Nineteenth Century and Beyond
Whilst radicals such as Sir Francis Burdett believed that Magna Carta could not be repealed, the 19th century would see the beginning of the repeal of many of the clauses of Magna Carta. The clauses were either obsolete and/or had been replaced by later legislation.
William Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England would be the high-water mark of the Whig interpretation of history. Stubbs believed that Magna Carta had been a major step in the shaping of the English people and he believed that the Barons at Runnymede were not just the Barons but the people.
This view of history however, was passing. At the popular level William Howitt in Cassell's Illustrated history of England would note that it was fiction that King John’s Charter was the same Magna Carta as was on the statute books and stated that “The Barons, in fact, were amongst the greatest traitors that England ever produced”. Frederic William Maitland provided a more academic history in History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, which began to move Magna Carta from the myth that had grown up around it back to its historical roots. In many literary representations of the medieval past, however, Magna Carta remained the foundation for many diverse constructions of English national identity. Some authors instrumentalized the medieval roots of the document to preserve the social status quo while others utilized the precious national inheritance to change perceived economic injustice.
In 1904 Edward Jenks published in the Independent Review an article entitled The Myth of Magna Carta, which undermined the traditionally accepted view of Magna Carta. Historians like A. F. Pollard would agree with Jenks in considering Coke to have ‘invented’ Magna Carta, noting that the Charter at Runnymede had not meant popular liberty at all.
Sellar and Yeatman in their parody 1066 and All That would play on the supposed importance of Magna Carta and its supposed universal liberty: “Magna Charter was therefore the chief cause of Democracy in England, and thus a Good Thing for everyone (except the Common People)”.
Read more about this topic: Magna Carta
Famous quotes containing the words nineteenth century and/or nineteenth:
“The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell’s major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)