ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1983, one of four surviving original copies of MagnaCarta, or the Great Charter, travelled to Tallahassee, capital of Florida, a town little visited by the millions who flock to the state’s beaches and theme parks. The copy was in Tallahassee on display as part of a ‘Celebration of Freedom’ across an ocean from Runnymede Meadow in England where King John had set his seal to it. This charter of liberties, extorted by the English barons from the king in 1215 and confirmed in definitive form by Henry III in 1225, is a crucial document for England’s history. Although the British Library’s display of the Great Charter describes it as ‘a series of detailed concessions on feudal law which often seem at first sight baffling’, it has become a symbol of the rule of law, marking one of the earliest attempts to impose the limitations of law on a ruler’s sovereign authority. As an indictment of tyrannical rule, it has won a position as the most widely known of all documents surviving from the European Middle Ages. That Magna Carta, repudiated almost at once by its grantor and resulting in civil war, would eventually earn such reverence that its visits to US cities over 750 years later are occasions for celebration is improbable, but true.
