Hey guys! Adventure Van here with a blog about the Magna Carta, also known as the Magna Carta Libertatum, is a collection of rights forged from the 1200s in a balancing effort to stop the Barons from revolting against the King. It is made of 63 charters (although it was originally one large block of text, separated by historians at a later date.) It guarantees the rights of the Barons from multiple insurgences on their persons, from reducing taxes to denying the King the right to wrongfully imprison them. It might also be noted that the effort did not work, instead letting the tensions rise until the First Baron's War was reached.
What did the Magna Carta entail? It is often cited as one of the sources for the US constitution, with many separate groups writing their own charters before they were all unified. However, even in Britain, the actual Manga Carta holds little to no legal weight, having been changed, repealed and refined to the point the original document means nothing to the legal system anywhere. Surprisingly, New Zealand is one of the closest places to having the Magna Carta have standing there, clause 29 of it actually being law. It's been mentioned many times over history, however.
The Magna Carta often is used as the people's arguments against monarchies and kings, despite originally being written as an attempt to balance the power of two separate ruling classes. Over the years, we've seen it used as an attempt to tone down the powers that be instead of removing them directly, except in extreme circumstances. It is a list of rights for those who were already in power and wanted to secure it, and it did not even work in stomaching the crisis that caused it to be written in the first place. The ideas on it, while powerful for their time, have slowly faded away as all historical documents do, and need to either be added upon and reinforced or let go of.
Adventure Van, signing out.
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