OWEN Dudley Edwards (May 31) is right to be exercised by the curious myth that England's Magna Carta is some sort of British declaration of human rights, and should be revered as such. It was, in reality, a damagelimitation exercise by a weak king who was beleaguered by his own arbitrary misrule at home and abroad. Put simply, King John had threatened the interests of the baronial elite, and the charter which he was forced to endorse codified the extent of their feudal obligations to the throne, restricted his discretion in matters of law, and confirmed the position of the Church.
It was enforced by a committee of 25 men drawn from the barons' own ranks - more a cartel of racketeers, perhaps, than a brotherhood of freedom-loving democrats. But it failed to avert the barons'war, was annulled by the Pope, and only really became constitutionally useful in the seventeenth century when the parliamentarians cited it for their own anti-royalist purposes. As far as the average medieval English man or woman was concerned, it made little difference, and it certainly didn't have the element of moral purpose inherent in Scotland's Declaration of Arbroath.
Even more mystifying than the fact that it comes top of a poll in Britain, or is admired by Gordon Brown, is the extent to which it seems to have entered America's Foundation Myth.
Visitors to the national archives building in Washington DC, where the hallowed documents which established the United States are displayed, are treated to a curious interpretation of the hesitant birth of the world's first great modern democracy.
"As English men and women, " it is claimed, "the colonists were heirs to the thirteenth-century English document, Magna Carta, which established the principle that no-one can take away certain rights."
Indeed, the US government, courtesy of that idiosyncratic politician, H Ross Perot, acquired a 1297 copy of the Magna Carta in 1974, and it is now displayed in close proximity to the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Strange, is it not, that in a country where we know for sure that the educated classes were familiar with the works of Voltaire, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Hutcheson, Rousseau and Smith, the founding fathers should supposedly look to a 500-year-old dodgy document which transferred a degree of power from a single tyrant to a self-interested warlord class bent on its own enrichment.
America may be a flawed and imperfect democracy, but it's certainly rather better than a mere update of thirteenth-century England - or at least let's hope it is, for all our sakes.
David J Black, 17 Lennox Street, Edinburgh.
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