I need sources telling about how the Magna Carta's laws influenced peasants and their lives.?

Question

Please include a source. I would like more than one. also, please describe each source so I am sure that is what I'm looking for. PLEASE HELP!!!!

I also would like a summery of the magna carta. what does it mean?

Answer 1

In 1215 in England a frustrated nobility forced King John of England to sign a document called the Magna Carta, a document they hoped would protect them from imprisonment or loss of property without trial by a jury of their peers. It was a product of the increased power of kings and the desire by nobles to mitigate an arbitrary use of that power. Pope Innocent III opposed the Magna Carta. He was not inclined to favor any demand for rights. Rights, he believed, belonged only to those with authority. He complained that the Magna Carta impaired King John's rights and dignity, and he annulled it partly on the grounds that John had signed the document under duress.

Answer 2

HERE IS A LINK THAT WILL TAKE YOU DIRECTLY TO THE MAGNA CARTA RANGING FROM PICTURES TO THE EVENTS SURROUND BY IT TO THE INFLUENCES OF IT THIS SHOULD REALLY HELP YOU . GOOD LUCK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

Answer 3

i don't know...sorry

Answer 4

Magna Carta (Latin for "Great Charter", literally "Great Paper"), also called Magna Carta Libertatum ("Great Charter of Freedoms"), is an English charter originally issued in 1215.

Magna Carta was the most significant early influence on the extensive historical process that led to the rule of constitutional law today. Magna Carta influenced many common law and other documents, such as the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights, and is considered one of the most important legal documents in the history of democracy.

Magna Carta was originally written because of disagreements between Pope Innocent III, King John and his English barons about the rights of the King.

Magna Carta required the king to renounce certain rights, respect certain legal procedures and accept that the will of the king could be bound by the law. It explicitly protected certain rights of the King's subjects - whether free and unfree - most notably the right of Habeas Corpus. Many clauses were renewed throughout the Middle Ages, and further during the Tudor and Stuart periods, and the 17th and 18th centuries.

By the early 19th century most clauses in their original form had been repealed from English law.

There are a number of popular misconceptions about Magna Carta, such as that it was the first document to limit the power of an English king by law (it was not the first, and was partly based on the Charter of Liberties); that it in practice limited the power of the king (it mostly did not in the Middle Ages); and that it is a single static document (it is a variety of documents referred to under a common name).

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After the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and advances in the 12th century, the English king had by 1199 become the most powerful monarch in Europe. This was due to a number of factors including the sophisticated centralised government created by the procedures of the new Anglo-Saxon systems of governance, and extensive Anglo-Norman land holdings in Normandy.

But after King John of England was crowned in the early 13th century, a series of stunning failures on his part led the English barons to revolt and place checks on the king's power.


France
King John's actions in France were a major cause of discontent in the realm. At the time of his accession to the throne after Richard's death, there were no set rules to define the line of succession. King John, as Richard's younger brother, was crowned over Richard's nephew, Arthur of Brittany.

As Arthur still had a claim over the Anjou empire, however, John needed the approval of the French King, Philip Augustus. To get it, John gave to Philip vast tracts of the French-speaking Anjou territories.

When John later married Isabella of Angoulême, her previous fiancé (Hugh IX of Lusignan, one of John's vassals) appealed to Philip, who then declared forfeit all of John's French lands, including the rich Normandy. Philip declared Arthur as the true ruler of the Anjou throne and invaded John's French holdings in mid-1202 to give it to him. John had to act to save face, but his eventual actions did not achieve this—he ended up killing Arthur in suspicious circumstances, thus losing the little support he had from his French barons.

After the defeat of John's allies at the Battle of Bouvines, Philip retained all of John's northern French territories, including Normandy (although Aquitaine remained in English hands for a time). As a result, John was revealed as a weak military leader, and one who lost to the French a major source of income, neither of which made him popular at home. Worse, to recoup his expenses, John had to further tax the already unhappy barons.


The Church
At the time of John’s reign there was still a great deal of controversy as to how the Archbishop of Canterbury was to be elected, although it had become traditional that the monarch would appoint a candidate with the approval of the monks of Canterbury.

But in the early 13th century, the bishops began to want a say. To retain control, the monks elected one of their number to the role. But John, incensed at his lack of involvement in the proceedings, sent the Bishop of Norwich to Rome as his choice. Pope Innocent III declared both choices as invalid and persuaded the monks to elect Stephen Langton, who in fact was probably the best choice.

But John refused to accept this choice and exiled the monks from the realm. Infuriated, Innocent ordered an interdict (prevention of public worship - mass, marriages, the ringing of church bells, etc.) in England in 1208, excommunicated John in 1209, and backed Philip to invade England in 1212.

John finally backed down and agreed to endorse Langton and allow the exiles to return, and to completely placate the pope he gave England and Ireland as papal territories and rented them back as a fiefdom for 1,000 marks per annum. This further enraged the barons as it meant that they had even less autonomy in their own lands.


Taxes
Despite all of this, England's government could not function without a strong king. The efficient civil service, established by the powerful King Henry II, had run England throughout the reign of Richard I. But the government of King John needed money for armies, for during this period of prosperity mercenary soldiers cost nearly twice as much as before. The loss of the French territories, especially Normandy, greatly reduced the state income and a huge tax would have to be raised in order to attempt to reclaim these territories.

Yet it was difficult to raise taxes due to the tradition of keeping them at the same level.

Novel forms of income included a Forest law, a set of regulations about the king’s forest which were easily broken and severely punished. John also increased the pre-existing scutage (feudal payment to an overlord replacing direct military service) eleven times in his seventeen years as king, as compared to eleven times in twice that period covering three monarchs before him. The last two of these increases were double the increase of their predecessors. He also imposed the first income tax which raised what was, at the time, the extortionate sum of £60,000.


///////// Rebellion and civil war

John of England signs Magna Carta—illustration from Cassell's History of England (1902)By 1215, some of the barons of England banded together and took London by force on June 10, 1215. They and many of the fence-sitting moderates not in overt rebellion forced King John to agree to the "Articles of the Barons", to which his Great Seal was attached in the meadow at Runnymede on June 15, 1215. In return, the barons renewed their oaths of fealty to King John on June 19, 1215.

A formal document to record the agreement was created by the royal chancery on July 15: this was the original Magna Carta. An unknown number of copies of it were sent out to officials, such as royal sheriffs and bishops.

The most significant clause for King John at the time was clause 61, known as the "security clause", the longest portion of the document. This established a committee of 25 barons who could at any time meet and over-rule the will of the King, through force by seizing his castles and possessions if needed. This was based on a medieval legal practice known as distraint, which was commonly done, but it was the first time it had been applied to a monarch. In addition, the King was to take an oath of loyalty to the committee.

King John had no intention to honour Magna Carta, as it was sealed under extortion by force, and clause 61 essentially neutered his power as a monarch, making him King in name only.

He renounced it as soon as the barons left London, plunging England into a civil war, called the First Barons' War. Pope Innocent III also annulled the "shameful and demeaning agreement, forced upon the king by violence and fear." He rejected any call for rights, saying it impaired King John's dignity. He saw it as an affront to the Church's authority over the king and released John from his oath to obey it.


Magna Carta re-issued
John died during the war, from dysentery, on October 18, 1216, and this quickly changed the nature of the war. His nine-year-old son, Henry III, was next in line for the throne. The royalists believed the rebel barons would find the idea of loyalty to the child Henry more palatable, so the boy was swiftly crowned in late October 1216 and the war ended.

Henry's regents reissued Magna Carta in his name on November 12, 1216, omitting some clauses, such as clause 61, and again in 1217. When he turned 18 in 1225, Henry III himself reissued Magna Carta again, this time in a shorter version with only 37 articles.

Henry III ruled for 56 years (the longest reign of an English Monarch in the Medieval period) so that by the time of his death in 1272, Magna Carta had become a settled part of English legal precedent, and more difficult for a future monarch to annul as King John had attempted nearly three generations earlier.

Henry III's son and heir Edward I's Parliament reissued Magna Carta for the final time on 12 October 1297 as part of a statute called Confirmatio cartarum (25 Edw. I), reconfirming Henry III's shorter version of Magna Carta from 1225.


Content of Magna Carta

Seal of King John on original Magna Carta.The Magna Carta was originally written in Latin. A large part of Magna Carta was copied, nearly word for word, from the Charter of Liberties. issued when Henry I ascended to the throne in 1100, which bound the king to certain laws regarding the treatment of church officials and nobles, effectively granting certain civil liberties to the church and the English nobility.


Rights still in force today
For modern times, the most enduring legacy of the Magna Carta is considered the right of Habeas Corpus. This right arises from what we now call Clauses 36, 38, 39, and 40 of the 1215 Magna Carta.

The impact of the Magna Carta is great in its influence, for example, on U.S. law. The following material refers to UK law and stands apart from a broader appreciation of the impact of the Magna Carta.

Three clauses of Magna Carta remain in force in current UK law, and can be viewed on the UK Statute Law Database.

Clause 1 of Magna Carta (the original 1215 edition) guarantees the freedom of the English Church. Although this originally meant freedom from the King, later in history it was used for different purposes (see below). Clause 13 guarantees the “ancient liberties” of the city of London. Clause 29 gives a right to due process.

In 1828 the passing of the first Offences Against the Person Act was the first time a clause of Magna Carta was repealed, namely Clause 36. With the document's perceived protected status broken, in one hundred and fifty years nearly the whole charter was repealed, leaving just Clauses 1, 39, and 40 still in force after the Statute Law (Repeals) Act was passed in 1969.


..............Feudal rights still in place in 1225
These clauses were present in the 1225 charter but are no longer in force, and would have no real place in the post-feudal world. Clauses 2 to 7 refer to the feudal death duties; defining the amounts and what to do if an heir to a fiefdom is underage or is a widow. Clause 23 provides no town or person should be forced to build a bridge across a river. Clause 33 demands the removal of all fish weirs. Clause 43 gives special provision for tax on reverted estates and Clause 44 states that forest law should only apply to those in the King’s forest.


Feudal rights not in the 1225 charter
These provisions have no bearing in the world today, as they are feudal rights, and were not even included in the 1225 charter. Clauses 9 to 12, 14 to 16, and 25 to 26 deal with debt and taxes and Clause 27 with intestacy.

The other clauses state that no one may seize land in debt except as a last resort, that underage heirs and widows should not pay interest on inherited loans, that county rents will stay at their ancient amounts and that the crown may only seize the value owed in payment of a debt, that aid (taxes for warfare or other emergency) must be reasonable, and that scutage (literally, shield-payment, payment in lieu of actual military service used to finance warfare) may only be sought with the consent of the kingdom.

These clauses were not present in the 1225 document, but still this led to the first parliament. Clause 14 provided that the common consent of the kingdom was to be sought from a council of the archbishops, bishops, earls and greater Barons. This later became the great council (see below).


[edit] Judicial rights (also in 1225 Charter)
These rights were the beginning of English judicial rights. Clauses 17 to 22 allowed for a fixed law court, which became the chancellery, and defines the scope and frequency of county assizes. They also said that fines should be proportionate to the offence, that they should not be influenced by ecclesiastical property in clergy trials, and that people should be tried by their peers. Many think that this gave rise to jury and magistrate trial, but its only manifestation in today’s world is the right of a Lord to trial in the House of Lords at first instance.

Clause 24 states that crown officials (such as sheriffs) may not try a crime in place of a judge. Clause 34 forbids repossession without a writ precipe. Clauses 36 to 38 state that writs for loss of life or limb are to be free, that someone may use reasonable force to secure their own land and that no one can be tried on their own testimony alone.

Clauses 36, 38, 39 and 40 collectively defined the right of Habeas Corpus. Clause 36 required courts to make inquiries as to the whereabouts of a prisoner, and to do so without charging any fee. Clause 38 required more than the mere word of an official, before any person could be put on trial. Clause 39 gave the courts exclusive rights to punish anyone. Clause 40 disallowed the selling or the delay of justice. Clauses 36 and 38 were removed from the 1225 version, but were reinstated in later versions. The right of Habeus Corpus as such, was first invoked in court in the year 1305.

Clause 54 says that no man may be imprisoned on the testimony of a woman except on the death of her husband.


Anti-corruption and fair trade (also in 1225 Charter)
Clauses 28 to 32 say that no royal officer may take any commodity such as corn, wood or transport without payment or consent or force a knight to pay for something the knight could do himself and that the king must return any lands confiscated from a felon within a year and a day.

Clause 25 sets out a list of standard measures and Clauses 41 and 42 guarantee the safety and right of entry and exit of foreign merchants.

Clause 45 says that the king should only appoint royal officers where they are suitable for the post.

Clause 46 provides for the guardianship of monasteries.


Temporary provisions
These provisions were for immediate effect, and were not in any later charter. Clauses 47 and 48 abolish most of Forest Law. Clauses 49, 52 to 53 and 55 to 59 provide for the return of hostages, land and fines taken in John’s reign.

Article 50 says that no member of the D’Athèe family may be a royal officer. Article 51 called for all foreign knights and mercenaries to leave the realm.

Articles 60, 62 and 63 provide for the application and observation of the Charter and say that the Charter is binding on the Kings and his heirs forever, but this was soon deemed to be dependent on each succeeding King reaffirming the Charter under his own seal.


1226–1495
The document commonly known as Magna Carta today is not the 1215 charter, but a later charter of 1225, and is usually shown in the form of The Charter of 1297 when it was confirmed by Edward I. At the time of the 1215 charter many of the provisions were not meant to make long term changes but simply to right the immediate wrongs, and therefore The Charter was reissued three times in the reign of Henry III (1216, 1217 and 1225) in order to provide for an updated version. After this each individual king for the next two hundred years (until Henry V in 1416) personally confirmed the 1225 charter in their own charter.

Magna Carta had little effect on subsequent development of parliament until the Tudor period. Knights and county representatives attended the Great Council (Simon de Montfort’s Parliament), and the council became far more representative under the model parliament of Edward I which included two knights from each county, two burgesses from each borough and two citizens from each city. The commons separated from the Lords in 1341. The right of commons to exclusively sanction taxes (based on a withdrawn provision of Magna Carta) was re-asserted in 1407, although it was not in force in this period. The power vested in the Great Council by, albeit withdrawn, Clause 14 of Magna Carta became vested in the House of Commons but Magna Carta was all but forgotten for about a century, until the Tudors.


[The Tudors
The Magna Carta was the first entry on the statute books, but after 1472, it was not mentioned for a period of nearly 100 years. There was much ignorance about the document. The few who did know about the document spoke of a good king being forced by an unstable pope and rebellious Barons “to attaine the shadow of seeming liberties” and that it was a product of a wrongful rebellion against the one true authority, the king.

The original Magna Carta was seen as an ancient document with shadowy origins, and as having no bearing on the Tudor world. Shakespeare’s King John makes no mention of the Charter at all, but focuses on the murder of Arthur. The Charter in the statute books was thought to have arisen from the reign of Henry III.


First uses of the charter as a bill of rights
This statute was used widely in the reign of Henry VIII, but apparently it was seen as no more special than any other statute, and could be amended and removed. But later in the reign, the Lord Treasurer stated in the Star Chamber that many had lost their lives in the Baronial wars fighting for the liberties, which were guaranteed by the Charter, and therefore it should not so easily be overlooked as a simple and regular statute.

The church often attempted to invoke the first clause of the Charter to protect itself from the attacks by Henry, but this claim was given no credence. Francis Bacon was the first to try to use Clause 39 to guarantee due process in a trial.

Although the early Tudor period saw a re-awakening of the use of Magna Carta in common law, it was not seen, as it was later, as an entrenched set of liberties guaranteed for the people against the Crown and Government. Rather, it was a normal statute which gave a certain level of liberties, most of which could not be relied on, least of all against the King. Therefore the Charter had little effect on the governance of the early Tudor period. Although lay parliament evolved from the Charter, by this stage the powers of parliament had managed to exceed those humble beginnings. The Charter had no real effect until the Elizabethan age.


Reintepretation of the charter
In the Elizabethan age, England was becoming the most powerful force in Europe and so pride became a primary force in academia; thus earnest - but futile - attempts were made to prove that Parliament had Roman origins. The events at Runnymede were "re-discovered" in 1215, allowing a possibility to show the antiquity of Parliament, and Magna Carta became synonymous with the idea of an ancient house with origins in Roman government.

The Charter was interpreted as an attempt to return to a pre-Norman state of things. The Tudors saw the Charter as proof that their state of governance had existed since time immemorial and the Normans had been a brief break from this liberty and democracy. This claim is disputed in certain circles, but explains how Magna Carta came to be regarded as such an important document.

Magna Carta again occupied legal minds, and it again began to shape how that government was run. Soon the Charter was seen as an immutable entity. In the trial of Arthur Hall for questioning the antiquity of the house, one of his alleged crimes was an attack on Magna Carta.

Edward Coke’s opinions

Jurist Edward Coke interpreted Magna Carta to apply not only to the protection of nobles but to all subjects of the crown equally. He famously asserted: "Magna Carta is such a fellow, that he will have no sovereign."One of the first respected jurists to write seriously about the great charter was Edward Coke (1552 - 1634), who had a great deal to say on the subject and was hugely influential in the way Magna Carta was perceived throughout the Tudor and Stuart periods, although his opinions changed across time and his writing in the Stuart period was more influential; that will be discussed below. In the Elizabethan period Coke wrote of Parliament evolving alongside the monarchy and not existing due to any allowance on the part of the monarch. However he was still fiercely loyal to Elizabeth and the monarchy still judged the Charter in the same light it always had, an evil document forced out of their forefathers by brute force; he therefore prevented a re-affirmation of the charter from passing the House, and although he spoke highly of the charter, he did not speak out against imprisonments without due process — actions which came back to haunt later when he moved for a reaffirmation of the charter himself.

Coke’s opinions were so confused because the people in that era were confused about how to treat the charter. The Petition of Right in 1628 was meant as a reaffirmation of the charter, but was defeated by the Attorney General. He stated that the petition claimed it was a mere codification of existing law stemming from Magna Carta, but, he claimed, there was no precedent shown as to these laws existing in such as a way as they bound the present king; there was a definite feeling that the king could not be bound by law and therefore Clause 39 and all others did not apply to him. The charter was seen as important as a statement as to the antiquity of Parliament; not, as could rightfully be claimed, because it was the catalyst to the genesis of Parliament but instead of Parliament being pre-Norman. Again, this latter point is disputed by certain modern critics. The Charter was seen in part as entrenched law due to Coke's opinon and no one would dare deny it, but it most certainly was not seen as binding on the king. Such suggestions were impermissible until the Stuart period.

Magna Carta had attained an almost mythical status for its admirers and was seen as representing a ‘golden age’ of English liberties extant prior to the Norman invasion. Whether or not this 'golden age' ever truly existed is open to debate; regardless, proponents of its application to English law saw themselves as leading England back to a pre-Norman state of affairs. What is true, however is that this age existed in the hearts and minds of the people of the time. Magna Carta was not important because of the liberties it bestowed, but simply as ‘proof’ of what had come before; many great minds influentially exalted the Charter; by the Seventeenth Century, Coke was talking of the Charter as an indispensable method of limiting the powers of the Crown, a popular principle in the Stuart period where the kings were proclaiming their divine right and were looking, in the minds of their subjects at least, towards becoming absolute monarchs.

It was not the content of the Charter which has made it so important in the history of England, but far more how it has been perceived in the popular mind. This is something which certainly started in the Stuart period, as The Charter represented many things which are not to be found in the Charter itself, firstly that it could be used to claim liberties against the Government in general rather than just the Crown and the officers of the crown as discussed above, secondly that it represented that the laws and liberties of England, specifically Parliament, dated back to a time immemorial and thirdly, that it was not only just but right to usurp a King who disobeyed the law.

For the last of these reasons Magna Carta began to represent a danger to the Monarchy; Elizabeth ordered that Coke stop a bill from going through Parliament, which would have reaffirmed the validity of the Charter and Charles I ordered the suppression of a book which Coke intended to write on Magna Carta. By this stage, the powers of Parliament were growing, and on Coke’s death parliament ordered his house to be searched; the manuscripts were recovered and the book was published in 1642 (at the end of Charles I's Eleven Years Tyranny). Parliament began to see Magna Carta as its best way of claiming supremacy over the crown, and began to preach that they were the sworn defenders of the liberties - fundamental and immemorial - which were to be found in the Charter.

In the four centuries since the Charter had originally catered for their creation, Parliament’s power had increased greatly from their original level where they existed only for the purpose that the king had to seek their permission in order to raise scutage. Now they were the only body allowed to raise tax, a right, which although descended from the 1215 Great Charter was no longer guaranteed by it, as it was removed from the 1225 edition. Parliament had now got so powerful that the Charter was at that time being used for two purposes with Parliament as a new organ of the Crown by those wishing to limit Parliament’s power, and as a set of principles Parliament was sworn to defend against the King by those wishing to rival the power of the king with Parliament’s power. When it became obvious that people wished to limit the power of Parliament by claiming it to be tantamount to the crown, Parliament claimed they had the sole right of interpretation of the Charter.

This was a hugely important step, for the first time Parliament was claiming itself a body as above the law; whereas one of the fundamental principles in English law was that all were held by the law; Parliament, the monarch and the church, albeit to very different extents. Parliament here were claiming exactly what Magna Carta wanted to prevent the King from claiming, a claim of not being subject to any higher form of power. This was not claimed until ten years after the death of Lord Coke, but he most certainly would not have agreed with this, as he claimed in the English Constitution the law was supreme and all bodies of government were subservient to the supreme law; the common law, embodied in the Great Charter. These early discussions of Parliament sovereignty seemed to only involve the Charter as the entrenched law, and the discussions were simply about whether or not Parliament had enough power to repeal the document or not. This debate was not as important as it may seem, for although it was important for Parliament to be able to claim a great deal of power, as they could foresee that war was brewing and that very soon they have to claim themselves as more powerful than the King himself, this very provision was provided for by the Charter itself. Clause 61 of The Charter enables people to swear allegiance to what became the Great Council and later Parliament and therefore to renounce allegiance to the King. Moreover, Clause 61 allowed for the seizing of the kingdom by the body which was later to become Parliament if Magna Carta was not respected by the King or Lord Chief Justice. In which case there was no need to show any novel level of power in order to overthrow the King; it had already been set out in Magna Carta nearly half a millennium before hand. However, Parliament was not simply seeking for a justification to overthrow the monarch, they were seeking to establish themselves as the true and sovereign government of the United Kingdom and for this they need to show they could overrule Magna Carta. However Parliament was not ready to repeal the Charter yet, they would need it in order to war against the King, and in fact was cited as the reason why ship-money was illegal, which was the first time Parliament overruled the king; the start of the rebellion.