves as to how far we translate the shining principles that it lays down into the experiences of the new world that we are today attempting to build.

F W Boreham

Image: Magna Carta

[1] This editorial appears in the Hobart Mercury on June 14, 1952.