Leptis Magna

“ It established the liberties of London, and of all the cities, towns, and ports of England. And finally, and by its noblest act of power, it declared the protection of every man in his life, liberty, and property, unless convicted by the judgment of his peers, or the law of the land. This was perhaps the noblest document ever published by a people, and well deserves its name of Magna Charta.
In the Popish controversy of our day, the existence of Magna Charta has been adduced as a proof of the freedom encouraged under Popery. ”

“ In many a time of national crisis, Magna Carta has been confidently appealed to as a fundamental law too sacred to be altered—as a talisman containing some magic spell, capable of averting national calamity. ”

“ The element of sentiment in politics can never be ignored.
It is no disparagement to Magna Carta, then, to confess that part of its power has been read into it by later generations, and lies in the halo, almost of romance, which has gradually gathered round it in the course of centuries. It became a battle cry for future ages, a banner, a rallying point, a stimulus to the imagination. ”

“ In the mean time, most of the barons were at London, where we left them, making holiday for the grant of Magna Charta, and pleasing themselves, that after so long oppression and Ægyptian bondage, the liberties of England were restored again in their days. They thought, likewise, that God had touch’d the King’s heart, and he was become a new man, and meant the good faith he had sworn, and flattered themselves that he would, from henceforward, inviolably observe their charters. ”

“ The compelling logic of events forces a way for its own fulfilment, independent of the caprices, aims and ambitions of individual men. The incidents of John’s career are the occasions, not the causes, of the great national movement which laid the foundations of English liberties. The origin of Magna Carta lies too deep to be determined by any purely contingent or accidental phenomena. ”

“ It is, indeed, no exaggeration to assert that Magna Carta marked the greatest political epoch in the history of our race, in that it saved England from becoming one of the arbitrary and degrading despotisms which arose in Europe after the overthrow of the feudal system, and that from its principles sprang representative and constitutional government, with all that these terms have grown to mean to Americans. ”

“ In this history of Magna Charta, the history of the baron’s wars was necessarily involved, so that in writing one I must write both: for, as you see, they were wholly undertaken for recovering and maintaining the rights of the kingdom contained in that charter, and were in affirmance of it. Whereby they that have been told the baron’s wars were a rebellion, may know better; and every honest man will find their cause to be so just, that if he had lived in those days he must have joined in it ”

“ Two hundred and eighteen years ago the royal governor of New York is reported to have exclaimed to the legislature of the colony: "There are none of you but are big with the privileges of Magna Carta." And to-day, Mr. President, can it not be said with equal force and pride that there are no Americans but are big with the privileges of Magna Carta? Long may that continue to be true! To provide that the spirit of these privileges shall endure forever, so far as lies in human power, is the highest and noblest duty of every American constitutional convention. ”

“ But statesmen and lawyers, in dealing with the practical problems of constitutional government, will not minimize the value of Magna Carta, and our debt to the generation that forced it from King John, merely because the underlying principles may not have been fully grasped by its framers and its traditions may be based on legends and myths. ”

“ The importance of the Great Charter, originally flowing both from the intrinsic and from the extrinsic features already described, has greatly increased, as traditions, associations, and aspirations have clustered more thickly round it. These have augmented in each succeeding age the reverence in which it has been held, and have made ever more secure its hold upon the popular imagination.
Thus Magna Carta, in addition to its legal value, has a political value of an equally emphatic kind. ”

“ The circumstances of the King’s minority, perhaps, implied a constitutional check on the monarchy in the necessary existence of guardians, but when Henry III. attained majority, Magna Carta, deprived of its original sanctions, would, with the disappearance of the Regency, tend to become an empty record of royal promises. The entire machinery of government remained exclusively monarchic; the king, once out of leading-strings, would be restrained only by his own sense of honour and by the fear of armed resistance—by moral forces neither legal nor constitutional. ”

“ As for the remaining part of the pope’s trash, it is not worth answering. “That the barons reduced K. John to those straits, that what they dared to ask, he dared not to deny.” For they asked him nothing but their own, which he ought not to have denied them, nor have put them to the trouble of coming so hardly by it. Nor was the granting of Magna Charta a foul and dishonourable composition, but just and honourable, and therefore honourable because it was just. As for the compulsion there was in it, a man that must be made to be honest, cannot complain of that himself nor any body for him. ”

“ They generated the sentiment which impelled men to patriotic and heroic sacrifice in the cause of liberty; they sustained generation after generation in the recurring struggles for political [Pg 5] justice and equality before the law; they formed and preserved a public morality which prevented violations of the principles of the Great Charter, and they were of incalculable inspiration and encouragement to Englishmen and Americans, if not to the whole world. The great traditions of Magna Carta have made its heritage peculiarly valuable and its service to humanity immortal. ”

“ Why then should Magna Carta be invariably extolled as the palladium of English liberties? Is not, when all is said, the extreme merit attributed to it mainly of a sentimental or imaginative nature? Such questions must be answered partly in the affirmative. Much of its value does depend on sentiment. Yet all government is, in a sense, founded upon sentiment—sometimes affection, sometimes fear. Psychological considerations are all-powerful in the practical affairs of life. Intangible and even unreal phenomena have played an important part in the history of every nation. ”

“ IV. Magna Carta: an Estimate of its Value. No evidence survives to show that the men of John’s reign placed any excessive or exaggerated importance on the Great Charter; but, without a break since then, the estimate of its worth steadily increased until it came to be regarded almost as a fetish among English lawyers and historians. No estimate of its value can be too high, and no words too emphatic or glowing to satisfy its votaries. ”

“ If a debt of gratitude requires to be here acknowledged to previous commentators, a far deeper debt is due to many scholars who have, within recent years, by their labours in various fields not directly connected with Magna Carta, incidentally thrown light on topics of which the Charter treats. ”

“ So far, our investigations by no means prove that the equality of all classes, or the equal participation by all in the privileges of the Charter, was an ideal, consciously or unconsciously, held by the leaders of the revolt against King John. Magna Carta itself contains evidences which point the other way, namely, to the existence of class legislation. At the beginning and end of the Charter, clauses are carefully inserted to secure to the Church its “freedom” and privileges; churchmen, in their special interests, must be safeguarded, whoever else may suffer. ”

“ Definition is a valuable protection for the weak against the strong; whereas vagueness increases the powers of the tyrant who can interpret while he enforces the law. Misty rights were now reduced to a tangible form, and could no longer be broken with so great impunity. Magna Carta contained no crude innovations, and confirmed many principles whose value was enhanced by their antiquity. King John, in recognising parts of the old Anglo-Saxon customary law, put himself in touch with national traditions and the past history of the nation. ”

“ It may be conceded that the framers of Magna Carta builded better than they knew, and likewise that many of the traditions as to the intent, meaning and scope of its provisions—traditions which were so potent and inspiring during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—were founded, as is now asserted, upon legends and myths. Yet, these legends and traditions, growing up and clustering around Magna Carta, served to keep alive and perpetuate its spirit. ”

“ EVENTS LEADING TO MAGNA CARTA. The Great Charter is too often treated as the outcome of purely accidental causes. Students of its origin are sometimes content to explain it as a mere tangible product of the successful resistance called forth by the tyrannies of King John. That monarch’s personal misdeeds, it is maintained, goaded into determined action a fierce unflinching opposition which never rested until it had achieved success; and the outcome of this success was the winning of the Great Charter of Liberties. ”

“ Magna Charta, "the great charter," extorted from King John by the barons of England at Runnymede on June 5, 1215, that guaranteed certain rights and privileges to the subjects of the realm, which were pronounced inviolable, and that established the supremacy of the law over the will of the monarch.
Magna Græca, the ancient name of the southern part of Italy, so called in early times as it was extensively colonised by Greeks. ”

“ A careful distinction is occasionally made (for example, in chapter 20) between the freeman and the villein, and the latter (as will be proved later on) was carefully excluded from many of the benefits conferred on others by Magna Carta. In this connection, it is interesting to consider how each separate class would have been affected if John’s promises had been loyally kept.
(1) The Feudal Aristocracy. Even a casual glance at the clauses of the Great Charter shows how prominently abuses of feudal rights and obligations bulked in the eyes of its promoters. ”

“ In the light of the important part which Magna Carta has thus played throughout many centuries of English history, it need not excite wonder that the estimation in which it was held, high as that was from a very early period, has gradually increased, until it has overstepped all due bounds, and has become utterly exaggerated and distorted. While some sympathy may be felt for such extravagant admiration, not unnatural in the circumstances, it is clearly the duty of the commentator to correct false impressions. ”

“ There is nothing astonishing in the fact that a pastime so passionately followed as falconry was in the Middle Ages, should have left its traces on two chapters of Magna Carta, the full import of which has not hitherto been appreciated by commentators, partly from failure to bring both of them together, but chiefly because of the too precipitate assumption that the words ad riviandum and in defenso, occurring in writs and charters, referred to fishing rather than to fowling. ”

“ The numerous factors which contributed towards the worth of Magna Carta may be distinguished as of two kinds, intrinsic and extrinsic. (1) Its intrinsic value depends on the nature of its own provisions. The reforms demanded by the barons and granted by this Charter were just and moderate. The avoidance of all extremes tended towards a permanent settlement, since moderation both gains and keeps adherents. ”

“ Those Crown tenants on one side of this fluctuating line were known as barones majores, those on the other as barones minores. The distinction had been recognized as early as the days of Henry II.; [504] but Magna Carta helped to stereotype it, and contributed to the growing tendency to confine the word “baron” to the greater men. [505] It is unlikely that any “minor baron” who obeyed the general summons would enjoy equal authority with the magnates invited individually by writ ”

“ Magna Carta—that "bulwark of the people’s rights"—thus left the great bulk of the rural population of England completely unprotected from the tyranny of their lords in amercements as in other things. The king must not take so much from any lord’s villeins as to destroy their usefulness as manorial chattels ”

“ Numerous reforms of Henry II., whether embodied or not in one or more of the ordinances or assizes that have come down to us, must be reckoned among their number, equally with those constitutional documents which happen to be couched in the form peculiar to charters granted under the king’s great seal. It is also necessary to remember the special grants made by successive kings of England to the Church, to London and other cities, and to individual prelates and barons. In a sense, the whole previous history of England went to the making of Magna Carta. ”

“ Hereupon he betakes himself to his shifts to draw in the rich abbies to be bound for him for sums of money; but though it was well managed, he failed in it. And that parliament was prolonged and spent in altercations between the King and the great men, till the week after Ascension-day: for the complaints against the King were so multiplied daily, and the grievances were so many, by the breach of Magna Charta, and the insolence of the foreigners, that Matt. ”