Transcript
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Hello folks. Dan Snow here. I am throwing a party to celebrate 10 years of Dan Snow's history. I'd love for you to be there. Join me for a very special live recording of the podcast in London in England on 12th September to celebrate the 10 years. You can find out more about it. Get tickets with the link in the show notes. Look forward to seeing you there.
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A (2:06)
We counted the sets of security doors as we passed through them. Reinforced pass key protected. In the end we worked out there were at least four layers of security for one of the most important documents in history. As we got through the final set of doors, we entered the strong room. There were manuscript boxes and tubes lining the shelves. In the middle there was a down lamp that was sending a splash of light onto one particular box that had been laid out there like a patient on a surgical table. Behind us, a climate control unit hummed and rumbled. Ended up working rather harder than usual to maintain the humidity levels. As we all piled into the room with a nod, the careful Curators lifted the top off the box. They removed the further protective sheet and unveiled the manuscript that lay beneath. We were now in the presence of Magna Carta. It might be the most famous medieval manuscript, but it's certainly not prettiest. There are no illustrations in the margins or fancy calligraphy. The copy that we were looking at had sat in a provincial library for centuries. It had got wet there. It rotted a little bit, so there were a few holes. Now expertly patched up by the team at the National Archives. It looks like one solid mass of text at the bottom. It has faded 13th century ribbons that are still attached, and they used to support a large wax seal, one on which the image of the King himself was stamped. This Magna Carta was issued by the King, but in the presence of the great men of the realm, a who's who of the powerful political elite of the 13th century. It's a very frail thing, showing its age at 800 years old, but it's also evidence of just how mighty the humble pen can be. The words formed by that pen, the words that make up Magna Carta, they are a thing of remarkable strength. But the strength doesn't lie in the physicality of that manuscript. It's a strength that we give it. We endow it with strength by believing in those words. If we stop caring, if we stop believing in it, then it's just a scrap of ancient charter, and there are plenty more of those in this building. Magna Carta matters, I think, because generation after generation of us have chosen to make it matter. Magna Carta is one of our foundations. We have made it so. We've made it a cornerstone of a world in which we believe that even the sovereign is subject to the law. In the world that we've built, you can fight the government in a court and you can win. You can demand due process. You can expect that your property, your money, your family, they're all going to be free from arbitrary seizure. But that's as a result of a process that stretches back to the earliest moments of our species, as soon as we had voices to remonstrate with the leader of the pack. And that's the story. It's a battle that remains unfinished today. Magna Carta is something that people return to again and again. Opponents of Henry iii, of Edward ii, of Richard ii, opponents of Charles I, opponents of George ii, the American revolutionaries, they were all influenced by Magna Carta. In fact, those American Founding Fathers specifically incorporated its spirit as they put pen to paper in Philadelphia 250 years ago. Gandhi asked the British for the protections of Magna Carta. Mandela cited it when he was on trial for murder. Its spirit infused those who drafted the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights. And the story of how all that came to be is as dramatic as any I've ever told on this podcast. It's a story that springs from an England on the brink of civil war, of a feeble king, disastrous defeat in France, a man whose desperation to prove himself on the battlefield turned his nobles against him in a fierce rebellion of a capital city seized and a monarch left grappling for control and a standoff on the banks of the Thames that forged the path of our histories. It's an essential story. It's the story of how we normies, how we little people hold our leaders to account, how we persuade our rulers to exercise restraint, ideally even to regard themselves as bound by law and traditional practices, to treat us with justice. And indeed, it's in Magna Carta that you read the famous line to no one will refuse or delay right or justice. Those are the words. That's the idea that people fought and died for 800 years ago, and they still do today. You're listening to Dan Snow's history, and this is the incredible story of Magna Carta in the decades before Magna Carta, at the end of the 12th century, Western Europe, well, it was. There was a lot of chaos around. There was almost constant war and fragile alliances. The kings wore crowns on their head, but power was not guaranteed by this alone. A monarch who failed to assert himself quickly found his influence slipping into the hands of ambitious nobles or family members or local warlords. And this was particularly true in what we call the Angevin Empire, the Plantagenet Empire, the realm that spanned Ireland, England, Wales and parts of France, ruled over at its height by Henry II and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Theirs was the empire that, when it worked, as it should stretch from the Scottish border to. To the Pyrenees, from Ireland to the Alps. And in fact, at its height, Henry II commanded more of France than the French king himself. But even Henry had to worry about that elite class of nobles, the barons whose stone castles dominated the skyline, the lords who within those castles could command private armies of knights. They were the men whom the king depended on for his armies, for his rule. But they were also men with a fierce streak of independence who could topple a king or undermine him if they were so inclined. And that streak of independence was exacerbated by the drama that lay at the heart of the plantagenet family. Henry II's family was plagued by bitter rivalries. He had four sons that survived into adulthood. Henry the young king, Rich the Lionheart, and Geoffrey of Brittany repeatedly turned against their father and each other, and often in open rebellion, sometimes encouraged by their mother, Eleanor. John the youngest, well, he grew up in the shadow of these larger than life figures in a family that was dazzling at its peak, but was often brought down by mistrust and ambition. There's a prologue to this podcast I'm doing now. Well, there's a couple, really. I did one recently on Richard the Lionheart, which I've put in the show notes for you to find. But you also might listen to the one on William the Marshal, who played such a key role right throughout this period. But if you don't listen to those episodes, then I'll give you the precis here. John took over the throne from his childless brother Richard in 1199. After Richard was killed or mortally wounded during a siege, he inherited an Angevin empire that was in absolute crisis. The King of France had sought any opportunity to chip away at the lands of the King of England, and it required someone of Richard the Lionheart's charisma and martial abilities to hold it together. Sadly, though, for the Plantagenet family, John was. Well, he was not his brother Richard. In fact, he became known as John Lackland because he hadn't been expected to inherit anything at all from his father, Henry. But really, the name ended up as an appropriate royal epithet because over the years of his rule, he lost a lot of land. From the moment he took the crown, things started to unravel. And I'm joined now by Dr. Michael Livingstone. He's gonna help me here explain what puts England on the road to Magna Carta. Mike Livingston, great to have you on the podcast.