Derek J. Taylor

This may be the best book I have ever read on Magna Carta. Rather than a worthy, but dull account of John's reign and the missteps that led to Runnymede, the author goes out and travels to a variety of places around England and Europe where events happened that shaped Magna Carta, and then to places where Magna Carta materially affected the lives of people. His travelogue includes Laxton, a tiny village which uniquely practices land allocation as it was done in John's time, Lincoln, a typical English town that benefited enormously from liberties given to it by John for supporting him, Bouvines, an obscure French village where a battle between the armies of the French king Phillip Augustus and John's ally Otto of Brunswick effectively ended John's chances of regaining his lost territories in France, and of course Runnymede itself, where Taylor discovers the site which commemorates Magna Carta is actually nowhere near where the historic signing, and where a monument erected by American lawyers is the only visible commemoration of the event, which lead's into Taylor's trip across the Atlantic to discover that the American reverence for Magna Carta is possibly greater than Britain's. In between, Taylor dissects Magna Carta honestly and discovered most of it is completely irrelevant today (only 3 clauses are still enforced as British law), and very little of it has anything to do with grand notions of freedom. nevertheless, as a symbol and an inspiration for what was to come, its value remains undiminished. This is an entertaining, informative and thoughtful work. For anyone who was bored to death by learning about Magna carta at school, I highly recommend this as a pleasant antidote… (mais)