Magna Carta Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Magna Carta trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Magna Carta trivia for history students, pub quizzers and anyone who has stood in front of one of the four surviving 1215 originals and wondered what it actually says. The quiz starts in the reign of King John: the lost French lands, the defeat at Bouvines, the barons' oath at Bury St Edmunds, and the ten days of haggling in a water-meadow beside the Thames that produced the charter sealed on 15 June 1215. From there it follows the document's messy afterlife. Pope Innocent III annulled it within weeks, the First Barons' War broke out, and it only survived because Henry III's regents reissued it in 1216, 1217 and 1225, when it finally acquired its name to distinguish it from the smaller Charter of the Forest. Later rounds cover Sir Edward Coke and the Stuart kings, its influence on the US Constitution, the Victorian historians who called the whole liberty story a myth, the clause repealed first, the three clauses still on the statute book, and the copies that ended up in Canberra, Washington and Fort Knox. Questions run from easy to expert and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our British history and medieval history quizzes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01King John, who agreed to Magna Carta, inherited the throne in 1199 from which crusading brother?
Richard I
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.
Q 02Runnymede, where Magna Carta was agreed, is a water-meadow on the bank of which river?
the Thames
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.
Q 03Stephen Langton, who helped draft Magna Carta, is also credited with dividing which book into chapters?
The Bible
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.
Q 04The rebel barons demanded that John confirm the Charter of Liberties issued a century earlier by which king?
Henry I
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.
Q 05Which pope annulled Magna Carta in 1215, declaring it null and void?
Innocent III
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.
Q 06Magna Carta's clause 61 let 25 barons do what if John broke it?
Seize his castles
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.
Q 07The collapse of the Magna Carta settlement in 1215 led to which conflict?
the First Barons' War
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.
Q 08During the war that followed Magna Carta, the rebel barons offered the English throne to which French royal?
Prince Louis
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.
Q 09What served as Henry III's crown in 1216?
His mother's gold band
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.
Q 10The document acquired the name 'Magna Carta' in 1217 to distinguish it from which smaller companion document?
the Charter of the Forest
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.
Q 11Which king, the grandson of King John, reissued Magna Carta in 1297 as part of English statute law?
Edward I
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.
Q 12A fire damaged one Magna Carta and which poem's only manuscript?
Beowulf
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.
Q 13Which cathedral keeps what is often called the best-preserved 1215 Magna Carta?
Salisbury
Q 21Who published the first Magna Carta printed in America, in 1687?
William Penn
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.
Q 22King John sealing Magna Carta is one of eight scenes on the giant bronze doors of which Washington building?
The Supreme Court
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.
Q 23Which playwright's drama about King John never once mentions Magna Carta?
William Shakespeare
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.
Q 14Lincoln Cathedral's Magna Carta spent much of the Second World War stored where for safekeeping?
Fort Knox, Kentucky
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.
Q 15Which jurist published the first modern critical edition of Magna Carta in 1759?
Sir William Blackstone
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.
Q 16The 1215 Magna Carta was written in which language?
Medieval Latin
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.
Q 17What was the parchment of the 1215 Magna Carta made from?
sheepskin
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.
Q 18Sir Edward Coke, who turned Magna Carta against the Stuart kings, helped draft the first charter of which American colony?
Virginia
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.
Q 19According to a 1660 pamphlet, which ruler sneered at Magna Carta as 'Magna Farta'?
Oliver Cromwell
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.
Q 20A 1354 statute restating Magna Carta introduced which phrase, later written into the US Fifth Amendment?
Due process of law
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'.
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.
Q 24Which 1930 parody history called Magna Carta 'a Good Thing for everyone (except the Common People)'?
1066 and All That
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.
Q 25Which organisation erected the Magna Carta Memorial at Runnymede in 1957?
the American Bar Association
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.
Q 26Which 1948 document did Eleanor Roosevelt call a possible 'international Magna Carta of all men everywhere'?
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
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.
Q 27Which Magna Carta clause is still on England's statute book today?
No unlawful imprisonment
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.
Q 28One of the few Magna Carta clauses still in force protects the 'ancient liberties' of which city?
London
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.
Q 29Which country's parliament displays a 1297 Magna Carta that it bought from an English school in 1952?
Australia
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.
Q 30The 1297 Magna Carta in the US National Archives belonged from 1984 to 2007 to the foundation of which Texas billionaire?
Ross Perot
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'.