Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy. The coincidence of the British Library’s magnificent exhibition with a general election campaign is bound to tempt political parties to claim a particular affinity with Magna Carta, or more precisely with what they believe it embodies. As David Carpenter’s new Penguin Classics edition demonstrates (together with the review of it that Peter Linebaugh contributed to this series) - this is a subject still wide-open to contest.
Yet this in no way diminishes the significance of previous interpretations, especially those that helped shape past political movements. That great popular movement of the early Victorian period, Chartism, naturally springs to my mind as someone who has devoted much time to its history. This was a movement that explicitly took Magna Carta as a foundational text. (See also the contributions to this series by Peter Evans.)
Magna Charta
There was nothing new about the People’s Charter, published in 1838, except, crucially, its title. Its six points for parliamentary reform (universal male suffrage; no property qualification to become an MP; payment of MPs; equal sized constituencies; voting in secret; and annual parliaments) had first been proposed as a package in the 1770s by John Cartwright. However, The People’s Charter did more than merely reassert established radical demands. The punchy title was massively significant. The allusion to Magna Charta (Chartists always inserted the ‘h’, subtly emphasising the affinity between the two documents) was one which almost all would have understood. Indeed, interest in ‘the Great Charter of Liberties’ of 1215 had grown over the previous quarter of a century, fuelled by an explosion of radical reform publishing during the Regency years.
