English History Archives

Magna Carta and Anglo-American Constitutionalism

Magna Carta has often been hailed as a statement of fundamental law, the basis of the English constitution, a defense of individual liberty, the establishment of the rule of law, and even the foundation of English democracy. Actually, it was none of these.

One of four known surviving 1215 exemplars of Magna Carta. This document is held at the British Library and is identified as British Library Cotton MS Augustus II.106.

It is true that the Great Charter, which was signed 800 years ago in June 1215 by 24 rebel barons and the Lord Mayor of London and witnessed by 12 bishops and 20 abbots, did succeed in obtaining King John’s recognition of a long list of liberties of the nobility, the towns, and the clergy. But it is important to understand that liberties — note the plural form — in medieval England were considered specific exemptions from royal control rather than the exercise of individual political, social and economic freedom, which nineteenth-century liberals sought to promote and protect. The preface to Magna Carta also proclaimed the freedom of the English Church, but that was the freedom of the clergy to conduct its own business, such as holding elections without royal interference. It did not establish the institutional independence of the Church from the state or change the traditional legal arrangement by which the clergy held their land in the king’s name.

King John on a stag hunt. King John of England, 1167-1216. Illuminated manuscript, De Rege Johanne, 1300-1400

Magna Carta also defended the common law rights of landowners, but those specific property rights should not be confused with the inalienable rights proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789. Nor did the limitations on royal power enumerated in this charter establish the rule of law. That constitutional principle was not fully realized in England until the seventeenth century at the earliest.

Finally, this document, which guaranteed specific legal rights of the landed class, had nothing to do with the introduction of democracy, which was not achieved in England until parliament granted the vote to all adult males in 1918 and to women in 1928.

Magna Carta and the subsequent parliamentary statutes confirming it were the product of negotiation and compromise between the nobility and the clergy on the one hand and the monarchy on the other. The first draft of the document, which is now lost, demanded more concessions from King John than the final version signed at Runnymede on June 15. Magna Carta was in fact a peace treaty, drafted by the archbishop of Canterbury, that attempted—unsuccessfully in the end—to resolve a growing conflict between a faction of the English nobility and a financially strapped king—a conflict that erupted in the First Baron’s War of 1215 after Magna Carta was signed and continued throughout the following three centuries. Although Magna Carta was confirmed by Parliament at least 32 times, it was also ignored for long periods, and it was not always treated with the reverence that it commands today in England and The United States. During the Tudor period, when royal power was significantly enhanced and the crown managed finally to suppress the independent power of the great magnates of the kingdom, Magna Carta was hardly ever mentioned. In the early sixteenth century there was even a temporary revival of the reputation of King John, the antagonist of the barons and the clergy at Runnymede, both for the king’s efforts to strengthen royal power and for his attack on the English Church, over which the Tudors acquired control at the time of the Reformation. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries almost all of the 63 clauses of Magna Carta were repealed, a striking testament to its irrelevance to modern constitutional law.

Romanticised image of King John signing the Magna Carta, 1864.

And yet Magna Carta, viewed as a constitutional icon and statement of individual liberty, has persisted to the present day. The document is still treated with a reverence similar to that of our own Constitution, and hundreds of people visit Runnymede every year, where a monument was constructed in 1957 by none other than the American Bar Foundation. In this 800^th anniversary year all four surviving copies of the charter are on display at the British Library.

The Magna Carta Memorial at Runnymede erected by the American Bar Association in 1957.

So how did this quintessentially medieval document acquire its iconic status as the foundation of the English constitution and a statement of what we call fundamental law? The key figure in this documentary make-over was Sir Edward Coke, the greatest English jurist of the seventeenth century, and the occasion was the Parliament of 1628, more than 400 years after Magna Carta was signed.

An engraved portrait of Sir Edward Coke, 1669

At that time Coke and his allies in the House of Commons attempted to place limits on Charles I’s use of the royal prerogative (the power the king exercises by himself) by passing the Petition of Right, which declared that English subjects could not be denied certain rights at the common law. During the war with Spain in the first three years of Charles’s reign (1625-28), the king had forced some of his wealthier subjects to lend him money with no guarantee of repayment, imprisoned men without showing cause (for refusing to lend the money), quartered soldiers in English towns without compensating those who housed them, and declared martial law in the parts of England where the army was stationed. During the debate on the Petition of Right, Coke argued that the king could not violate these rights under any circumstances, even in a time of war, because the king was under the law rather than above or outside it. In order to buttress this claim, Coke and his fellow MPs, supported by a group of antiquarians who rummaged through the records of parliament stored in the House of Lords, constructed the myth of the ancient constitution, which they claimed had originated in the misty Anglo-Saxon past and took precedence over the subsequent growth of royal power. According to Coke, the clearest written expression of this mythical ancient constitution was Magna Carta, which he transformed from a remedy of the specific grievances of wealthy landowners into a guarantee of the property rights and personal liberty of all freeborn English subjects. Coke could not have been clearer in this anachronistic historical exposition. According to Magna Carta he said, ”every free subject of this realm hath a fundamental property in his goods and a fundamental liberty of his person.”

The frontispiece to the first volume of Coke’s Reports (1600)

Now, there is good reason to celebrate Coke’s achievement in this regard. His reinterpretation of Magna Carta made a significant contribution to the acceptance of such hallowed constitutional principles as the rule of law, due process, and the claim, first made by John Adams in 1779, that we are a government of laws, not of men. In the conflict leading up to the American Revolution, colonists invoked the authority of Magna Carta to support their concept of “liberty” and independence from Great Britain, casting George III in the role of a the tyrannical King John. But as we recognize Coke’s achievement in this regard, we should also recognize that this brilliant jurist was not a very good historian. Not only did he invent an ancient constitution that had never existed, but he practiced what we now call Whig history—taking a document or an event (in this case Magna Carta) out of its proper historical context and making it out to be more modern than in fact it really was.

All images via Wikipedia.

Religion and the Decline of Magic, by Keith Thomas (1971)

By Mark Sheaves

Political and religious discord, disease, famine, fire, and death afflicted the lives of the English population between 1500 and 1700. While alcohol and tobacco provided an escape, Keith Thomas argues that astrology, magic, and religion offered all levels of society a way to make sense of human misfortune. These competing systems of belief shared the ethical assumption that difficulty struck those who deserved it, and thus operated as systems of social control during this period. Religion and the Decline of Magic provides a detailed account of how and why people practiced an eclectic systems of belief in early modern England. The transition from Catholicism to Protestantism, which stripped Christianity of its magical power to provide believers protection from misfortune, he argues, explains the boom in magical beliefs in the early sixteenth century. Yet the widespread use of non-religious magic before the Reformation tempers this conclusion. This balanced study offers explanations and arguments while also acknowledging their weaknesses.

The question of why magic declined but religion endured underpins the book. Thomas points to a fundamental difference in function between religion and magic: religion offered an explanation of human existence while magical practices commonly addressed specific temporary problems. The popularity of the holistic system of astrology, however, which seemed to do both, provides a counterpoint to this distinction. He also demonstrates the malleability of religion. Thomas shows that Christianity shed magical elements, such as a belief in the ability of idols to intervene in human affairs, while developing new theologies that kept up with contemporary intellectual thought and technology. The author also notes the importance of scientific and philosophical revolutions resulting in a widespread belief in natural rather than supernatural laws, which Christian theology successfully integrated with the rise, for example, of natural theology. Technological advances, such as improvements in agriculture, firefighting, and complex mechanisms of banking and insurance, also improved life expectancy and reduced misfortunes. Thomas appears most convinced by the idea that over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries English people developed a belief in their own capacity to help themselves thus rendering the everyday power of magic redundant. He largely relates this self-help philosophy to Protestant theology. However, this diligent scholar demands further research before reaching definite conclusions.

Depiction of the Devil giving magic puppets to witches, from Agnes Sampson trial, 1591. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

While some of the arguments rest on premises now refuted, such as the idea that elite individuals drive changes in our conception of ourselves, the depth of detail and its clear engaging prose makes this book a must for anyone interested in the history of belief in early modern England. The idea that religion maintained importance in English society into the eighteenth century, despite increased emphasis on scientific and rational understandings of the world, significantly challenged previous explanations of the incompatibility between religion and science at the time of publication. This radical conclusion represents the key legacy of this excellent classic work of history.

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, (Scribner, 1971)

Interested in Sixteenth-century England? You may also like these reviews:

Christopher Heaney reviews Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, by Barbara Fuchs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)

Michelle Brock on The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village, by Eamon Duffy (Yale University Press, 2001)

The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, by Barbara Fuchs (2013)

By Christopher Heaney

There are few characters more English than William Shakespeare’s Falstaff, yet there he is, alone onstage in part two of Henry IV, praising his favorite drink: Spanish wine, the “good sherris sack” that “ascends [him] into the brain” and gives him bibulous valor. It’s one of Falstaff’s funnier monologues, but still touching, infused with his realization that his young friend Prince Hal no longer seems to love him. If so, Falstaff muses, then at least their time drinking sherry from Jerez together was well spent.

Eduard von Grützner: Falstaff mit großer Weinkanne und Becher {Falstaff with big wine jar and cup} (1896). Image via Wikimedia commons — Eduard von Grützner: Falstaff mit großer Weinkanne und Becher {Falstaff with big wine jar and cup} (1896).

Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for

the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his

father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land,

manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent

endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile

sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If

I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I

would teach them should be, to forswear thin

potations and to addict themselves to sack. [Henry IV, Part Two, Act 4, Scene 3]

To addict one’s self to sack. An appropriate pun, perhaps intentional. “Sack” as both noun and verb: “sack,” another name for sherry, popular in Shakespeare’s England after the privateer Sir Francis Drake “sacked” 2,900 butts of the drink from the shipyards of Cádiz in 1587 (or so the story goes). Falstaff never labels the wine explicitly as from Spain, but it remains the “fertile” drink that redeemed the “cold blood” and “lean, sterile and bare” lands—England, perhaps—that Harry inherited from his father. Now “hot and valiant,” Harry is ready for Henry V. (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”) Stolen, drunk, and stripped of its Spanish origins, wine from Jerez is sent back in time to become sherry, a medieval fount of Elizabethan identity and someday staple of English fruitcakes, funerals, and vicars’ sideboards.

John Cawse: Falstaff and the recruits from Henry IV, Part II, (1818)

Barbara Fuchs doesn’t land on the Falstaff example in her excellent The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, but it is part of the process she so attentively explores. During the English Renaissance, she argues, early modern Spain’s extraordinarily rich literary production—“chivalric, sentimental, and maurophile romance, as well as picaresque, pastoral and novella”—was appropriated, de-nationalized, and then hidden by England’s emerging national canon of literature.

Coming off the world-changing century that began with the conquest of Granada and accelerated through Columbus’s exploration of the New World, imperial Spain remained the puissant—nay, poderoso—geo-political power to beat, which the English attempted through literary emulation, Fuchs argues. For Shakespeare and contemporaries on page and stage like Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Thomas Middleton, “the Spanish vein” ran rich and deep, “even as the political situation between the two nations deteriorated in the wake of the Reformation and imperial rivalries.”\

Fuchs makes her case by juxtaposing texts on Spain and translated Spanish sources to argue that in the period under study—from the late sixteenth century to the 1620s and beyond—English writers celebrated the act of piracy, literary and literal, as a means to steal from the Spanish Golden Age and transform it into something new. By looking at translators in the late sixteenth century, she suggests that England was self-conscious of its “relative poverty of English letters,” and sought to enrich its own imperial ambitions through the translation of Spanish geographies, manuals for navigation, military treatises, and, epics and romances. The Chilean epic La Araucana was translated as a “how-to” guide for conquering Indians and Irishman, but still more influential was Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote, which Fuchs shows was freely available and popular in England from the year of its publication in 1605. She explores how Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle turned Quijote’s romance into a parody of London’s merchant class, piracy, and syphilis. During the failed negotiations of the Spanish Match between Prince Charles and the infanta Maria Anna, Fuchs proves just how often English writers continued to plunder Cervantes and Spain’s vibrant theater, turning “Spanish plots” into racist stereotypes of suspicious “plotting Spaniards.”

Why has it taken so long for scholars to recognize Spain’s obvious influence on English literature—and, one might add, the arc of its empire, in general? Why is it so revolutionary to suggest, as Fuchs argues, that “English literature was deeply transnational” at its founding moment? Fuchs suggests that the disavowal of Spain was itself the move England used to distinguish its literature from that of “the world,” and complicit in that erasure are critics and scholars of literary history who fetishize “‘English’ genius.” To make the point, she takes on the holy grail of Spanish-English literary relations— Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s lost play, Cardenio, inspired by one of Don Quijote’s stories-within-a-story. Just as Don Quijote is the oft-dropped asterisk to England’s claim to have invented the novel, Cardenio, when it is periodically reconstructed, is celebrated as a lost work of Shakespeare, minimizing the Cervantes connection, or taking it as an opportunity to fetishize folkloric, tarantella-dancing Spain, source of English sunburns. All this despite the fact that those reproductions have no Shakespeare-penned script to work from, only a possible eighteenth-century rewrite whose gaps are filled in with Cervantes instead.

Honoré Daumier, Don Quichotte und Sancho Pansa {Don Quijote and Sancho Panza} (Circa 1868)

Fuchs works the Cardenio–Quijote question to yield a final twist worthy of Jorge Luis Borges. Fellow literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt recently received a Mellon Foundation grant to fund re-productions of Cardenio as “a lost play of Shakespeare’s” throughout the world. Fuchs draws from Greenblatt’s correspondence with Jesús Eguía Armenteros, the beleagured writer who took on the project in Spain, in which the Harvard scholar suggested that the Spanish writer “take the basic source material, the story in Cervantes, and our version of Cardenio and transform it to fit the concerns and the theatrical conventions of Spanish culture and society.” Eguía Armenteros instead began his play with a conversation between ‘The Author” and a character named “Harvard Professor Stephen Greenblatt.” “But I don’t know what the ‘theatrical conventions of Spanish culture and society’ are,” the Author complains.

Who does? But as The Poetics of Piracy shows, they are alive, well, and still intoxicate Falstaff’s heirs.

Barbara Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)

“Oh this learning, what a thing it is!”: The New Archive (No. 16)

By Charley S. Binkow

Has any single author had as massive an impact on history as William Shakespeare? For over four centuries, the works of the Bard have been read, analyzed, and performed all around the world. Keeping track of that massive history, let alone the history of Elizabethan/Jacobian England, is a monumental ambition. Luckily, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., has taken up the task. And even better: they’ve digitized their collection for the world to see.

Title page of the First Folio, by William Shakespeare, with copper engraving of the author by Martin Droeshout. Image courtesy of the Elizabethan Club and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Title page of the First Folio, by William Shakespeare, 1623.

This extensive online collection has over 80,000 digital images. There are manuscripts, flyers, posters, books, papers, costumes, theater memorabilia, art pieces and a lot more. The behemoth archive is broken up easily into three sections: What, When, Where, and Who. Historians interested in letters of Francis Bacon or religious ceremonies of the 17^th century (like these marriage sermons), only have to click a few buttons to find what they’re looking for. Just browsing the topics will intrigue most anyone. Some fascinating things I stumbled upon include a picture of a Japanese Hamlet from 1905, Edwin Booth’s Iago and Richard III costumes, and a German graphic of The Merchant Venice from the 19^th century.

Photographic full-length portrait of Edwin Booth as Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice, c. 1870 (Via Wikimedia Commons)

Historians, theater enthusiasts, and Shakespeare lovers will get a lot out of this collection. Historians can get primary documents showing Shakespeare’s influence all over the globe, they can read the documents of his time, and peruse four centuries of art in high definition (seriously, zoom all the way in and get up close to the cross-hatches). Any one studying anything even tangentially related to Shakespeare’s age can find something useful in this collection, like this early map of Cuba from the 16^th century or this Italy travel guide.

This is an amazing collection of historical images. Follow our links, or just jump into it and get lost among the artifacts. The love of Shakespeare is infectious; seeing the thousands of items associated with Shakespeare, compiled by people who love him and his era, will make you want to open a new tab in the Folger site and start reading the complete works.

Catch up on the latest from the New Archive series:

Charley Binkow explored photographs of California’s Gold Rush

Henry Wiencek found a digital history project that not only preserves the past, but recreates it

And Charley Binkow perused some incredible photographs of Egypt snapped by European travelers

First image courtesy of the Elizabethan Club and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University

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