100 Fun Facts About Magna Carta

King John, who agreed to Magna Carta, inherited the throne in 1199 from which crusading brother?

Richard I: paying for his crusade, and then the ransom to free him from a German emperor's prison, had already strained England before John's own war taxes pushed the barons into revolt.

Runnymede, where Magna Carta was agreed, is a water-meadow on the bank of which river?

The Thames: the meadow was neutral ground, lying between King John's stronghold at Windsor and the rebel barons' base, so neither side had to meet on the other's ground.

Stephen Langton, who helped draft Magna Carta, is also credited with dividing which book into chapters?

The Bible: Langton was a Paris theologian whom the pope made Archbishop of Canterbury over King John's objections, a quarrel that shut England's churches for years before the two men met over the charter.

The rebel barons demanded that John confirm the Charter of Liberties issued a century earlier by which king?

Henry I: he issued it at his coronation in 1100 and then largely ignored it, but it handed the barons a precedent, and they built their own list of demands on top of it.

Which pope annulled Magna Carta in 1215, declaring it null and void?

Innocent III: John had made England a papal fief two years earlier, so the pope backed his vassal and struck the charter down as extorted by force, barely ten weeks after Runnymede.

Magna Carta's clause 61 let 25 barons do what if John broke it?

Seize his castles: the 25 could also take his lands and hold them until he put things right, though the king, queen and their children were not to be touched; within three months the two sides were at war.

The collapse of the Magna Carta settlement in 1215 led to which conflict?

The First Barons' War: the peace lasted barely three months, and the fighting outlived John himself, ending only in 1217 under the government of his young son.

During the war that followed Magna Carta, the rebel barons offered the English throne to which French royal?

Prince Louis: the future Louis VIII won over most of the rebel barons, but John's death pulled the rug from under him; they rallied to the boy king instead, and Louis went home in 1217.

What served as Henry III's crown in 1216?

His mother's gold band: with the capital in enemy hands and the royal regalia missing, Queen Isabella's jewellery had to serve when the nine-year-old was hastily crowned at Gloucester; a full ceremony followed four years later.

The document acquired the name 'Magna Carta' in 1217 to distinguish it from which smaller companion document?

The Charter of the Forest: 'great' simply meant the larger of the two documents, not the more important; the clauses on the royal forests had been lifted out to make the shorter one.

Which king, the grandson of King John, reissued Magna Carta in 1297 as part of English statute law?

Edward I: in the year William Wallace beat his army at Stirling Bridge, the charter became a statute, which is why this version, not John's original, still has clauses in force today.

A fire damaged one Magna Carta and which poem's only manuscript?

Beowulf: the 1731 blaze at Ashburnham House in Westminster left the epic's pages scorched and brittle, and melted the royal seal on one of the four surviving 1215 charters into a shapeless blob.

Which cathedral keeps what is often called the best-preserved 1215 Magna Carta?

Salisbury: its copy was probably delivered by Elias of Dereham, a cleric who was at Runnymede when John agreed the charter and who later oversaw the building of the present cathedral.

Lincoln Cathedral's Magna Carta spent much of the Second World War stored where for safekeeping?

Fort Knox, Kentucky: stranded in America by the war after starring at the 1939 New York World's Fair, it was evacuated there in 1941 alongside the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.

Which jurist published the first modern critical edition of Magna Carta in 1759?

Sir William Blackstone: early printers had worked from Henry III's later reissue, and his 1759 edition was the first to sort out the many versions and set John's original charter apart from them.

The 1215 Magna Carta was written in which language?

Medieval Latin, then the working language of law and government: for everyone else the charter had to be heard, so copies went out to sheriffs and bishops to be read aloud to the people.

What was the parchment of the 1215 Magna Carta made from?

Sheepskin: a royal treasury manual written a generation earlier tells its scribes to use it on purpose, because ink is hard to scrape off sheepskin without leaving a visible blemish.

Sir Edward Coke, who turned Magna Carta against the Stuart kings, helped draft the first charter of which American colony?

Virginia: the 1606 charter promised settlers the same 'liberties, franchises and immunities' as people born in England, so the charter's guarantees sailed with the first colonists.

According to a 1660 pamphlet, which ruler sneered at Magna Carta as 'Magna Farta'?

Oliver Cromwell: the pamphlet, a hostile tract printed after his death, claimed that as Lord Protector he met any appeal to the charter with that pun; a Lord Chief Justice was still repeating the story in 2005.

A 1354 statute restating Magna Carta introduced which phrase, later written into the US Fifth Amendment?

Due process of law: the same statute of Edward III stretched the charter's protection from 'free men' to every man 'of what estate or condition that he be'.

Who published the first Magna Carta printed in America, in 1687?

William Penn: tried in England for preaching as a Quaker, he saw his jurors jailed for refusing to convict him; years later he had the charter printed on his new colony's first press.

King John sealing Magna Carta is one of eight scenes on the giant bronze doors of which Washington building?

The Supreme Court: the panels trace the growth of law from a trial scene in Homer's Iliad to Chief Justice Marshall, and the sculptors show John not granting the charter but being forced to it by his barons.

Which playwright's drama about King John never once mentions Magna Carta?

William Shakespeare: his play turns on who is the rightful king, the threat of French invasion and John's quarrel with the pope, the worries of his own Elizabethan audience, and leaves the charter out.

Which 1930 parody history called Magna Carta 'a Good Thing for everyone (except the Common People)'?

1066 and All That: Sellar and Yeatman's spoof textbook lists the charter's promises, such as 'that everyone should be free', and tacks 'except the Common People' onto the first three.

Which organisation erected the Magna Carta Memorial at Runnymede in 1957?

The American Bar Association: US lawyers built the domed memorial as a tribute to the charter, and returned in 2015 for its rededication before the Queen on Magna Carta's 800th anniversary.

Which 1948 document did Eleanor Roosevelt call a possible 'international Magna Carta of all men everywhere'?

Universal Declaration of Human Rights: she chaired the commission that drafted it, and told the UN General Assembly she hoped its adoption would rank with the US Bill of Rights and France's Rights of Man.

Which Magna Carta clause is still on England's statute book today?

No unlawful imprisonment: it survives as chapter 29 of the 1297 reissue, alongside just two other clauses; every other clause in this list has since been repealed.

One of the few Magna Carta clauses still in force protects the 'ancient liberties' of which city?

London: when Occupy protesters camped beside St Paul's invoked the charter in 2012, the Court of Appeal noted, 'somewhat ironically', that this clause protects the City of London, the very body evicting them.

Which country's parliament displays a 1297 Magna Carta that it bought from an English school in 1952?

Australia: the governors of King's School in Bruton, who had not known the school owned it, sold the charter to raise funds; it is now on show in Parliament House, Canberra.

The 1297 Magna Carta in the US National Archives belonged from 1984 to 2007 to the foundation of which Texas billionaire?

Ross Perot: his foundation bought it from the family of the earls of Cardigan; when it was sold in 2007, David Rubenstein bought it and sent it straight back on loan 'as a gift to the American people'.

Which US university learned in 2025 that a Magna Carta 'copy' it bought for $27.50 is a rare original?

Harvard: its law library bought the sheet in 1946 from a catalogue that called it a rubbed, damp-stained copy; a British historian browsing the library's website realised it was an original of the royal reissue of 1300.

Cornelia Parker's 2015 'Magna Carta (An Embroidery)' is a hand-stitched copy of what?

Prisoners sewed most of the text of the Wikipedia article about it, as the page stood on the charter's 799th birthday, while Edward Snowden, Jarvis Cocker and other public figures each stitched a word that mattered to them.

Which 1214 battle, a defeat for John's allies, forced him to sue for peace and fuelled the barons' revolt?

Bouvines: John was not even on the field; his German and Flemish allies lost the battle for him, and the campaign he had spent years planning and taxing England to pay for collapsed with it.

Rebel leader Robert Fitzwalter marched against King John in 1215 as Marshal of the Army of whom?

God and Holy Church: the rebels who marched under that name took the capital in May 1215, and once they held it John had little choice but to meet them at Runnymede.

The rebels' draft demands, presented to John at Runnymede, are known to historians by what name?

The Articles of the Barons: the king's seal went onto this working list of terms first, and only after several more days of haggling did his clerks write up the formal charter.

Clause 33 of the 1215 Magna Carta ordered the removal of what from England's rivers?

Fishing weirs: these fixed fish traps made money for their owners but got in the way of boats, so the charter ordered them off every river in England, sparing only those on the sea coast.

Scutage, addressed in Magna Carta's clauses 12 and 14, was a payment made instead of what?

Military service: knights who would rather not fight paid cash, which the king used to hire soldiers; John demanded it so often and so steeply that the charter made it subject to the realm's 'common counsel'.

Two clauses of Magna Carta deal with hostages King John was holding from the rulers of which two neighbours?

Wales and Scotland: clause 58 promised to hand back at once the son of the Welsh prince Llywelyn the Great, and clause 59 dealt with the sisters of Scotland's King Alexander II, whom John also held.

What did the barons give Henry III for reissuing Magna Carta in 1225?

A new tax: the money went to defend Gascony from the French king, and because Henry issued this charter of his own free will, it became the definitive text that later kings confirmed.

The barons who seized power from Henry III in 1258 ruled through which reform programme?

The Provisions of Oxford: they put a council of fifteen over the king; when the French king, asked to referee the quarrel, sided with Henry, the country slid back into civil war.

Which rapper unveiled a 2013 album cover beside one of the four original Magna Cartas?

Jay-Z: the album was 'Magna Carta Holy Grail', and its artwork spent that July on show in an English cathedral beside its medieval namesake; the Library of Congress later counted it among the charter's turns in popular culture.

Of what disease did King John die in October 1216?

Dysentery: he fell ill on campaign in the middle of the civil war, and died only days after his baggage train, treasure and all, is said to have been swallowed by the tides of the Wash.

Which mocking nickname did King John carry from his youth?

Lackland: as the youngest son he was given no great inheritance, so the name stuck; he ended up with everything in 1199, and his dealings with the French king then earned him a second nickname, 'Softsword'.

Which US president has a memorial acre at Runnymede?

Kennedy: the memorial is Britain's tribute to the murdered John F. Kennedy, and the acre it stands on was given to the United States itself.

Which veteran knight, guardian of the boy king Henry III, beat the rebel barons at Lincoln in May 1217?

William Marshal: as regent he also reissued Magna Carta in the boy's name within weeks of John's death, cutting away the rebels' best argument and winning many of them back.

In Disney's 1973 animated Robin Hood, the future King John of Magna Carta appears as which animal?

A lion: the film follows the Robin Hood tradition that made John a byword for a cruel, grasping ruler, so its Prince John taxes Nottingham dry while Robin, a fox, robs him back.

In 2018 a man tried to steal one of the four original Magna Cartas by doing what?

Smashing its case with a hammer: the blows only holed the outer layer of protective glass, alarms rang, and staff wrestled him to the ground before he could get away.

Which antiquarian acquired the two 1215 Magna Cartas now held by the British Library?

Sir Robert Cotton: the charters were part of the great private library his family later gave to the nation, which in 1753 became one of the founding collections of the British Museum.

Which 1628 parliamentary document, backed by Coke, cited Magna Carta in its preamble?

The Petition of Right: Charles I had jailed knights who refused him a forced loan, without charge or trial, and Coke led the Commons in citing the charter against him.

Which American composer wrote 'Magna Charta' in 1927 at a campaign group's request?

John Philip Sousa: the March King wrote the march at the request of the International Magna Charta Day Association, which was campaigning for the charter's anniversary to be celebrated every year.

King John never signed Magna Carta: the great seal that made it binding was pressed into resin mixed with what?

Beeswax and resin took the impression in a special press worked by an official called the spigurnel; the barons at Runnymede added neither seals nor signatures of their own.

King John's crown jewels are said to have vanished in 1216 in quicksand at the edge of which English bay?

The Wash is where the chronicler Roger of Wendover has quicksand and whirlpools swallow the king's baggage as he crossed a tidal estuary; John fell fatally ill on the same journey.

To bring down a tower of Rochester Castle in 1215, King John ordered the fat of forty of which animals?

Pigs "of the sort least good for eating" were what John's writ demanded: their fat fired the props of a mine dug under the keep, and one corner of the great tower came crashing down.

Which American whistleblower stitched the word 'liberty' into Cornelia Parker's 2015 Magna Carta embroidery?

Edward Snowden was one of some 200 people invited to hand-stitch a section, from prison inmates to barons; a newspaper editor pricked his finger and left a spot of blood on the work.

One of the British Library's 1215 Magna Cartas may have been found by a lawyer in the shop of which tradesman?

A tailor is thought to have had the charter on his premises when the lawyer Humphrey Wyems came across it; Wyems gave it to a famous manuscript collector in January 1629.

Which British prime minister could not give the English meaning of 'Magna Carta' on an American talk show in 2012?

David Cameron was stumped by host David Letterman's surprise history quiz, though he did name 1215 as the year; he also failed to say who composed Rule Britannia.

Which American Revolution hero dismissed Magna Carta as no true constitution, since no elected body wrote it?

Thomas Paine made the case in Rights of Man, fifteen years after his Common Sense, breaking with fellow revolutionaries who treated the charter as the root of their liberties.

Which British leader wanted to hand Lincoln's Magna Carta to America to help draw the United States into war?

Winston Churchill saw the charter, already across the Atlantic for an exhibition, as a gift to sway a still-neutral nation, but the cathedral that owned it refused and the plan was dropped.

A long-lost 1300 Magna Carta turned up in 2015 inside what, in the town archives of Sandwich in Kent?

A Victorian scrapbook had kept the charter unnoticed; it is one of only eight surviving originals of the 1300 confirmation, issued by King John's grandson.

Which defendant in South Africa's 1964 Rivonia Trial told the court that democrats everywhere venerate Magna Carta?

Nelson Mandela named the charter during a three-hour statement from the dock, the speech he closed by saying he was prepared to die for a free and democratic society.

What do the words Magna Carta, a name scribes first used in 1217, mean in English?

Great Charter was a label of size, not praise: scribes used it to tell the larger document apart from a shorter companion charter issued at the same time.

Which people did clause 8 of Magna Carta protect from forced marriage, a right the Crown had been selling?

Widows could stay single for as long as they wished under clause 8, ending a trade in which barons' womenfolk were sold in marriage; clause 7 also gave them their inheritance at once.

Clause 40 of Magna Carta is a single sentence in which the king swears never to sell, deny or delay what?

Justice had been for sale under John, who took large payments from barons to hear or settle their cases; the promise still stands in English statute as part of clause 29 of the 1297 text.

Clause 39 of Magna Carta shields a free man from punishment except by the law of the land or judgement by whom?

His peers meant his social equals, so a baron answered to barons; later lawyers stretched the phrase into a guarantee of trial by jury, a reading historians now call anachronistic.

Clause 41 of Magna Carta guaranteed which travellers safe passage in and out of England, except in wartime?

Merchants could come, stay and trade free of illegal tolls; those from an enemy country were to be held in wartime only until the king learned how his own traders were being treated there.

Clause 35 of Magna Carta set one nationwide measure for corn, ale and which other drink?

Wine, ale and corn each got a single standard measure, and the same clause fixed the width of dyed cloth and ordered weights to match, so a buyer faced the same units in every market.

The very first clause of Magna Carta declares that which institution shall be free, with its rights undiminished?

The English Church opens the charter and returns in its closing clause, perhaps a mark of the cleric who brokered the deal; the promise is one of only three parts of the charter still in force.

Under clause 54 of Magna Carta, a woman's accusation could have a man arrested only over the death of whom?

Her husband was the only death a woman could prosecute by private 'appeal' after 1215. A woman was not expected to fight, so the man she accused lost his usual right to clear himself by battle.

Magna Carta's clause 12 let the king levy an aid without consent to knight his son, wed his daughter or pay what?

His own ransom was no idle worry: John's brother had been seized on the way home from the Holy Land and held by the German emperor until England raised a vast sum in silver.

Clause 51 of Magna Carta promised to expel the foreign knights, mercenaries and which other hired soldiers?

Crossbowmen were among the foreign troops John had brought in with horses and arms; the clause before it goes further and names the alien captains who were to lose their posts.

Which duchess, earlier a queen of France, was the mother of the King John who agreed to Magna Carta?

Eleanor of Aquitaine was in her late seventies when John raced to free her from a siege at Mirebeau in 1202; she died two years later as his French lands slipped away.

King John of Magna Carta fame was the youngest son of which king, remembered for his clash with Thomas Becket?

Henry II is named in Magna Carta itself: several clauses promise to review lands that "our father King Henry" had taken from their holders without a lawful judgement.

Which duchy, the homeland of William the Conqueror, did King John lose to the French king in 1204?

Normandy fell to Philip II, and John's long, costly and failed campaign to win it back, paid for by squeezing his barons, set the stage for the revolt that produced the charter.

Stephen Langton, who mediated between King John and the barons at Runnymede, held which office in the Church?

Archbishop of Canterbury was a post Langton waited six years to take up: John refused the pope's choice and kept him out of England until 1213, at the cost of his own excommunication.

King John, who agreed to Magna Carta, belonged to which royal dynasty that held the English throne until 1485?

The Plantagenets may owe their name to the yellow broom flower, one of several theories about a nickname of John's grandfather; the family had held the crown since 1154.

Which teenage nephew, a rival claimant to the throne, was King John widely suspected of murdering in 1203?

Arthur of Brittany was sixteen when he vanished from John's prison at Rouen; one chronicle has the drunken king kill him with his own hand and sink the body in the Seine.

King John's quarrel with the pope put England under which penalty that halted most church services from 1208?

An interdict left the clergy able to offer little more than baptism for infants and absolution for the dying; it was lifted only after John submitted to Rome in 1213.

What vow did King John take in 1215 that gave him the Church's protection as the barons closed in?

To go on crusade was a promise few believed, but it worked: Magna Carta itself grants John a crusader's respite before he had to answer certain claims over confiscated lands.

Runnymede was chosen as neutral ground between the rebel barons' base at Staines and which royal fortress?

Windsor Castle and Staines lay either side of the meadow, so neither party had to enter the other's stronghold; the spot was already a traditional place for assemblies.

At which shrine town of a martyred Saxon king are the barons said to have secretly sworn an oath against King John?

Bury St Edmunds is where the barons are believed to have met in the abbey church in 1214 and sworn to make John accept an earlier king's Charter of Liberties, the model for their demands.

In which western cathedral city was the nine-year-old Henry III hastily crowned days after King John's death in 1216?

Gloucester was safe royalist ground at a time when over half of England lay in rebel hands; the boy was knighted by his guardian and then crowned under the eye of a papal legate.

In which Nottinghamshire town's castle did King John die in October 1216, too ill to travel any farther?

Newark Castle, a bishop's fortress on the Trent, was as far as the dying king could go after falling ill at Lynn; a company of mercenaries then escorted his body away for burial.

King John was buried in 1216 before the altar of the Saxon bishop St Wulfstan in which English cathedral?

Worcester still holds the king's tomb, topped by an effigy made in 1232, and the cathedral library keeps his will alongside a 1225 copy of Magna Carta.

Sir Edward Coke wielded Magna Carta in the early 1600s against which doctrine championed by James I and Charles I?

The divine right of kings met its match in Coke's claim that the charter put even the monarch under the law; the Crown had him arrested and suppressed his planned book on Magna Carta.

Which 1689 Act, passed after the Glorious Revolution, sits beside Magna Carta in Britain's unwritten constitution?

The Bill of Rights echoed the old charter in binding the Crown: no royal levies without Parliament's approval, and no cruel and unusual punishments.

In Darnell's Case of 1627, the lawyer John Selden argued that Magna Carta stood behind which ancient writ?

Habeas corpus is never named in the charter, yet Selden's reading stuck: American colonists later took it for granted that Magna Carta had guaranteed the writ.

The campaigner Granville Sharp insisted in the 18th century that Magna Carta had already outlawed which practice?

Slavery had no basis in English law, a point Sharp helped win in the Somerset ruling of 1772; he also held that repealing any part of the charter would be treason.

Which 1640s radical movement, led by John Lilburne, was divided over whether Magna Carta protected English liberty?

The Levellers were split: Lilburne called the charter the foundation of English liberties, while his ally William Walwyn dismissed it as a "mess of potage".

Which radical MP, arrested in 1763 for an attack on the king in issue No. 45 of his paper, invoked Magna Carta?

John Wilkes turned his arrest into a popular cause: crowds rallied to his name and the number 45, and a senior judge, Lord Camden, condemned his treatment as a breach of Magna Carta.

Which American colony asked in 1638 to make Magna Carta part of its law, only to be refused by Charles I?

Maryland's assembly passed an act giving settlers their liberties under the great charter of England, but the Crown disallowed it; at home the same king had refused to confirm the charter in any way that cut his independence.

Which earl led the barons who rose against Henry III in the 1260s to reassert Magna Carta and call a famous parliament?

Simon de Montfort captured the king at Lewes in 1264, and his parliament of 1265 was the first to summon burgesses from the major towns alongside the knights and nobles.

Which pirate, said to have studied black magic, led the French fleet sent to aid the rebel barons in 1217?

Eustace the Monk had left a Benedictine cloister and turned outlaw, then pirate; captured off Sandwich when royalist ships seized his flagship, he was beheaded and his head was paraded on a pike.

The peace of 1217 that ended the civil war after Magna Carta, also named after Kingston, is called the Treaty of where?

Lambeth gave its name to a peace that sent the French claimant home, restored the rebels' lands and promised to uphold the charter, which was reissued within weeks under its lasting name.

A version of Magna Carta issued in November 1216 applied its liberties to which other land under the English crown?

Ireland got its own text, Magna Carta Hiberniae, with the names swapped, Dublin standing in for the English capital; the only known manuscript was destroyed when the Four Courts exploded in 1922.

Which Commonwealth country reprinted Magna Carta in 1881 among its Imperial Acts and still keeps clause 29 in force?

New Zealand still counts clause 29, the promise of lawful judgement, among its statutes, as do several other former colonies whose law was inherited from England.

Which cathedral keeps one of the four surviving 1217 Magna Cartas under the same roof as its celebrated Mappa Mundi?

Hereford sometimes shows the two treasures side by side in its chained library; the charter still has the small writ that told the county sheriff how to put it into effect.

In 2009 the four surviving 1215 Magna Cartas joined which UNESCO register of documentary heritage?

Memory of the World listing covers all four, although each differs slightly in size and wording and historians treat none of them as the master copy.

Which protest group cited Magna Carta in 2012 while fighting eviction from the churchyard of St Paul's Cathedral?

Occupy campaigners got short shrift from the Master of the Rolls, who doubted that the charter's famous promise of lawful judgement was even relevant to campers in a churchyard.

The ancient Ankerwycke tree, said to have witnessed the events at Runnymede in 1215, belongs to which species?

Yew trees can live for millennia, and this one, across the river from the meadow, may be 2,500 years old; Henry VIII is said to have courted Anne Boleyn beneath it.

Hew Locke's The Jurors, made for Runnymede on Magna Carta's 800th anniversary, consists of twelve bronze what?

Chairs, one for each member of a jury, stand in the open meadow; each is decorated with symbols of struggles for freedom and equality, past and present.