[MUSIC] So, we've said we'd like to use public history as a way to help you understand Magna Carta's importance over the last couple of hundred years. So what is public history? Well, public history is history for, and often by a much broader public than just professional historians and scholars. It's a way of considering broad historical themes and changes as the sum of thousands of individual's experiences. And it often helps history be more accessible because it connects, the day to day lives of individuals from the past with the common experiences of the public today. Magna Carta, as a matter for public history, first enters the picture in 1965 with a key work by Sir James Holt, who died earlier in 2014. Magna Carta is perhaps is best well known work and it caused somewhat of a stir in the historian's community. Because he argued that Magna Carta should only be seen as one moment in an argument and that much of the myth around Magna Carta's importance is a wiggish myth. That is, it's a reconstruction after the fact by those people that wish to tell history as a story of inevitable progress towards greater civilization. In the 1965 book published on the 750th anniversary of Magna Carta's sealing, Holt argued strongly that it was a fallacy to see an unbroken line of the development of human rights from Magna Carta through the English Bill of Rights and the American Bill of Rights up to the present. Instead, he pointed out that many of the meanings that have been attributed to Magna Carta were absolutely not there in the intent of those who drafted it and argued over its clauses. They've been read in since as the document has been reinterpreted again and again. It could be said that he separated Magna Carta the document from Magna Carta the argument. So Holt demonstrated that Magna Carta had been made to carry very different meanings that shifted over time and according to who was using the document to promote their own cause. Here's a quote from his book, Magna Carta is the history not only of a document but also of an argument. The history of the document is of repeated reinterpretation but the history of the argument is the history of a continuous element of political thinking. In this light, there is no inherent reason why an assertion of law, originally conceived in aristocratic interests, should not be applied on a wider scale. The class and political interests involved in each stage of the charter's history are one aspect of it, the principles it asserted, implied, or assumed are another. Holt's book pointed out that some of the concerns in Magna Carta were not at all specific to England at the time of it's creation. The demand for protection from arbitrary seizure of property and the request for the judgement of ones peers were also included in charters developed in Germany, Sicily, and France in the medieval period. What does make Magna Carta unique is the fact that it has survived, and it has been repurposed and re-edited over time, as you will have seen over the last three weeks of the course. By the the end of the 18th century, Magna Carta had already been called upon in many different contexts to lend weight and urgency to people's political demands and cries for extra liberty. Holt highlighted that many of the demands represented in the 1215 Magna Carta were not unique to England at this point in time. The request for the judgement of one's peers and the demands for protection against arbitrary seizure of property were also included in charters on the development in Germany, Sicily, and France in the Medieval Period. What has made Magna Carta unique is the fact that it's survived, and it's done this by being something of a chameleon document. It's lent it's weight to a wide variety of causes, and demands for liberty, as you'd have seen now for the last three centuries. In the 19th century, popular movements calling to parliamentary reform also adopted and adapted Magna Carta to lend it's support to their claim. But at the same time in the houses of parliament influential political leaders were calling for the reform of statute and no longer could it be assumed that a documents age was any guarantee of its value. So over the course of the 19th century many of the individual chapters of the Magna Carta were removed from the statute books in the 1850s, 60s, and 80s. Magna Carta's status as a living legal document was eroded at the same time that its political utility in arguments for liberties expanded. By 1970, only three chapters of Magna Carta remained only English statute books. Clause one protects the freedom of the English Church. Clause 13, which grants liberties to the city of London. And clause 39, which limits the power of any monarch so that he or she may only detain individuals in accord with the law of the land, keeping the monarch within the rule of law. While these clauses are very important to our sense of legality and nationality here, in America the connection to Magna Carta as a document has remained, in some sense, stronger and more fundamental as aspects of the Bill of Rights directly pick up from clauses of Magna Carta.
