Magna Carta Argumentative Essay

The Magna Carta also known as the “The Great Charter” is a document that King John of England agreed to in the 15th June 1215 that was to create peace and avert rebellion from the barons. King John agreed to this document as a solution due to the escalating rebellion threats by the England barons due to the unproductive foreign policies and tax systems he imposed.
The threat of rebellion started was from the decreasing prestige of King John that began in 1208 when he began a disagreement with Pope Innocent III. His prestige continued to decrease when he imposed heavy taxation on barons who did not support him in a military war that he lost against France in 1213 (Painter, 1979). Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury, however, pushed for the

Kings concessions on his tax policy and at the stalling of the negotiations in 1215, a civil war started led by Robert Fitz Walter Robert was able to take control of London and thus forced King John at Runnymede on 15th June 1215 to sign a document known as the Articles of Barons. Four days later, however, after alterations on the document, a formal documented was presented to the public and was called the Magna Carta.
The Magna Carta was originally inscribed in Latin and was composed of sixty-three clauses that aimed at dealing with the grievances that the citizens and rebellious barons put across regarding King John’s rule.

The Magna Carta addressed the complaints about the rights to ownership of land, the judicial system regulations, and the medieval taxation with no modern equivalence imposed (Hudson, 2014). The document also required that fish barrages from the Thames, the sacking of some royal servants and the regulation of quantifying instruments such as weights. The document demanded that taxation was not to be done without the approval of the realm constituted of the land barons and the church leaders. The resulting document thus had clauses that were majorly on the rights of baron property owners and other influential citizens of the country and also some limited plans of the people who created the document. As a result, the welfare and desires of the influential wealthy classes were taken care of with the majority of the population of England not benefiting from the document. The Magna Carta is famously known for being the first document that required every England citizen, even the king himself to be subject to the

law.
The Magna Carta was initially ineffective in fully creating a peace treaty with the barons and citizens due to its biasedness, and alterations were made in the later years of 1216, 1217 and finally 1225 by Henry III who succeeded the King after his father’s death. An instance of the use of the Magna Carta was between 1625 and 1649 when the opponents of King Charles I used the document to govern the arbitrary use of royal power. King Charles efforts of stopping his trial were disregarded by his opponents through referencing the Magna Carta (Holt, 2015). Magna Carta was later used as a foundation to the creation of the English system of common law. Out of the sixty-three clauses, three are still incorporated in the English law. The first protects the rights of the English Church; the second approves the liberties and levies of London and other cities in England, while the third protects the constitutional rights of everyone to fair treatment in courts and their freedom.
The Magna Carta has overtime proved to be fundamental to the start and development of the English Liberties even though most of its clauses have been edited or revoked over time. In conclusion, Magna Carta has retained its symbolic influence as a document that has defended the England citizens form tyrannical and arbitrary use of power situations and acted as a defence of citizen liberties.