15 June—Today is the 808^th anniversary of the Magna Carta Libertatum, the Great Charter of Freedoms, commonly referred to, without the definite article and the Freedoms limitation, simply as Magna Carta.

Magna Carta was drafted in Latin (of course) by Cardinal Stephen Langton, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury in 1215 (because there were no Protestants at the time—anywhere), as a strategy or stratagem to preempt a revolt and make peace between the autocratic and oppressive albeit weak and unpopular King John and a group of 40 activist, rebellious barons.

Needless to say, King John had to be forced to affix his seal “in the meadow that is called Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines, on the fifteenth day of June in the seventeenth year of our reign,” as was written in Latin (of course) on the pregnant parchment. Runnymede literally means “meeting place in the meadow.”

English nobles tended to be somewhat better educated and more literate—if not more intelligent—than most commoners (i.e., peasants) in the thirteenth century. That’s the case to this day. The nobles and their king spoke French but not necessarily Latin or English, while the commoners (i.e., peasants) spoke English but probably not Latin or French. That’s the way the church and nobles liked it. Thus, it’s doubtful that all the barons were actually able to read and understand what they were forcing on the king.

That’s kind of like legislators voting for bills without understanding—or even bothering to read—them. Especially long bills like budget implementers in the Connecticut General Assembly that are cornucopias of all sorts of surprises that are rushed through in the closing minutes of a session.

Simply put, then, among the thousands of words detailing feudal financial arrangements, obsolete measures, descriptions of land and husbandry, and other obscure instrumentalities, Magna Carta stated that the king had to obey the law (almost like everybody else except Boris Johnson and Donald Trump) and that even most common people (i.e., peasants) had certain—albeit fewer—rights.

Magna Carta promised to protect the church’s rights (a sine qua non, of course, carried through to the U.S. Constitution, thanks to which those rights are still abused), protected the nobles (the only people who really mattered) from illegal imprisonment, and provided for access to relatively swift justice. It also guaranteed other silly populist nonsense like no taxation without representation.

Magna Carta protected the rights of women and children who inherited property and stated that there could be no punishment without lawful trial and conviction. It also gave the lords the right to declare war on the king if he didn’t abide by the terms of the contract. That provision was supposed to be implemented through a council of 25 barons in what was essentially a non-legislative form of impeachment.

Legislative impeachment is another British innovation, by the way. The first recorded one is that of William Latimer, the Fourth Baron Latimer, during the so-called Good Parliament in April of 1376. He was tried and convicted of corruption, fired from all his prestigious court jobs, fined, and imprisoned. But—wouldn’t you know?—he was pardoned in October and, thanks to his pal John of Gaunt, the (royal) Duke of Lancaster, returned to favor.

Getting back to Magna Carta, to no one’s surprise, neither King John nor the refractory barons stood by their signed and sealed contractual commitments. Politics as usual. And not quite as stupid or weak as he may have acted and been characterized in popular literature, King John was able, a month later, to bribe or otherwise appeal to Pope Innocent III, the capo di tutti capi in Rome, who was Canterbury’s boss at the time, to annul Magna Carta. And that predictably led to the First Barons’ War. What an impeachment!

Both King John and Pope Innocent III died in 1216. But the barons lingered on to finish their first war and a second one half a century later, against Henry III.

And so on. Magna Carta was fiddled with (amended?) any number of times and even though it may have been an inspiration for the U.S. Constitution (through the Mayflower Compact and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut), its significance and influence tend to be overstated by lots of commentators.

More to the point, contrary to the history presented in the Mel Brooks movie “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” King John, terrible monarch and despicable person though he may have been, did not—repeat, did not—give his name to toilets. Don’t laugh. Okay, laugh. But it must be over two decades ago that a serious website about history and language actually presented that delightful albeit specious etymology as a fact. Were it were so!

In all events, that untrustworthy website got flushed down the john long ago . . .