Unearthing the Magna CArta (and 'The Law') again. Text from The British Library. (A Thread of light woven through the dark ages?.....I was nudged again to look at the Magna Carta, I don't know why, but hopefully its resurface means that the LAW is going to be 'utilised to change the game'. Its code and symbolic for the NEED for LAW to be enforced where there has been Exploitation and manipulation. Fingers crossed that this flag being waved is hinting that the proper Law is a thread of light woven into THIS version of DARK AGE. The dark age of now IS the NOW implementation of UPSWEEPING CHANGE . "THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America And to the Republic for which it stands One nation, under God Indivisible with liberty and justice for all" ...."Magna Carta has lived on for 800 years, and is echoed in the United States Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.Perhaps Magna Carta’s most important legacy is that everyone – including our leaders – must obey the law. What started out as a document of specific complaints from a group of barons has turned into an international symbol of liberty, without which we might not have the rights we value so much today." ~~Michaela~~)

https://www.bl.uk/magna-carta/videos/what-is-magna-carta?utm_campaign=400667_MagnaCartaDay_BrandShorts_20210615&utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20British%20Library What is Magna Carta? Narrated by Monty Python’s Terry Jones, this animation takes you back in time to medieval England in 1215 under the reign of Bad King John. Why was the charter originally created? And what does it actually say? Read transcript of this video This may look like a plain, unassuming piece of parchment, but it’s actually one of the most famous documents in the world. Magna Carta, meaning ‘the Great Charter’, has inspired people across the centuries, from Thomas Jefferson to Mahatma Gandhi. But why was the charter originally created? And what does it actually say? Let us take you back to medieval England. It’s the year 1215, and the ruler is King John. Many people believe that King John was one of the worst kings in history. He imprisoned his former wife; he starved his opponents to death; he allegedly murdered his own nephew, and pulled the beards of the Irish Chiefs. King John had imposed heavy taxes on his barons in order to pay for his expensive foreign wars. If they refused to pay, he punished them severely or seized their property. The barons demanded that King John obey the law; when he refused, they captured London and John was forced to negotiate. The two sides met at Runnymede in June 1215. The result of the negotiations was written down by the king’s clerks in the document we know as Magna Carta. Although most of the charter’s clauses dealt with medieval rights and customs, Magna Carta has become a powerful symbol of liberty around the world. The most famous clause, which is still part of the law today, for the first time gave all ‘free men’ the right to justice and a fair trial. ‘No man shall be arrested or imprisoned except by the judgment of their equals and by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.’ However, this clause was not as liberal at it sounds. The Charter only applied to ‘free men’, the vast majority of people in 1215 were unfree peasants who were ruled over by their landowners. And although, Magna Carta was intended to create peace between King John and his rebellious barons, England was plunged into civil war after the Pope declared the Charter invalid. When King John died of dysentery in 1216, nine year old Henry III took to the throne. To keep the peace, Magna Carta was reissued several times during the 13th century, until it was finally made part of English law. Magna Carta has lived on for 800 years, and is echoed in the United States Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.Perhaps Magna Carta’s most important legacy is that everyone – including our leaders – must obey the law. What started out as a document of specific complaints from a group of barons has turned into an international symbol of liberty, without which we might not have the rights we value so much today. ......................John was a thoroughly nasty piece of work. He was a murderer, a womaniser, he was always trying to put people in their place, to get them down – do them down. You never knew where you stood with him if he put his arm around your shoulder, he was going to stab you in the back, but he was more complex than that and that’s what made him so dangerous. He was highly energetic, he was a master of detail and that’s what made his manipulation of people so devastating. The barons rebelled against King John for a variety of reasons, some of those reasons were long term. They went all the way back to the 1150s, they went all the way back to the reign of King John’s father who had slowly whittled away the privileges of the barons. He’d taken away their castles, he had taken away their lands and above all he’d established a new sort of law court presided over by the king to which business that previously had gone to the courts of the barons now went. In 1215 Magna Carta asserted the fundamental principle that the king was subject to the law. He couldn’t just simply say ‘off with your head’, into prison – he had to go through some sort of proper legal process. But it also asserted that principle in certain key areas. One was money, it was trying to prevent the king taking your money in lawless ways and it was also asserting that principle in the area of justice. The king’s justice was to be fair and available to all free men. The most important thing about Magna Carta is that it places the sovereign under the rule of law, that’s the first and fundamental principle here. And although it failed as a peace, and although it actually survived as law for less than 12 weeks – it was annulled by the Pope by the beginning of September 1215 – it was reissued thereafter in an attempt to buy baronial support continually throughout the 13th century and it acquired a totemic status. It said that kings of England could not misbehave without there being consequences. Magna Carta is in Latin, the official language of record, and that’s only understandable by an elite. The nobility speak French and very, very quickly, to make the charter accessible to them, it was translated into French. Now, was it ever translated into English which of course is the language of the ordinary population? There’s no evidence that it ever was until much later in its history. And so did ordinary people know about the charter at all because they can’t read it? I think probably though, it was read and translated into English at meetings of the county court, so people could hear it in English even if they couldn’t read it.................. King John’s death was vital for the survival of Magna Carta, if he’d won the war there would probably be no charter at all. But the minority government of his nine-year-old son, to win the war, to win the hearts and minds of all the people fighting against them, decided that they would issue a new version of the charter. After 1215 Magna Carta should, in theory, just have died. It was part of a peace settlement, the peace settlement failed, the barons went back to war against the king, the king went to war against the barons, England was invaded by the French. That should be the end of it. But, it contained principles that could still be used for negotiations between King John’s nine year old son, Henry III, who succeeded in 1216, and the barons who were still at war against him. And therefore it was reissued just over a year later in November 1216. And then it was reissued again at the end of that civil war in 1217 and then again in 1225 as an attempt to negotiate taxation between the English Church and the king. Thereafter it was reissued regularly whenever there were problems between the realm and its sovereign and by the end of the 13th century it had become totemic. In the 1270s we find the Church demanding that a copy of Magna Carta be displayed on the door of every major monastery and every cathedral church. It had become a totem, not just a legal settlement. Magna Carta was very important for the whole development of parliament. First of all it asserted a fundamental principle that taxation needed the consent of the kingdom. Secondly, it made taxation absolutely necessary for the king because it stopped up so many sources of revenue. And thirdly, in making concession to knights in the county, to burgesses in the towns, it looked forward to their representation in Parliament. They were going to have to be summoned to give consent to taxation. And so Magna Carta laid the foundations for the tax-based parliamentary state. You could argue that Magna Carta made a major difference to English politics in the 13th century, certainly it cropped up again and again in political debate. You could argue that it prevented kings of England from, as it were, exploiting their rights to the absolute full. It put an end to arbitrary kingship. And yet, kings continued to tax, they continued to tyrannise their subjects for centuries thereafter. What mattered about Magna Carta, I think, was Magna Carta the idea, not necessarily Magna Carta the political tool. It survived long after the tyranny of any individual king and therefore it became a point of principle rather than of practical politics.