Professor David Carpenter – Why 2025 is the 800th Anniversary of Magna Carta

At the end of 1215 the Charter King John had issued at Runnymede seemed a failure without a future. This talk explores how the Charter was revived and how the version issued by King Henry III in 1225 was thought throughout the middle ages and beyond to be the Magna Carta, the charter of King John being only ‘the Charter of Runnymede’. The talk will discuss the differences between the Charters of 1215 and 1225 and show how the latter, being far more inclusive and consensual, was much better equipped to sink deep roots into the English political community. The final section of the talk will consider both how far Magna Carta was simply a selfish baronial document and to what degree it can be considered a watershed between lawless and lawful rule.

Dr Andrew Spencer – The First Two Centuries of the English Parliament

The talk will focus on how the idea of parliament, encapsulated in clauses 12 and 14 of the 1215 version of Magna Carta but omitted from the 1225 charter, germinated in the minority of Henry III and became a fixture of English politics and the constitution over the course of the remainder of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The paper will look at the composition and business of parliament and how kings and, at times, their opponents sought to use it to govern and reform the realm.

Helen Carr (in conversation with Dr Paul Dryburgh) – Protest to civil war; civil war to abdication; abdication to deposition and murder

In the centuries after Magna Carta, the people who were the subjects of the Crown wrestled with the problem of how to respond to a king who was weak and ineffectual, or to one who showed despotic tendencies, or, indeed, veered from one extreme to the other. Through a lively conversation, two experts on the period, Helen Carr and Paul Dryburgh, will explore how the ways in which people responded to and dealt with ‘bad kings’ evolved and changed in the two hundred years or so after Magna Carta.

Dr Kathryn Maude – ‘a series of unparalleled completeness and antiquity’: Administering the Nation from the Thirteenth Century

In the first report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Record Office in 1840, Francis Palgrave addresses Queen Victoria, telling her that ‘your Majesty’s Public Records constitute a series of unparalleled completeness and antiquity’. In this talk I will address the thirteenth century development of this great mass of administrative records in the Chancery and Exchequer, and the effect that this administrative state had on governance in medieval England.

Dr Ian Bass – The English Church is to be free: Magna Carta, the Church, and the Crown

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the English Church had established itself as a leading player in the political community of England. Bishops had been emboldened on occasion to attempt to keep the king of England’s power in check, exemplified most notably by Archbishop Thomas Becket of Canterbury, whose antagonism against King Henry II’s encroachments on ecclesiastical privilege led to his own martyrdom in December 1170. This was no different almost half a century later with Magna Carta. Among the backdrop to 1215 and the first issuing of Magna Carta was King John’s refusal to accept Stephen Langton as the papal candidate for archbishop of Canterbury leading to interdict. It is no surprise, then, that clause one states that ‘we grant to God and confirm by this our present charter for ourselves and our heirs in perpetuity that the English Church is to be free and to have all its rights fully and its liberties entirely’, and is confirmed once more in clause sixty-three. To celebrate the 800th anniversary of the 1225 confirmation of Magna Carta, this talk examines the changing role of the English episcopate in attempting to reform the Crown, as well as the Church’s importance in issuing and confirming Magna Carta throughout the thirteenth century.