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Hello, if you look at the English Statute book, you'll find the following lines. No free man shall be seized or imprisoned or stripped of his rights or possessions or outlawed or exiled or deprived of his standing in any other way.

Nor will we proceed with force against him or send others to do so except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.

These words have been there for 794 years, that clause 39 of Magna Carta.

Issued by King John in 1215, Magna Carta is seen as the foundation of English law and liberty. It includes clauses on universal justice, but it has 63 clauses and one, for instance, on the fishing rights in the upper terms.

Magna Carta is both a proclamation of law and, as sometimes can seem to us, rather hodgepodge of baronial ambition.

We'd be to discuss Magna Carta, a David Carpenter, Professor of Medieval History at King's College London, Michael Clanshee, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the Institute of Historical Research,

and Nicholas Vincent, Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia.

Nicholas Vincent's King John's a famous villain of English history in Magna Carta, happened on his watch in 1215. Does he deserve the reputation he has?

Well, you see, most villains in the past, they're sort of found by modern historians to be good in parts and not good in others.

John really was an absolute rotter through and through the worst king in English history, possibly.

In the 14th century, 150 years or so after the events of 1215, the barons considered the possibility of promoting John of Gaunt, the son of Edward III as King,

and one of the principal arguments against any such idea was the fact that he was called John. There could not be another king, John.

Matthew, a Paris, from the Chronicle of St. Albans wrote, foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fownness of John.

Yes, well, that's certainly a fairly damning judgment, isn't it? What did he do wrong?

It was quite like another.

I suppose he failed in all the respects in which his father had succeeded. He was the son of a very, very successful father, Henry II,

who had built up this extraordinary plantation at Empire in France.

Henry II had killed his Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry II had fathered endless illegitimate children, but had succeeded.

John didn't do anything like a crimes on those sorts of scales, and yet failed. He lost Normandy. He killed his own nephew, Arthur of Brittany.

He lost it after the wives of his courteous, and those courteous were able to object to that in such a way that eventually that led on to rebellion.

He failed, above all, to reconquer the lands that his father had gained in France. He lost Normandy in 204,

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