50 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.