Magna Carta Two

Organisation: None whatsoever
Rules: Each Knight makes up his or her own
People qualified to become Knights: Everyone, Anywhere
How to become a Knight: Make the vow aloud in front of at least one other person

The Vow

I declare that all life is sacred. I vow to dedicate my own life henceforth to defending, cherishing and protecting life on Earth. I hereby declare war on all enemies of life on Earth and I hereby vow to conduct an unremitting fight against them. I will behave with true knightly courtesy to all my sister and brother Knights and give them what aid and succour they need.

Policy

There will be no central organisation. Each local group of knights shall form their local community and arrange to meet locally at regular intervals to plan their campaigns against the enemies of life. It will be the duty of each group to ensure that any atrocity against life in its area be attacked and destroyed. The need to establish national journals of the Knights, or even a world one to keep Knights in touch with each other is evident.

First Published by John Seymour (2001, Fourth World Review Number 112)

The postings on this site are: The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; Knights of Gaia.

Like the very first clause in Magna Carta the final clause seeks to make a clear distinction between the Earthly and eternal powers of the king and of the church respectively.

It is an attempt to place the Church and the State in the broader context of the governance of a realm that at the time numbered perhaps five or six million persons. The 63rd and final clause of Magna Carta goes like this:

‘It is accordingly our wish and command that the English Church shall be free and that men in our kingdom shall have and keep all these liberties, rights, and concessions, well and peaceably in their fulness and entirety for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all things and all places for ever’.

Is this clause deserving of a place in Magna Carta II - the sequel? If you think it does then how should the clause be worded?

The postings on this site are: The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; Knights of Gaia.

The first clause in Magna Carta concedes the freedom of the Church and its right to elect its own dignitaries without royal interference. This was a reflection of a dispute between King John and the Pope over Stephen Langton's election as Archbishop of Canterbury. It does not appear in the Articles of the Barons and it was a moot point whether to include it in the Magna Carta at all.

Here is the translated text of this clause from the British Library website.

‘First that we have granted to God and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired. That we wish this so to be observed, appears from the fact that of our own free will, before the outbreak of the present dispute between us and our barons, we granted and confirmed by charter the freedom of the Church's elections - a right reckoned to be of the greatest necessity and importance to it - and caused this to be confirmed by Pope Innocent III. This freedom we shall observe ourselves, and desire to be observed in good faith by our heirs in perpetuity.

Is this clause deserving of a place in Magna Carta II - the sequel? If you think it does then how should the clause be worded?

The postings on this site are: The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; Knights of Gaia.

After 800 years it is time for a sequel to Magna Carta…and it would be rather nice if Charles III, King of England, were on hand to sign it into English Law at Runnymede at the Summer Solstice of 2015…800 years on. At the Radical Consultation in Swindon a draft of the sequel Magna Carta II will be prepared for endorsement at the Final Plenary Session on Saturday 9th September 2006 and a Declaration of Intent produced for the Monday Press Conference 'Nine Eleven - Five Years On' .

Magna Carta II will be a People’s Charter. Each of the sixty three (unnumbered) clauses of Magna Carta I will be posted to this weblog site with a few remarks about the context of the original clause and its relevance to a 21st Century setting.

Each posting will be open for comment and anybody from anywhere may do so. In this way an Open Online Conference about a Local Neighbourhood Charter will be convened for three months in June, July and August 2006 leading up to the Radical Consultation in September.

The job of the conference participants on 7-9 September will be to sift through the internet postings and other comments and learned papers that have come in...by post, email or by hand...and agree the wording...or perhaps several alternative form of words...for the charter that will be put before the Final Plenary of the Third Radical Consultation on the afternoon of Saturday 9th September 2006 for enthusiastic endorsement.

The postings on this site are: The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; Knights of Gaia.

The text of Magna Carta bears many traces of haste and is clearly the product of much bargaining and many hands. Most of its clauses deal with specific…and often long-standing…grievances rather than with general principles of law. Some of the grievances are self-explanatory but others can be understood only in the context of the feudal society in which they arose. Of a few clauses, the precise meaning is still a matter of argument.

Magna Carta attempted to do several things: to define the power of the monarch vis-à-vis the barons; to safeguard the powers of the Church and to codify some of the rights ordinary people enjoyed under Common Law. So it ended up setting down some basic ideas of liberty, democracy and constitutionalism. Many of these have tended to be taken for granted ever since. But for any renewal of theories of governance it represents quite a good departure point.

The document begins with a greeting from John, by the grace of God King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and Count of Anjou, to his archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justices, foresters, sheriffs, stewards, servants, and to all his officials and loyal subjects.

About two-thirds of the clauses of Magna Carta are concerned with matters of feudal governance and the misuse of their powers by royal officials. Many of these clauses can be adapted or updated to suit modern conditions. The scope for extortion and abuse in the feudal system…as in almost any system…was great so governance needed a light touch with rights, duties, rules and regulations applied benevolently.

Complaints about administration of The Good Old Law were rife long before King John came to the throne with abuses aggravated by the difficulty of obtaining redress. One of the things Magna Carta does is to set out the means for obtaining a fair hearing of complaints against the king and his agents…and against lesser feudal lords.

The postings on this site are: The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; Knights of Gaia.

The day the English barons and King John signed the Magna Carta is often regarded as the first tentative step from absolute monarchy to government by the people. Nothing is ever this straightforward but in a recent poll by The Times newspaper a quarter of the five thousand people polled voted the Magna Carta as the most important milestone in English Constitutional history. The event took place at Runnymede an island in the River Thames on 15th June 1215.

But in the 18th century the Vatican started harmonising everyone’s calendar. There were sound reasons for this because the sun and moon were getting out of alignment. In England the loss of eleven days this entailed happened in September 1752 shifting Christmas to just 355 days after Christmas 1751. The complications rippled on for centuries.

In the Gregorian calendar the years 1800 and 1900 were no longer leap years but in the Julian calendar they were. This resulted in the difference between the two calendars increasing to 12 days after February 1800 and then to 13 days a century later. 2000 was a leap year in both calendars. So Old Christmas Eve that was on the 4th January in 1753 is now on 6th January every year and coincides with Twelfth Night.

Be that as it may one way or another in England eleven days have been lost since Magna Carta was signed in 1215. So to avoid confusion about the 800th anniversary in 2015 it makes sense to associate Magna Carta II with the Summer Solstice rather than with a specific date like the 15th or the 26th.

The postings on this site are: The Royal Prerogative; Date of Magna Carta; What Is Magna Carta; Charter 2015, The Clauses of Magna Carta; Knights of Gaia.

In England the royal prerogative is the way centralised Government bypasses Parliament. These princely prerogatives are what Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army left in the royal domain after grabbing the things that mattered for their Short, Long and Barebone Parliaments.

Oliver Cromwell was born in 1599 and was elected to represent Cambridge City in the Short Parliament of April 1640. He continued to serve in the Long Parliament convened in August 1640 and took a leading role in that parliament's refusal to bail out the bankrupt King Charles I, eventually stripping him of his power, taking control of fiscal policy and placing the army and navy under parliamentary control. Within two years a Civil War was waging throughout the land with families divided and royalist Cavaliers and parliamentarian Roundheads at daggers drawn.

Out of the skirmishing the Puritans emerged victorious, cut off the king's head and after an interlude with the Barebones Parliament appointed Cromwell as Lord Protector of England ruling with the help of a single-chamber parliament. It was not long before the expense of a standing army and the cost of the trade war with the Dutch brought Cromwell to his knees too. Nations need finance as well as firepower if they are to undertake glorious action. Cromwell died in 1658 and two years later the monarchy was restored.

The immediate legacy of the English Civil War was a constitution in which the King in Parliament was the glue that bound together the monarchy and the three branches of government: the legislature, the administration and the judiciary. Before the English Civil War the princes did not rule unfettered. There was a written constitution imposed by provincial barons on King John at Runnymede called Magna Carta. But mostly the princes were constrained by the unwritten Common Law and the rights derived from it upheld by a semi-independent judiciary’.