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Summer Session Kansan Friday, June 18, 1965
Magna Carta Birthday Is Observed in Britain
This week, in the Great hall of the Law Courts in London, a ceremony attended by the Lord Chancellor and Judges of the Supreme Court was held to mark the 750th Anniversary of Magna Carta.
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This will be the tribute of the British legal profession to what has become the most important single document in the development of constitutional and legal freedom not only in Britain but also in the United States and in many countries of the Commonwealth.
This is only one of many celebrations that will be held this summer in England and the United States and in other lands where English law is a heritage of free peoples.
ON JUNE 10 there began a three-week son-et-lumiere pageant at Runnymede, site of the historic meeting in 1215 where King John sealed the first Magna Carta in the presence of his barons.
A play specially commissioned by the City of London will open at the Mermaid Theater in honor of the anniversary.
Lady Parker, wife of the Lord Chief Justice, will sponsor a large charity costume ball.
Representatives of an American organization, the Magna Carta Dames and Sons of the Barons, held commemorative services in England. Thousands more Americans will visit Britain to tour the places connected with the Charter—the abbey at Bury St. Edmund's, where the barons met to plot their rebellion; Windsor Castle, close by Runnymede, where King John was in residence at the time of his meeting with the barons; Runnymede itself, where the Queen recently dedicated a memorial to the late President Kennedy, and where a plot of several acres is now actually American soil.
THE ORIGINAL document sealed at Runnymede on June 19, 1215, has not survived, but four of the many official copies sent out soon after are still extant, two of them in their original sites at Lincoln and Salisbury Cathedral, the other two in the British Museum. All these are on view to the public.
When the barons foregathered on the flowering Thamesside on that 15th of June, they had with them a long list of demands, each the specific redress of a particular grievance.
The King had no choice but to accept them, faced as he was with armed rebellion.
THE BARONS may have been unlettered men, but they were astute and farseeing. When it came to setting down their terms they saw to it that the clerks and lawyers used phrases that would bind not only the King but also his descendants.
In terse Latin sentences, in 63 articles, the Charter set down concrete remedies for abuses in a dozen different areas—the administration of justice; the punishment of crime; the laws of forestry; towns and trade; the freedom of the church; debts and estates; security of property.
ANOTHER, OUTLINING the principle of an incorrupt police force, states, "We will appoint as justiciaries, constables, sheriffs or bailiffs, only such men as know the law of the land and will keep it well."
Many of its articles have come down to us as part of our fundamental birthright as free citizens. One of its greatest is the ringing declaration, "To no one will We sell, to none will We deny or delay right or justice."
Perhaps the most famous is the 39th Clause, which states, "No free man shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised, outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will we proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land."
KING JOHN WAS in no doubt as to the meaning of the Charter as a curb on his power. He ground his teeth as the Great Seal was affixed.
"The law of the land"—the phrase occurs again and again—was forever after to be greater than the will of the king. Here was the birth of modern democracy.
After John's death of a "surfeit of peaches and new cider" in October
1216, confirmations of the Charter were issued on the accession of Henry III and again in the following year, 1217. In the third great Charter of Henry III's reign, issued in 1225, Magna Carta assumed its definitive form and was thereafter confirmed 37 times in the next 200 years. By then it had become part of England's Common Law. It is still for the most part valid.
During Tudor times, there was little need to reiterate the provisions of the charter, and its constitutional provisions lay dormant.
THEY WERE REVIVED when the struggle between Crown and Parliament began again in the Stuart era. The 1628 Petition of Rights made specific reference to Chapter 39 of the Charter, but went even beyond it in condemning taxation without Parliamentary consent, imprisonment of persons without showing cause, quartering of soldiers on the populace, and the misuse of martial law.
The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, requiring prisoners to be brought before the court promptly, and the 1689 Bill of Rights, also were reinforcements of the Charter provisions.
When Englishmen first came to Virginia, they brought with them a Royal Charter drawn up and sealed in 1606 confirming their heritage of freedom and proclaiming that they and their descendants should enjoy "all Liberties, Franchises and Immunities to all Intents and purposes as if they had been abiding and born within this Our realm of England." This included all the rights that derived from the Magna Carta.
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