How did Magna Carta become a symbol of liberty?

Magna Carta became a symbol of liberty in stages. In the 13th century it was reissued, read aloud and placed in statute law, so that it became familiar well beyond the barons it first served. In the 17th century lawyers recast it as a statement of ancient individual rights. In the 18th and 19th centuries reformers and radicals used it as a slogan, often with little regard for what it actually said. [1] [2] [3]

In 1265 Henry III reconfirmed the charter and ordered it read out once a year in shire courts. The Church helped entrench it, partly because its first clause guaranteed the Church's freedom. From the 1250s it was read regularly in church in Latin, Anglo-Norman and English, and from 1253 anyone who broke its terms faced excommunication, according to Smithsonian Magazine. [1]

In 1297 Edward I's chancellors reissued the 1225 version under his seal, ordered it read twice a year in cathedrals and added it to the Statute Rolls, which enshrined it in English law. By the end of the century it was cited in court and in political argument, and had come to serve as a totem against tyrannical kings for laypeople as well as the elite. The National Archives likewise describes it as a totem of the liberty of the subject from arbitrary kingship and of the rule of law. [1] [4]

Early in the 1600s, English lawyers took a new interest in the charter. Sixteenth-century humanist research had produced a picture of an English legal tradition that upheld individual liberty from earliest antiquity. Sir Edward Coke and John Selden gave Magna Carta a special status on this basis: other statutes could be repealed, but this one was held to embody the original liberties of the English people against the state. [2]

Coke's commentary in The Second Part of the Institutes presented the charter as the central legal safeguard against arbitrary royal action. He saw it as a declaration of rights held since antiquity, not as a grant of new ones. Opponents of Charles I used this reading to argue for limits on the king's prerogative, in a conflict that ended in civil war and the king's execution. By the mid-century, historians were already doubting the accuracy of this account, but the idea of the charter as a guarantee of individual freedoms had taken hold regardless. [2]

After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, parliament became the supreme law-making body, able to amend or repeal even parts of Magna Carta. That weakened the idea of it as an unalterable ancient law. The charter nonetheless endured as a weapon against what critics saw as an overbearing parliament. It was invoked against the Excise scheme of 1733 and against naval impressment, and John Wilkes used it to win public support after his arrest in 1763. [3]

Alexander Lock writes that those who invoked it rarely read it or understood its historical context. For them it was a symbol of English liberty rather than a legal text, and beyond the due-process promises of chapters 39 and 40 they cared little about its specific clauses. Its image appeared on objects such as playing cards, porcelain and prints. In this account its power as a flexible symbol is what secured its place as an international emblem of freedom. [3]