2015 Magna Carta Lectures with Robin Griffith-Jones

The Revd Robin Griffith-Jones – Magna Carta: Charter for our Times or Antiquarian Icon?

We love an anniversary; and the Temple will be celebrating Magna Carta as energetically as you are in Salisbury. But what are we celebrating, and what will all the year’s lectures and services and books and tours achieve? What will have changed, thanks to the anniversary, by the end of 2015? Nobody need doubt that the Charter lies at the foundation of the constitutional building we now gratefully occupy; but we normally celebrate a finished building, its beauty and its functionality, not the courses of stones buried beneath ground.

I will ask whether and how the Charter’s continuing resonance still gives it an audible, effective presence in our polity. The best possible place in which to raise such questions is a church, built in the years around 1215 and still at a city’s centre, such as Salisbury Cathedral or the Temple Church.

Robin Griffith-Jones is the Reverend and Valiant Master of the Temple at the Temple Church in London, and Senior Lecturer in New Testament at King’s College London. The Temple was King John’s London headquarters in 1214-5; the pivotal negotiations between John and the Barons at Epiphany 2015 took place there; the effigies of William Marshal (the hero of those dangerous years) and of his son (one of the Surety Barons) still lie in the Church; and Robin’s own predecessor Brother Aymeric was one of the King’s advisors at Runnymede.

Tickets are £7 and are available by phoning 01722 424800, emailing courses@sarum.ac.uk or on the door. Follow-up seminar takes place on Saturday 28 March priced at £10. Places limited.
Lecture takes place in Salisbury Cathedral.

Subsequent lectures and seminars

Lectures: Chris Dyer (24 April), Nicholas Vincent (15 May), Dick Howard (7 June), Lord Igor Judge (18 June) and Lesley Smith (rescheduled, 24 July) Seminars: Robin Griffith-Jones (28 March), Chris Dyer (25 April), Nicholas Vincent (16 May) and Lesley Smith (rescheduled, 25 July)