Why The Magna Carta Matters 805 Years Later

805 years ago today, England's King John signed the Magna Carta, which became a cornerstone of the American republic.

Full transcript: 

Scott Rasmussen  0:07  

Good morning, Scott Rasmussen here. Welcome to my podcast. Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day. You know, I'm a, I'm a pollster. So I'm a numbers guy. And I like, every morning, to take a number, explore what it can teach us about the world around us. I like to put it in context. But I'm also a history buff. It's one of my great passions is studying history and trying to learn from it. And so today's number is a historical number. It's 805. 805 years ago today, on June 15, in the year 1215, so early 13th century, on June 15, 1215, King John accepted Magna Carta, he put his royal seal on what was destined to become one of the most influential documents in humans history. And the reason I want to focus on it today is because it reminds us that the rights and freedoms that we enjoy as Americans didn't come from a bunch of guys sitting around in powdered wigs having a theoretical debate about what's the best kind of government to have or how do you define certain rights. Instead, the rights and freedoms we enjoy as Americans come from eight centuries of pragmatic experimentation. We're able to draw upon the accumulated wisdom of the ages. And as we do that, our responsibility is not to ignore it or or throw it away, but to build upon it, to add another chapter for those who come after us. Now, I'll be back right after this with some additional thoughts on Magna Carta and the events that took place 805 years ago today. 

Scott Rasmussen  1:59  

Welcome back. Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day. I'm Scott Rasmussen and the number today: 805. 805 years ago today, Magna Carta was accepted by King John. And you know, the the point of all of this is to remind us that the rights and freedoms we enjoy as Americans weren't just dreamt up by a bunch of guys in powdered wigs in the 18th century. If that was all it was, if it was just a bunch of bright guys who sat down and wrote up a Constitution and eventually a Bill of Rights, well, then we might conclude we have smarter people today and we should just throw it out and start all over again. You know, why not? Well, the reason why not is because that's not how it happened. The founders of our nation were drawing upon six centuries of experience, trying to figure out how best to explore ideas of freedom. So, I'm going to talk today, I'm going to touch on three different things. First: what actually happened in the year 1215? Second: how did it come to be such a cornerstone of the United States of America? And third: you know, how does it impact our world today? How does it impact the world of the pandemic? How is it relevant in the midst of these racial tensions following the murder of George Floyd? 

Scott Rasmussen  3:19  

So, let's start at the beginning what happened in 1215. It's really an impossible world for us to imagine. The King John at that point, was a pretty unpopular guy. He had been ruling for about a decade and a half. He was the first English king to be excommunicated by the Pope. And he'd had a bunch of foreign policy failures. He lost some wars to cover the cost. He was raising taxes. And there was a revolt, there was a civil war in England. In fact, one of his adversaries, one of the barons, actually controlled London. It's hard to imagine an English king who can't even control London. But that's the way things were. And, essentially, what happened is there were peace negotiations to try and end the civil war and Magna Carta, the great charter, was a peace treaty. And what it signified was the king was acknowledging that he was under the rule of law that he had to go back to these nobles to seek their permission for certain things. Certainly not a democratic document the way we would think of democracy today. But it was, in a sense, the very first written constitution anywhere in Europe. And it, look, it didn't work out all that well. The King put his seal on this document in June, it was going to be the peace treaty. And three months later, they were fighting again. Within about a year, King John died and perhaps that could have been the end of the story. Magna Carta never would have meant anything but his nine-year-old son succeeded him and reissued a modified version of Magna Carta and then it became the norm for centuries. Every king began to deal with these issues and the questions were raised, okay, if the king is under some limits if he has to get permission from other people, well, what does he need permission for? And who does he have to ask? And what rights do we have as individuals to protect us from the crown? Those were the issues that took off. So in a legal sense, the events of 1215 had no impact because the king died, peace didn't hold. But the cultural impact was huge. It established the idea that even a king was under the law. And it began the process that led us to things like Parliament or in the United States to our Congress. So, the next part that I want to explore is, how did this have such an impact on the United States? I mean, how is it relevant to our country? Well, the answer is these debates went on in England for a long time and about four centuries after Magna Carta was accepted and became a starting point for all these discussions, there was another English Civil War. And they were fighting about a lot of things, but primarily about the relationship between a king in the parliament and again, who has what rights? What kind of protections do we all enjoy. The losing side in that Civil War, a lot of them ended up coming to the United States of America. The colonies at that point, they weren't the United States, obviously. And they took ideas of Magna Carta with them. You find the language, echoes of the language in a lot of the state constitutions and a lot of the discussions that went on in colonial America. In fact, the Declaration of Independence was in a very real sense modeled after Magna Carta. The Constitution or the Bill of Rights has some direct references and especially our fifth amendment can be traced pretty well directly to the Magna Carta, to the document that was agreed to more than 800 years ago. Ironically, Magna Carta had a greater life in the colonies than it did in England. In fact, one of the things that's really surprising about it is, if you go to the field at Runnymede, where this document was agreed to, where the peace treaty was accepted, the first marker, the first historic marker to that event, was not placed by the British crown. And I guess that's understandable because the entire point of the document was to place limits on the crown. It was presented by the American Bar Association in 1957. So Americans, in many ways claimed a greater heritage from Magna Carta than the English. There's only a few provisions left from the original document that are still in place. But the attitudes and the ideas that begin with Magna Carta have sparked centuries debate of debate about, you know, who should decide what, who has what authority and what rights and freedoms do we have that no king or government can take away. Now, I'll be back with some closing thoughts about what that means in the 21st century, right after these messages. 

Scott Rasmussen  8:12  

Welcome back to Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day. I'm Scott Rasmussen and I hope that you'll share this podcast with your friends and subscribe. You can find that at JusttheNews.com or anywhere you download your favorite podcast. Today's number 805. It was 805 years ago today, that King John put his royal seal on the agreement he really didn't want to sign but the peace treaty that became known as Magna Carta. In the short term, the document was a failure, but it exerted an amazing influence on the history of the world. Ultimately, it played a key role in the founding of the United States, as many of the people who came to the colonies took the words and the attitudes of Magna Carta with them. They talked about freedom. They talked about accountability. And, by the way, it's important to recognize that they didn't just accept Magna Carta as it was in the year 1215. And they didn't accept it the way it was understood in the 16th and 17th centuries. Instead, colonial Americans added to it. In fact, the idea of religious liberty was unheard of iin England, at the time. It was introduced in the United States. The idea of freedom of the press didn't exist anywhere in the world until colonial America added that as an expansion to the provisions and the thoughts behind Magna Carta. Our Declaration of Independence expressed noble ideals about freedom, equality and self governance and their ideals that we don't live up to perfectly. In fact, no society in history has lived up to them, but they are still ideals worth pursuing. The founding documents of our nation we're imperfect in many, many ways. Especially in the fact that they left African Americans out of the discussion entirely. But, what we have to recognize is, these documents, these experiments were part of an eighth century tradition that we can now draw upon to build a better future to draw us closer to living up to those noble founding ideals of freedom, equality and self governance. And when we recognize that it's the accumulated wisdom of the ages, not just one group of men who happened to come up with an idea for a constitution in the 1780s. It gives us a different appreciation of the blessings that we have as Americans. It's not a case of well, if we got a bunch of smarter guys together this year, we'll come up with better documents. No. Our task will, like the colonists who said, okay, we like Magna Carta, but we think you need religious liberty. We like Magna Carta, but we think we need freedom of the press. They were expanding the boundaries, then later in our history when suffragettes began to say, hey, wait a minute, these provisions should apply to women as well. Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights Movement demanded that everybody be included under the provisions of these ideals. And again, we're a long way from them. But our best approach forward is to build upon the wisdom of the centuries, to build upon a tradition that began 805 years ago today, on June 15, 1215. I'm Scott Rasmussen. I hope you've enjoyed today's Number of the Day and I'll be back with another one tomorrow.