As well as making available a new English translation of Magna Carta 1215, The Magna Carta Project is producing expert commentaries on every clause of the Charter, with versions available for schools, the general public and scholars. For this blog, Dr Henry Summerson, Research Associate on the Magna Carta Project, describes his role in writing the commentaries. I see my role in the Magna Carta Project as that of an all-rounder who has been recruited to support a team of specialists. The authors of the commentary on a number of chapters pretty well choose themselves – Paul Brand for the ones dealing with legal matters, Louise Wilkinson for those relating to matters like inheritance and marriage, David Carpenter for chapters which link politics and government, and so on. But that still leaves about half of the chapters which make up the Charter unassigned, some of them concerned with issues which have never received much scholarly attention – Number33, for instance, about fish-traps in the Thames – while others are celebrated ones which have been repeatedly debated from the seventeenth century onwards, like Number 40, in which King John promised that he would not sell, defer or deny justice. Obscure and famous alike, they make up my responsibility, to be researched and interpreted, for what seems like the first time in some cases, for the umpteenth times in others.
If I’m to have any chance of saying something new about the well-known
chapters, or of shedding light on the obscure ones, I’ve got to research them
all as fully as possible. Fortunately
practically all the available sources (of which there are surprising, and
sometimes alarming, amounts) are in print.
Less fortunately, what are probably the most important ones, the volumes
published by the Record Commission in the 1830s and 1840s, which record the
day-by-day workings of King John’s government, came out before the invention of
the subject index. They’ve got impressively
detailed indexes of people and places, but that is all. This means that unlike present-day
publications of, say, the Selden Society or the Pipe Roll Society, they offer
no lists of headings to guide me round their contents, and the only way I can
discover what is in them is to read them, all of them, again and again. To do that for every chapter in turn would be
an impossibly time-consuming undertaking, and so I tackle them in batches,
dealing with four or five chapters at a time. This is still a slow business, but it has the
advantage of enabling me to keep an eye out for things which I missed in
earlier trawls – one of the great advantages of electronic publishing is that
it’s easy to correct or amplify texts which have been put up on-line.
So for each batch I start by reading right through the Record Commission
editions of the Close Rolls, Patent Rolls, Fine Rolls etc., noting down
relevant material as I go, and then – with some relief – I turn to the Pipe
Rolls. These do have subject indexes,
admittedly rather rudimentary ones for the years before 1189, but very full
ones for later years, and I start by going through these, though I always end
up skimming the complete text as well, since even the best subject index can’t
be expected to cover every possible issue.
I treat the Curia Regis Rolls,
which have impressively detailed indexes, in much the same way, and also
relevant Selden Society volumes. For
ecclesiastical affairs I turn principally to the English Episcopal Acta series.
Then there are administrative records like the Book of Fees, and texts like Glanvill
and the Dialogue of the Exchequer,
the latter reinforced by Thomas Madox’s Antiquities
of the Exxhequer – some 250 years old now, in its second edition, but based
on a reading of twelfth- and thirteenth-century records so extensive as to make
it practically an original source in its own right.
After that I turn to the narrative
sources, the contemporary accounts of the reigns of the Angevin kings by men
like Roger of Howden, Gervase of Canterbury and Roger of Wendover. Of varying reliability, and often wildly
prejudiced, the likely biases of these chronicles have always got to be kept in
mind, though they also help to give them vitality, and may in any case reflect
opinions held by others besides those of the men who wrote them. Many of these texts are available in the
Rolls Series, or have been published by Nelson/Oxford Medieval Texts, but some
important chronicles – the History of
William Marshal, for instance, or the Histoire
des ducs de Normandie – have to be consulted in free-standing editions. All these works can present problems of
interpretation; for help in understanding individual words, and what they
signified in the years round 1200 (some commonly-used words could have five or
six different meanings), I make continual use of the recently completed Medieval Latin Dictionary. I always leave reading secondary material until last, since I like to
form my own impressions of the issues represented by a chapter in Magna Carta
before finding out what other historians have made of them. Every generation has its own point of view –
or sometimes several points of view - about the Charter, and some great
historians have given expression to it, from Stubbs and Maitland in the late
nineteenth century via McKechnie, Jolliffe, Stenton (both of them) and
Mitchell, down to Sidney Painter and Sir James Holt in recent times, and indeed
beyond, to scholars working today. I
don’t think of myself as engaged in a debate, still less a quarrel, with what
eminent scholars of past generations have written about Magna Carta, but I do
need to know what their views were, and (if possible) why they held them. And at a less exalted level, I also need to
keep an eye out for what can be very valuable material published in specialist
journals (when working on the fish traps, for instance), or by county record
societies. The Royal Historical
Society’s on-line bibliography is a great help in tracking down sometimes
recondite books and articles. I’ve got to
be selective in the books and articles I consult if I’m ever to write anything
myself, but here, as in other respects, I’m helped by the organisation of the
Magna Carta project, since everything I write is read by my colleagues, who can
draw my attention to anything important I’ve missed.
I’m also helped, in a different way, by my additional responsibility for
providing commentaries for general readers and for secondary school
pupils. My principal task involves writing
commentaries for an academic readership of scholars like myself and my
colleagues, but the project has a wider remit, to put its learning at the
disposal of people who want to know about Magna Carta, but not necessarily all about it. I compose these supplementary commentaries
last, basing them on, and constantly referring back to, the longer texts I’ve
just composed, and the need to express myself concisely and clearly, without
using technical language, makes them a valuable control on these – I’ve often
picked up mistakes and inconsistencies, and realised that I’ve been vague just
where I need to be precise, while doing this.
And when all that’s done, the commentaries can finally go up on the
project website. I’ve had no feedback yet,
but look forward to getting some, even if it does make corrections necessary –
it will all help in the task of interpreting Magna Carta, a process that has
never ceased and is not likely to.
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