Printing
Xu Mingjie, Magna Carta and Kingship in the Parliamentary Politics in Late Medieval England
2020-12-03
It is a very prominent phenomenon in the political history of England that Magna Carta was repeatedly confirmed by parliament up to forty nine times between the late 13th and the early 15th centuries. Despite the massive historiography devoted to this topic, the root causes of the parliamentary confirmations of Magna Carta have not been sufficiently explored. This paper further discusses this issue from the perspective of the monarch, which leads to a striking finding that these confirmations largely depended on the support of the crown. The crown's actions of such sort were not arbitrary, but derived from the urgent need that it ought to expand power through the parliament since the establishment of the parliamentary politics in the mid 13th century. The parliament had a great voice in such key state affairs as public finance and taxation. Therefore, the crown had to play the political game with the institution, and Magna Carta was a crucial medium between the two sides in this game. In the 15th century, however, the role of Magna Carta gradually declined as a result of the alienation of the parliamentary politics. The evolution of these parliamentary confirmations of Magna Carta exhibited a fundamental feature of kingship in the late Middle Ages that the monarch centralised its power through negotiation and compromise instead of coercion.