England has something more to celebrate today than getting through to the next round of the World Cup

Civitas, 15 June 2006

At last the People couldn’t bear it any longer, so they said to the Barons (who were now Noble English Gentlemen): “We really can’t stand this misery any more. Won’t you do something?”
“Well,” said the Barons, “we can’t put up with him any longer either, so we’ll see what we can do for you.”
Then the Barons got together and talked.
“Suppose,” said one of them, “that we made a List of all the things he must do and all the things he mustn’t do. Then we could take it to him and make him Seal it with the Great Seal and make it a law. Perhaps that would make him behave better.”
“That’s a good idea,” said the others. “We’ll try it.” So they made a List and in it they put things like:
You are not to put anyone in prison unless he has done something wrong.
Even if he has really done something wrong you are not to put him in prison until you have taken him to a Just Judge and had him Judged.
You are not to take away a Farmer’s Ploughs and Carts and things that he needs for farming.
You are not to take away a workman’s hammer or chisel or anything he needs to do his work with.
These are just a few of the things the Barons put in their List. But you can see what a bad King John was when they had to put in things like that. There were lots more things in the List, so they called it the Great Writing, or Magna Carta.”
So wrote Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall about what happened in England on 15 June 1215 some 791 years ago. She did so in her 1937 re-working of Our Island Story written for still younger children and published under the playful title of Kings and Things.

Of this version of our island story, Marshall wrote in the preface that: ‘These stories of English history have been written in the hope that Mothers and Nannies and other great Potentates of Nursery land will read them to their obedient subjects in the Story Hour which so often precedes the tragic necessity of “going to bed”.’
Some think use of irony in history telling is only a post-modern innovation and that the idea that bed-time stories for young children might serve a valuable civic purpose is preposterous. Such contemporary conventional wisdom forms part of the mind-set of our ‘enlightened’ metropolitan elite that has been responsible for bringing this once great nation into the sorry pass it now finds itself in regarding social cohesion and political literacy among its young.
To Henrietta Marshall in that work of hers belongs the last word on the abiding signficance of Magna Carta:
‘When (King John) saw all these stern Barons with swords in their hands he got frightened. He promised to keep all the rules the barons had made and he sealed Magna Carta, and it became the Law …. It was a great Day for England. A Day to Remember. For his Magna Carta was the true beginning of our freedom.’
Doubtless, our elites will sneer at such a sentiment and demand to know exactly whom Marshall intended to subsume withiin the first person plural pronoun she employs here. My answer is that she intended to include all who had occasion to be read her book — especially, but not exclusively, her young compatriots.
Happy Magna Carta Day! As for England possibly winning the World Cup, all one can say about that on today’s showing is: Dream on!