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.