The surprising part about this book is that the Magna Carta does not really show up until the final chapters.  The title is correct; the book is largely about the year and how people in England lived at that time.  There are chapters on schools, families, tournaments, trials, the church, and other important aspects of life under King John, with mere hints in each about how the Magna Carta might have affected them.  King John himself is the focus of many of the pages, of course.  He was the youngest child of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, the fighting royal couple played by Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn in _The Lion in Winter_.  Upon the death of his father, and then of Richard the Lionheart, his brother who had taken the throne, John became king.  John had betrayed Richard, and was generally an unreliable negotiator, having all the power on his side.  He plundered his subjects, with royal revenues by 1215 six times what they had been when he became king in 1199.  He spent lavishly, too, often against his will. He was defeated at the battle of Bouvines and had to pay a huge sum in truce to France in 1214.  The decisive defeat made him king only of England; historians have celebrated the way this turned out, as otherwise England might not have had an existence independent from Europe, but it was not what John had planned at all.  He was forced to concentrate only upon his own island, with drastically limited resources and with some barons who had refused to participate in the war, and others who had been burned in doing so.

King John ruled a land that was perhaps more advanced that we realize, although not much of that advance may be attributed to him.  He did inherit a prosperous kingdom.  All English towns contained at least one school, and not (as had been the case in the past) within monasteries.  If parents could pay, the son went to school, and some peasants were indeed able to negotiate an education for their sons.  Daughters went only to the first few years of school.  By 1215, completing one's education did not mean going to Europe. Oxford may have been less prestigious than Paris or Bologna, but it was a center of the learned.  After a legal clash against students in 1209, some teachers and pupils moved over to spark another center of learning in Cambridge.

Intellectual life through reading did not have to end at middle age; the invention of spectacles enabled teachers and writers to continue indefinitely.  People were certainly not as ignorant as we might imagine.  A fascinating section of the book, dealing with England as part of the wider world, shows that seamen and every learned geometer knew the world to be spherical rather than flat.  It was revisionism in the nineteenth century that declared that in the Dark Ages people were "flat-earthers"; this was probably academic prejudice against what was supposed to have been a time of barbarity and superstition.  There was, of course, superstition aplenty. "Trial by Ordeal" was common; even within an inchoate legal system, guilt or innocence might be determined by lowering a defendant into water to see if he thrashed about (guilty) or "if the water received him" (innocent). God was called upon to make the guilt or innocence plain in such trials, but in
1215 Pope Innocent III forbade priests from helping to determine the ordeal' s outcome.  It was a spur that brought about trial by jury instead.

The details of life in that year come thick throughout the main part of the book.  Astrology was promoted, but some monks and teachers thought it was bunk.  People took part in religious rituals, but one prior wrote, "There are many people who do not believe that God exists... that the universe has always been as it is now and is ruled by chance rather than Providence."  No one knows how many the "many people" were.  There were English colonies as far away as Alexandria.  Summers were warmer by one centigrade degree than they are now, with milder winters and lower rainfall.  If you were right handed, you would write with a quill from the left wing of a goose (and vice versa) so that the feather would curve outwards when you wrote.  Wolves roamed the forests which covered nearly a third of England.  Men wore underwear but women didn't.  Hay was used for toilet paper.  Chess was played with enthusiasm but with simpler rules than now.  Adulterers would be whipped naked through the streets.  This is a lively history, and fun to read.

It concludes with the actual signing of the Magna Carta itself and its effects.  The rebellion by the barons in 1215 was quite different from the many rebellions against previous kings.  Those involved fighting to restore a particular monarch to the throne.  The barons had no such champion; the focus of their revolt was simply a program of reform.  The document itself consists of 63 clauses, the first ten of which (and many of the subsequent ones) have only to do with maintaining the barons' property rights. There are ringing, lofty expressions of principle, but they are late in the charter, and while they are what we revere it for, they were evidently not uppermost on the minds of the barons.  This does not matter, really; "To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice" and that no one will have action against him "... except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land" were important principles then and now. The Magna Carta was intended as a peace treaty, but John was eager to wiggle out of it any way he could, and was helped by the Pope, who declared the Magna Carta null and void.  The all-out civil war that followed was capped by John's death a year later from dysentery.  The Magna Carta was reissued, as it was again in 1225, and it is the 1225 text that entered the statute books.  It was this version that bad kings had to reaffirm; public cries after royal infringements, for instance, forced Edward I to confirm the charter in 1297.  This spirited introduction to thirteenth century history shows that the Magna Carta thus may be more eternally important not as a foundation for specific rights, but as the primal symbol for struggle against tyranny.

 

---Reviewed by Rob Hardy