An analogous case can be made for his treatment of Magna Carta and the development of English common law, not only in the History (begun in the 1930s, delayed by the war, and finally published after his second premiership ended), but in the many common law references in his wartime and postwar speeches. Much could be said concerning these charges, but one might begin by noting that Churchill’s narrative pursues purposes beyond the merely historical: both the subject and the author necessarily propelled the work into a larger political context. Even The Second World War (1948-1953) has met with sustained criticism from historians for being incompletely documented, skewed toward self-justification, and selective in its treatments. Such reflections, it must be noted, do not mark the first time Churchill’s historiography has been questioned. Yet this is essentially how Churchill proceeds in his most sustained treatment of the topic in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956-1958), finding connections between root and branch that could be discerned clearly mostly in hindsight. Indeed, the medieval charter retained a remarkable inspirational immediacy for Churchill, who was inclined to trace clear lines of descent through the congested and meandering corridors of history.Īs historians are apt to point out, the record of the growth of British constitutionalism is rather more complicated than identifying a series of vital transition points that may be connected together in an uninterrupted stream of progress. Churchill frequently pointed to Magna Carta as the foundation of the British liberties he strove so mightily to defend. The spectacle of a proud king bending before the will of his subjects fired the imagination of one the greatest guardians of freedom: Sir Winston S. His consent dramatically extorted by defiant barons at Runnymede in June of 1215, King John agreed to limits on the power of the crown. This year marks the 800 th anniversary of Magna Carta, an important landmark in the development of the English common law.
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