HW: Tim's liberty

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 06:28:21PM -0400, Gordon Hundley typed out:
> On Apr 16, 2007, at 10:18 AM, M Holmes wrote:
> >I saw an original of the Magna Carta recently. The notes at the display
> >said that only 4 of the original 40 freedoms guaranteed by the document
> >still exist, and Labour is trying to abolish two of those.
> If memory serves, those freedoms were never conferred by the Magna  
> Carta on common people, simply on clergy and nobility. But I follow  
> your point.

	The historian speaks up... It's a tricky point. Magna Carta 
applies to all free men; but not serfs. Exactly where the boundary lies 
between the two wasn't completely clear then and it isn't clear to us 
now where it did then as a result. A serf in English law was one who was 
legally bound to his land and couldn't leave without a lord's 
permission; a free man could sell up and quit any time, although he 
might be obliged to *sell* to his lord, often at a loss, and so his 
circumstances weren't perhaps so very different. 

	The trouble is that we're talking about 1215--and the law in 
question, being English, is assembled from cases, not decreed, and we 
don't have this sort of thing written until the 1320s. For practical 
purposes I think everyone who actually worked land, and a good few 
artisans, and craftsmen, was subject but not necessarily enserfed, but 
their precise status might only be known, even to them, when it came to 
an argument either before a court or against the lord, both of which he 
would have to be lucky to come out to any advantage.

	Some further info based on one of the four surviving originals 
at the British Library, including pictures and a translation:

http://www.bl.uk/treasures/magnacarta/basics.html

	Yours,
		Jon (who taught this once upon a time)
-- 
"When fortune wanes, of what assistance are quantities of elephants?"
	    (Juvaini, Afghan Muslim chronicler, c. 1206)
 Jon Jarrett, Fitzwilliam Museum, jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk