#MagnaCarta: 800 years of Law, Liberty and Legacy (full version)

0:02 wor [Applause] [Music] magara is a peace treaty that was made between King John and his subjects in 1215 it was intended to put an end to a civil war that had broken out between the king and his people this iconic document is seen as the great great

0:49 grandfather of all legal Innovation that's followed [Music] since magnar asserted a fundamental principle that the ruler was subject to the law and that principle has reverberated down the ages so the most famous chapter of the charter is chapter 39 which says that no free man is to be outlawed arrested imprisoned deprived of property or in any way proceeded against save by the lawful Judgment of his peers or the law of the land and that means the king can't just say off with your head into prison I'm seizing your lands if he wants to act act against you he has to do so by some kind of lawful

1:41 process the exhibition on Magna Carta at the British Library staging this year called Magna Carta Law Liberty Legacy is the biggest exhibition that there has ever been on Magna Carta and we will be drawing on the really rich historical collection of manuscrip scripts and documents that we have here in the library but supplementing that with an enormous and really exciting range of loans from nearly 30 different lenders with this ahrc funded project we've been able to draw on the new research and bring the fruits of that research to the public both through the exhibition itself and through the events program that we're delivering alongside the academic Partners have

2:28 also helped to develop the content of our exhibition here so we had an Advisory Group and they helped us in the selection of objects and the scoping of the exhibition choosing the themes and have really been at the heart of developing the [Music] exhibition what are you going to see in this exhibition that you wouldn't see in the ordinary run of events you're going to see at least five magn cartas most people think there are only four but you're going to see five of them you're going to see the foundational documents of the American Constitution the Declaration of Independence but also the Bill of Rights the basis of American law the basis of the American Constitution you're going to see King John's teeth the teeth that he used to bite down on

3:14 whatever he at the night that he spent at runny me having granted this Charter perhaps the teeth that he nashed in Fury at the Barons for forcing this Charter upon him you're getting to see the axe that was used to behead various of those who as recently as the 1820s protested against the arbitrary authority of the king and attempted a conspiracy against English [Music] Monarchy everybody thinks this is a document that must been known to pieces that it's been looked at for hundreds of years there can't be anything new to discover we wanted to find out what wasn't known about magnar and we have

4:00 indeed found out a great deal about this document that 3 years ago we did not know the Magna carter project has had several strands in it one which Nick Vincent's been particularly concerned with is to collect all the original charters of King John and hundreds have emerged they've all been photographed and so on to see whether we can actually see the hand in some of these charters in the four Originals of Magna Cart itself and I think a huge amount is going to come out of that we wanted to get behind the image of King John by finding out precisely what the King was up to and to do that we had to visit hundreds of archives in England and France and actually find the king's outgoing correspondence it's only when

4:46 you put bits of historical evidence in context against one another that you can actually see the broader picture so only when we see the king negotiating with two sides of a rival dispute can we actually see that the king is a duplicitous individual who is playing off one side against the other it's only when we find the king promising one thing to one party and the same thing to another party that we know that the king is a liar and that the king is capable of playing off Rivals against one another in order to occupy the ground himself in the first week of February we had a really exciting event at the British library to celebrate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta for the first time in 800 years we brought together the four surviving origin Magna carter

5:32 Charters now that could have been just an occasion of Celebration and anniversary and so forth but because of the scholarly investigation that underpinned this we were able to say a whole series of interesting things about these documents that hadn't been noticed who actually wrote them what the scribes what the individual handwriting of those documents tells us and the detailed scientific investigation of the text of the charter also revealed at that reunification a whole series of words scribble on the front of one of these documents that we did not know were there and they show us that the charter continued to be used that people were still looking at it investigating it in the 14th and 15th centuries trying to apply to a later political environment

6:18 and none of that do we know until these documents came together it's not so difficult to think back a 100 years it's much more difficult to think forward a 100 years to 20 1 15 and to wonder whether Magna Carta will still be studied and celebrated then um I think in the short term its future is in good hands with the Arts and Humanities research Council project and the great celebration of this year let's hope in 215 Magna Carta will similarly be studied and celebrated what fascinates me about this is that here's a story that's 800 years old that you think everybody knew and and yet if you dig a little deeper and if you have some clue as to where to look you are going to find things that

7:05 fundamentally alter the way that we view the past is there something special about the English legal tradition is there a respect for Law and freedom in England that there isn't elsewhere it's important if we revisit those questions that we do so from a sound and scholarly historical base and thanks to the HRC we are able to do that