Next Monday the common law world will celebrate the sealing of Magna Carta eight centuries ago. The document, brokered at Runnymede by Archbishop Stephen Langton as a political expedient between a beleaguered monarch and a governing elite, still fascinates. It is both a convoluted, practical covenant rooted in a distant, specifically Christian, past; and an icon of the benefits inherited by all citizens in the multinational, multicultural, inter-religious and increasingly secular world we live in today.

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