4 - What Magna Carta Means to the Modern British Public

Summary

At most points in the twentieth century, Magna Carta would probably have been regarded as falling into the category of historical events about which ‘every schoolboy knows’, in the once-familiar phrase. Certainly, when Sellar and Yeatman produced their famous 1930 parody of traditional history teaching, 1066 and All That, they not only included a chapter on Magna Carta and its provisions, but chose for the original cover illustration a cartoon conflating Magna Carta with the Order of the Garter. Similarly, when Galton and Simpson had Tony Hancock appeal to his fellow jurors ‘Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?’ in a 1959 episode of Hancock's Half Hour, the joke would have been pointless if they were not able to assume that the vast majority of BBC TV viewers knew at least a little more about Magna Carta than Hancock's character did. Today, perhaps we are not so sure. Indeed, in June 2014 the Prime Minister, David Cameron, felt justified in announcing as a significant policy initiative that in future all school pupils should be taught about Magna Carta, with the aim of promoting British values.

How far are the British public aware of Magna Carta today? To explore this question, Ipsos MORI conducted two brief opinion polls, one towards the end of 2012 and one in May 2014. These followed in the steps of a 1998 MORI survey, which had confirmed that there was at that point widespread recognition of the name at the very least, with 75 per cent of British adults saying they had heard of Magna Carta, putting it on a par with documents receiving widespread contemporary news coverage such as the Human Rights Bill and the Maastricht Treaty. But we went further than the 1998 survey, exploring also the public's knowledge of some basic historical facts about Magna Carta, their beliefs as to what it contained and their attitudes to some of the rights it embodied.