Travel – UK – Lincoln Castle – Magna Carta

This is an excerpt from my book Travels through History : Leicester, Lichfield, Lincoln, and Loughborough currently available at a discount.

Magna Carta Libertatum (Medieval Latin for “the Great Charter of the Liberties”), commonly called Magna Carta is a charter of rights agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. He hated it with a passion; it was outrageous that the King’s power be limited, that he should be answerable to his barons. King John even went cap in hand to the Pope to have it annulled, to be as if it had never happened. 

The charter, on a single sheet of parchment which now sits in Lincoln Castle, was probably written out by the clerk to the Bishop of Lincoln at Lincoln Cathedral – then the head of the largest diocese in England. 

By the end of September 1215, the charter had become worthless and so presumably many Bishops’ clerks, for copies of the charter were made for all Bishops, discarded them. The clerk to the Bishop of Lincoln didn’t. 

The charter would have taken a great deal of careful writing – some 3,500 perfectly crafted words. The clerk, though, may well have studied at the mediaeval ‘University’ of Lincoln, then based at Lincoln Cathedral and by many accounts as well regarded as Oxford or Cambridge. 

He would have been following in the footsteps of another clerk, Stephen Langton, who had studied books about the power of Kings and later, as Archbishop of Canterbury, had a big influence over the drafting of the charter. In the 12th century power was the hot topic. People from all parts of Europe were asking questions about power: how to stop it being abused, how to limit it, how to make the powerful accountable. The books Langton may have studied are still in the Cathedral Library. So the clerk to the Bishop of Lincoln would have known that the annulled charter was important and he must at all costs preserve it.  

Only two years later after King John’s death at Newark, his infant son, then King Henry III, re-issued the charter alongside a smaller charter limiting his powers over the great forests of England. The 1215 charter, because it was bigger, became known as Magna Carta, and the smaller document became The Charter of the Forest, sealed in 1217. Lincoln Cathedral is the owner of original copies of both these documents, on display at Lincoln Castle – the only place where they can be seen together in the world. Magna Carta was re-issued in 1225 and then in 1297. It became the foundation of limits on the power of the King. 

The short film at Lincoln Castle traces the influence of Magna Carta through the Peasants Revolt of 1381, to King James I who asserted that he was King by Divine Right, to the Bill of Rights of 1689 when William and Mary came to the throne at Parliament’s invitation, right through to the growth of parliamentary democracy. In America and elsewhere Magna Carta formed the heart of their constitutions, used to stand up to the power of Kings.

The Charter of the Forest, sealed on 6th November 1217, is an important medieval document with a history woven into the city of Lincoln. When the “Charter of Liberties”, sealed by King John in 1215, failed to stop the civil war, rebel Barons asked Prince Louis of France to become the monarch. At just nine years old, Henry III succeeded John when he died and, with the help of the knight William Marshal, finally defeated Louis and the rebel Barons. 

As part of the peace process afterwards, the 1215 charter was rewritten and an accompanying document called the Charter of the Forest issued in the name of King Henry III on 6th November 1217. To distinguish between them, they referred to the larger document as The Big Charter, hence its nickname in Latin ‘Magna Carta’. Whilst Magna Carta dealt with issues affecting the nobles, the Charter of the Forest helped the common man – especially if you lived in or near a Royal Forest. Magna Carta was the first document to state that the king and his government were not above the law. Amongst many other conditions, the document also said that all free men have the right to justice and a fair trial with a jury.  

Royal Forests were special hunting grounds with their own laws, and varied from heaths to grasslands, wetlands to woods. William the Conqueror had introduced Forest Law to England and people resented the cruel punishments forest courts gave out to those who broke the rules. For example in Lincolnshire, the fens north of Bourne and Spalding were a Royal Forest – the Forest of Kesteven – and there were strict rules about who could graze their cattle or hunt there. This charter provided some economic protection for free men who used the forest to forage for food, to graze their animals, and to obtain wood for fires.