Can someone provide an example of an English monarch explicitly ceding authority over governance – not delegating authority or accepting the reality of a weak balance of political power – that predates the Magna Carta?
asahi mentions the Charter of Liberties, 1100, which limited King Henry I’s authority but did not confer the same into any other seat or person. It basically says “here’s how I intend to govern.” In contrast, the 1215 Magna Carta offers a similar message, but crucially also gave barons the authority to enforce the rest of the agreement against King John. As quoted by septimus in post #15, King John authorized 25 barons to bear “all their might” should the king fail to abide by the agreement.
Nava says that “Germanic or Germanic-influenced monarchs” needed to call “a meeting between the monarch and the people” to make big decisions. I understand the Parliament of England as having its roots in the Magna Carta itself. When, in England, did the law (as opposed to political realities) require the monarch to consult “the people” on matters of governance before the Magna Carta? How did they do so before the first incarnation of Parliament was established by the Magna Carta?
Stanislaus quotes Lord Sumption, whose expertise I defer to and who says that, before the Magna Carta, the king was clearly not above the law. The lecture linked to is a very interesting read and has changed some of my views on the matter. (Those who think that the Magna Carta enshrines a constitutional protection of the rights of the people should read about Sir Edward Coke’s reinterpretation of the Magna Carta starting near the bottom of page 14.) Still, in denying that Medieval English kings were absolute monarchs, Sumption seems to equate “absolute monarchy” with the ability to do and declare anything. This is not how I understand absolute monarchy. “Absolute,” in my reading, refers to the sole authority to declare the law as they see fit, not the power to do the same. Sumption states that the barons, and presumably the kings of that era, “knew perfectly well that the King could not do as he liked, either in theory or in practice,” which is to say with plenary authority and power. Sumption specifically says that “Medieval kings did not, as the Roman Emporers had done, make law in the plenitude of their power. With the aid of counsellors and wise men, they derived it from the revelation of existing law, whose authority came from its antiquity. The most that could be done was to define it, to express it in better words.” This does not challenge the idea that English kings claimed sole authority to enunciate the law so long as they remained within those unstated bounds of antiquity, that prudent kings did not attempt to exercise authority beyond their power/actual ability to do so, and that the Magna Carta is important historically in how it vested (a very limited but still meaningful) authority in a seat other than the crown to determine and enforce the law against the king.
Before the Magna Carta, enforcing the law against the king required denying the king’s authority in toto; under the 1215 Magna Carta, the council of barons could enforce the charter against the king without denying the king’s possession of and authority under the crown.
The obvious weakness that I see in my thesis is found in Lord Sumption stating “There was no institutional mechanism for enforcing the King’s obligations on him against his will. Magna Carta certainly did not provide one.” I understand Sumption here as saying that it did not create a constitutional mechanism for constraining the king to the law generally. Nonetheless, I do think it did transfer some authority from the crown to the barons (with the language, “we give and grant the barons the following security”), and my understanding is that this is the first time that such a transfer occurred in English history. Again, this is a minimal transfer of authority. The 1215 charter did little more than take the existing remedy of defiance and allow the same dispute, settled by power aka the use of force, to arise without a formal renunciation of feudal bonds; it institutionalized and reduced the friction of existing functional politics; it acknowledged authority where power already existed. Also, it was the king agreeing to behave in certain ways and allowed the barons to hold him to that promise, rather than the barons compelling the king to behave in the ways of the barons’ choosing. In practice, little had changed, certainly nothing of significance, and Sumption takes a practical view of history. (Moreover, the 1225 charter omitted this creation of a council of barons, so it is hard to draw a through-line from the 1215 charter to modern institutions.) Still, my point isn’t about the magnitude of the authority transferred but the mere fact that some authority was ceded from the crown. I think this was novel, and the way in which it is novel inspired new concepts of authority and power in government that, in part, led to the way modern laws are more derived from the people up rather than from leaders down.
Another objection to my thesis might be seen in Lord Sumption’s compelling argument that the important concessions in the Magna Carta are mooted by the magnitude of subsequent social and economic changes. To the extent that the Magna Carta is an agreement to abide by feudal norms, it became irrelevant as feudal practices fell by the wayside. Those involved in the Magna Carta certainly didn’t think the most important thing was a concession of power to the barons.
But, I read history as a long exchange of stories, and this concession of power seems to mark an inflection of those stories, so I see this aspect of the Magna Carta as relevant in understanding how we got to where we are today. Much like the first usage of a given word is often quite different from its modern usage without any direct link between them, the Magna Carta’s assignation of authority is quite distinct from modern systems but remains interesting and important because it was the first to do what it did within this history of society.
In favor of my view is the fact that, as put by Sumption, “Its famous title, the ‘Great Charter,’ was only acquired later in the thirteenth century.” The history and influence of the Magna Carta has less to do with what it actually did than how later generations interpreted it and thereby shaped their actions and consequently their future. Sir Edward Coke cast it as enshrining a protection of individual liberties; I see it as experimenting with the notion that not all authority need flow from a single seat. I’ll admit that I may well have taken the enthusiasm of Sir Edward Coke and applied it to a different aspect of the same document, but that only makes my perception of the Magna Carta inflated if earlier (or common and contemporaneous) agreements with the king did the same thing – thus the query at the top of this post. My current view is that the Magna Carta may have been strongly present in the common consciousness at the right time for the wrong reasons, but it was there nonetheless, and this aspect of it gave credibility to moves in the same direction, if with much larger effect, toward governance by “we the people.”
I want to add to all of my disclaimers that I’m not trying to say that the Magna Carta was a model for the U.S. Bill of Rights or similar protections in other common-law-derived nations. Stanislaus says “[the Magna Carta] wasn’t, at the time, all that it’s now cracked up to be” – and I agree with that. I think the OP overstates the case for the Magna Carta as the foundation of modern rights. Nonetheless, the Magna Carta can still represent an important turning point in English history away from “rule by authority of position” and toward “rule by the people,” even if that path wends between many inflection points.