Let’s imagine the scene. It is a few days past midsummer in the year 1215. The place: the King’s Chancery near the Temple in London. In a room bathed in natural light, a dozen scribes are seated at their lecterns, each with 50 sharpened quills at the ready, fashioned from the largest feathers from the wings of a goose or swan.
Right-handed scribes use feathers from the left wing because the sharpened end curves away while left-handers write with those from the right wing. Each wields a small knife (a pen-knife) to cut the nib of the feather or erase any mistakes. On each lectern is a piece of parchment made from the hide of a sheep.
The hair has been removed by liming before being stretched on a frame while wet to produce a thin membrane. The parchment has been scraped to create a smooth surface for writing and then whitened by rubbing in a paste of lime, flour, egg whites and milk. In a pot on a shelf of the lectern is ink made from oak galls produced in the tree’s bark as a protective reaction to a wasp laying eggs. The crushed galls create an acidic liquid that is then coloured black by the addition of ashes or soot and bound with gum Arabic.
The scribes have been gathered for the most important project of their lives — to write down from dictation a peace treaty between King John and his rebellious barons, who have had enough of being taxed and pushed around. The document has no title; but in time, it will come to be known as the Great Charter, or Magna Carta. It stated, for the first time, the principle that no one was above the law, not even the king.
And its clause that gave all “free men” the right to justice helps explain why it subsequently inspired constitutional documents such as America’s Bill of Rights in 1791 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
June 15 this year marks the 800th anniversary of the momentous meeting at Runnymede at which John acceded to the barons demands (only to renege on them within a few weeks). We are used to seeing a representation of the King seated at a table signing the charter surrounded by the barons. However, not only was it not signed, or sealed, it would not have been ready to copy down for some days after the final deal on June 19.
The king’s first act was to issue a writ that was sent around the country telling the sheriffs to expect a new law and instructing them to “observe and cause to be observed, by everyone, everything contained in the charter, lest the peace of our kingdom should happen to be troubled again”.
But first it had to be written down, and it is not clear how many copies were made. Since time was pressing, scribes in both London and Oxford worked on the documents. We know this because Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, collected a batch in Oxford in late June.
Some experts think there must have been about 40, one for each shire. Of the originals, just four survive; and tomorrow, the British Library will bring this quartet together for the first time, a unique event to be witnessed by academics and 1,215 people chosen by public ballot in which more than 40,000 took part.
Two of the four 1215 charters are normally held in the British Library (one is thought originally to have been London’s and the other — which has been damaged by fire — Canterbury’s). A third, recently on display in the Library of Congress in Washington, is usually in Lincoln. The fourth, in Salisbury Cathedral, is the best preserved and easiest to read.
The 3,500 words had to be crammed on to the single sheet of parchment, and to do this without running out of space was one of the great skills of the scribe, who heavily abbreviated the Medieval Latin to fit it in. Before sending their great treasure to London for the unification, Salisbury invited Chris Woods, director of the National Conservation Service, to examine the charter to make sure it was returned in the same condition for the opening of the cathedral’s own Magna Carta exhibition in March. (Indeed, after tomorrow’s unification, everyone will have a chance to see all four in their usual settings).
Woods is the ultimate documents man. As conservator of the Lincoln Magna Carta, he has travelled the world with the cathedral’s copy locked in a special metal case to protect it from temperature change, pressure and movement. Naturally, it flies first class, though Woods does not go so far as to handcuff himself to the case. To avoid attracting attention to his precious cargo, he tries to keep his travel arrangements deliberately low key, though he is met by armed guards on arrival.
Americans revere Magna Carta far more than we do here: even the memorial at Runnymede was paid for by the American Bar Society. It was a foundation document of the United States, relied upon in drawing up the Constitution and quoted in more than 100 Supreme Court rulings.
When the Lincoln Magna Carta went to the World’s Fair in New York in 1939, 14 million people came to gaze upon it. The outbreak of war meant it was stuck on the other side of the Atlantic, and Churchill even considered gifting it to America in perpetuity but was dissuaded from doing so. This desire to see Magna Carta up close is powerful for anyone with a sense of history or even a simple curiosity about what made us who we are. I was privileged to sit with Woods as he pored over the parchment taken from its glass box for only the second or third time in 100 years. We could see how it had been folded and probably then kept in a drawer or chest for centuries. We could make out the place where the King’s seal had been torn away. Woods could also surmise that this Magna Carta may have been written in Oxford. The style is different to the other three versions and the ink isn’t the same.
There are splodges on the manuscript where it has been slightly damaged by water and the back shows signs of waxing, a preservation method used by the Victorians. Remarkably, it was not until the 19th century that any real efforts were made to put Magna Carta routinely on public display: the Salisbury copy was pinned up, judging by the tell-tale hole marks.
In many ways, the charter’s importance was rediscovered during the English Civil War because its central tenet — that the king is not above the law — was at the heart of the breach between Crown and Parliament. It is no coincidence that this calamitous quarrel happened when kings of a Scottish line ascended the throne, since Magna Carta did not apply north of the Border and monarchical absolutism was not challenged there.
James I, and then his son Charles I, never subscribed to what they considered the lese majeste enshrined in the charter. The latter would lose his head for failing to understand the importance of this provision. In any case, the document transcribed in the summer of 1215 did not last long as a legal instrument, if it ever really was one.
John had no intention of honouring it, especially the so-called security clause, whereby a council of 25 barons were to ensure the agreement was observed. He despatched emissaries to Rome who obtained Pope Innocent III’s agreement to annul the charter. However, John’s triumph was short-lived: he died in Newark the following year having allegedly lost his treasure in The Wash.
In 1066 and All That, Sellar and Yeatman called him An Awful King. He was far worse than that. His nine-year-old son, Henry III, took the throne under the regency of William the Marshal, one of the country’s leading barons, and the Charter was reissued in 1217, though this time without the security clause.
It was periodically confirmed throughout the 13th century; and even though much that it contained about weirs on the River Medway or the protection racket known as scutage has been redundant for centuries, three of its clauses survive to this day — defence of the church, protection of the City of London, and the right to trial by jury.
But much more than that, the principles of liberty that it enshrines have shone like a beacon throughout the free world in a way that those scribes sharpening their quills in preparation to write it down 800 years ago cannot have begun to contemplate.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015
