Chicken Runner61
We stand where we want!
- May 20, 2007
- 4,609
Nothing posted on here - Did she die in Vain??
Nothing posted on here - Did she die in Vain??
LOL - one of his best lines.
"...A pint, that's nearly an armful" ties with "....the lapels always wear out first" for me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/15/world/europe/magna-carta-still-posing-a-challenge-at-800.html
“The myth of Magna Carta lies at the whole origin of our perception of who we are as an English-speaking people, freedom-loving people who’ve lived with a degree of liberty and under a rule of law for 800 years,” said Nicholas Vincent, a professor at the University of East Anglia and the author of “Magna Carta: A Very Short Introduction.”
“It’s a load of tripe, of course. But it’s a very useful myth.”
For one thing, as Jill Lepore pointed out recently in The New Yorker, the original Magna Carta in fact lived a short life and died an obscure death.
It was not seen at the time as marking a great moment in democratic history. Nobody had a chance to follow any of its provisions. Almost immediately after agreeing to it, King John prevailed on the pope to annul it. (In an instance of, perhaps, poetic justice, John died of dysentery shortly afterward.)
Also, it was a narrowly fashioned agreement between a small group of privileged people and an even-more-privileged monarch; there was no mention of regular people or of democracy as we know it.
The original Magna Carta became the basis for a number of successive agreements over the years, signed again and again by various kings, culminating in a more definitive 1297 version, one of whose copies Mr. Rubenstein bought for the National Archives.
But it was not until centuries later that Magna Carta was resurrected, reinterpreted and held up as a great symbol of the rule of law. It was invoked in the early days of the American colonies, again during the drafting of the Constitution, and countless times since.
“It’s one of the many, many things in the Anglo-American legal tradition that will eventually grow and mutate and be misinterpreted as something that’s important,” Akhil Amar, a professor at Yale Law School and author, most recently, of “The Law of the Land,” said of Magna Carta, using the historical present. He added: “Stuff happens later that endows it with a certain retrospective significance.”
seems to be wilfully revisionist. that the original was short lived and it was not invoked again seriously for a long time later, still shouldnt lessen its significance historically. Just like a mathematical medical or technological breakthough of centuries ago, that hasnt been always applied and immediately developed upon. People have a very linear view of history and human development, which is not necessarily true.
Interesting that historian David Starkey has been wheeled out to comment on Magna Carta yet by comparing the SNP with the Nazi Party has completely overshadowed the 800 year-old document. As mischief-making goes he is right up there with Katie Hopkins and Russell Brand.
I quoted that part of the article before I finished reading the whole thing myself. To be fair to it, they do go on to voice the other side of the argument, suggesting it is simply trendy to dismiss the meaningfulness of the Magna Carta, and that it's importance isn't and shouldn't be contained to its immediate impact.