Magna Carta Research Paper

Dr. B. Breslow’s topic was on the Magna Carta and the origins of Parliament. He explained how there were strains between the parliaments and the King. It all began when King John inherited not only the British throne, but also extensive lands in Western France, acquired by his father Henry II through inheritance, war, and circumstance, and defended during his reign by his brother Richard I against the King of France. During much of his reign, John was at war with France, and by the time of his death in 1216, the French empire was substantially lost. King John was in need of money so he forcefully taxed his subjects. Since that day, the Magna Carta agreed by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, around 1215. First drafted by the Archbishop …show more content…
B. Lowe’s topic was the Magna Carta in the Era of the English Civil War. At the time, the Parliament of England did not have a large permanent role in the English system of government. Instead, Parliament functioned as a temporary advisory committee and the monarch would summoned them. Once summoned, a parliament's continued existence was at the king's pleasure, since it was subject to dissolution by him at any time. Yet in spite of this limited role, Parliament had, over the preceding centuries, acquired de facto powers of enough significance that monarchs could not simply ignore them indefinitely. Without question, for a monarch, Parliament's most indispensable power was its ability to raise tax revenues far in excess of all other sources of revenue at the Crown's disposal. By the seventeenth century, Parliament's tax-raising powers had come to be derived from the fact that the gentry was the only stratum of society with the ability and authority to actually collect and remit the most meaningful forms of taxation then available at the local level. This meant that if the king wanted to ensure a smooth collection of revenue, he needed the co-operation of the gentry. For all of the Crown's legal authority, by any modern standard, its resources were limited to the extent that, when the gentry refused to collect the king's taxes on a national scale, the Crown lacked any practical means with which to compel

Show More