Context - Magna Carta Context involves time and place. We need to know what else was happening at
the time a source was created in order to understand its meaning. It is possible, as in the case of the Magna
Carta, that people later took the source out of context. To better understand, let's look at the original
meaning of the Magna Carta within the context of the early 13th century, and then let's
look at how first the English, then the American revolutionaries interpreted the Magna Carta
during the Early Modern period. In 1215, barons (members of the aristocracy)
forced the hated King - King John - to sign the Magna Carta, stating that the king was
not above the law. The Magna Carta was the king's promise to
follow a rule of law and avoid arbitrary acts such as imprisoning the people when he wanted. Instead, there needed to be what we would
call today - Due Process. While this might sound democratic, we need
to consider the time and place in which it was created - medieval England. England was a feudal society at the time in
which the upper levels - the king, then the aristocracy(barons) - had legal rights and
privileges. The king technically owned the land, but he
needed the support of the barons for collecting taxes from the peasantry and appointing knights
to defend that land. Most of the Magna Carta focused on spelling
out the privileges of the barons. It was not democratic in the way we think
of the term today. The barons were not thinking of most of the
people in England when they drew up the charter. Instead, they sought rights and privileges
for themselves. Still, the Magna Carta did not even benefit
the barons for very long. The King, almost immediately after he signed
the document under duress, appealed to the Pope. England, like much of Europe, was a Catholic
country in the 13th century. The Magna Carta became null and void almost
immediately. It was later reissued and referred to in the
medieval courts. Nonetheless, it was an agreement between the
king and his barons. Hardly democratic. By the end of the century, people did consider
it as a document that promised everyone rights, but it was not enforced and became irrelevant. So why has it seemed to loom so large in the
history of the United States and the creation of its representative democracy? The Magna Carta got a makeover centuries later
when an English jurist Edward Coke started to claim that it was England's Constitution
and that it provided basic liberties to all Englishmen. He took Magna Carta out of its feudal context
(for example, he did not bring up most of the charter which focused on feudal economic
matters or feudal privileges). It was not as simple as one man saying the
Magna Carta was important. As Harvard Professor Jill Lepore maintained,
"Claiming a French-speaking king's short-lived promise to his noblemen as the foundation
of English liberty and, later, of American democracy, took a lot of work." Coke's rehabilitation and reimagination of
the Magna Carta became a symbol of English liberties because it was a popular idea in
17th century England and then 18th century America. In the 17th century, the English parliament,
especially the Whigs, sought to limit the power of the king, who was trying to become
an absolute monarchy. The political fighting, that led to actual
bloody battles, over the limits of the king's power was for the most part settled in 1688
with the Glorious Revolution. In the next century, as the colonists protested
British policies and eventually declared their independence from Britain, the reinterpreted
Magna Carta provided a document promising liberty to all English men. The revolutionaries, like the English members
of parliament in the previous century, used the Magna Carta as evidence that they had
natural rights, more particularly it promised, they believed, a society based on rule of
law and due process. They also claimed that it meant they could
not be taxed without representation. For example, Benjamin Franklin sought to explain
the reason colonists refused to pay the Stamp Tax. He appeared before the English House of Commons,
in 1766, and said the following: "How then could the assembly of Pennsylvania assert,
that laying a tax on them by the stamp-act was an infringement of their rights?" He responded that Pennsylvanians had such
rights because they were "the common rights of Englishmen, as declared by Magna Carta." For Franklin and other colonists, they cited
the Magna Carta as a way justify their actions. They claimed that such rights were figurately
carved in stone when written in the Magna Carta. But, like history, the Magna Carta itself
proved to be more dynamic - its meaning and significance changed depending on the time
and place. While it started as an agreement between a
king and his barons, the American revolutionaries were inspired by a much different understanding
of the document. They saw it as a way to protest "no taxation
without representation," and then later to create a system based on the rule of law and
due process. We should not overstate the Magna Carta' importance
to the 18th century revolutionaries. While it was used to justify their rebellion
about British policies, in the decade before the American Revolutionary war, Americans
since have raised the Magna Carta to an even more important place in American revolutionary
history. It was in the 19th and 20th centuries, the
Americans turned to the Magna Carta as the precedence for the U.S. system based on rule
of law and due process. In other words, they saw it as the precedent
for the U.S. Constitution and the first 10 amendments to the Constitution that later
became known as the Bill of Rights.