Tony Hancock has had a good year. The comedian died 47 years ago but he has been widely quoted as one of our greatest commentators on the document whose 800th birthday we are celebrating this week.
For those of you who are not familiar with the episode of his comedy show Hancock’s Half Hour, our hero is the foreman of an unruly jury, whom he is trying to guide and inspire with the deep and profound principles of British justice. “Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you?” he pleads with them. “Did she die in vain? Brave Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and close the boozers at half past ten!”
There is something wonderfully appropriate about Hancock’s creative ignorance. After all, the events that led up to Runnymede 800 years ago were not as noble or principled or inspiring as subsequent generations sometimes imagined. Indeed, the whole tale could readily be told as one of accident, circumstance, self-interest, intransigence, and persistently low-principle. The basic story is reasonably well known.
King John was, by all accounts, a dreadful man and a dreadful monarch. He was endlessly hungry for money – first to maintain, and then to recapture, his lands in Normandy. Moreover, he was thoroughly unprincipled in the way he raised it – his taxation policy being brutal and arbitrary, and paying little regard for due process, custom or basic fairness.
On the other side, the famous barons were hardly paragons of decency or public interest. They were not, just in case we imagine otherwise, interested in putting together an early draft of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. They wanted primarily to protect themselves against a monarch who was unscrupulous and vindictive even by the high standards of the age.
At least, though, we have the church – standing in the midst of all this sordid power politics, wielding the sword of justice with the fearlessness of Christ himself. Alas, even that is wrong. The Pope at the time was Innocent III, perhaps the supreme papal monarch of the middle ages. He didn’t like John, to be sure. Indeed, he excommunicated the king and placed the whole country under interdict for six years, effectively preventing the Church from performing any of its duties. But that was because John had disagreed over who should appoint, and who should be, the next Archbishop of Canterbury. When the king finally folded, Innocent was one of his staunchest allies. He declared England a papal fiefdom, which John then subjected to papal authority and papal protection. And then he went on to annul Magna Carta on the – technically correct – grounds that it was signed under compulsion.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, does at least comes out of the story a bit better. A leading biblical scholar at the University of Paris, he defied both the king and on occasion the pope, earning himself exile in the process. He probably did not draft the Charter, as earlier scholars seemed to think, but he did contribute to its formation, as well as serving as an intermediary between the opposing parties.
All of which explains why Clause 33 of the Great Charter of England reads:
All fish-weirs shall be removed from the Thames, the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea coast.
And Clause 47 reads
All forests that have been created in our reign shall at once be disafforested.
And Clause 6 says
Heirs may be given in marriage, but not to someone of lower social standing.
And Clause 21 says
Earls and barons shall be fined only by their peers
And Clause 35 says
There shall be standard measures of wine, ale, and corn … throughout the kingdom
This is a document born of time and place and circumstance and pragmatism. Except that Clause 38 says
No official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.
And Clause 39 says
No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions…except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
And Clause 40 reads
To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice
And the subsequently abolished Clause 61 says that
The barons shall elect twenty-five of their number to keep, and cause to be observed with all their might, the peace and liberties granted and confirmed to them by this charter.
And this is why the language of extending these rights to “all free men” pervades this document.
In other words, for all the low pragmatism behind the Great Charter, there is some pretty high – indeed unprecedentedly high – principle within it. We might call this the law of unintended consequences, except for the fact that they were partially intended.
Take the question of due process in Clause 39, for which Magna Carta may be best known. The biblical scholars in Paris, and especially Stephen Langton, had been preoccupied with this. How far should Christians be subject to the governing authorities? Drawing on the OT Book of Deuteronomy, and in particular its careful placing of the king under the law, Langton was able to argue that only lawful action could be right action.
Or, take the extension of rights language to all free men. At this juncture, I want to pay full tribute to Tom Andrew who wrote the recent Theos report The Church and the Charter, and did a superb joy in analysing, compressing and articulating some highly complex narratives and ideas into a really accessible format. But I also want to mention Larry Siedentop who kindly wrote the foreword to the report and whose own book, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, I know was really helpful to Tom in his drafting.
Inventing the Individual is a fine piece of intellectual archaeology and it shows how it was the intrusion of certain ideas concerning the worth of the individual, ideas that were deeply rooted in Christian thought, that allowed the development of our ideas of freedom and what we would now call human rights – ideas that we mistakenly today trace back to the 18th century and not beyond. The fundamental idea, as Siedentop puts it, that “Christ reveals a God who is potentially present in every believer” was a game changer. Thereafter, for all that it took an unconscionably long time to work out, the idea that every individual had inviolable worth, not contingent on ability or circumstance, was always waiting in the wings.
Siedentop emphasises that much of this development in the West was subject to our law of unintended consequences. Canon lawyers of the 12th century were more interested in protecting the church than inventing the individual. But they did.
It’s a law that just keeps on appearing. The Councils that eventually settled the Great Schism of the 15th century were not especially interested in elevating electors over whom they elected – but that was the consequence of their work.
The Reformers who translated the Bible into the vernacular in the late 15th and early 16th centuries were certainly not intending to undermine royal authority – quite the contrary in fact. But the long term impact of placing the scriptures in the hands of all people and then advising them to read and inwardly digest them was to decentralise power radically.
The sectaries who dragged the British Isles into civil war in the seventeenth century were among the least tolerant people who ever governed this country. And yet, it was from their mutual theological disagreements that principles of ecclesiastical and political toleration first emerged on a principled basis.
Repeatedly, unintended consequences emerge from the mess and chaos of circumstance –and so it is with Magna Carta, a document justly praised for, in Barack Obama’s words, “first laying out the liberties of man”, without ever really intending to do so!
Let me end with two brief thoughts.
First: there’s a Christian theological explanation for all this. As St Paul put it (2 Cor. 4.7), humans are jars of clay – weak, fragile, and often rather chipped and dirty. But we are given a treasure which is none of those things and which somehow persists and works to the common good, even when we do not. As Paul puts it elsewhere, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness” (Rom 8.26)
Second: this tale of unintended consequences might give us pause for thought. What are the causes and the cases today that appear selfish or self-interested or pragmatic or even unprincipled – and indeed may even be all of these things – but which in years to come might have generated goods and freedoms that our descendants will take for granted.
Nick Spencer
