Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Dec. 9, 2023 - On Brand

01:40:40

OB #32 - Magna Carta, Magna Farta, Magna Blarta: Mall Cop

Any of those titles describe what happened with about the same level of accuracy. In a pod first, Lauren leads a deep dive into the history and context of the Magna Carta, which is oft-misrepresented and abused by alt-right idiots. Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/OnBrand Buy a magnet! - Ooooolookattheshinyshiny

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hey, this is On Brand, and I'm your host, Lauren B. Ha ha!
	Tricked ya.
	Just me today.
	Sorry.
	Not really.
	So, it's our first History Corner on the main feed.
	I'm not intimidated.
	You are!
	So, just a heads up, we are well aware of a release scheduled being All over the place as of late.
	And thank you so much for your patience and for showing up here.
	I hope to make it up to you lovely people to catch up with some more content in the future.
	I hope we can do that.
	I really hope you like this too!
	Still no big fancy graphics to the watchers out there.
	Sorry, it's mostly just going to be my dumb muppet face today.
	But, you know, she's active.
	She does a lot.
	So, this week's History Corner is about the Magna Carta.
	More specifically, off to a great start, debunking the bullshit around the Magna Carta, Carta, Carta, Carta, right?
	So, I originally intended this topic to be reserved for an off-brand on the Patreon feed.
	That format is a little bit more relaxed and easy-breezy.
	Our main episodes are a little more rigorous.
	And I'll definitely do my best to come correct.
	We'll see.
	I hope so.
	Honey.
	Honey!
	You deserve main episode energy.
	Gonna bring it.
	That being said...
	I'm not a historian.
	I'm an enthusiast who's been an adult long enough to have collected some worthwhile ideas.
	We're all in this together.
	We're all just bags of goo bobbing around in the ocean of life who fart and sneeze and sometimes sneeze out a fart, which is the funniest combo.
	Um, we're all in this together.
	Nobody's nerfed.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Let's party.
	I hear you ask.
	Why do you hate Magna Carta, LB?
	Well, I don't really.
	I do get ferociously annoyed when real historical events with real-world consequences get boiled down and subverted into a meme that is used to argue a totally opposite or unrelated point.
	While there are great ideas put forth in the Magna Carta, its actual place in history has been distorted over the centuries to meet the needs of the time.
	Shocker, right?
	So let's all agree now up top.
	Put your hand on your phone or your laptop or your earbud in your ear.
	We're listening, right?
	Let's all hold hands and agree that ideas like justice, fairness, equality, civil rights, human rights... Great!
	Great!
	Tens across the board.
	Love it.
	Huge fan.
	Those ideas do exist, to some extent, in the Magna Carta.
	So, props up top.
	Hell yeah.
	High five.
	Fireworks, party horn emoji, okay?
	So, let's start up nice, and we're going to talk about the good stuff that smarter folks than me on the internet agree is good about the most important Magna Carta things.
	The document from 1215.
	England.
	Didn't write that in, that's funny.
	Okay, whatever.
	Per the UK Parliament website, which asks, why is Magna Carta significant?
	I'll be saying the or just Magna Carta.
	I'm not super picky about it.
	I hope it doesn't bother anybody out there.
	Any who's will be's.
	Magna Carta is significant because it is the statement of law that applied to kings as well as to his subjects.
	Although the idea of England as a community with a law of the land independent of the will of the king was implicit and custom before 1215, Magna Carta gave this concept its first clear expression in writing Kinda.
	And then there's a little subheading, dissatisfaction with government, which is so funny that it's, this is the only thing that was on this page of the website.
	Magna Carta was an attempt by the rebels, rebel barons, to state what they believed established custom to be, and by implication, where they believed the king was breaking the rules of the customs.
	The text reveals dissatisfaction not just with King John, but with the whole system of government that had been developed by John's predecessors as well.
	The King, however, also pointed to customary rules to justify his position.
	Magna Carta was initially more of a piece of propaganda, justifying the rebel cause, than a piece of constitutional law.
	As a piece of baronial propaganda, it was distributed widely.
	Copies were sent to every county court in England and it was ordered to be translated into the vernacular.
	It therefore very quickly became widely known and copied.
	Mostly, I've found different stuff as far as how common it was, because the Magna Carta was in Latin, the nobility spoke French, everybody else, regular folks like me and you, regular degulars, spoke English.
	So I'm pretty sure it made the rounds eventually.
	But I mean, you know, grain of salt with history stuff.
	We're just doing our best.
	I also really liked what humanrights.gov in Australia also had to say.
	So, right.
	The Magna Carta.
	This document guarantees barons their ancient rights.
	So again, kind of like implying laws are already in place.
	No new taxes unless a common council agrees to them.
	All free men have the right to justice and a fair trial with a jury.
	The monarch doesn't have absolute power.
	The law is above all men and applies to everyone equally.
	Still have a problem with that one.
	So, all free citizens can own and inherit property.
	We'll get to free citizens later.
	Widows who own property don't have to remarry.
	Don't incentivize dead husbands, but okay.
	The one document puts into writing four huge ideas, which is adorable to put on an official website, limits on government, The idea that a government can only govern so long as it has the agreement and support of the people.
	Rule of law.
	Was there five ideas?
	Anyway, the idea that all people and institutions are subject and accountable to laws and justice.
	The idea the justice system should treat everyone fairly and equally.
	That's the idea.
	Here's a great quote that seems a bit more accurate and relevant to today's discussion from a really great article, which I've used a lot for this episode, the Magna Carta myth from 2015 in The New Yorker.
	Oh no, I don't have the author.
	It's Googleable.
	You can find it.
	Magna Carta has been taken as, quote, Magna Carta has been taken as foundational to the rule of law, chiefly because in it, King John promised that he would stop throwing people into dungeons whenever he wished, a provision that lies behind what is now known as due process of law.
	And is understood not as a promise made by a king, but as a right possessed by the people.
	Due process is a bulwark against injustice, but it wasn't put in place in 1215.
	It was a wall built stone by stone, defended and attacked year after year.
	Much of the rest of the Magna Carta, weathered by time and for centuries forgotten, has long since crumbled, an abandoned castle, a romantic ruin."
	End quote.
	I will be quoting more later.
	That is a much better writer than me.
	Great job.
	So, I'd like to consider some of the historical environment from which this document emerges.
	And also I hope that this episode, you know, illuminates Some of the, you know, meme stuff that gets thrown around.
	And maybe, you know, your worst uncle gets kind of uppity around Christmas and you've got something to argue.
	It's my gift to you.
	Happy Honda Days.
	Right, so things to keep in mind moving forward when we're talking about the beginnings of statehood.
	We're in early medieval time, so 1000s, 1200s.
	Being a citizen of a state and identifying as like English or French, something like that, is centuries away.
	People are connected by their regions, their local customs, social mores.
	Remember, social customs become common law.
	And then regular old laws.
	Common law is a specific thing, and then just laws.
	We're moving from clan-type affiliations to citizens, kind of.
	Getting there.
	I honestly think a major problem with how these big historical ideas like Magna Carta are popularly understood is that they're plunked down in a modern context.
	Like, it's like a constitution, but old.
	That's not it.
	The king, Bad King John, is who we're talking about.
	Like, from Robin Hood, kind of, technically.
	Bad King John.
	We know who that is.
	Right?
	Favorite cartoon when I was a kid.
	Himself and the situation he entered into as a ruler has a massive impact on the social conditions of the moment, along with the structure of the governing monarchy, which looks completely different from what we understand government to be today.
	So using Magna Carta's old constitution but new just doesn't work.
	So let's set the scene a little bit because I know I'm going back in time.
	Back in time we're going to work on some stuff.
	We're going to hammer out some ideas.
	And so let's talk a little bit about Succession, the operation, not the show, because it has everything to do with the story of Bad King John.
	Succession was fairly stable during the Plantagenet reign.
	And so we're talking about like the 1100, 1200 time.
	Even if the actual events surrounding the individual heirs were pretty messy.
	Norman rulers up to that point hadn't yet fully adopted primogeniture, which is the automatic inheritance of the throne to the eldest heir.
	Usually a boy, but not always.
	So kings would arrange for their successors to either take over parts of their kingdom to run in their lifetime, or have some kind of contract basically that's up whenever the king can't rule anymore, or to ensure that their chosen successor becomes the monarch when they die.
	Another reality which is ignored by patriarchal history is that men and women could both be reigning monarchs at this time.
	Not to say women didn't have a much harder time in the same position, and stakes for them were much higher.
	So we're talking about, we're going into this, King John is the guy that is associated with the Magna Carta.
	Dad, Henry II.
	Brothers, Richard, Geoffrey, Henry the Young King.
	So there are four sons that made it to adulthood.
	And so we've got Henry II, king, Eleanor of Aquitaine, mom, queen.
	And she's fascinating.
	She's a prime example of a queen who ruled in her own right, even though she was married to Henry II.
	Her story is incredible as a bit of like a puppet master being married to Henry of England, maintaining political power as the Duchess of Aquitaine, a huge region in Southern France, kind of like the Bay of Biscayne, that anchored that southernmost chunk of the Norman French English realm.
	So her three eldest sons with Henry, we just went through, yeah, the second, Henry Young Guy, Rich, Jeff, were constantly rebelling, as soon as they could, were rebelling and battling their father for more power and control in the region.
	We're talking about England, Ireland, and half, a big hunk of most of modern France, down to the Pyrenees, was kind of England, but kind of France.
	Sort of a whole thing.
	So, uh, that's a lot of territory to manage.
	And what shakes out, essentially, is you have Eleanor with the three eldest sons versus Henry II and his fourth son, John, nicknamed Lackland because he was supposed to lack land.
	Not inherit the throne, definitely not going to be king and not intended to inherit any substantial land holdings.
	He was probably supposed to be like to go in the church or to be a scholar of some kind.
	So the notion that you can cycle through to the fourth son, really unlikely.
	And usually sons that aren't supposed to be kings, it's a mixed bag.
	Doesn't always work out great.
	So the sons, The three—Eleanor's three sons—eventually lost their rebellions but compromised a settlement with their father.
	Eleanor, however, was imprisoned and severely punished for her role in those rebellions.
	There's a great documentary series called She-Wolves, England's Early Queens, presented by Helen Castor.
	It's easy to find, I think.
	I know.
	I think I watched it on YouTube.
	Anyway, so I know that's how I first learned about Eleanor of Aquitaine.
	It's very good.
	It's awesome.
	Highly recommend.
	Go watch it.
	Helen Caster.
	You're an angel.
	Also, historians labeling these women as she-wolves?
	Who are doing the exact same thing as their male counterparts?
	Says a lot, right?
	But I mean, women still could hold power in a way Uh, that was a little more equal, even though she, you know, I mean, I do think the consequences were more dire.
	Uh, so primogeniture or hetero, hereditary rule was becoming more commonplace through the rest of Europe, but that just wasn't how things had settled quite yet in England.
	I also get the feeling that women were more easily pushed out of the roles of head of state as the custom of crowning male heirs really took hold kind of across Europe.
	It seems like the Norman rulers favored stability whenever possible.
	I heard from a number of sources that went out of their way and made a point to mention that this was not a time of assassinations.
	Um, you know, not like bloody court wheelings and dealings.
	Uh, infighting and scheming?
	You betcha.
	Outright picking off the guy at the top wasn't really done.
	Fighting and attacking family was considered, like, untoward.
	Now, I don't know if it's, like, out of the question, but it's a big gamble, diplomacy-wise, because you're relying on those familial ties and those diplomatic kind of connections.
	You met your foe on the battlefield, and they died of dysentery a month later like a true warrior!
	I'm kidding.
	But seriously, okay.
	So imagine how volatile your daily life must be if it's all warrior kings duking it out for the right to rule constantly.
	Having a monarchy based on who can fight best means you're always fighting.
	And like we understand in medieval time, life is very fragile.
	So, establishing successors and codifying familial monarchy is far more stable to govern compared to, like, who wins the fight on a given day.
	So it's totally understandable they're trying to get a more stable government system.
	And remember, family is a legally binding contract.
	As much as a concept of genetic relationships to each other like we have.
	So it's a legal framework at this time as well.
	So marriage, quote, legitimate heirs, unquote, inheritances.
	These were all legal concepts which could be enforced both by municipal management and maybe more importantly, more consequentially, the church.
	That would be the Catholic Church, so the nobility supports your power and the Pope and Roma needs to also sign off on you too.
	Permission slips from both both camps or you're on shaky ground as far as like where your power is is centered and is is like where the seat of your power is.
	I think that the pop culture notion of a petulant king with like a turkey leg in one hand and a broadside in the other just commanding off with their head while entertaining Is wholly misleading as to how legalistic governing has always been.
	During this period, because nobility was trying to work out a way to create a more stable system of governance and kind of just like inventing political theory, it's really interesting to see military might, the way things were done with the rule of law, this like kind of stabilizing governing force.
	Apparently the Norman rulers, and now we're talking about the, uh, the Plantagenet-Angevin line in power, like 200-ish years out from the Norman conquest, uh, you know, like William the Conqueror, Norman conquest of England in 1066.
	We're especially concerned with bureaucracy and administration, making rules and enforcing them.
	Also, familial relations—remember, marriages are contracts—carried a lot of weight among the ruling class.
	It's frowned upon to harm or attack your family.
	So if you want to do it, you've got to be real slick about it.
	Or make sure you win, which is a gamble.
	I tried very hard to understand all of the treaties and diplomacy and bickering that feeds into this story and I'm barely holding it together and it's a lot Because the treaties are technical and they don't usually follow them or something.
	There's always a technicality that a monarch or their legal experts can bring up and argue.
	It's fascinating.
	Impossible to keep track of.
	I am not qualified to tell you all of it, nor would it be particularly relevant to my subject.
	And it would take forever.
	You have access to Wikipedia.
	Knock yourself out.
	So I'll use shorthand whenever possible to explain who's mad at who.
	Bear that in mind.
	While John didn't handle the situation he was handed particularly well, the situation as it was constructed by his brothers and his father and his predecessors was not great.
	So something to consider.
	And the Catholic Church was a deeply entrenched institution in England, which held power concurrent with secular power, but also, bonus, held in its clutches the fate of every immortal soul of every living human.
	Cool.
	Very chill.
	So, Important in daily life and in politics for sure.
	Ecclesiastical appointments held immense amounts of influence over governance and nobility, as well as land holdings, landlords and tenancies, all kinds of standard social resources we come to identify as secular today.
	So, for every nobleman I mention or is involved in the story, add a high-ranking bishop who's also in the mix.
	An archbishop, you know, they're in the politicking and mixing it up.
	Also a note on ecclesiastical courts, which is something that is completely foreign to Americans and was crucial in the way that law developed in the medieval world.
	So no distinct system of ecclesiastical courts existed in England before the 12th century, which is a pretentious and confusing way to say the 1100s.
	Previously, bishops of the church were also secular lords who exercised their authority through local assemblies.
	Lots of different configurations of local governance existed throughout the kingdom, like shire councils or hundreds.
	The term hundreds, which is basically an association of a hundred representatives that are collected from various regions, and they're called hundreds.
	It's a little confusing until you get used to it.
	So there were secular common law methods of governance.
	In medieval times, so 1000 on, I think 1000 to 1500 is kind of what we agreed on collectively as humans.
	So medieval time, before that dark ages, they were part of a transnational system with the Pope at the summit, although the Ecclesia Anglicana was recognized as a distinct entity in the Magna Carta, and medieval English kings exercised some authority over church matters.
	The church tried cases involving actions of the clergy, articles concerning the church, and cases where the matter was of a spiritual nature.
	Hmm, room for interpretation.
	This last included, with respect to the laity, so lay people, issues of morality, religious behavior, marriages, legitimacy, wills, and the administration of interstate estates.
	I don't know what that word means.
	I'm sorry, I didn't look it up.
	Estates.
	Maybe people that are arguing over estates.
	Church Estates?
	Don't know.
	It served as a registry concerning baptisms, marriages, and burials.
	Fornication, bigamy, adultery, bestirdy, homosexuality, prostitution, and incest were all within the province of the ecclesiastical courts.
	For many, this is kind of wild, being tried in a church court was preferable to being tried in any of the other secular courts, especially for murder, since the church courts could not order capital punishment.
	I guess you'd luck out if you managed to swing that.
	A dispute between Henry II, John's dad, and Archbishop Thomas Beckett secured the benefit of clergy but did not exempt the clergy from temporal justice and civic matters.
	The jurisdictional boundary thereafter was generally clear and was controllable by the royal writ of prohibition.
	Caesar got Caesars and God got Gods, for the most part.
	That was quoted in one of the writs that William the Conqueror kind of put forth.
	So, let's see.
	I was surprised to find that the ecclesiastical courts in England lasted for much longer than I thought.
	The break with Rome in 1534.
	Thank you, Henry VIII, right?
	Had a minimal effect on the daily work of the ecclesiastical courts, which continued to deal with matrimonial questions, probate, and interstate succession to personal.
	Okay.
	People.
	Succession.
	Until Victorian times.
	Victorian times.
	That's crazy.
	There were trains.
	Ecclesiastical courts.
	Anyway.
	So when discussing the different forms of resources required by the king to maintain power, not just money, his individual relationship and his court relationship with the church and his country's relationship with the church plays a significant role in what he can and can't do.
	And keep in mind that there is a secular legal structure and a religious one.
	From what I can gather, both these systems function in relative harmony, I guess, you know, kind of next to each other.
	But you can imagine, because they, from what I read, there was like a clear delineation of, you know, your jurisdictions, church versus state.
	I kind of feel like maybe in practice, it would be a little more complicated.
	And you can also imagine that both institutions are always competing with each other for power.
	As it applies to regular people, however, the existence of a religious court at all in society is a sticky wicket.
	I feel like that's obvious.
	Secular courts are pretty clear in punishing a criminal for doing a bad thing, whereas religious doctrine has more leeway to punish, label a criminal, and punish them for being a bad person or a bad Christian.
	And that can mean a lot of things.
	Religious doctrine is susceptible to biased interpretation, which can and often is easily exploited by the powerful.
	Of course, of course, divorce is prohibited by the Catholic Church.
	Of course.
	Why would you ever think such a thing?
	Well, in this story, as an example, King John marries two Isabellas.
	The first one was his cousin.
	Yuck.
	Also, the church agrees.
	It's too close of a familial relation to be a marriage recognized by God and is marriage in the eyes of the church.
	So you are not allowed to marry your cousin.
	Ugh.
	[LAUGHS]
	So you're not allowed by the church to marry your cousin without a writ of dispensation
	from the pope.
	Hmm.
	So when this first Isabella failed to produce any children, John was
	free to dissolve the marriage because he never got that permission slip from the pope.
	Should the marriage not have happened at all?
	Probably.
	His marriage not being recognized by the church is an extremely convenient technicality, And he's free to marry, uh, Isabelle numero two, who was at the oldest, 15 years old.
	There's no specific record of her age, but could have been nine, nine years old when he actively pursued her romantically and talked about being smitten by her.
	Marf, uh, nyech.
	The stuff's kind of all over the place.
	History's weird.
	Right.
	So another great example is Henry VIII, as far as ecclesiastical courts and ecclesiastical rules kind of coming into play.
	His marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
	You know, that one.
	So when he wanted to ditch her for Anne Boleyn, conveniently, there is a verse in the Bible that states you shouldn't marry your brother's wife.
	Catherine was, in fact, his brother's wife.
	His brother died, he married her.
	Again, should the marriage have happened in the first place?
	If we're applying this logic, no.
	All signs point to religious scholars in Henry's corner, like, retconning this loophole.
	However...
	And I do think this is really interesting.
	An argument can be made that he was a true believer, or could have moments of being a true believer, and his inability to produce a male heir with Catherine of Aragon was God's punishment for his sin of marrying his brother's wife.
	I can absolutely see a situation unfold where the suggestion to Henry, putting it in his mind that his marriage was not a holy union, And add in, like, a hot piece, a bowl in that he's after, and then he can work himself up into a froth enough to split his country from the Catholic Church and the Pope and make the Church of England.
	I think it's interesting to consider, but we'll never really know, the dichotomy of, like, religion and politics in the mind of a monarch, right?
	So for the Magna Carta to be held up as this bastion of secular law, as celebrated by my country, America, who prides itself on the separation of church and state, it's just not.
	It's just not.
	Church courts were specifically included in the legal structure of the land by the actual Magna Carta document and all subsequent versions of it.
	And obviously, ecclesiastical courts operated until there were steam engines.
	So royal power attempted to curtail church power with these types of documents.
	But the efficacy of those limitations can get kind of fuzzy depending on the situation.
	Church courts still answer to Rome.
	Not the state that they were in.
	And the Pope still technically had power over the King, who was supposed to be an absolute monarch.
	This is still relevant today, as church and state separation is constantly being eroded by our Supreme Court in the USA.
	Especially when the cases are being won and eroding these rights on flimsy, contrived, Like, cases are so awful and just, like, tossing legal precedent out the window, along with what the Founding Fathers explicitly wanted to do away with by making America.
	I mean, think about, like, the contention around JFK being our first Catholic president.
	The argument against his election was made because, per his religious beliefs, he was answerable to the Pope, as the Pope being the God's representative on Earth.
	That's how Catholicism works.
	And Americans, Protestant Americans, really could, they could make a lot of hay with that.
	Of course, You know, I'm talking about all their struggles.
	Nobility had access to unimaginable wealth and luxury.
	But the phrase, heavy is the head that wears the crown, um, has some weight to it because their list of powerful enemies was long and I bet it got pretty scary.
	You know, uh, I wouldn't want to be a prince watching their uncle get So, add the divine right to rule into the mix, and you've got everyone claiming God is on your side.
	Those stakes are very high.
	it can be freaky. It can make you weird, you know?
	So add the divine right to rule into the mix and you've got everyone claiming God is on your side.
	Those stakes are very high.
	Subsequently, if one is to lose this conflict or even to reach a compromise,
	the implication is that God don't like you no more and likes the other guy better.
	It's dangerous.
	I do think it's a challenge to hold in our minds the possibility of a cynical, scheming warmonger and a devout child of God both existing in the same person.
	I think it's interesting, though.
	We have no way of knowing how the percentages of hubris and religious devotion and political understanding and education and advice from royal advisors interacted in a monarch's brain, but it's entirely possible that religious or moral conviction played a role in governance.
	Maybe more than we consider today, which I also addressed a little bit in my previous History Corner when we talked about Cyrus the Great.
	So, all of this stuff I've mentioned is in play.
	And is simply not included in the lore around Magna Carta.
	I think the contemporary environment of this document is critical to understanding its actual significance.
	As evidence of a king overstepping his bounds, exposing himself over and over as an ill-equipped or unfair administrator, And being backed into a corner by the highest class of nobility whose traditional role is to support him and the structure of aristocracy.
	Like, they should all be protecting each other's rightful place at the top of a feudal system.
	So it's, it's kind of major when your, you know, your, your nobility is, is just consistently rebelling against you.
	That threatens the whole system.
	Um, right.
	So we're about to get into like a, an overview, um, you know, kind of how we got to here, but I want to keep, I want you to keep in mind all those force forces from, you know, royalty that are at odds with each other.
	So, uh, let's see, there's a good overview timeline.
	kind of a loose timeline, of legal precedent leading up to bad King John and essentially
	the less than ideal circumstances he was handed when he was crowned.
	So I'm going to start quoting, I think it's things from Britannica. I'll have links somewhere
	of my sources. So great. "With his conquest of England in 1066, William the Conqueror,
	not William, the one from the Bayeux Tapestry, a Norman, secured for himself and his immediate
	successors a position of unprecedented power. He was able to dominate not only the country,
	but also the barons who helped him win it and the ecclesiastics who served the English
	We were just talking about.
	He forced Pope Alexander II to be content with indirect control over the church in a land that the papacy hitherto had regarded as bound by the closest ties to Rome.
	Because, you know, bishops used to be Like secular and religious administrators.
	Uh, right.
	Religious and civic leaders.
	I wrote that and then I said it anyway.
	That's silly.
	Okay.
	So, uh, William son Henry the first was, so we have William the Conqueror, 1066 Bayou Tapestry.
	His boy, William son Henry the first was compelled to make concessions to the nobles and the clergy in the Charter of Liberties.
	We're getting into some proto-Mendicant territory.
	A royal edict issued upon his coronation.
	In 1100, the Charter of Liberties promised to, quote, abolish all the evil customs by which the Kingdom of England has been unjustly oppressed, end quote.
	A little vague.
	A list of customs that appear over The Charter of Liberties hardly stopped either Henry I or his successors from plundering the realm, butchering their enemies, subjugating the church, and flouting the laws.
	But it did chronicle complaints that made their way into the Articles of the Barons a century later.
	Tons of references are made to other monarchs throughout the reading that I've done, like King Conrad II of Germany establishing similar edicts which predate Magna Carta.
	So I found tons of references that are made to other monarchs, like King Conrad II of Germany, as an example, establishing similar edicts which predate the Magna Carta.
	So there's a tradition of when you become king, you announce some kind of, Contract and agreement with your barons like with with your nobility as it just an agreement of like okay It's it's it's like a inaugural address almost like this is what we're gonna do Sorry back to the timeline Henry first Successor so we've got William Henry Henry first successor Stephen.
	I think who was on the throne in 1135 So we've got 1066, 1100, 1135, who held the throne, whose hold on the throne was threatened by Henry I's daughter, Matilda.
	And she's also in the first, I believe, episode of the She-Wolf documentary series that I mentioned earlier.
	Also very fascinating.
	And again, Women kind of had, I think, more leeway to rule in their own right at the time.
	So he again issued a solemn charter in 1136 with an even more generous promise of good government in church and state.
	So Matilda's son, Henry II, Second, he began his reign in 1154 and started by issuing a solemn charter promising to restore and confirm the liberties and free customs that Henry I, his grandfather, had granted to God and Holy Church and all his earls, barons, and all his men.
	They're developed, in fact, through the 12th century 1100s, a continuous tradition that the king's coronation oath should be strengthened by written promises stamped with the king's seal.
	That's like, what you do?
	Although the volume of common law, which kind of applied to everybody, increased during that period, in particular during Henry II's reign, which ended in 1189.
	No converse definition had been secured in regard to the financial liabilities of the baronage to the crown.
	The baronage also had no definition of the rights of justice that they held over their own subjects.
	So there, yeah.
	Oh, we'll get to other stuff later.
	So as the Ongevin administration, so we got Plantagenet Ongevin, A-N-G-E-V-I-N.
	I'm not as familiar with that word because it's not as fun to say as Plantagenet.
	They're kings.
	Those brand of kings.
	The administration became ever more firmly established with learned judges, able financiers, and trained clerks in its service.
	The baronage as a whole became ever more conscious of the weakness of its position in the face of these entrenched kind of like, you know, bureaucrats.
	Agents of the Crown.
	Like, bureaucrats got more and more power.
	Compounding discontent.
	This is a very simple way to put it.
	Compounding discontent.
	We'll get into it.
	So, compounding discontent among the nobility were tax increases during Richard the Lionheart, Richard I, Richard's reign from 1189 to 1199, which resulted from his crusade, his ransom, and his war with France.
	We'll get into that too.
	Understatement of the 1100s, John was confronted with myriad challenges upon his rise to the throne in 1199.
	So we've gotten to, we've gone like William the Conqueror, Henry I, Stephen, Matilda's son, Henry II.
	I don't remember how that happened.
	Couldn't have been great.
	She's labeled a she wolf, but also boss bitch here for it.
	And then we've got Henry the second Richard was King for about 10 years, 11, 89 and 99.
	And now we're at, we have arrived at bad King John.
	In 1199, his position, already precarious, was made even weaker because of the rival claim of his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, and the determination of Philip II of France to go to war and end the English hold on Normandy.
	And remember, England is the island.
	Ireland kind of, because Ireland's like still fighting with England a lot.
	And then, So yeah, I've got UK in your mind, up top, island nation, and then going straight down from there, kind of a big chunk of France, down to the period, down basically to Spain.
	Um, and so that's, that's a big hunk of land to manage, right?
	And the, the further, the further out your, your kingdom is stretched, the harder it is to defend.
	It's just logistics, right?
	So let's do a speed run through all the chips stacked against our boy, John.
	Okay.
	Uh, there is, this is kind of wild.
	Uh, there is a Norman traditional governing concept of, Oh boy.
	It's malevolent with I-N-A at the end.
	Malevolencia.
	Malevolencia.
	Or Royal Ill Will.
	There's a couple of different versions of this too.
	But essentially, it is a traditional right that the king has to be a massive asshole if he's angry as he sees fit.
	The king can dole out punishment if you make him mad, and it's his right, like a governing right, to do so.
	Of course, we discussed the importance of diplomacy and familial ties, but if a king has a right to react in anger, then they always have that justification to fall back on.
	Also, divine right of kings, so maybe God told you to do it.
	Also cited was an Angevin tradition of vis et voluntas, force and will.
	Or Ira and Malevolentia, anger and ill will.
	These are governing concepts, like veto power or something.
	Nuts.
	So ruling with an iron fist can certainly be effective, but it's incredibly costly to maintain.
	It's reasonable to assume that resentment's built up over time with monarchs acting on their emotional outbursts as like a tradition and doling out arbitrary punishments.
	That's going to make people mad, right?
	Uh, so also John's, let's see.
	Yeah.
	John's dad, Henry II, employed this attitude towards governance as was the custom.
	And it seems like he was also a very successful military tactician.
	Uh, Henry II grew and maintained the kingdom, not all of it, but still grew and maintained the kingdom.
	Um, Which, yeah, more than like half of modern France along that sea coast.
	Henry II ultimately also defeated several of his sons and his wife, organizing rebellions against him.
	Winning big prizes can encourage historians to cast you in a favorable light, as well as encourage your nobility, who have directly benefited from the spoils of war you provided them, to stay on side.
	Money talks!
	So it's not Bad King Henry, it's Bad King John, right?
	Let's see, so Angevin rulers had begun incrementally increasing taxes, so we're talking about, Angevin I think would be...
	Maybe the Henrys started Angevin, so not Williams.
	They're all Normans, but then there's types of Normans, which is Angevin and Plantagenet.
	So Angevin rulers had begun incrementally increasing taxes.
	Also, these words get thrown out when I'm listening to podcasts or watching documentaries, and people don't try to explain where they come from.
	But I feel like maybe my explanations are kind of dumb.
	I hope they're not.
	I hope it helps to understand.
	Anyhoo, OK.
	Increasing taxes in a response to the decrease, this will make sense, in profits from royal land holdings.
	Yeah.
	Since the Norman conquest of 1066.
	So it makes sense.
	The more you expand your empire, the harder it is to get all the money from the edges, right?
	Barons in the North of England and regions in the South of France, where Eleanor of Aquitaine is from, basically the furthest areas from the concentration of power, We're always the most difficult to manage.
	Makes sense.
	So, John is inheriting a problem of both diplomacy and logistics.
	One could argue that Henry II created a crisis of succession by trying to divide his realm up between his three eldest sons, while John, the youngest surviving son, was nicknamed Lackland.
	Lacked land.
	He was not supposed to get any land of consequence, right?
	So Henry the Young King, eldest, is charged with England, Normandy, and Anjou.
	Geoffrey gets Brittany, which is like the hangy-doodle off the side of France, a big hunk sticking out on the ocean on the top.
	And Richard the Lionheart, that one, becomes the Count of Poitou, I think that's how you say it.
	And is set to inherit Aquitaine.
	So that's the southern part of that French, uh, French-English territory.
	One would assume this implies a close tie to his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, which is a powerful position to be in.
	Uh, so while this could have been a diplomatic victory, ensuring the legacy of Henry II and the Plantagenet-Angevin line didn't really turn out that way.
	I mean, it worked out for the lion kind of, but his plans didn't turn out, right?
	So all these sons were battling and rebelling and betraying all over the place in contests with their father for power.
	All of this military conflict is absolutely draining the royal coffers and noble coffers.
	Resources all over the realm are stretched extremely thin.
	What's the solution?
	Taxation.
	What universally pisses people off?
	Taxation.
	Great idea.
	So Henry the Young King and Geoffrey and Henry II, the king, start getting picked off by war and disease, right?
	So you've got people that are in charge of these spots that are kind of like dropping like flies, and that creates a power vacuum.
	Richard the Lionheart does become King of England for about a decade, 1189-99.
	We can assume folks liked him because we know him as Lionheart.
	I would accept that nickname in a heartbeat.
	Right?
	As King.
	Choices, choices.
	Richard goes off on crusade, which is very expensive, and gets captured and ransomed by the Germans on the way back.
	Also very expensive.
	Richard also sold off a lot of royal properties to cover expenses, either for the ransom or for funding in general.
	I couldn't really figure that out.
	So he's basically paying off debts when he should be operating with a surplus from this huge thriving kingdom, right?
	You're spending too much money, dog.
	So selling royal properties is a much more dire crisis than it would seem.
	From what I understand, nobility all over Europe, and what I've learned, and this is over many centuries, we're not talking about just the medieval period, nobility all over Europe got very cavalier in dividing up and selling off their land holdings as though it were an infinite resource.
	Because it can seem like a lot.
	It can seem infinite.
	But they aren't.
	It speaks to the vast wealth of the aristocracy.
	But to their short-sightedness and shitty money management as well.
	Land holdings don't just accrue in value like real estate.
	It's not just a plot of land.
	There are serfs that work the land.
	They're tied to the land.
	You own them with the land.
	You are entitled to the profits from that land.
	You get consistent leases, rents, and a share of that money.
	You are allowed to tax them.
	You are allowed to do kind of whatever you want to get money out of them.
	It's not just land.
	It's a constant revenue stream.
	It's, you know, it's, it's very, it's, it's a YouTuber's dream.
	It's a, it's, it's passive income.
	When you sell off a portion of that profit engine, you lose that income and your neighbor gains that income.
	It's serious.
	And I mean, if, if his amount, the amount of land holdings that he sold made it onto Wikipedia or wherever else I read it, then, uh, it was a lot.
	That's kind of major.
	So they're already losing a lot of, you know, like power, like militarily questionable, but like soft power and influence as well as resources.
	So John, the man, King John himself, he did himself no favors at all.
	His reputation of being a particularly disagreeable man and the Angevin tradition of anger and ill will as a policy It was said to be universally agreed upon as a dangerous combination.
	Contemporary chroniclers state that John was sinfully lustful and lacking in piety.
	It was common for kings and nobles of the period to keep mistresses, so that wasn't crazy weird.
	But chroniclers complained that John's mistresses were married noblewomen, which was considered unacceptable.
	What are you going to do?
	I think that it's tough to apply, you know, kind of modern standards, because also marriages are like contracts.
	And I know that Henry II and Eleanor kind of hated each other.
	So like, marriage is a little different.
	It's, you know, it's a legally binding contract at this time to Protect your lands and stuff.
	More so than a romantic entanglement of some kind, but not always.
	Right, so there were also, let's see, so imagine owning the wives of your barons, or in some cases, rumors of forcing himself on noblewomen and women in general, does not make friends.
	Right, so historical accounts are kind of all over the place about him, and it needs to be said that his contemporaries that were writing stuff down hated him.
	So, the veracity of accusations against him that have been passed down to today are dubious.
	Grain of salt.
	You know, maybe he didn't force himself on anyone, but also, A relationship with a king and like a noble lady or just a lady, you know, walking around.
	How much consent could possibly be there anyway?
	You know, what are you going to do?
	Um, yuck.
	But it's the reality of the story.
	And he was kind of known for being like a ledge, which is like gross.
	Don't, uh, a profoundly British disagreement, uh, that I found particularly entertaining, um, is his aptitude as an administrator.
	This comes into play as far as like how his whole reign's gonna go.
	Here's the facts.
	Okay, he had a traveling court which was common for monarchs at the time.
	The king and his retinue would be hosted by a noble and the king would make a royal procession around the country to different nobles throughout the year.
	It became way more regular as far as like a cycle of visiting castles and great houses or whatever.
	And he is said to be an effective and involved administrator in his realm and spent more time, this is real, in the actual country of England than any of his predecessors.
	France was usually the home base for royal court, but he spent the most time in England since William, you know, hopped over the channel and took over.
	The account I read Lauded him as having excellent organizational skills and being more directly tied to his subjects and involved in the minutia of governance.
	The argument was made and it makes sense that some kings had previously decided to get involved
	with administration, but by the time, and so that was kind of normal, but by the time John
	was in charge, that administrative role had gotten too big and unwieldy to be managed by one dude.
	So he was probably micromanaging and pissing people off left and right.
	And what I've seen bear out through learning about this story is that he was texting his
	subjects as much as he possibly could, just nickel and diming everyone.
	And that takes a lot of administrative work and a lot of supervision.
	So he was texting people into the ground.
	So I don't know if it was the priority to be an excellent administrator or he was just squeezing everyone dry of all this money.
	So, you know, keep that in mind.
	And, Let's get to paperwork, the most exciting part of any medieval story.
	Unlike his predecessors, John did not issue a general charter to his barons at the beginning of his reign.
	You know, we normally write stuff down, put a seal on it.
	The practice of kings swearing coronation oaths in which they bound themselves to the administration of justice began in 877 in France.
	Magna Carta borrows from many earlier agreements.
	Most of his ideas, including many of its particular provisions, are centuries old.
	Nothing new, right?
	Kings have insisted on their right to rule in writing at least since the 6th century BCE.
	So, not brand new.
	Author Stephen Church suggests the king might have been preparing his young- the king, Henry II, preparing his youngest son, John, for the life of a scholar.
	Mentioned that earlier, right?
	So in 1179, before he was king, before- yeah, Henry was still king.
	Henry II was still king.
	He placed him under the tutelage of Ranulf de Glanville.
	Ranulf de Glanville.
	Great.
	Who wrote and oversaw one of the first commentaries on English law, the Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England.
	Right?
	Kind of interesting.
	Pretty interesting.
	Right.
	The treatise explained English laws are unwritten, and it is utterly impossible for the laws and rules of the realm to be reduced to writing.
	Which is an interesting way to put it, but that's kind of like understanding that there are customs and common laws that just weren't written down, but everybody just was expected to know them, or did.
	Also, people couldn't read.
	What are you going to do?
	So, at the same time, all the same, Glanville argued custom and precedent together constitute a knowable common law.
	A delicate handling of what during the reign of Henry II had become a vexing question.
	Can a law be a law if it's not written down?
	Glanville's answer was yes.
	But that led to another question.
	If the law isn't written down, and even if it is, by what argument or force can a King be constrained to obey it?
	Pin in that for later, but interesting, right?
	Cause King's in charge, but King makes the laws.
	King allows laws, but King's in charge.
	Confusing.
	Um, so this next moment, uh, in John's story, I'll keep it simple.
	John loses Modern France.
	I kept describing that big, you know, like, the big hunk on the ocean side of France and England and the whole, the UK area.
	Loses France.
	Yeah, his forebears had done a lot of work to accumulate all that, and he ends up basically losing it.
	This is an oversimplification.
	And technically the kingdom had been divided between his brothers before he was in charge, but he's on the books for losing it.
	And the barons are pissed because he lost it.
	So after the loss, specifically of Normandy, Normandy is that little divot area that's on the bottom of the channel between Britain and France.
	And so Brittany is that big, you know, the hunk that's off to the side.
	And then next to that kind of fitting in with Britain and the English channel is Normandy.
	John was forced to rely on English resources alone to reclaim that territory.
	Which is what we were talking about earlier as far as the, you know, administration and taxation and bopping around in his own country.
	So he could just be a really, like, be really into England or that's the territory he has to rely on to be able to try to get Normandy back.
	And the Crown began to feel a new urgency in the matter of revenue collection.
	Always goes great.
	So every element of wealth accumulation came along with an impact on regular people that had to be managed to maintain power.
	That's the soft power part, right?
	If the king pisses off enough nobles, knights will not come fight for you.
	So no amount of money is going to get knights to Normandy if they all fucking hate you.
	Right.
	So your nobility, the source of your military might, will just stay home.
	Then the king has to employ mercenaries, which are wildly expensive and considerably less loyal and reliable as a fighting force since they don't really have skin in the game the way that like barons and dukes do who are defending their territory.
	Here, so some info on economic conditions, right, which played a massive role in the friction point which forced the Magna Carta that all kind of ties into this.
	The Angevin Kings had three main sources of income available to them.
	Namely, revenue from their personal lands or domain, which is spelled D-E-M-E-S-N-E, probably where we get the word domain.
	So that's kind of their, you know, their royal purview.
	Money raised through their rights as a feudal lord.
	So that's serfs and, uh, Surplus, um, you know, tribute and rents and stuff and revenue from taxation.
	English kings had widespread feudal rights, which could be used to generate income, uh, including the scutaj system, which is feudal military service, which in which feudal military service was avoided by a cash payment to the king.
	So, deriving income from fines, court fees, and the sale of charters and other privileges.
	So charters to a city, like if you want to start a city, charter a city, you want to become a sheriff, you want to become an administrator, you pay for those privileges.
	So, King John intensified his efforts to maximize income to the extent that he has been described as, quote, avaricious, miserly, extortionate, and money-minded, end quote.
	Not great.
	He also used revenue as a way of exerting political control over the barons.
	Debts owed to the crown by the king's favorite supporters may be forgiven.
	Collection of those owed by enemies was more stringently enforced.
	So, arbitrary, right?
	The result was a sequence of innovative, this is hilarious to me, innovative but unpopular financial measures.
	John levied scrutage payments.
	So is that like paying instead of having to be pressed into military service, you pay a fee and you don't have to go.
	John levied those payments 11 times in his 17 years as king, as compared to 11 times in total during the reign of the preceding three monarchs.
	quite a bit more time. In many cases, these were levied in the absence of any actual military
	Wild.
	campaign, which ran counter to the original idea that scutage was an alternative to actual
	military service. Wild. So John maximized his right to demand relief payments when estates
	and castles were inherited, sometimes charging enormous sums beyond barons' abilities to pay.
	I'm sure they loved it.
	So right, so John was deeply suspicious of the Barons, particularly those with sufficient power and wealth, to potentially challenge him.
	Numerous Barons were subject to his malevolencia.
	I think I finally got it.
	Cool.
	Even including the famous knight William Marshall, 1st Earl of Pembroke.
	Love your corgs.
	Right, so normally held up as a model of utter loyalty.
	The most infamous case, which went beyond anything considered acceptable at the time, or now, was that of the powerful William de Brouwse, 4th Lord of Bamber.
	So fun to say this stuff.
	Okay, so who held lands in Ireland?
	Which also, John was supposed to be in charge of Ireland as decreed by his dad, Henry II, and John tried to kind of subdue Ireland and then his His soldiers, like, abandoned him and mutinied, and they're like, you're bullshit.
	And he got the nickname Soft Sword, which is... hateful.
	Double entendre from the past.
	Weird.
	So, you know, Ireland.
	Ugh.
	Right, so, William de Brousse.
	Was subjected to punitive demands for money and when he refused to pay a huge sum, it was 40,000 marks.
	I mean, I have no frame of reference as to how much that was for a baron at the time.
	Seems like a lot.
	It was probably an unreasonable amount of money.
	And so his wife, Maude, and one of their sons were imprisoned by John, which resulted in their deaths, probably from starvation.
	So starving your wife and kid to death, because you can't pay some money.
	Yuck.
	Bad.
	Not going to be a popular person.
	And also, DeBrowse died in exile in 1211, and his grandsons remained in prison until 1218.
	All that because of the money.
	And John was cranky, I guess.
	John's suspicions and jealousies meant that he rarely enjoyed good relationships with even the leading loyalist barons.
	So why would you be loyal, right?
	John continued to sell charters for new towns and sell governmental appointments like sheriffs.
	Those appointments turn around to make their money back by increasing fines and penalties, particularly in the forests where they can really get common people.
	Another innovation of Richard's.
	Increased charges levied on widows who wish to remain single.
	That was expanded under John.
	Great.
	The Jews, who held a vulnerable position in medieval England, they lived under the protection of the kings.
	They were protected by the king.
	They were this protected class, but it was very precarious.
	They were subject to huge taxes.
	There's 44,000 pounds is the number that was extracted from the community by the Talaj, it's a tax, of 1210.
	Much of it was passed on to the Christian debtors of those Jewish moneylenders who were like, you know, under the protection of the king.
	It's like special class from the king.
	And now they're charging Christians more money.
	That'll go great.
	Sure.
	But actually, So the Jewish population, the Jewish community that was allowing for loans to be had in this time were often targets of hideous pogroms, persecution,
	You know, burnings at the stake and lynchings and all that kind of stuff.
	And part of that happened.
	It was a great way to insult the king and get at the king because they were under the protection of the king.
	So they were always like vulnerable, kind of like political football.
	So awful to read about.
	It's terrible.
	Right.
	So John also created a new tax on income and movable goods.
	New.
	Brand new.
	In 1207.
	Effectively, a version of a modern income tax.
	He created a new set of import and export duties payable directly to the crown.
	He found that these measures enabled him to raise further resources through the confiscation of the lands of barons who could not pay or refused to pay.
	At the start of John's reign, there was a sudden change in prices, as bad harvests and high demand for food resulted in much higher prices for grain and animals.
	This inflationary pressure was to continue for the rest of the 1200s and had long-term economic consequences for England.
	the resulting social pressures were complicated by bursts of deflation that resulted from John's
	military campaigns. Right, and he got into his position with the monarchy being tapped.
	Um, so I'm going to go ahead and close this out.
	So he's just kind of adding fuel to the fire as far as the debt problem is concerned.
	It was usual at the time for the king to collect taxes in silver, which was then reminted into new coins.
	These coins would then be put in barrels, this is wild, and sent to royal castles around the country to be used to hire mercenaries and meet other, like, military administrative costs.
	At those times, when John was preparing for campaigns in Normandy to take it back, for example, Huge quantities of silver had to be withdrawn from the economy and stored for months, which unintentionally resulted in periods during which silver coins were simply hard to come by, commercial credit difficult to acquire, and deflationary pressure placed on the economy.
	The result was political, obviously, political unrest in the country, literally hoarding all the money.
	Batshit, right?
	All these problems compound.
	Everybody's mad.
	I don't think I need to explain why.
	I feel like I'll get it, right?
	On June 15th, 1215, the document known as Articles of the Barons was agreed upon, and it was, the king put a seal on it, accepted it, everybody's cool, June 19th.
	The Charter went beyond simply addressing specific baronial complaints and formed a wider proposal for political reform, albeit one focusing on the rights of free men, Quote-unquote free men, not serfs, and unfree labor.
	Um, we knew we'd get here, right?
	While later versions of the Magna Carta, like I think this is not 1217 but 1225, do include all men, not just free men.
	And men, meaning actually men, not men and women, men meaning subjects, is kind of up for interpretation.
	There is legal precedent where Explicitly the word men applies to men and women in certain portions of law, but women do not have the same legal status as men.
	They're second class citizens.
	So it depends.
	What gender is implied.
	I think that the generous read is that men means everybody, but not always.
	Um, right.
	And Freeman is, is, is, is a special category as well.
	So a rights of free men is a specific class.
	Um, that, so that magnanimous gesture of like all men, um, is even in, in subsequent Magna Carta, Iterations is undermined by the lack of enforcement of the Charter and those wonky definitions of who are men and who is entitled to rights.
	There is no singular agreed-upon definition of freemen from the time, but one assumes that freemen are nobility and, like, top regional administrators and maybe, like, top, like, traveling... Oh, maybe this is, like, a hundred years later.
	There's, like, successful, you know, like, there's a few merchants And a few like tradesmen, craftsmen that are bopping around at the time that aren't tied to the land.
	Right.
	So probably ranking clergy, like basically the top cast of society, maybe a couple of other dudes that are special case.
	You have to remember that a belief persisted also among the aristocracy until frighteningly recently that regular people were a different species entirely.
	That we were just different species of human.
	Um, that the rich were born to be rich and the poor were born to be poor.
	They claimed their digestive organs, their constitution worked differently.
	They felt temperature differently.
	They were genetically, like rich were genetically smarter and more capable.
	Cause obviously if you're like born rich, then you have all these skills and there's like, and you're so smart.
	And so it must be genetic, not just that you have access to resources.
	These benefits were present for, uh, Oh, I'm sorry.
	The beliefs, they were present in the time of King John, and they were present in the founding of America.
	Never.
	Forget.
	That.
	It's basically a pre-eugenic, proto-eugenics kind of idea.
	So, right.
	So, let's see.
	Where are we at?
	The Articles of Barons.
	It promised the protection of church rights.
	Mentioned earlier, protection from illegal imprisonment, good, access to swift justice, new taxation only with baronial consent and limitations on scrutage and other futile payments, right?
	And barons would have a 25-member governing body that would have input in the way that the government is run.
	Let's see, neither John nor the rebel barons seriously attempted to implement the peace accord.
	The rebel barons suspected that the proposed baronial council would be unacceptable to John.
	and that he would challenge the legality of the charter.
	They packed the baronial council with their own hardliners and refused to demobilize their forces or surrender London,
	which they had raided and taken over in their rebellion and that had forced John's hand as they agreed.
	So they didn't do this other, they said they're gonna do.
	Despite his promises to the contrary that he was going to participate,
	John instead appealed to Pope Innocent III for help, observing that the charter compromised the Pope's rights
	under the 1213 agreement that had appointed him as John's feudal Lord.
	Basically, John got in a big fight with Pope Innocent over some appointments and made him mad.
	And so Pope Innocent excommunicated John, um, in 1209, but the Pope Innocent was like going a little excommunication wild.
	So it wasn't as serious of, uh, of, of punishment.
	I think in other times in history, excommunication would be like a big fucking deal.
	And it's kind of like, well, it happens and then like, oh, we're okay.
	And basically like John.
	New that his station because of all the things I just told you all the bad stuff happening in the realm you needed the pope on his side because the pope could kind of intercede and sort of you know nudge people along maybe force them and you know threaten other other leaders to like back off so John kinda.
	It pulled back some of the Royal English controls on the church and reinstalled the Pope as sort of this like figurehead and gave, you know, like reinstated more like these rights that the church was withholding because of the excommunication.
	It was like a whole thing.
	So it seems like John capitulated to Pope Innocent III after pissing him off.
	But really, Capitulating worked out better for John because Pope Innocent could go to bat for him with all the other leaders of Europe.
	And also sucking up works, I think.
	Um, so, and I do love this.
	So, so the Pope was in charge of John, technically.
	Innocent declared the charter, not only shameful and demeaning, but illegal and unjust.
	And then excommunicated the rebel barons.
	And defended John and dissolved the Magna Carta.
	The Magna Carta was immediately dissolved.
	And then the failure of the agreement led rapidly to the First Baron's War of several.
	So Magna Carta is immediately, like, Axed, you know, it's like 86 by the Pope, because John begged for him to do it.
	So, after undergoing a number of reissues and amendments and posts after John is no longer king, by 1225 what was left, nearly a third of the 1215 charter had been cut or revised, had become known as the Magna Carta.
	So technically we should be celebrating 1225, not 1215.
	If we want to celebrate the Magna Carta.
	And granted liberties, not to free men, but to everyone free and unfree.
	Which is a bigger deal and it's good.
	It also divided its provisions into chapters.
	It entered the statute books in 1297 and was first publicly proclaimed in English in 1300.
	So that's kind of where the, you know, the, the wide distribution is sort of a little sketchy.
	Right.
	And let's see.
	So from here on out, That, uh, what I've got is the, uh, the New Yorker article that I mentioned earlier.
	He just really put this all together, kind of like the subsequent implications of the idea of the Magna Carta.
	I couldn't figure out a better way to write it.
	He's just really good.
	So I'm going to rely on his interpretation, and it bears out from everything that I read.
	I think it's just well written and really interesting.
	So this is going to let you know kind of why the Magna Carta specter is still In politics and in our discourse today, when it was kind of just a thing that was really normal.
	And, um, and it was, you know, it was like a, it was like an inaugural address.
	One of many, except it was specifically it kind of the rebellion made it interesting, but it wasn't super special necessarily.
	Right.
	So let's see.
	Did Magna Carta make a difference?
	Most people apparently knew about it.
	In 1300, even peasants complaining against the Lord's bailiff in Essex cited it publicly.
	So that's in the record.
	But did it work?
	There's debate on this point.
	But Stephen Carpenter comes down mostly on the side of the Charter's inadequacy, unenforceability, and irrelevance.
	It was confirmed nearly 50 times, but only because it had hardly ever been honored.
	An English translation, a rather bad one, was printed for the first time in 1534, Which also, like, printed?
	I don't know.
	Maybe people just, in 1300 when it was in English, people just yelled it?
	Yeah, okay.
	So, printed for- that makes sense.
	There weren't- there wasn't printing in 1300.
	Okay.
	So, printed for the first time in 1534, by which time Magna Carta was a little more than a historical curiosity.
	Then, strangely, in the 1600s, Magna Carta became a rallying cry during a parliamentary struggle against arbitrary power.
	Even though, by then, the various versions of the Charter had become hopelessly muddled and its history obscured.
	Many colonial American charters were influenced by Magna Carta, partly because citing it was a way to drum up settlers.
	Edward Koch, the person most responsible for reviving interest in the Magna Carta in England, described it as his country's ancient constitution, quote-unquote.
	Problem, right?
	Right.
	Let's see, he was... did we talk about it?
	He was in the House of Commons.
	No.
	He was a legislator.
	Anyway, he was rumored to be writing a book about Magna Carta.
	Charles I forbade its publication.
	Eventually, the House of Commons ordered the publication of Koch's work.
	American lawyers see Magna Carta through Koch's spectacles, not the thing itself.
	might have been a little propaganda-y. American lawyers see Magna Carta through Koch's spectacles,
	not the thing itself, because of the book that he wrote.
	Nevertheless, Magna Carta's significance during the founding of the
	American colonies is almost always wildly overstated.
	As cherished and important as Magna Carta became, it didn't cross the Atlantic in, quote, the hip pocket of Captain John Smith, unquote, as the legal historian A.E.
	Dick Howard once put it.
	Silly.
	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.
	That's a stretch, okay?
	So, let's see...
	Quote, on the 15th of this month, Anno 1215, was Magna Carta signed by King John for declaring and establishing English liberty, end quote.
	Benjamin Franklin wrote in Poor Richard's Almanac in 1749 on the page for June, urging his readers to remember it and mark the day.
	So Magna Carta was revived in the 17th century in England and celebrated in the 18th century America.
	17th century, 1600s, 18th century, 1700s, America.
	Because of the specific authority, it wielded as an artifact.
	The historical document as an instrument of political protest, but as author Vincent points out, The fact that Magna Carta itself had undergone a series of transformations between 1215 and 1225 was, to say the least, inconvenient to any argument that the Constitution was, of its nature, unchanging and unalterable.
	Right?
	The myth that Magna Carta had essentially been written in stone was forged in the colonies.
	By the 1760s, colonists opposed to taxes levied by Parliament in the wake of the Seven Years' War, citing Magna Carta as the authority for their argument, mainly because it was more ancient than any arrangement between a particular colony and a particular king or particular legislature.
	So in 1766, when Ben Franklin was brought to the House of Commons in England to explain the
	colonists' refusal to pay the stamp tax, he was asked, "How then could the Assembly of Pennsylvania
	assert that laying a tax on them by the Stamp Act was an infringement on their rights?"
	It was true, Franklin admitted, that there was nothing specifically to that effect in the colonies' charter.
	He cited, instead, their understanding of, quote, the common rights of Englishmen as declared by Magna Carta, end quote.
	In 1770, when the Massachusetts House of Representatives sent instructions to Franklin, acting as its envoy in Great Britain, he also was told to advance the claim that taxes levied by Parliament, quote, were designed to exclude us from the least share in that clause of Magna Carta, which has for many centuries been the noblest bulwark of the English liberties and which cannot be too often repeated.
	No, it wasn't.
	We know that, right?
	"No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or deprived of his freehold or liberties or
	free custom or be outlawed or exiled or any otherwise destroyed, nor will he pass upon
	them nor condemn him but by the judgment of his peers in the law of the land."
	Right.
	That's not what it said.
	We know that.
	Let me just run over it. The Sons of Liberty imagine themselves the heirs of the barons,
	despite the fact that the charter enshrines not liberties granted by the king
	to certain noblemen, but liberties granted to all men by nature.
	In 1775, Massachusetts adopted a new seal, which pictured a man holding a sword in one hand and a Magna Carta in the other.
	In 1776, Thomas Paine argued that, quote, the charter which secures this freedom in England was formed, not in the Senate, but in the field, and insisted on by the people, not granted by the crown.
	End quote.
	In common sense.
	Not true.
	That's not true.
	But he urged Americans to write their own Magna Carta.
	Fair.
	Magna Carta's unusual legacy in the United States is a matter of political history, but it also has to do with the difference between written and unwritten laws, and between promises and rights.
	At the Constitutional Convention, Magna Carta was barely mentioned, and only in passing.
	Invoked in a struggle against the king as a means of protesting his power as arbitrary, Magna Carta seemed irrelevant once independence had been declared.
	Um, the United States had no king in need of restraining.
	So toward the end of the constitutional conviction, when, uh, George Mason of Virginia raised the question of whether the new frame of government ought to include a declaration or a bill of rights, the idea was quickly squashed.
	In, uh, Federalist No.
	84, urging the ratification of the constitution, Alexander Hamilton explained that a bill of rights was a good thing to have as a defense against a monarch, but that it was altogether unnecessary in a republic.
	Bill of Rights are, in their origin, stipulations between kings and their subjects, abridgment of prerogative in favor of privilege, reservations of rights not surrendered to the prince.
	End quote.
	Short-sighted, maybe, I would argue.
	Also, I think a Bill of Rights is a good idea.
	of a Bill of Rights for two reasons. First, the Constitution would not have been ratified without
	the concession to anti-federalists that the adopting of the Bill of Rights represented.
	Also, I think a Bill of Rights is a good idea. I agree.
	Second, Madison came to believe that while a Bill of Rights wasn't necessary to abridge the
	powers of a government that was itself the manifestation of popular sovereignty of the people, it
	might be useful in checking tyranny of a political majority against a minority.
	Fair.
	Quote.
	Wherever the real power in a government lies, there is the danger for oppression."
	Madison wrote to Jefferson in 1788.
	In our governments, the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from the acts in which the government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.
	Feels like a fancy way of saying people should be in charge and therefore we shouldn't keep the people from people being in charge.
	Anyway, right.
	So the Bill of Rights directed by Madison and ultimately adopted as 27 provisions bundled into 10 amendments to the Constitution does not, on the whole, have much to do with King John.
	Only four of the Bill of Rights' 27 provisions, according to the political scientist Donald S. Lutz, can be traced to the Magna Carta.
	Madison himself complained that, as for trial by jury, freedom of the press, or liberty of conscience, Magna Carta does not contain any one provision for the security of those rights.
	Imagine who yells about the Magna Carta, and freedom of the press, and trial by jury, and liberty of conscience, so that's, you know, basically like free speech.
	So, Magna Carta doesn't say anything about that, as acknowledged by Madison himself, right?
	Instead, the provisions of the Bill of Rights derive largely from the Bill of Rights adopted by the states between 1776 and 1787, which themselves derive from Charters of Liberties adopted by the colonies, Including Massachusetts' Body of Liberties.
	In 1641, documents in which the colonists stated their fundamental political principles and created their own political order.
	The Bill of Rights, a set of amendments to the Constitution, is itself a revision.
	History is nothing so much as an act of amendment.
	Amendment.
	Amendation.
	I've never seen that word before.
	That's crazy.
	Okay.
	Amendment.
	Upon amendment.
	Upon amendment.
	It would not be quite right to say that Magna Carta has withstood the ravages of time.
	It would be fair to say that, like much else that is very old, it is on occasion taken out of the closet, dusted off, and put on display to answer a need. Such needs are
	generally political. They are very often profound. In the United States in the 19th century, the
	myth of the Magna Carta as a single, stable, unchanged document contributed to the veneration of
	the Constitution as unalterable.
	Despite the fact that Thomas Paine, among many other founders, believed a chief virtue—can you tell I'm upset about this?—a chief virtue of a written constitution lay in the ability to amend it.
	That's what our Founding Fathers said, and it's so obvious, and they say it all the time.
	Oh my god.
	So, between 1836 and 1943, 16 American states incorporated the full text of Magna Carta into their statute books, and 25 more incorporated, in one form or another, a revision of the 29th Article of the Barons.
	Quote, No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
	End quote.
	The 14th Amendment was passed in 1868.
	It came to be interpreted as making the Bill of Rights apply to the states.
	In the past century, the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment has been the subject of some of the most heated contests of constitutional interpretation in American history.
	No signs of stopping either.
	So Magna Carta was conscripted to fight in the human rights movement and in the Cold War too.
	This, quote, this Universal Declaration of Human Rights reflects the composite views of the many men and governments who have contributed to its formulation, end quote.
	Eleanor Roosevelt said in 1948, urging its adoption in a speech at the United Nations, she had chaired the committee that drafted the declaration, but she insisted, too, on its particular genealogy.
	This Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which it wasn't, may well become the international, okay, right, the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere.
	Right.
	It's real flimsy.
	You know what I mean?
	Sorry.
	In 1957, the American Bar Association erected a memorial at Runnymede, which is where they signed the Magna Carta.
	In a speech given that day, the association's past president argued that in the United States, Magna Carta had at last been constitutionalized.
	We sought, in the written word, a measure of certainty.
	This is all so absurd.
	Anyway, all right, so Magna Carta cuts one way and then again another.
	Magna Carta decreed that no man would be imprisoned contrary to the law of the land, Justice Kennedy wrote, in a majority opinion, in Boumediene, B-O-U-M-E-D-I-E-N-E.
	It's a beautiful name.
	I'm sure someone says it very nicely.
	V. Bush, right?
	In 2008, finding that Guantanamo prisoner Lakhdar Boumediene and other detainees had been deprived of an ancient right.
	That ancient right.
	But on the 800th anniversary of the agreement made at Runnymede, one in every 110 people in the United States is behind bars.
	So maybe we don't take it that seriously.
	So that's the end of the portion of the New Yorker article, which I think just really puts a nail in the coffin as far as like what the notion of the Magna Carta has become specifically in America.
	And it's just insulting.
	It's insulting and gross and weird.
	So in conclusion, here's what I think really went down.
	Okay.
	King John screwed the pooch.
	Big time.
	What's interesting and special about this, his particular pooch screwing moment.
	That moment in time was that he allowed himself to truly be cornered and coerced by his subjects in a way monarchs hadn't before.
	At least not in writing.
	And at least it wasn't, like, official.
	Rather than the stereotype of an absolute monarch ruling absolutely, kings were always expected, you know, to have some degree, like, consult with councils and consider the input of the people, who they considered to be the people.
	Maybe not super fair, but...
	There was never, you know, this kind of ruling solo.
	It just wasn't, it wasn't expected.
	And it's confusing because, you know, as we talked about earlier in the episode, that there were laws that were spoken or written and there were laws that everybody just assumed.
	And let me tell you how great that has gone in America over the past eight years of just assuming everybody's going to act right and everything will be fine.
	I think that we are living through an example of why explicit rules that should be amended and strengthened and should be bolstered by the experience and will of the people is the most important thing to have in a governing body and a governing in a fucking humane society.
	Anyway.
	I'm gonna get upset, still.
	I don't need Russell to make me mad.
	I'm mad at all their stuff.
	I'm mad about people just, like, you're listening to the wrong parts of Thomas Paine.
	You know?
	Right.
	So, rather than the stereotype of the monarch, the guy, you know, kings had to participate in some kind of consensus.
	However, John kind of lacks agency when confronted with rebellion of his nobles in a way kings just aren't supposed to.
	It's that, you know, divine right of kings.
	If he's supposed to rule because God likes him the best, then that should win out the day.
	There shouldn't be this kind of capitulation.
	Right.
	So I think he got himself into that pickle, honestly.
	And it's unique that he capitulated.
	Not as a partner in negotiation, but with his back against the wall.
	Because I think that more adept rulers, more adept monarchs, can kind of read those tea leaves and kind of see that they are rolling towards a friction point that will put them on the back foot.
	And instead, they can You know, they can, they can try diplomacy.
	They can try to work with their subjects rather than just fighting, fighting, fighting, and then just draining them and putting them in like really precarious financial situations, life situations.
	It's not fair.
	Um, they're not gonna like it.
	So, uh, I think he was a bad king and that he couldn't really admit shit was going down.
	And, That's not, I mean, even an absolute monarch, you can't maintain that.
	You can't keep that rolling forever.
	Something is going to give, right?
	I don't think it's silly to treat this problem as, I think it's silly to treat this problem as one from a bygone era because we're dealing with it today, in America, right now.
	Donald Trump has used and is using the presidency to shield himself from legal consequences.
	And if you see his running for presidency in his second term, do you think he wants to be president?
	No, he doesn't want to deal with the ramifications of the laws he broke.
	And that's the best way that he can do it is to whip people up into a froth, you know, like activate the MAGA and potentially wriggle out of this.
	That's like, that's why it's happening, right?
	So the issue in question Which the Magna Carta was trying to solve is whether or not the king is subject to the same laws as the citizens.
	We still haven't fixed it.
	So guess what?
	We don't get to judge them for not working it out in 1215.
	Maybe we need to judge us in 2023, not getting our shit together.
	I think we can learn a ton from this historical event, from the conditions which created the crisis to the toothless resolution, which still led to a few very destructive baronial revolts.
	Too little, too late is dangerous to stable governance.
	And as subjects, we can only be pushed so far before the system cracks.
	I feel like this is obvious.
	So also, I think when conservative pundits invoke the Magna Carta, Yeah, right?
	Okay, so I'm getting ahead of myself.
	I think that when conservative pundits avote the Magna Carta, there's an implication that history fixed it.
	History's fixed it, so why are you bitching?
	I get that this is more of an American problem than a British one.
	So the connection to Russell Brand may come off as tangential, fair, but he keeps cozying up to Trump and Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson more and more.
	Those people say this shit all the time.
	Maybe I'm unfairly patting myself on the back for cutting him off at the pass or defining where his rhetoric might lead in the future.
	Either way, the problematic idea, usually, is that we used to have it right way back in the before times, and modern globalist society is the problem.
	That's the problematic idea.
	Before good, now bad.
	End of thought.
	From Wim Hof to Jordan Peterson, who we've covered in the show before, Russell Platform's the holy hell out of that idea, and it couldn't be more wrong or more detrimental.
	Maybe I'm reading way too much into this.
	I'm sure that's... Listen, fine.
	I accept that.
	And I don't think that my interpretation is entirely fleshed out.
	But something hasn't set right with me for a long time.
	When the Magna Carta is invoked.
	And I had a bummer of...
	you know, family life occasionally in my childhood. I had to talk about this more than most people,
	I think, probably. It sucks because it also doesn't make any sense. It's more like learning
	the wrong history so then when you have to go learn the right thing, your pieces don't fit
	together and you're like, "Oh, the Magna Carta is just like an inaugural address with a stamp on it.
	You guys told me the wrong thing." The implication is, like, you know, I don't know.
	Something doesn't sit right, whenever it comes up.
	The implication I'm extrapolating, right, is that we, as a species of white Anglo-Saxons, declare due process, a la Michael Scott, and civil rights have been fixed ever since.
	So then what are all you women and minorities and disenfranchised groups complaining about?
	If you just follow the rules, duh, they're super old, you should know them by now, then you wouldn't have all these problems you keep complaining about.
	Like, oh, Magna Carta fixed it, so did the Constitution, shut up!
	There's something so dismissive and poisonous to me, to that idea of invoking, you know, 1776 and, and Magna Carta and, or even just implying that we need little, little groups that will all just get along.
	Um, it didn't happen whenever we had those little groups, people still had to like hammer out difficult ideas and work together.
	Russ, you know?
	Um, right.
	So, I will leave you reiterating one of my favorite lines from that New Yorker article.
	Due process is a bulwark against injustice.
	It wasn't put in place in 1215.
	It is a wall built stone by stone, defended and attacked year after year.
	Your silence will not protect you.
	Justice takes cooperation and persistence.
	It's work.
	It's hard, but it's worth it.
	That's what she said.
	Oh God, this took so long.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you so much for listening.
	You're wonderful and I appreciate you and Bye Magnet!
	They're cool!
	And hopefully we'll get to do more history stuff.
	If you guys like it, let us know.
	Let me know.
	If you hate it, be considerate.
	I don't know.
	I hope that you guys can take some of this information and go forth and know you better, man.
	Right?
	Bye Magnet!
	Love you to bits!

▲