Magna Carta from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Time. About John Baker’s book «Reinvention of Magna Carta 1216-1616». Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. XLIX + 570 p.

This article is a review on the study of John Baker, dedicated to the Magna Carta. The main purpose of the article is to draw the evolution of the perception of the Charter, its reception life and the new meanings and also on how they are presented in the book of J. Baker. John Baker’s book describes the origins and meaning of that Charter, on its subsequent transmutation through later revised reissues, confirmations, lawyers’ readings, legal treatises, court cases and parliamentary debates into the substantially altered Magna Carta known to later generations with new meanings. The author focuses on how knowledge of that document was spread in a variety of ways and used by later generations not just to restrain royal excesses bit also crown officials. John Baker describes the causes why the peace agreement between the barons and John Lackland of 1215 transformed with the royal grant in 1225. He argues why the 1225 editorial board then gained status as a parliamentary statute. The book covers the period from 13 to the beginning of the 17 centuries. However, the author focuses on the post-reformation time. At the beginning of the 16 century the Magna Carta is beginning to be addressed more often. But the true resurrection of the Magna Charta occurs after 1580, when lawyers and commoners of the House of Commons use it (especially chapter 29) in order to protect the liberties and property of subjects. Throughout the book, the author constantly returns to Chapter 29, which is considered as central to the Great Charter, and prohibits the king arresting, imprisoning, expelling, and “depriving” without a court sentence and not “according to the law of the land”. One of the leitmotivs of many studies on the history of the Magna Carta is the assertion that by the efforts of Ed. Coke and his fellows in the legal branch Magna Carta in pre-revolutionary England was turned into a myth, gaining the status of a keeper of fundamental rights and liberties. By his research, J. Baker asserts a completely different point of view, believing that the reception life of the Magna Carta was much more complicated, and its reinterpretation took several centuries. At the same time, J. Baker agrees that it was during the prerevolutionary time that the Magna Carta gained very high prestige and entered into mass circulation for several decades. Historical surveys of the second half of the 17 and 18 centuries deprived it of the heroic status and made the attitude towards the Charter more balanced. But, he indicates, this does not detract from its role and global significance, since some of its provisions still operate, being present as principles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and, as norms, in modern administrative law of Britain.

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