10. If anyone who has borrowed from the Jews any amount, large or small, dies before the debt is repaid, it shall not carry interest as long as the heir is under age, of whomsoever he holds; and if that debt falls into our hands [if the Jewish creditor dies and the king takes over his bonds], we will take nothing except the principal sum specified in the bond.
11. And if a man dies owing a debt to the Jews, his wife may have her dower [dowry] and pay nothing of that debt; and if he leaves children under age, their needs shall be met in a manner in keeping with the holding of the deceased, and the debt shall be paid out of the residue, saving the service due to the lords. Debts owing to other than Jews shall be dealt with likewise.
Those clauses are not in the 1216 Magna Carta. But we are not in 2016. This will all look very silly if we have to go through it again next year. No one would blame the Queen, by then aged 90, if she refused to turn up.
I hope that you are enjoying David Cameron's celebration of Magna Carta, only two clauses of which are in any sense still operative (with one of those being the one that entitles the City of London to do as it pleases) and no part of which can be enforced through the courts, while he seeks to repeal the Human Rights Act, which remains in force.
I have a lot of time for people who object to the term, "the Magna Carta". I was taught never to add a definite article to anything Latin: Magnificat, Nunc Dimittis, Te Deum, et cetera. Plus, there is no the Magna Carta. Myths are not lies. But they are not facts, either.
What an utterly retarded post, pulling out an irrelevant section about Jews that has nothing to do with why Magna Carta is celebrated (well done to this blogger for making the amazing discovery that Europe was once antisemitic-who knew?).
ReplyDeleteThe whole point of Magna Carta was that it's historically ground-breaking because it was the first ever document to place restraints on the Monarch himself, guarantee equal justice for all and enshrine jury trial in law thus giving birth to the notion of the rule of law and limits on the power of the executive.
Rejecting that extraordinary legacy because of a prejudiced passage is like rejecting everything Plato wrote because of his views on slavery or completely dismissing Thomas More because he had six heretics burned at the stake. Only a historical illiterate judges the past entirely by the standards of today.
We do of course have a Bill of Rights-and it wasn't enacted by Tony Blair.
You're probably one of those Leftwing illiterates who thinks Britain had no civil liberties before 1998.
Thus giving birth to the notion of the rule of law and limits on the power of the executive.
DeleteAnd if you believe that as an historical fact, then you need to read cleverer Tories.
They would be the first to explain to you that, while myths are not facts, nor are they lies.
The Whigs who tried to define Magna Carta as you do insisted precisely that there was nothing knew about it, but that it reached back to an Anglo-Saxon constitution that the Norman Conquest had overthrown.
That view fed into, and even created, a certain school of English Marxism. But it had no factual basis. Still, well, see above.
There is a reason why Shakespeare's King John does not mention Magna Carta at all, and why for most of history John has been regarded as purely the worst ever King of England, with no mitigating feature, still less one as big as this.
As I said, read cleverer Tories.
Or read you. Better still, do both.
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