UK marks 800 years of Magna Carta Monday June 15,2015

Queen Elizabeth II led commemorations Monday June 15,2015 to mark the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta — but the human rights the document helped enshrine are at the center of a modern political feud.

British Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch joined the queen for a ceremony at Runnymede, a riverside meadow west of London where, in 1215, King John met disgruntled barons and agreed to a list of basic rights.

The Magna Carta — Latin for Great Charter — is considered the founding document of English law and civil liberties and was an inspiration for the U.S. Constitution.

It established the principle that the king was subject to the law, rather than above it, and stipulated that "no free man shall be seized or imprisoned ... except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land."

Note

Magna Carta (Latin for "the Great Charter"), also called Magna Carta Libertatum (Latin for "the Great Charter of the Liberties"), is a Charter agreed by King John of England at Runnymede near Windsor on June 15,1215 

First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury  to make peace between the unpopular King and a group of rebel Barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. Neither side stood behind their commitments, and the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III leading to the FirstBarons' War 

After King John's death, the regency government of his young son,Henry III, reissued the document in 1216, stripped of some of its more radical content, in an unsuccessful bid to build political support for their cause. 

 At the end of the war in 1217, it formed part of the Peace Treaty Agreed at Lambeth, where the document acquired the name Magna Carta, to distinguish it from the smaller Charter of the Forest  which was issued at the same time. 

Short of funds, Henry reissued the charter again in 1225 in exchange for a grant of new taxes; his son, Edward I, repeated the exercise in 1297, this time confirming it as part of England's Statute Law

The charter became part of English political life and was typically renewed by each monarch in turn, although as time went by and the fledgling English Parliament passed new laws, it lost some of its practical significance

In many literary representations of the medieval past, however, Magna Carta remained a foundation of English national identity.

The legal profession in England and the United States continued to hold Magna Carta in high esteem; they were instrumental in forming the Magna Carta Society in 1922 to protect the meadows at Runnymede from development in the 1920s, and in 1957, the American Bar Association erected the Magna Carta Memorial at Runnymede