Magna Carta’s spirit can help us resist today’s overweening state

On Monday it will be 800 years since a bunch of barons forced King John of England to give his seal to a document they had drawn up. Scrawled on sheepskin, in ink made from dust, water and apples, the document contained 63 clauses.

Its aim was to prevent a civil war between the irate barons and autocratic John. To avoid his kingdom descending into strife, the barons said, John should accede to their demands, which were as varied as “There should be standard measures of ale, wine and corn throughout the kingdom” to “If a man dies owing money to Jews, his wife (should) pay nothing towards the debt from it”.

Reluctantly, John signed. But the peace was short-lived. Within weeks the document had been annulled by Pope Innocent III, who described it as “shameful”, and the barons and king were at war.

None of the men who gathered in that field near Windsor on June 15, 1215 to watch John give a tentative nod to their demands could have imagined the impact their document would have — not just in England but everywhere.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Magna Carta, as it came to be known, has shaped the world we live in more than any other single document.

It propelled England into the modern era, helped give birth to liberty in America, inspired French revolutionaries, shaped Aussie law, and inspired radicals as far afield as South Africa and China. Not bad for a list of demands made by some pissed-off medieval barons 800 years ago.

The reason the Great Charter had such a planet-quaking impact is because, for all its quirkier demands about ale, women and debt, it unleashed a simple but revolutionary idea: that the power of the state must sometimes be shackled in order to allow individual liberty and autonomy to flourish.

This idea sings through clauses 38 and 39. “In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it,” says clause 38.

Here, in words that sound as relevant to us today as they must have done to those barons 800 years ago, we have one of the earliest articulations of the rule of law. Let people be, Magna Carta says, unless there’s a strong case they’ve done something wrong.

Clause 39 says: “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled … except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.”

Here again we have a proposal to limit pesky officials’ ability to interfere with people’s rights and property unless they have a very good reason to do so.

Magna Carta, with its king-defying — even God-defying — insistence that the power of the state should be limited in the name of letting “free men” go about their business, let the genie of liberty out of the bottle. And there was no forcing it back in.

Subsequent generations built on Magna Carta, arguing that it shouldn’t only be barons who enjoyed protection against nosy, interfering officials — so should everyone. In England in the 17th century, the radical jurist Edward Coke cited Magna Carta in his successful arguments against the right of officials to search people’s homes. He said: “(T)he house of everyone is to him as his Castle and Fortress.”

That is, an Englishman’s home is his castle. Coke was saying the falling-down home of a dirt-poor farmer should be treated the same as a baron’s castle: a place where officialdom should not tread. And so was Magna Carta’s promise of liberty spread beyond barons.

In America in the 1760s, the revolutionary James Otis denounced the British colonialists’ use of “writs of assistance”, which allowed them to search people’s homes. Such meddling went against Magna Carta, he said.

He went so far as to say that when that document was signed in 1215, “American independence was then and there born”. The Fourth Amendment of the US constitution — which guarantees “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects” — made clause 39 of Magna Carta a reality for all.

Magna Carta energised the French Revolution. The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen borrows from the barons when it says no man should be “indicted, arrested, or detained except in cases determined by law”.

In South Africa, Nelson Mandela appealed to Magna Carta in his famous 1964 trial, insisting that he and all black South Africans deserved protection against the excessive power of apartheid courts.

In Tiananmen Square in 1989, the rowdy students who faced down the Communist Party’s tanks also harked back to that document drawn up by English barons. They pinned Magna Carta to their “Democracy Wall”.

On the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, the thing most people are saying about it is that it pretty much invented the rule of law. That’s true. But it makes Magna Carta’s achievements sound boring, lawyerly. For what Magna Carta ultimately did is point to a potential, and profound, shift in the relationship between the state and the individual. It implied that there’s something bad in an overweening state, and something good in letting individuals be. “The right to be let alone”, as American revolutionaries would put it.

“Let alone” — this is Magna Carta’s true revolutionary idea, the one that spoke to generation after generation who longed to get officials off their backs so they could live more freely.

The Levellers, the most radical wing in the English Civil War of the 1640s, put it best. Magna Carta, they said, was a “brazen wall and impregnable bulwark” protecting people from power.

This is what humans have longed to build, using Magna Carta as a foundation stone: a brazen wall guarding the individual from officialdom. From the Levellers to the Tiananmen revolters, the human demand has been the same: shackle the state in order that the individual might live a freer, happier life.

Today, even as we celebrate Magna Carta’s birthday, this idea is under attack. We’re no longer “let alone”. The bossiness of the state is growing, at the expense of individual autonomy.

Whether it’s banning smoking, restricting boozing, censoring speech, reading our emails, storing our phone data, or telling us how we should eat, parent and behave, the state’s instinct to interfere in our lives is as strong today as it’s ever been

The state is breaking down the “impregnable bulwark” between itself and us, now monitoring the minutiae of our lives.

Waving the Magna Carta won’t ward off these nannies, nudgers and naggers. Instead we need to recover the spirit of Magna Carta, which was expanded on by hordes of humans over 800 years: the spirit of freedom; the spirit of independence; the spirited demand to be let alone to determine our destinies for ourselves.