The Faversham Magna Carta featured alongside Textus Roffensis in the Magna Carta 800 exhibition at Rochester Cathedral in 2015, highlighting their significance as foundational documents of English Law.

The Faversham Magna Carta was exhibited at Rochester Cathedral from 10th October to 6th December 2015 as part of the Magna Carta 800th anniversary celebrations. Faversham’s rarely displayed Magna Carta was the centerpiece of this major free exhibition celebrating the importance of the medieval charter to today’s concepts of the freedom of the individual, democracy and society.

The Lady Chapel was entirely fitted out with the travelling exhibition, the final stop on a tour including Faversham, Canterbury, Maidstone, Dover and Sandwich.

The Magna Carta (“Great Charter”) is a document guaranteeing political liberties that was drafted at Runnymede, a meadow by the Thames, and signed by King John on June 15, 1215, under pressure from his rebellious barons. By declaring the sovereign to be subject to the rule of law and documenting the liberties held by “free men,” Magna Carta provided the foundation for individual rights in England and eventually throughout the English-speaking world.

The Faversham Magna Carta exhibited at Rochester Cathedral in 2015.

Rather than introducing new laws, the aim of Magna Carta was to hold the King to account on laws already in existence. Three such clauses are still in the statute books today; due process, Habeas corpus and the liberties of the Church, the City of London and the Barons of the Cinque Ports. Some clauses offer an insight into life an attitudes at the time such as protections for widows and a woman’s word alone not being sufficient to indict someone for murder. Other clauses seek to boost trade by establishing freedom of movement for international merchants and by standardising measures for wine, beer, corn and cloth.

The exhibition detailed the necessity and history of the Magna Carta signing with interactive elements on the political negotiations between King John, the barons and the Church, the legal legacy of Magna Carta and its influence around modern world.

Rochester is particularly significant to the history of Magna Carta after its signing as King John laid a brutal siege of Rochester Castle between October and December 1215 in a bid to retake it from rebel barons. Having broken Rochester Bridge, stabled his horses in the quire of the Cathedral and captured the castle bailey, the royal army used siege engines to bombard the rebels inside the keep. Miners attacked the building’s south-east turret, burning the fat from 40 pigs to fire the timber props and bring down the south-east corner of the keep. Starvation eventually forced the rebels’ surrender.

Compiled almost 100 years before Magna Carta, Textus Roffensis is a record of far older laws extending back as early as the seventh-century Æthelberht’s Code.

The first part of Textus is understood as Prior Ernulf’s personal legal encyclopedia. As such Textus represents the first documentary evidence of the compromises made between the new Norman rulers and their indigenous English subjects. Contained within are codes from successive kings of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, detailing early compensatory laws for various infarctions, proto-legal devices and safeguards for the Church. Textus contains some of the earliest Old English in existence with both Saxon and Scandinavian cultural and linguistic influences, comprising the legal legacy of the Anglo-Saxon era in the early part of the twelfth-century and setting the legal and political foundations for the signing of Magna Carta almost 100 years later.

Acknowledgements

Rochester Cathedral extend their thanks to the Magna Carta Trust and all the organisers of the Magna Carta 800th anniversary celebrations, not least the Faversham Magna Carta Kent tour exhibition team.

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