The Magna Carta
In Our Time
00:00
The Courts of England in the 13th Century
In the 13th century, who's enforcing these laws and how? Certainly it never had been probably so strongly enforced before. The standard law book of the time says in its prologue that a no poor man will be rejected from the King's Court. It wasn't necessarily true in practice, but that is the ideal which they aimed at. Every person before the King's law has to be a free man, but whether he is a great baron or a small, relatively small peasant,. They'll be treated equally.
Transcript
Play full episode
