Magna Carta through the Ages

Contemporary Review, July, 2004

Magna Carta through the Ages. Ralph V. Turner. Pearson Longman. [pounds sterling]19.99. x 256 pages. ISBN 0-582-43826-8. As the author points out, Magna Carta was a 'practical solution to political problems', the demand that the King govern according to law. Yet it was soon regarded as a foundation document for the developing British Constitution with its idea that power must be exercised according to principles and laws agreed by both the governor and the governed.

The mythic value of the Charter took on a life of its own in England and then throughout the English-speaking world where its insistence on the liberty of the subject became the basis of ordered government and, in time, democracy. The author points out that 'each generation has reinterpreted Magna Carta in light of intellectual currents of its own time'. In this study Prof. Turner devotes half his eight chapters to the Charter itself, its origins and reception, the nature of King John's rule and the effect of the charter in the century after its promulgation. The final four chapters trace Magna Carta's profound effects during the later Middle Ages and Tudor period, the seventeenth century and after, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (when Whig historians raised the document to mythic proportions) and the Charter in the New World. There is also an appendix which gives a translation of the Charter.