Magna Carta Day

Have you ever wondered why British currency is the "pound"?

For about 500 years, starting in AD 790 under Anglo-Saxon King Offa, the silver penny was the only coin minted in England.  These were small, thin, hammered coins, and 240 of them weighed one pound.  Thus, a "pound" is 240 pence, and later the pound was subdivided into 20 shillings of 12 pence each (still 240 pence).  In 1971, Britain switched to a decimal coinage of 100 pence to the pound.  If you've heard the expression "pound sterling", it comes from the 92.5% "sterling silver" of the pennies.

A couple weeks ago at a coin show I purchased a silver penny from King John.  It's about the size of a US dime and is in XF40 (extra fine, with a numerical grade of 40) condition.  Here's an example of such a penny in a somewhat higher condition:

 

King John wasn't the most popular of English kings.  He was the king during the Robin Hood time frame, and was compelled by his barons to agree to the Magna Carta.

Magna Carta is often taught as a precursor to the US Constitution, as it limited the rights of the English king.  However, as Wikipedia states:

First drafted by Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton to make peace between the unpopular king and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. Neither side stood behind their commitments, and the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons' War. 

It was largely forgotten by Queen Elizabeth's time.

At the end of the 16th century, there was an upsurge in interest in Magna Carta. Lawyers and historians at the time believed that there was an ancient English constitution, going back to the days of the Anglo-Saxons, that protected individual English freedoms. They argued that the Norman invasion of 1066 had overthrown these rights, and that Magna Carta had been a popular attempt to restore them, making the charter an essential foundation for the contemporary powers of Parliament and legal principles such as habeas corpus. Although this historical account was badly flawed, jurists such as Sir Edward Coke used Magna Carta extensively in the early 17th century, arguing against the divine right of kings propounded by the Stuart monarchs. Both James I and his son Charles I attempted to suppress the discussion of Magna Carta, until the issue was curtailed by the English Civil War of the 1640s and the execution of Charles. The political myth of Magna Carta and its protection of ancient personal liberties persisted after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 until well into the 19th century. It influenced the early American colonists in the Thirteen Colonies and the formation of the United States Constitution, which became the supreme law of the land in the new republic of the United States.^[c] Research by Victorian historians showed that the original 1215 charter had concerned the medieval relationship between the monarch and the barons, rather than the rights of ordinary people, but the charter remained a powerful, iconic document, even after almost all of its content was repealed from the statute books in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

So while Magna Carta would have limited the king's prerogatives, had it been complied with, it limited them only with respect to the barons; it had nothing to do with individual rights.  Those rights, as we understand them today, are actually the result of the English Enlightenment.  The myth of the Magna Carta as some sort of foundation of the rights of man is just that, a myth.

It is still, however, very interesting as history.  King John affixed his seal to Magna Carta in Runnymede Meadow, a few miles from Windsor Castle, on this date in AD 1215.