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Tuesday, July 9, 2013 by Liz Smith YOU can believe it or not, but I sat down at a beautiful scenic pool overlooking the gorgeous Connecticut River over the 4th of July and had with me a welter of newspapers and tabloid magazines plus a copy of a little priceless book titled “1215: The Year of Magna Carta,” written by historians Danny Danziger and John Gillingham.
Only four actual originals of the Magna Carta exist — two in the Treasures Gallery of the British Library — another at Salisbury Cathedral, one in the Lincoln Cathedral Library. Our historians say “... the Library one under bullet-proof glass, lies there intact, nearly eight hundred years old. It is just as famous as any document you can name in any museum or parliament. It holds its own against the American Declaration of Independence; indeed the authors of that document professed to have read the Magna Carta before they put pen to paper ... the eloquence of a few of its sentences, the nobility and idealism they express, has elevated this piece of legislation to eternal iconic status ... it is the foundation stone of modern freedom.” So I went on to read how it all happened and how King John was forced into a less than despotic position. This is all so important, that when Britain made a memorial to John F. Kennedy, they gave an acre of land at Runnymede to the people of the United States and if you go and stand on it, you are officially in the U.S. |
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| This book “1215” is full of fascinating adventurous history. It tells us among other things that the England of 1200 was vastly different from that of 1100. For instance, women wore no underwear though the temperature was higher than it is now ... you could travel from Windsor to the Hampshire Coast without leaving the forest ... ink made from gall was extracted by little pimples on the oak tree ... you wrote with a left wing goose feather if you were right handed and a right wing if you were left handed ... the Crusades were in full swing ... the rich grew richer and for the poor, life was hard ... but people had good teeth because sugar wasn’t yet a staple of diet ... the first universities came into existence ... a few ruins from 1000 still survive ... there were numbers of people who could read in French, English and Latin — the monks weren’t the only ones ... literature was a’borning ... most people in “civilized” Britain were then Catholic. This is a wonderful book published by Simon & Shuster back in 2004. |
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I was already behind the rap “music” scene, being scathingly told that this song, concert, whatever it consists of, had already gone platinum and had been out for a week. (It is the 12th solo album by Jay-Z of the Beyonce Jay-Z family.) He had introduced his monumental work and presented it next to the famous copy in Salisbury Cathedral. (People who weren’t talking or thinking too much about history, already knew that Samsung had bought a million copies at $5 each to give away.) |
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SO I listened to Jay-Z’s rap because I wanted to learn and I thought the marketing was pretty brilliant even if I didn’t recognize anything thrilling in the words.
As one headline put it: “In Egypt, mob rule is no substitute for democracy.” It took the United States revolutionaries a long time to react to the first Magna Carta with its ideas of democracy and freedom for everyone and we are still fighting in this great country for “equality and fairness.” But at least, maybe we know what we are fighting for. Anyway, I’m not bragging on my failure to keep up with Jay-Z and his version of the “Magna Carta.” I was just surprised at the serendipity of all the 4th’s holiday reactions ... the international problems to be solved world wide ... piling on ... lessons learned ... freedom commercialized — and, why not ... it’s part of freedom. Perhaps one day the Middle East will join the west in worshipping international business, success, advertising, and all the rest of the advantages commercial freedom has laid on us — and we can stop killing each other over religion. |
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Contact Liz Smith here. | Click here for NYSD contents. |