Harper joins with populist Ford brothers

But all was not over yet for the poor [prime minister], who must needs drink to the dregs the bitter cup of association with such low company.

With apologies to Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame[1]

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[1] Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, tr. A.L. Alger (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2015), p. 28.

A Made-in-Canada solution to the Niqab issue

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

It has come to my attention that the niqab issue has wreaked havoc on the fortunes of the NDP in Quebec.  Well done! But by bedeviling Tom Mulcair’s party you also assist that of Gilles Duceppe, the formally moribund Bloc Québécois.  Finding support among separatists cannot be a good thing, given that you once prorogued parliament (I think it was in 2008) on a perceived link with the Bloc.

In order to avoid downright false charges of being in bed with the separatists when it suits you, permit me to suggest a made-in-Canada solution to the perplexing matter of niqabs in citizenship ceremonies.  Instead of wearing the niqab these unfortunate and oppressed women (numbering a few dozen, I imagine) should be required to wear a goalie’s mask.  Voila – instant recognition as an integral part of the “Canadian family” simply by donning a modest piece of face-saving equipment!  You’ll make hockey history (at last), and it will only increase the sales of your long-nurtured book.  But the Muslim women will profit too, for you will be also be providing new and exciting career opportunities for Canada’s niqab-wearing population.  A win-win deal if there ever was one.

Your obediant servant,

Joerge Dyrkton

Hobbes visits Canada's Wonderland

Hobbes's "Leviathan"

Thirty minutes’ drive north of Toronto in the city of Vaughan is Canada’s Wonderland, the largest amusement park in Canada.  Wonderland hosts two major roller coaster rides, “Behemoth” and “Leviathan”, both names of different titles belonging to the work of Thomas Hobbes, possibly the most original political philosopher ever to write in English (and Latin).  Hobbes’s thought – as this blog has elsewhere demonstrated – is at the foundation of Harper’s Conservative “movement”, and it forms the basis of Republican thinking in the United States, even though Hobbes himself was not a republican thinker, a point that the Quentin Skinner (the eminent English historian of political thought) makes quite clear.[1]  This piece considers the names of these two major roller coaster rides and their possible relationship with the ruling Conservative Party of Canada.

Where did the two names, Behemoth and Leviathan, come from?  Both are mentioned in the Bible (Job 40:15-24 and Job 41); one is a land monster and the other is a sea monster, respectively, but names derived only from the Bible do not make for good public fare in today’s multicultural Canada.  It remains possible that there is a great Toronto wit about enforcing Northrup Frye’s former classic, The Great Code (1981) which discusses these two “hulking brutes” (see also, notably, the frontispiece to his book) but I suspect something much more nefarious is afoot.[2]  Let’s look instead to Hobbes.

Hobbes published Leviathan, his classic work of political philosophy in 1651, two years after King Charles I lost his head.  And he published his Behemoth (a narrative of the English Civil Wars ending with the Restoration of the Monarchy) around 1668 in his “eightieth year”.[3]

Despite the fact that Hobbes wrote Leviathan before Behemoth, Behemoth (following the order of appearance in the Bible) was named the first giant roller coaster at Wonderland.  But consider the timing.  Canada’s Conservative Party under Harper was first elected to minority rule in January 2006.  Is it a coincidence that Behemoth was announced as Wonderland’s newest roller coaster ride in August 2007?  Harper was first elected to majority rule in May 2011.  Is it a coincidence that Leviathan (a bigger roller coaster ride than Behemoth) was announced 3 months after that election victory?

 

If we delve into Hobbes’s writing we can find interesting support for the idea of a roller coaster.  For example Behemoth begins with the very sentence “If in time as in place there were degrees of high and low …”[4]  But it is the analysis of Quentin Skinner in Hobbes and Republican Liberty (2008) that helps clarify Leviathan and its relevance to the subject matter at hand.  First of all, Hobbes was inspired by Galileo; and it is his detection of the motion of the heavenly bodies that provides the basic assumption at the root of all things (including Harper’s thinking): “the only thing that is real in the whole world is motion”.[5]

 

In an early work, De cive (1642), Hobbes defines liberty as “nothing other than the absence of impediments to motion”.[6]  He goes on to say that “the different ways man can move himself … the more civil liberty he may be said to possess.”[7]  In other words Hobbes’s theory of citizenship is based on motion, and his ideas as expressed in De cive are further developed and refined in Leviathan (1651), where freedom is applied to corporal bodies. [8]  Hobbes continues: ” …the liberty of the man, which consisteth in this, that he find no stop in doing what he has the will, desire or inclination to do.“[9] Again: “liberty is the absence of external impediments”.[10] If Hobbes had known the roller coaster, he might have used it as an example to represent his “no stop” ideas of individual liberty and motion, where there is always the threat of metaphoric violence. Instead it appears Canadian Conservatives have latched on to the great roller coaster to represent Hobbes’s ideas.

Another key Hobbesian notion is the idea of “the multitude” which comprise the fearful ‘Leviathan’ monster featured on the eponymous book’s frontispiece (see above image, for example, or the cover of the Penguin edition of Leviathan, edited by C.B. Macpherson).[11]  Gone now from Harper’s Canada today – certainly from Wonderland - is the Aristotelian notion of “society” (and the idea of man as a social animal), overturned by Hobbes.[12]  The commercial, frequently automated and rather technological character of Wonderland (Hobbes considered himself a man of science) is on par with the Conservatives’ version of mass “culture” which stands in opposition to our fading national ideals of the CBC, which plumbs our souls with high fiction and deeper facts. 

Today the Conservatives can trumpet consumer “choice” at Wonderland: you can ride – and be scared by - Behemoth, or, if you are old enough, you can ride - and be scared by – Leviathan; or both[13]  Or you can be scared by the myriad of other rides, thereby exercising, again, the freedom of “rational choice” (despite fright), a key tenet in Conservative thinking. [14] This fear is also central to Hobbes who, writing in the context of Civil War and of “every man against every man,”[15] spoke of “perpetual fear”[16] and “continual fear”[17] which is the reason why we today (excepting Justin Trudeau, until recently) lock our doors at night (and why Stephen Harper once shut himself in a storage closet).[18] It is this excitement of fear that draws us to Canada’s Wonderland, and it is fear on which the Conservative Party – and its leader - usually feeds.  Put another way: amusement parks can be compared to gambling for youth who thrive on thrill – and instead of sending young people to war (a constant threat) there is always the big roller coaster.

Apolitical critics might claim that my argument misses out on the significance of science fiction.  There was a “Behemoth” movie in 1959 and again in 2011, and there was a science fiction novel Leviathan Wakes published in June 2011.   But it is worth pointing out that the original sources using the combined names “Behemoth” and “Leviathan” prior to Canada’s Wonderland are the Bible and Hobbes – and no other roller coaster ride names in North America are as unique and deeply meaningful.  In other words, it is important to pay attention to how popular “culture” is laden with political implications, if not ideology,[19] and Canada’s ruling Conservative Party has its fingerprints all over Wonderland’s two major rides – with the special help of Hobbes.   

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[1] My argument is especially indebted to the recent work of Quentin Skinner, first published in 2008.  See Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 

[2] Northrup Frye, The Great Code: the Bible and Literature (Toronto: Academic Press Canada, 1982), p. 152.

[3] Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth or Long Parliament, ed. Paul Seaward (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014), p.6.

[4] Ibid., p. 107

[5] Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, p 109.

[6] Ibid., p. 109.

[7] Ibid., p. 117.

[8] Ibid., p. 128.

[9] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A.P. Martinich (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 158. Cf. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, p. 129.

[10] Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, p. 130. And as Quentin Skinner ever so succinctly explains, Hobbes is the first to look at freedom “entirely as absence of impediments rather than absence of dependence”. Ibid.,, p. 157.

[11] See Horst Bredekamp, “Thomas Hobbes Visual Strategies” in Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 29-60.

[12] Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, p 94.

[13] See Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, ed. J.M Bernstein (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 85.

[14] See Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, p.137.

[15] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A.P. Martinich (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 95

[16] Ibid., p. 82.

[17] Ibid., p. 96.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 216. 

Stephen Harper's Margaret Thatcher premise on Tina Fontaine, 15-year-old aboriginal murder victim

Margaret Thatcher: “There is no such thing as society” (October 31, 1987)

Stephen Harper: “We should not view this as a sociological phenomenon.  We should view it as a crime.” (August 21, 2014)

Note: according to RCMP statistics over 1000 aboriginal women have been murdered in Canada in the period from 1980 to 2012 (Globe and Mail, Editorial, Saturday August 23 2014, p. F9)

Thomas Paine's words for Stephen Harper

A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and a government without a constitution, is power without a right.[1]

~ Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, 1791

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[1] Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man in Two Classics of the French Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 420 (Chapter 4).

Recommended reading for (and on) Stephen Harper

Stephen Harper has never apologized for impugning the integrity of Canada’s Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, yet another apparent “error” in savoir-faire.  I recommend that he read the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” (August 26, 1789), but perhaps our Prime Minister would reject the dichotomy: “Any society in which the guarantee of the rights is not secured, or the separation of powers not determined, has no constitution at all.” (Article 16)[1]

It is worth noting that the Constitution of 1789 lasted 4 years (but left a huge legacy beyond the French Revolution) and was replaced by the Constitution of 1793 (known as “Year 1”).  Associated with Robespierre and the Reign of Terror, the Constitution of 1793 makes no case for the separation of powers, which was first articulated in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748).[2]  For Montesquieu (as I have said before), his notion of spirit was the holy trinity of the legislative, the executive and the judiciary, rooted in Augustinianism and the Christendom of the Middle Ages.  Unfortunately, our Prime Minister favours the Romans (who it is worth mentioning also invented the concept of dictatorship in the West).

I would recommend that Harper also read Montesquieu, but our beloved Prime Minister likely has other, more current priorities – and none so long.  It matters not that Montesquieu was a major influence on the framers of the U.S. Constitution, for it seems Harper does not dwell at length on the concept of a required “mediation” (a ‘liberal’ term) between the legislative, executive and judiciary.  Again the word “balance” (a ‘liberal’ term) is foreign to Harper’s lexicon, and so is the idea of “checks and balances” (unless we consider the role of populism – or elections). Ultimately, if we are to believe the German political theorist Carl Schmitt, strongly influenced by (Harper’s favourite) Hobbes, and author of the prescient 1921 book Dictatorship (written in the wake of WWI and in the early throes of the Weimar Republic, prior to Hitler’s Beer Hall putsch) the executive will only come to dominate the legislative.[3]  This is consistent with Harper’s (and Hobbes’s) individualism and their anti-social premises – and the Tory need for the state to restrain the passions of the people.[4]

In other words, Harper’s “error” in not apologizing to the Chief Justice represents an attempt to curry favour with his constituency of non-liberal, so-called democrats, populists who see political incorrectness – and (not infrequently) political irresponsibility – as a badge of honour hearkening an aura of authority for the state.  Because his base is ‘unread’ (immersed as they are in Sun News and the like), these said constituents will remain unaware of the creeping significance of Harper’s assaults on the Constitution.

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[1] Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo, eds., The French Revolution: A Document Collection (Boston: Wadsworth, 1999), p. 104.  Emphasis added. 

[2] See Carl Schmidt, Dictatorship, tr. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), p. 128.

[3] Ibid., p. 91.

[4] Herbert Spencer, Political Writings. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. John Offer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2001), p. 78.

On the Ancient Greeks and Canada's Conservative Government

According to the ancient Greeks, the citizen belonged to his city, or “polis” – not to himself or his family.[1]  In other words, the polis defined the Greek sense of liberty through community, which stands in contrast to modern notions of individual liberty.[2] Nevertheless, it is because of the polis that we have the words, politics, metropolis and, of course, polite.[3]

However Canada’s Conservatives do not look to the ancient Greeks (save for Sparta), as they adhere instead to the Romans, who are noted for an absence of philosophical thought and an apparent virility in war.  So today in Canada we see a different strain of anti-polis politics and no sense of community, which is why the Harper Conservatives are locked out of the nation’s metropolitan cores – Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. It also explains why the Conservatives, who veer towards the abrasive, are short on politeness, as it is considered either effete or too “sophisticated”.  In other words it’s Greek to them.

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[1] Stephen Leacock, Our Heritage of Liberty (London: The Bodly Head, 1942 [Nabu Public Doman Reprint]), p.21.
[2]  See Herbert Spencer, Political Writings. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. John Offer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 103.  See also Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared With That of the Moderns” in Political Writings. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. and tr. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 309-328.

[3]Leacock, Our Heritage of Liberty, p.21.

An inelegant tweet

Harper’s Magna Carta is nothing but a Magna Farta.[1]

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[1]  This link to political flatulence was first used in the English House of Commons in 1667.  See Anne Pallister, Magna Carta: The Heritage of Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 29,30.

On Harper's Mentor (Thomas Hobbes), Law and the Supreme Court

In a recent Globe and Mail article, columnist Lawrence Martin suggests that Harper’s “chief negator” is the Supreme Court – not the NDP or Liberals.[1]  While this is true a few broader (and some more of Hobbes’s philosophical) points are worth mentioning.  One is the fact that, thanks to Pierre Trudeau, we have a written Constitution, which now guides the Supreme Court in its decisions.  Originally conceived to prevent abuses of power in the provinces, it also now works to restrain “provincial” leaders at the federal level.

Another point is that Harper’s attitude to law is much different from his predecessors, who previously counted on the legislative and judiciary to do their business without improper browbeating by the executive.  Harper is not only being “excessive” and “unprecedented” in his run-in with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, for which there has been no apology, he takes his cue from Hobbes, whose profound influence on our Prime Minister’s political thought is discussed elsewhere in this blog.[2]

 

Hobbes contends that law is a matter of sovereign decision-making alone: “law, properly, is the word of him, that by right has command over others.”[3] In other words there is little place for the Supreme Court in Harper’s intellectual framework, a feature which dates the Prime Minister more than it does Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651 during the wake of the English Civil War. Hobbes also had no place for precedent and no regard for ancient law, so the Magna Carta figures little in his works, creating intellectual space for Harper to ignore its 800^th anniversary next year.[4]

Hobbes essentially argues that law has no special virtue because of it existing over time; it survives only because of sovereign consent: “When long use obtaineth the authority of a law, it is not the length of time that maketh the authority, but the will of the authority signified by his silence (for silence is sometimes an argument of consent).”[5]  This results in a tremendous amount of present-day-ism in Harper’s hyperactive agenda, as there is no wish for tacit consent over existing laws. Because Harper’s political thinking does not appreciate law over time our Prime Minister will likely remain obdurate towards native land claims and aboriginal title - and the Constitution itself, including its origins in the Magna Carta.  What I wish to stress is that Harper’s attitude towards law is born in part of Hobbesian political philosophy – not necessarily a hard-nosed temperament or, more recently, petulant thinking.

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[1] Lawrence Martin “Stephen Harper’s real opposition” Globe and Mail, Tuesday July 1, 2014, p. A9

[2] See my blog in the Book Review section entitled: “Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’ and Harper. Alternatively entitled: “On Harper and Hobbes, Trade Secrets with China, and Ancient Canadian Wisdom”.

[3] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A.P.Martinich (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 119 (Ch. 15).  See Anne Pallister, Magna Carta: The Heritage of Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1971), p. 25.

[4] J.C. Holt, Magna Carta. Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 16

[5] Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 198 (Ch. 26)

The Magna Carta of 1215 - and Article 61. Building the case for clause consciousness

What is the Magna Carta? And what is its significance?  In order to answer these two questions we must also raise the question: which Magna Carta are we talking about?  Only then can we begin to understand Article 61.

The Magna Carta (today considered by some to be more ‘long’ than it was ‘great’) was a legal and constitutional document signed by King John of England on 15 June, 1215, nearly 800 years ago.  He was compelled to do so by the English barons who were likely following the example of the Coronation Charter of Henry I, signed in 1100.  But as signatories go, King John (not unlike King Henry I) may have had no intention of keeping to his Charter; the King complained to Pope Innocent III that he signed under duress, who absolved him of any legal obligations in a Papal Bull of 24 August, 1215.  Baronial rebellion continued.

As luck would have it, King John died in 1216, and the throne was handed over to his nine-year-old son, King Henry III.  The Magna Carta was reissued in 1216, but article 61 was missing.  It was reissued in 1217 – again article 61 was missing.  Finally, when King Henry III was an adult a 1225 version was reissued, along with The Charter of the Forest, which dealt with articles 44, 47 and 48 (forest law) also deleted after 1215.[1]  The so-called final version of the Magna Carta is the 1225 version, again missing article 61, but upheld by law and Parliament.  This 1225 version of the Magna Carta was always combined with the Charter of the Forest[2], and it is these two documents that are touring Canada (or at least some parts of the country) in 2015.

So what is this mysterious Article 61, and why are Canadians not able to view it in original text and Latin form?  Article 61 is very long - here it is translated in part, as it would be in 1215:

And if we do not correct the transgression, or if we are out of the kingdom, if our justiciar does not correct it, within forty days, reckoning from the time it was brought to our notice or to that of our justiciar if we were out of the kingdom, the aforesaid four barons shall refer that case to the rest of the twenty-five barons and those twenty five barons together with the community of the whole land shall distrain and distress us in every way they can, namely, by seizing castles, lands, possessions, and in such other ways that they can, saving our person and the persons of the queen and our children, until, in their opinion, amends have been made; and when amends have been made, they shall obey us as they did before.[3]

If there is a royal transgression of the Charter, then twenty-five barons considered as a whole (one of which is the Lord Mayor of London) has the right to exercise coercion.  In his Constitutional History of England (1880) William Stubbs sums up article 61 succinctly and in admiring tones:

The enforcement of the Charter is committed to twenty five barons, to be chosen from the whole baronage.  These are empowered to levy war against the king himself, if he reuse to do justice on any claim laid before him by four of their number, and in conjunction with the communa – the community of the whole realm – to distrain him, saving his royal person and queen and children.[4]

In other words, Article 61 incarnates the right of the community to compel the King to obey the law; his will was no longer considered absolute. And it meant the loss of royal prestige. In other words, space was evacuated for the development of Parliament, or are we reading history backwards too much? A generation after Stubbs, Pollock and Maitland in their History of English Law (1895) describe the Magna Carta as a “treaty extorted.”[5] Note the 'cool' tone: “Even in the most famous words of the charter we may detect a feudal claim which will only cease to be dangerous, when in course of time men have distorted its meaning – a man is entitled to the judgement of his peers.”[6]  But Pollock and Maitland’s point remains: the king is “below” the law.

 

Is it possible that the Magna Carta and the legacy of Article 61 are ‘distorted’ by history? After the death of King John it was never reissued in any form.  Article 61 certainly plays a significant role in America political culture, particularly in relation to the Declaration of Independence. The American historian George Burton Adams, claims Article 61 to be the most significant entry in the Magna Carta, perhaps for good reason. He argues that because of the Norman Conquest English feudalism was more fully idealized than its French counterpart (thereby reversing the positions of Stubbs and Maitland).  In other words, the Magna Carta functioned on feudal principles of an ideal reciprocity. And as he explains in The Origin of the English Constitution (1912) “the king’s action was bound and limited … the community possessed the right to coerce him.”[7] Simply put: Article 61 is essential because it defines the notion of a limited monarchy.

The Magna Carta is marked modestly on the occasion of its 700^th anniversary by an English paper in 1915, when Britain was at war (fighting another form of tyranny), only to be united in a larger published volume in 1917, when the United States entered the war.  The Magna Carta, in particular Article 39 and its implied notion of “due process”,[8] is also seen as the precedent to the American Bill of Rights, the twin to Article 61 and the Declaration of Independence.  The resulting work, Magna Carta Commemoration Essays, is both an official from of medieval memory and joint war effort, strong in its sense of “constitutional liberty” spread across the English-speaking world.[9]

However if we look to the 750^th anniversary of the Magna Carta in 1965, the distinguished British medieval historian J.C. Holt (recently deceased in April 2014) understates the document of 1215.  His revised edition of 1992 begins: “In 1215 Magna Carta was a failure.  It was intended as peace and it provoked war.”[10]  Here he overturns the whiggish Stubbs who observed in the Magna Carta a certain “treaty character.”[11] While Holt’s book is complex, deeply historical and essential reading, one cannot resist the impression that his thinking was formed, in some part, in youth as a witness to Neville Chamberlain speaking to enthusiastic crowds of “peace for our time”.

Today as we near the 800^th anniversary of the Magna Carta a charitable organization – not the Ministry of Heritage - is bringing the document to Canada on a tour in 2015, but there is no mention of Article 61.  Prime Minister Stephen Harper (who, it is assumed, knows economics – certainly not law) could not have it any better.  Not only is there no historical discussion about compelling a “King” to place himself “below” the law, taxpayers are not on the hook for their own political education, which in Harper’s Canada can be a good thing.

There are four copies of the Magna Carta of 1215 in existence, all in England: two with the British Library, which never travel, one with Salisbury Cathedral, and another with Lincoln Cathedral.  The Lincoln Magna Carta has toured the world somewhat, and it was on display in Australia in 1988.  The Australian Parliament even owns a 1297 version of the Magna Carta, which is on permanent display in Canberra.[12]  By comparison with Australian efforts, the role that Canada’s Parliament plays in educating the public about the Magna Carta is pitiful.

Pollock and Maitland maintain that the Magna Carta is “full of future law.” [13]   Legal figures have played a large role in maintaining its importance, in particular Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634) who revived it in time for the constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century with the 1628 Petition of Right (which restricted Charles I) and the introduction of Habeas Corpus.  While Coke was busy recasting seventeenth-century English law in light of the thirteenth century, he was looking at the 1225 issue of the Magna Carta – not the original 1215 version.[14]  It was not until 1759, more than a century after King Charles lost his head, that the two versions, 1215 and 1225, were actually distinguished. In other words, in the aftermath of civil war England was able to “coerce” its King without the aid of the Magna Carta of 1215. Imagine what Coke would have made of the Magna Carta (and the Petition of Right) if he had seen the original 1215 version!  George Adams, aided by Stubbs, resolve this issue by pointing out that the “feudal” Article 61 was succeeded by the constitutional “machinery” of the Provisions of Oxford (1258), a document from the period of the “Mad” Parliament fettering King Henry III, which (if we look to the example of Simon de Montfort who foreshadowed a free Parliament) compares somewhat with the struggles of the English seventeenth century.[15]

Discontinuities and continuities aside, the current Canadian tour of the Magna Carta speaks of many implied future laws, for example trial by jury and consent to taxation and women’s rights, but it misses any discussion of the coercive article 61, which is integral to the history of the English constitution.  Consider this a brief essay in historical revisionism. 

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[1] See the discussion by Katherine Fischer Drew, Magna Carta (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004), p. 139.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., , pp.137,138.

[4] William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in its origin and development, Vol 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1880) [Gale Making of the Modern Law Print Edition], p. 605.  For a fine discussion of Stubbs, see J.W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 126-151.

[5] Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English law before the time of Edward I, Vol. I   (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895) [Gale Making of Modern Law Print Edition], p. 150.

[6] Ibid. ,p. 151.

[7] Burton Adams Adams, The Origin of the English Constitution (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1912) [Gale Making of Modern Law Print Edition], p. 251.

[8] No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimized, neither will we attack him or send anyone to attack him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land. Source: Drew, Magna Carta, p. 134.

[9] See Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.  An interesting and very fertile book: the author misses any discussion of the 700^th anniversary of the Magna Carta.  He also misses any discussion of Tolkien.  For an interesting discussion of “The Influence of Magna Carta on American constitutional development” see H.D. Hazeltine in Henry Elliot Malden, Magna Carta Commemoration Essays (London: Royal Historical Society, 1917)[Bibliolife], pp. 180-226, esp. p. 206.  See also the address by McKechnie – a lawyer - on the occasion of the 700^th anniversary in Malden, Magna Carta, pp. 1-25.

[10] J.C. Holt, Magna Carta, Second ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),p. 1.

[11] Stubbs, Constitutional History, Vol. I, p. 595.

[12]See the Magna Carta Canada Blog “Where is Magna Carta Today?” (April 27,2014) by Carolyn Harris
http://www.magnacartacanada.ca/883/ viewed 10 June 2014.

[13] Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, Vol. I, p. 150.

[14] Holt, Magna Carta, p. 20.

[15] Both Adams (1912) and Stubbs (1880) refer to the “machinery” of The Provisions of Oxford.