1. Historic anniversaries in British public life: Magna Carta 800/2015 in perspective
The 800th anniversary celebrations of Magna Carta offer an opportunity to judge not only the importance of the document and the influence of its ideas on Britons today, but to consider also the growing British fascination with historical anniversaries of all sorts. In recent years a distinctive feature of British public life has been the number of historic anniversaries we not only register but mark in some public way, whether through celebrations or ceremonies of a more sombre type. Many of these are connected with the two twentieth-century world wars which have defined British identity and shaped British history like nothing else has in the modern period. Whether the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings in June 2014, the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War two months later, or the Battles of Agincourt (1415) and Waterloo (1815) as well as the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta in 2015, the British have become addicted to historical anniversaries, many of them military in nature. Each new year begins with the publication of the lists of historic anniversaries to follow over the next twelve months.1 If we awaken early enough each morning, at 5.35am on BBC Radio 4 great and notable events which occurred on this day in history are listed and sometimes explained, as if to encourage us out of bed to do something notable in the day to come as our forebears did notable things before us.2 It is reminiscent of the St. Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here3
There is even an ‘On This Day’ BBC website listing daily events in the period 1950–2005, effectively covering the television age before the advent of the internet age.4
The British have always been a historically minded people who have used history for contemporary political and civic purposes. But the recent desire to acknowledge our past in so many ways and so many places is worthy of some consideration, especially in the light of the public activities and projects connected with Magna Carta across Britain in 2015. What does the remembrance of Magna Carta tell us about the status of anniversaries in British public life and national consciousness, and how should historians think about the growing propensity to remember British – and other – history in this manner?
The 2015 celebrations for Magna Carta came to a climax at Runnymede, in the meadow where the document was sealed on 15 June 1215 800 years previously, in the presence of the Queen and Prince William, the archbishop of Canterbury and the prime minister, David Cameron.5 The audience had assembled there early on a damp and faintly misty June morning, though they were soon exceedingly hot with no shade under a strong sun. There were speeches; bands and orchestras played; choirs sang; people chatted amiably and the atmosphere was more village fête – though for an event for 3,500 people – than political event or historical commemoration.6 Fittingly, the morning’s activities ended with a flypast by the Red Arrows, the RAF’s elite aerial acrobatics team, who grace many a British festival. Probably the largest cheer of the morning was given before the speech of the United States’ attorney general, Loretta Lynch, representing the U.S. government and people.7 But this was not in virtue of the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’, or the American veneration of Magna Carta, which is palpably greater than in Britain. Rather, it was for her role in the arrest and detention in the previous days of allegedly corrupt officials from the governing body of world football, FIFA. In a country not famed for its devotion to soccer, the American authorities had done what no government in Europe had dared to do despite all the evidence of misappropriation and malfeasance by FIFA officials. Magna Carta had secured the rights of the innocent and mandated due process under the law: many clapped and cheered Lynch for ensuring that the rule of law would extend to the administration of ‘the beautiful game’ across the world.8
Figure 1.1. ‘The Jurors’ by Huw Lock at Runnymede, Surrey, commissioned by Surrey County Council and the National Trust to commemorate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta in 2015. The twelve chairs represent the historical and ongoing struggle for justice and equal rights.
Participants at Runnymede that morning were also able to admire the new sculpture in the meadow by Hew Locke.9 Called ‘The Jurors’, it celebrates the famous 39th clause of Magna Carta mandating for all men ‘the lawful judgment of his equals’. Locke’s bronze installation takes the form of twelve chairs for twelve jury members and pays tribute not only to Magna Carta’s English origins and influence in Britain but, in chairs devoted to the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of the serfs and the struggle for the freedom of Nelson Mandela, among other themes, to its influence around the world. Mandela, of course, cited the rights granted by Magna Carta in his great speech at the Rivonia trial in South Africa in 1964.10 ‘The Jurors’ is a less dramatic memorial than the column that nineteenth-century satirist Richard Brinsley Sheridan proposed to erect in the meadow for the centenary of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 on ‘a spot sacred to the liberties of the people’.11 But this was never built. The celebrations planned for 1715 were never held in a tense year in British history when the new Hanoverian regime of George I was threatened with Jacobite rebellion. Nor did the planned commemorations of 1815 and 1915 take place in years in which Britain was engaged in two great wars in France and the Low Countries.
Figure 1.2. The American Bar Association Memorial to Magna Carta at Runnymede, erected in 1957.
This climax to the events of 2015 was, in fact, a very British style of anticlimax, understated and casual rather than scripted and formal. This was in keeping with the planning and organization of the Magna Carta anniversary from the first which had fallen to the ‘800 Committee’ under the aegis of the Magna Carta Trust which had been formed in 1956.12 The 800 Committee included public figures, politicians, jurists, academics and representatives of those institutions which hold copies of Magna Carta, among them cathedrals and great libraries.13 But until the grant of £1 million by the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, in his 2014 Budget speech – and this can hardly be considered magnificent public largesse – the 800 Committee and the preparation of the Magna Carta memorials entrusted to it had been largely supported by an individual, Sir Robert (Bob) Worcester, an American domiciled in England and famous for his long career in British political polling, who chaired the 800 Committee. Until 2012 most of the available public funds for cultural activity went to support the London Olympics; only latterly did the state recognize the significance of 2015, and, interestingly, having made a grant to the Magna Carta commemorations, central funds were then found, on the same model, for the commemorations of Agincourt and Waterloo in 2015 as well.14 The British and Commonwealth campaign at Gallipoli in 1915, one of the many disastrous campaigns of the First World War, was not forgotten, either. On 25 April 2015, ANZAC Day, there were ceremonies at the Australian and New Zealand War Memorials in Hyde Park and at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London. On the previous day, there had been a commemorative service at the Cape Hellas memorial at Gallipoli itself. Each of these was attended by members of the British royal family.15
None of these military anniversaries evoked the crescendo of interest that attached to Magna Carta in 2015. The interest was all the more effective as a tool of public education because it was largely generated from below by academic, church, community and local groups given small sums for their projects, exhibitions and celebrations.16 In a very British fashion, the energy and interest was self-generated rather than imposed or choreographed from above. There were notable exhibitions, such as that in Westminster Hall which brought the four surviving original Magna Cartas to a single place, and the British Library exhibition ‘Law, Liberty and Legacy’ which ran for much of the year, designed by Dr Claire Breay, lead curator of medieval and early manuscripts at the British Library.17 Among several academic conferences, that held in June at King’s College London and the British Library was the most notable in bringing together all the leading historians.18 Magna Carta featured on several major websites including those of The National Archives,19 the Historical Association,20 Salisbury Cathedral21 and many smaller and less well-known ones. There were church services and thanksgivings; commemorative coins and postage stamps; local exhibitions and lectures; books and learned articles; school lessons aplenty; and several major television and radio programmes, such as the series devoted to Magna Carta’s history and legacy in BBC Radio 4’s ‘In Our Time’ strand.22 The celebrations and commemorations were not without a scholarly purpose and outcome as well. Thanks to a large grant in 2012 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to Professor Nicholas Vincent at the University of East Anglia for a three-year project to track down lost originals of Magna Carta and create an online database about the document and its textual and manuscript history, two new copies were found.23 Both were Magna Cartas dating from 1300 and both were originally from Kent. One was from Faversham and the other, found in the Kent County Archives along with the town’s Charter of the Forest, had originally been in the possession of the town of Sandwich.24
Inevitably among such a range of commemorations, the import of Magna Carta became blurred, distorted and anachronistic. It was celebrated too often as a cornerstone of modern ‘democracy’ in some generalized way, rather than the rule of law, the rights of the subject, and due legal process.25 Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that all this activity had its effect: the sheer number of local projects and commemorations is testimony to the interest people took in the anniversary and its penetration into the collective ‘national mind’, if only for a few weeks in mid 2015. The Magna Carta anniversary celebrations may be the best evidence of British historical consciousness today, but they are hardly the only example of the marking and observance of anniversaries in our public life. Indeed, their prominence and success in 2015 owed a great deal to a public culture which has been highly interested and engaged in historical remembrance since at least the 1980s.
For academic historians the significance of modern public anniversaries can be best approached via the emergence of two relatively recent sub-disciplines: the history of memory and the history of traditions. Eric Hobsbawm related the ‘invention of traditions’ to the development of modern nations and states in the nineteenth century and their requirement for a shared history and ceremonies by which to create national cohesion. Previous forms of solidarity had been based on religion, duty to a sovereign, regional or even tribal association. The new nation states in Europe and the Americas had to replace these with a national narrative which could be dramatized through anniversary.26 Hence the first celebrations of Bastille Day, 14 July, waited until 1880 and came at a time when the French Third Republic was struggling to legitimize republicanism, unify a nation, and turn ‘peasants into Frenchmen’.27 Roland Quinault’s work on the history of public anniversaries, specifically centenaries, adds detail and texture to this broad thesis. Their observance emerged later than might be expected in the last third of the nineteenth century. Unlike twentieth-century observance, centenaries then tended to celebrate writers and cultural figures rather than military heroes and military events. The British state was not greatly involved: they were the work of enthusiasts and followers. The development of mass transportation and the growth of leisure assisted public participation. If they encouraged national solidarity, centenaries and anniversaries were made possible by the emergence of a mature historical consciousness in the final decades of the nineteenth century.28 The rise in historical interest and publication in these years, the development of major public institutions like the National Portrait Gallery which gave popular access to Britain’s past, the introduction of history as a degree course in universities and its institutionalization in the school curriculum, and the systematic gathering and cataloguing of historical documents in major collections, raised public awareness of the past and made the public anniversary possible.
Some of the most notable anniversaries still celebrated in Britain were spontaneous acts of memorialization, emerging from the natural desire of populations to remember events and bear witness to the changes to their lives. Armistice Day, 11 November, emerged in this manner directly after the First World War, part spontaneous, part planned, and rapidly won pride of place in the British public’s annual ceremonial traditions.29 Indeed, it supplanted the annual celebration of the Battle of Trafalgar of 21 October 1805, which throughout the nineteenth century had been a major anniversary both in Britain and across the empire.30 After the First World War it was felt to be inappropriate to mark military victory in this manner and public mourning and remembrance took the place of celebration. Guy Fawkes Day, 5 November, also emerged rapidly after the events of 1605 in which Roman Catholic plotters were caught before they were able to blow up parliament: almost immediately ‘national deliverance’ was celebrated widely across England and remembrance was institutionalized by the passage of the Observance of 5th November Act, widely known as the ‘Thanksgiving Act’, in January 1606, which mandated celebration and prayer on 5 November each year in thanks for the salvation of the king and legislators. The anniversary became a ritualized means for the denunciation and persecution of Roman Catholics; later, in the 1630s and 1640s, it was used by puritans as an occasion to denounce their political and religious enemies, royalists and all alleged crypto-Catholics.31
The Magna Carta commemorations in 2015 led to nothing like this. The events of 1215 are too far in the past to create conflict as opposed to curiosity. The principles that Magna Carta embodied and has represented ever since are too central and precious to British and western political values and judicial systems to evoke dissent. There has been academic debate, as there should be: for example, the argument of the senior judge of the Supreme Court, Jonathan Sumption, who is also a leading medieval historian, that Magna Carta’s importance has been exaggerated, was controversial.32 There was criticism of David Cameron for using his speech at the ceremony at Runnymede on 15 June to exalt a putative British Bill of Rights of the future above the Human Rights Act of the present, passed by the Labour government in 1998 and disliked by many Conservatives because of its perceived bias in favour of individual petitioners.33 Cameron told the gathering that ‘here in Britain, ironically the place where those ideas were first set out, the good name of human rights has sometimes become distorted and devalued’. The mixing of party politics with national commemoration was not well received. In Beijing, an exhibition of the Hereford Cathedral Magna Carta at Renmin University was cancelled and relocated to the British embassy when the necessary ministerial approvals were not forthcoming.34 But these were relatively insignificant controversies and conflicts when set against the wider history of anniversaries and their celebration in British history.
The very success of the Magna Carta celebrations and the interest in anniversaries raise questions about a society so much given to retrospection: it may reinforce the view that Britain is a society with a better past than future and is fixated on lost glory.35 On the other hand, it may also be evidence of the remarkable success of history as a discipline in Britain today. On television and radio, in newspapers and magazines, on bookshelves and in libraries, history is popular and finds a ready audience – and this audience can appreciate the celebration of the past and participate fully in it. Certainly the commemoration of national anniversaries provides us with a type of national cohesion, though this may in itself simply be a replacement for other types of solidarity. Most religious ritual, ceremony and festivity is an act of remembrance – be it the birth and death of Jesus at Christmas and Easter; or the deliverance of the children of Israel from Egyptian slavery at Passover.
Some anniversaries are untroubled and untroubling, notably those commemorating events from the distant past or those that remember sacrifice in a self-evidently virtuous struggle such as the defeat of Nazism in the Second World War. But remembering the First World War is more difficult because the cause Britain fought for does not seem so just and noble now, and because the First World War is seen to have been badly managed by politicians and generals who, in the popular view of the war, needlessly sacrificed hundreds of thousands of British lives. The remembrance of national heroes is also easily accomplished. Winston Churchill’s reputation has only grown since his death in 1965, ensuring that the fiftieth anniversary in January 2015 was quite without criticism. In the 1960s and 1970s his mistakes were more prominent in public discussion, and it was common to hear and read reference to Tonypandy in 1911 (where as home secretary Churchill used troops to shut down a strike of Welsh coal miners); Gallipoli in 1915 (which was Churchill’s idea); going back onto the gold standard at the pre-war exchange rate in 1925 when he was chancellor of the exchequer; and his support for King Edward VIII in 1936 during the abdication crisis. Sometimes, an anniversary can usefully encapsulate a movement or an idea. A recent conference at the Institute of Historical Research in London on the relationship between science and modernism in the period 1880–1920 exactly coincided with the centenary of the first ever use of poison gas in warfare on 22 April 1915 in France on the Western Front.36 What better way to point to the ambiguities in the history of technology and of ‘progress’ itself than to remind the audience of this dark centenary?
Few anniversaries are without their attendant moral and national difficulties. Remembering the Second World War will be different for other combatant societies – for Germany and Japan, of course, and also for Russia and China, where the scale of what occurred and what is to be remembered is so different from British historical experience. There have been various arguments and disagreements over Second World War anniversaries: arguments over who sacrificed more; over who liberated the French (almost always the Americans); over the presence of German representatives at ceremonial events; and of the omission of due acknowledgment at the D-Day commemorations in 2014 of the role of Canadian personnel on 6 June 1944. The bombing of Dresden in February 1945 reignites controversy in Britain each year. To some Britons, the fact that the nation defines itself through the remembrance of conflicts and warfare is no sort of recommendation, and they object to the ‘militarization of remembrance’. In early November each year, most Britons wear a poppy in the lapel of their jackets and coats. It is timed to coincide with the anniversary of 11 November 1918, the day the First World War ended. The poppy we wear is a plastic flower, red in colour, to remind us of the real red poppies which grew on the battlefields of Flanders between 1914 and 1918: it is a national symbol of remembrance, perhaps the most notable of all personal, British symbols. But some critics today wear white poppies instead, distributed by the Peace Pledge Union which was founded in 1934, because they object to symbols of conflict and violence and to the glorification of warfare as they see it.37
The same event can therefore be remembered and experienced in different ways. This was made clear to me on 9 May 1990 when leading a party of students to Moscow under the old Soviet Union. We encountered a group of men wearing British military decorations, members of the North Russia Club which united comrades who had served at the Royal Navy bases in Archangel and Murmansk in northern Russia during the Second World War. Membership was later extended to all those who had served on the Arctic convoys to Russia supplying the Soviet Union with war materiel – guns, ammunition, supplies – from 1941.38 Their role in the war had been largely forgotten in Britain, and commemorating our alliance with Stalin was difficult during the Cold War. But these men came every year to Soviet commemorations of the end of the war and they looked on the Russians as their comrades and friends.
There are many anniversaries in the British calendar that are intrinsically controversial. The annual Guy Fawkes celebrations were occasions for the stigmatization of Roman Catholics, as we have seen. In 2014 many British television programmes and articles conveyed a message that the First World War was purposeless, meaningless carnage. Yet to many of the men who marched away to fight, the war had a powerful rationale in stopping ‘Prussianism’ and the domination of great powers over smaller nations seeking to be free. To them it was a fight for international order and liberalism, though this commitment has largely been overlooked in subsequent literary, dramatic and musical explorations of the war. Hiroshima Day, 6 August, has been taken up not only by peace movements in general, but by those who would distort the history of the use of atomic weapons and present it as a crime, rather than present it in its own unique historical context. Controversy attends any historical commemoration where the issues remain unresolved – for example, the centenary of the American Civil War in the early 1960s at a time when the same issues of African-American civil rights were still being fought over in the United States.39 It was difficult to avoid controversy and many American organizations, whether official or private, gave up the attempt at remembrance, or did so in a carefully muted fashion. Only military remembrance was possible on the basis of the shared heroism and sacrifice of both sets of combatants who in the 1860s fought nobly although for different causes. But as soon as those causes came under scrutiny, remembrance was pitched into the present and became politicized rather than historicized. This was also the fate of the centenary of the Russian Revolution in 2017. It was impossible to note the anniversary of the Bolshevik coup without noting also the crimes of the Soviet Union, its disregard for human life and truth, its inauspicious collapse, but the continuation of its anti-democratic and anti-western culture nonetheless. The different commemorations of 1917 were influenced not only by ideology but also by the knowledge that the Revolution, whatever the hopes for it at the time, ended in persecutions, purges, the gulags and collapse.
The annual commemoration of the Apprentice Boys of Derry/ Londonderry, Northern Ireland, is in a league of its own when it comes to controversy and communal tension, even though the events recalled occurred as long ago as December 1688 when thirteen Protestant apprentice boys in Derry shut the city gates against a force of 1,200 Catholic troops. There followed more than seven months of siege, much of it under the command of the deposed king, James II, during which it was reported that 4,000 of the townspeople, about half the population, died of starvation. The siege was eventually lifted by the forces of the new Protestant British monarch, William III, and the besieging Catholic army retreated. These events are marked each year by the ceremonial closing of the gates in December and then the biggest and most antagonistic of Northern Ireland’s Orange Order parades on the second Saturday of August to remember the relief of Derry/Londonderry. Protestant parades are more than merely acts of remembrance; in tense, religiously divided communities they have been understood as acts of intimidation on the part of the majority Protestant community against the minority Catholic community in Ulster. The problem is all the more intense in Derry/Londonderry because here the nationalist community – Catholic – is actually larger than the loyalist – Protestant – population. The routes taken by the parades and marches, which are held across the cities and towns of the province, have led them by design into many Catholic districts in order to reinforce the sense of subordination felt by many Catholics. They were always controversial but became the cause of outright violence between the communities in the years of the Troubles after 1968. Policing them drew the civil and military authorities into the local conflicts as well. After particularly intense conflict over Orange Order parades in Portadown in the mid and late 1990s, an investigative commission was established to recommend ways of reducing communal friction, and under the terms of the 1998 Public Processions (Northern Ireland) Act, a permanent Parades Commission, a quasi-judicial public body, now oversees arrangements which allow Protestants to march, but in less contentious places, and Catholics to live in peace.40 The parades – and the annual summer marching season in Northern Ireland in general – are an example of the commemoration of events which are still integral to contemporary politics. In Northern Ireland, the way history is remembered, recorded and celebrated has itself become part of the ongoing conflict between groups.
Some anniversaries, meanwhile, remember or commemorate the wrong thing. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the French Revolution will appreciate the inflated significance that 14 July gives to the fall of the Bastille. The Bastille was a hated symbol of the corruption of the French ancien regime, but when the crowd overwhelmed it there were only a handful of prisoners to be released. Because it was a building that could be taken, as in a battle, it had an immediate significance. Yet, to a historian, there are far more important events in that same season, such as the pledge of 17 June 1789, taken by members of the Third Estate and the liberal nobility, to create an enduring popular assembly – or the famous debates and decisions of that assembly on 4 August 1789 to end all feudal dues and relationships, all the privileges and legal immunities of an aristocracy that had prospered at the expense of the people. The commemoration of 14 July each year may be said to hamper a true understanding of the French Revolution as a sequence of events and developments stretching across more than a decade from 1786 to the rise of Napoleon in the mid 1790s.
There are also forgotten anniversaries, those overlooked or otherwise uncelebrated. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography devoted lavish resource and time to an update in October 2008 designed to coincide with the ninetieth anniversary of the end of the First World War which added several dozen biographies of people connected with the war who were missing from the Dictionary. But the update coincided with the global financial crash of that month, when the world economic system seemed on the brink of collapse, and no one took any notice.
We should also register the capacity of a public ceremonial or commemoration to transform and overshadow private remembrance such that personal responses are overwhelmed by wider, societal reactions. It is to the credit of British society that Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January each year – the day that Auschwitz was liberated in 1945 – has been officially observed since 2001.41 The anniversary has grown in stature and significance in recent years, so that on 27 January 2015 the prime minister, the deputy prime minister and the leader of the opposition, among others, were all engaged in a televised public act of remembrance.42 No one could be against the efforts made thereby to ensure that this particular horror is not forgotten and that as a society, we educate the next generation about the degree of man’s inhumanity to man. But grief is largely private and is not always easily shared. Public ceremonial may educate others, those who perhaps need to be educated, but can feel like an invasion to those who themselves suffered or lost family members, or have been deprived of family members never born. When we mark anniversaries of such grave events in this public manner we should be aware also of the private reactions of those affected for whom public ceremonial may feel like an invasion of the privacy and solitude that personal remembrance sometimes requires. For this reason the most potent anniversaries in the calendar are not national anniversaries of the sort investigated by historians, but personal ones, a set of individual memories that we carry with us and which pattern our lives. We recall – just about – when and where we first met our partner, when and where we learnt we were to become a mother or father, when and where we learnt of a death – and it could be the death of John F. Kennedy on 23 November 1963, which so many people then alive, all over the world, seemed to recall in the years that followed.43
Anniversaries structure our lives. They remind us who we are, which tribe we belong to, what we believe in and how we should understand the past. They bind us together, whether in a nation, sect or group. They can also divide us from others. But what made the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta notable was its universality based on the central ideas contained within the document itself.44 There was much understandable public interest in the history of the early thirteenth century which brought the parties – king, bishops and nobles – to Runnymede in June 1215. There was legitimate pride in Magna Carta as a product of English history and values. But the anniversary celebrations were notable for the focus on the ideas of due process, fair and open procedures, the rule of law and the submission of all – even monarchs – to that law. This made it possible to widen the participants in, and audience for, the 800th anniversary because these ideas have an international – indeed a universal – impact far beyond the confines of England, Britain and the Commonwealth. Most anniversaries are confined by the history of the events and the biography of the individual being celebrated. Exceptionally, in 2015, the Magna Carta anniversary exceeded the boundaries of time and place and was marked and celebrated around the world, in Beijing as well as in Runnymede.
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1 See, for example, the 2016 list on the Visit England website: <https://www.visitengland.com/biz/advice-and-support/travel-trade/anniversaries-2016>. This includes reference not only to the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the 300th anniversary of the birth of Capability Brown, but the centenary of Roald Dahl’s birth and the 950th anniversary of the battle of Hastings.
2 For a comprehensive list of anniversaries relevant internationally, see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_historical_anniversaries>.
3 Shakespeare, Henry V, IV. iii.
4 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/default.stm>.
5 ‘Magna Carta changes the world, David Cameron tells anniversary event’ <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33126723>; ‘Magna Carta: leaders celebrate 800th anniversary of the Great Charter’, The Guardian, 15 June 2015 <http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/15/magna-carta-leaders-celebrate-800th-anniversary-runnymede>; ‘Authors of Magna Carta would be “bemused” by celebration 800 years on’, The Daily Telegraph, 15 June 2015 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11675736/Authors-of-Magna-Carta-would-bebemused-by-celebration-800-years-on.html>.
6 Magna Carta. Foundation of Liberty. Runnymede 800. 15 June 2015 (official programme, National Trust, 2015).
7 ‘British picnic on the grass and raise a pint to Magna Carta’, Washington Post, 15 June 2015 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/british-gather-to-commemorate-800thanniversary-of-magna-carta/2015/06/15/63e90a58-133d-11e5-89f3-61410da94eb1_story.html?tid=ptv_rellink
8 ‘FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s real foe was US Attorney General not ethics inquiry’, The Guardian, 21 Dec. 2015 <http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/21/fifa-presidentsepp-blatter-nemesis-loretta-lynch-football-new-york>.
9 ‘Sculpture at Runnymede celebrates Magna Carta’s blow against injustice’, The Guardian, 15 June 2015 <http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jun/15/hew-lockesculpture-jurors-runnymede-magna-carta-against-injustice>; <http://artatrunnymede.com>; <https://photosynth.net/preview/view/71e2a982-5079-41de-ac9e-75c1d422e9d8>.
10 <http://artatrunnymede.com/magna-carta-nelson-mandela/>; <http://www.bl.uk/magnacarta/articles/magna-carta-in-the-modern-age>.
11 Annual Register, 1788, pp. 220, 249–51, cited in R. Quinault, ‘The cult of the centenary, c.1784–1914’,. Research, lxxi (1998), 303–23, at p. 305.
12 <http://magnacarta800th.com>.
13 <http://magnacarta800th.com/magna-carta-today/membership-of-the-magna-carta-800th-committee/>.
14 <http://www.agincourt600.com>; <http://waterloo200.org/about/>.
15 Royal British Legion: Gallipoli Centenary: <http://www.britishlegion.org.uk/remembrance/what-we-remember/gallipolicentenary/?gclid=Cj0KEQiA6IC2BRDcjPrjm_istoUBEiQASrLz1k1rR_uonafbX7WJ0rDnky62eVomBYD9V5NEvesURwUaAj_t8P8HAQ>.
16 <http://magnacarta800th.com/projects/>
17 <http://www.bl.uk/events/magna-carta--law-liberty-legacy>; Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, ed. C. Breay and J. Harrison (2015).
18 <http://magnacarta.cmp.uea.ac.uk/read/conference>.
19 <http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/medieval/magna-carta/>.
20 <https://www.history.org.uk/news/news_2510.html>.
21 <http://www.salisburycathedral.org.uk/magna-carta>.
22 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00k4fg7>.
23 <https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/media-room/press-release-archive/-/asset_publisher/a2jEGMiFHPhv/content/university-of-east-anglia-unveils-magna-carta-research-project>; <http://magnacartaresearch.org>.
24 ‘Magna Carta edition found in Sandwich archive scrapbook’, BBC News, 8 Feb. 2015 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-31242433>; ‘Faversham: Magna Carta rediscovered’ <http://magnacarta800th.com/projects/round-1-grants/faversham-magnacarta-rediscovered/>.
25 ‘In this field of dreams, democracy was born’, Daily Telegraph, 16 June 2015.
26 E. Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-producing traditions: Europe, 1870–1914’ in The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge, 1983; rev. edn. 1992), pp. 263–307.
27 Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-producing traditions’, p. 271. See E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 (Stanford, Calif., 1976).
28 Quinault, ‘The cult of the centenary’, pp. 320–3.
29 A. Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919–1946 (Providence, R.I., 1994).
30 W. Shephard Walsh, Curiosities of Popular Customs and Rites, Ceremonies, Observances and Miscellaneous Antiquities (1898), p. 940.
31 J. A. Sharpe, Remember, Remember: a Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); D. Cressy, ‘The fifth of November remembered’, in Myths of the English, ed. R. Porter (1992).
32 J. Sumption, ‘Magna Carta then and now’, address to the Friends of the British Library, 9 March 2015 <https://www.supremecourt.uk/docs/speech-150309.pdf>.
33 ‘David Cameron: I’ll fix human rights mess’, BBC News, 15 June 2015 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33134338>.
34 ‘Magna Carta not welcome at Beijing University’ <http://magnacarta800th.com/articles/magna-carta-not-welcome-at-beijing-university/>.
35 P. Wright, On Living in an Old Country: the National Past in Contemporary Britain (1985)
36 ‘Being modern: science and culture in the early twentieth century’, 22–4 Apr. 2015, IHR, London <http://www.history.ac.uk/events/browse/17866>.
37 <http://www.ppu.org.uk/whitepoppy/>.
38 The North Russia Club was wound up in 2007. There is still an Arctic Convoy Club. See <https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=arctic+convoy+club&sa=X&biw=1280&bih=907&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&ved=0ahUKEwiLyJSTkv_KAhUBVxQKHWiKCqUQsAQIVQ>
39 R. Cook, ‘Ordeal of the union: Allan Nevins, the Civil War centennial and the civil rights struggle of the 1960s’ in Reconfiguring the Union: Civil War Transformations, ed. I. Morgan and P. Davies (2013), pp. 181–200; J. Sexton, ‘Projecting Lincoln, projecting America’ in The Global Lincoln, ed. R. Carwardine and J. Sexton (Oxford, 2011), pp. 288– 302.
40 <http://www.paradescommission.org>
41 <http://hmd.org.uk/page/about-hmdt>.
42 <http://hmd.org.uk/news/holocaust-memorial-day-2015-uk-ceremony-honourssurvivor-memory>.
43 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/22/newsid_2451000/2451143.stm>.
44 N. Vincent, Magna Carta: Origins and Legacy (Oxford, 2015), p. 150.