[geeks] 4th Amendment Gone

[Mike Meredith]

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 16:33:47 -0500, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Isn't it closer to the truth to say that John Plantagenet signed the
> Magna Carta because his barons put it in front of him and said, "Sign
> this or we'll kill you"?  Certainly that's the way I learned it in
> history class in school in England.

Yup. Although nobody was that happy with the result at the time.

In a sense the Magna Carta is important only because we believe it to be
so. Many of the rights in it are merely minor points that the barons
wanted in there to codify their existing rights. Some other clauses were
quietly dropped in later versions.