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LONDON — June 19 will mark the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta — the great charter of rights and freedoms drawn up by the Catholic Abbots of England’s Catholic monasteries and the feudal barons of the English counties and presented to King John to sign. Queen Elizabeth II will visit Runnymede on the Thames, where the signing took place, and various ceremonies and commemorative events are planned around the country for the occasion. But what most people perhaps do not recognize is the central role played by the ROMAN CATHOLIC Church in all of this.

On this day 800 years ago, King John was compelled to sign the Magna Charta, formally accepting a limit to his prerogative to ravage everything in England. But the ink on his signature was barely dry before he brought in foreign forces and tried to wipe out the barons who had compelled him to sign the Charta. The English almost lost their newly-recognized rights within months of the signing because they were not sufficiently suspicious of the King. As David Hume noted in his magisterial History of England, The ravenous and barbarous mercenaries, incited by a cruel and enraged...

Yesterday was the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede. The “Great Charter” (actually, its full name was Magna Carta Libertatum, or Great Charter of Liberty) was the first codification in English history of the principle that the power of government had limitations. I attended a mini-conference to commemorate it on Sunday night and yesterday morning. Hosted by the American Freedom Alliance, in Bellaire (near the UCLA campus), it was an intellectual feast, with talks and panels from historical scholars and law professors (including Amy Peikoff, an Objectivist atheist who declared Ted Cruz to be the...

MAGNA CARTA, on which King John placed his seal 800 years ago today, is synonymous in the English-speaking world with fundamental rights and the rule of law. It’s been celebrated, and appropriated, by everyone from Tea Party members to Jay Z, who called his latest album “Magna Carta Holy Grail.” But its fame rests on several myths. First, it wasn’t effective. In fact, it was a failure. John was a weak king who had squandered the royal fortune on a fruitless war with France. Continually raising taxes to pay for his European adventures, he provoked a revolt by his barons,...

'Among the 27 men named in the preamble to Magna Carta as King John of England's advisors and negotiators was Alan, lord of Galloway and constable of the Scottish king, Alexander II. How had this man, ruler of semi-independent Galloway, a senior officer in Alexander's kingdom and lord of Lauderdale and Cunninghame, come to exercise such influence in English politics?'

Originally published on June 11, 2015 11:30 am Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. Transcript RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST: The Magna Carta has a big birthday coming up. That document, establishing the foundation of the modern judicial system, will turn 800 years old on Monday. ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: At the British Library in London, an exhibition displays the Magna Carta alongside original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Bill of Rights. Both of those documents were inspired by the Magna Carta. A couple of months ago, I visited the British Library for a story on the...

What sometimes seem like epic battles to reshape the world generally fade to irrelevance very quickly. To take just one recent example, 20 years ago the Justice Department was trying to break up Microsoft because the software giant was perceived as too powerful to be challenged by other firms. Today, of course, all the talk is of Google and Apple with Microsoft struggling to find a niche. Only a few events and documents -- like the American Declaration of Independence -- are worthy of celebrating even a century or two later. On Monday, June 15, the Magna Carta turns 800,...

Here might be a workable way to look at academia: That which academics dismiss is probably worth exploring. “There is quite a list of academics who question the importance of the Magna Carta,” University of Chicago law professor Richard Helmholz pointed out in a lecture at the Cato Institute on June 4, 2015. “They dismiss it as baronial and backward looking, an immediate failure and talk about the myth of the Magna Carta.” “I don’t think that view is correct.” Certainly, the sections of the Magna Carta he supplied to accompany his talk hold up well in translation: • No...

In June the world will celebrate 800 years since the issuing of Magna Carta. But 2015 is also the anniversary of another important, and far more radical, British milestone in democratic history, writes Luke Foddy. Almost exactly 750 years ago, an extraordinary parliament opened in Westminster. For the very first time, elected representatives from every county and major town in England were invited to parliament on behalf of their local communities. It was, in the words of one historian, "the House of Commons in embryo". The January Parliament, which first met on 20 January 1265, is one of the...

This year people in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and plenty of other nations will mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. The document will be lauded for establishing one vital principle.

Did the Battle of Lewes, which saw King Henry III defeated 750 years ago, lead to England's first tentative steps towards representative democracy? As bloodied bodies littered the South Downs, the King hid in a priory. His father, King John, had been forced to sign Magna Carta by England's rebellious barons, now Henry had suffered even greater humiliation at their hands. His victor was Simon de Montfort, the French-born Earl of Leicester, who was fighting for the rights of England to be governed by the English. After the battle, where de Montfort's forces were outnumbered by two to one, he...

A venerable enumeration of the rights of man is barely taught anymore, resulting in record low recognition of same. “I went to see the Magna Carta when it was on display a few years ago,” British Conservative MP Daniel Hannan remembered in a speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan last week. “You can get right up to it: Nobody comes.” “When it was on display in New York City in 1939, 14 million people came to see it.” Hannan was the keynote dinner speaker at the Philadelphia Society’s regional meeting on Friday, October 10th. The Society of leading conservative intellectuals was...

More than 280 years after it was damaged in a fire, one of the original copies of the Magna Carta is legible again. Written in 1215, the Magna Carta required the king of England King John to cede absolute power. Today, the Magna Carta is seen as a first step toward constitutional law rather than the hereditary power of royalty. There were four copies of the document created at the time. One, held by the British Library, was badly damaged in a fire in 1731.

John, by the grace of God, king of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and count of Anjou, to the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justiciars, foresters, sheriffs, stewards, servants, and to all his bailiffs and faithful subjects, greeting. Know that, having regard to God and for the salvation of our soul, and those of all our ancestors and heirs, and unto the honour of God and the advancement of the holy Church, and for the reform of our realm, by advice of our venerable fathers, Stephen archbishop of Canterbury, primate of all England and cardinal of...

OUSTON (AP) — It was care fit for a king: The yellowing parchment was fitted inside a custom-designed aluminum and steel case with monitors, then wrapped in specially made packaging. Once it was on the plane, a canon chancellor nervously tracked the flight as it crossed the Atlantic Ocean. That document, a rarely seen copy of the Magna Carta, had never before left England's shores and only once been outside its home in the Hereford Chapel near the Welsh border. Now, the famous charter, written nearly 800 years ago and considered one of the most important documents in the history...

Western states are no longer able to repay its debt. Overwhelmingly, the debt burden of a number of stakeholders is predicated on the existence of large-scale and long-term commitments that are at the core of the overall social contract prevalent in the Western world and beyond. The policy approaches employed thus far, whether ‘quantitative easing’ or ‘twisting’ have not helped lower the debt waters — indeed, they have made matters worse. Instead of ‘quantitative lowering’ of these waters, at least in the United States, private banks and corporations are using their excess liquidity to re-leverage at a feverish pace, thereby...

A man used his DIY expertise to make his own gun using a fence post and a children's building set. Trevor Cracknell, 48, went to a neighbour's house in Macclesfield, Cheshire, and fired the gun which had a steel barrel encased inside a wooden casing. The mechanism was held together with nuts, bolts and metal strips from a Meccano-style toy set.

I am looking at a reproduction of an old engraving of Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It is in Bat Ye'or's book "The Dhimmi," which collects primary documents from history to chronicle the impact of Islamic law on non-Muslims through the centuries. What is notable about the image, which is based on an 1856 photograph, is that the church, said to be at the site of Jesus Christ's crucifixion and burial, has no cross and no belfry. Stripped of its Christian symbols, the church stood in compliance with the Islamic law and traditions of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, which...

CALGARY - Thursday, Jan. 10/08. Outspoken conservative commentator Ezra Levant will be before the Alberta Human Rights Commission Friday defending his former magazine's 2006 publication of a series of Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Members of Calgary's Muslim community were outraged when Levant's now-defunct publication, the Western Standard, published the cartoons in February 2006, shortly after their initial appearance in a Danish newspaper led to rioting and protests around the world. Syed Soharwardy, president of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, later filed a complaint against the Western Standard to the Alberta Human Rights Commission. Ezra Levant was publisher...

We start the year in Britain with a challenge to our essential nature, for 2008 might turn out to be the year when we decide to rip up the Magna Carta. Among the basic civil rights in this country, there has always been, at least in theory, an inclination towards liberal democracy, which includes a tolerance of an individual's right to privacy. We are born free and have the right to decide what freedom means, each for ourselves, and to have control over our outward existence, yet that will no longer be the case if we agree to identity cards.