Magna Carta Themes

The rebel barons were coming to terms with the fact they lived in a lawless country where even though they owned land and had titles, the king could still do whatever he wanted to them. What they n...

A lot of the Magna Carta takes outrage that would have been expressed as, "How dare you sir! I will not stand for this injustice!" and translates it into formal sounding legalese. For each clause t...

In some ways the rebel barons weren't really asking for much. They lived at a time when there were already plenty of dumb rules that ruined everything. Their lives were filled with inexplicable tax...

It isn't pleasant, but the reality of life in the medieval era was that people often died young and they often died suddenly. And as if that isn't grim enough, those deaths would open up a whole me...

The Magna Carta is an odd sort of peace treaty—it came before a war and not after one. It was designed to stop the king and the barons from fighting and therefore it doesn't declare a winner or a...

If the government did something to hurt you in the medieval era, your options were limited. Courts of law had been invented, but they were only sporadically used and you couldn't sue—let alone co...