Magna Carta - Nineteenth Century and Beyond

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Whilst radicals such as Sir Francis Burdett believed that Magna Carta could not be repealed, the 19th century would see the beginning of the repeal of many of the clauses of Magna Carta. The clauses were either obsolete and/or had been replaced by later legislation.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)”.