Important as the Magna Carta (ad 1215) has been as a founding myth for everything we hold dear about law and liberty, it was already hopelessly behind the times. Greeks and Romans had got there long before.
Our political system derives from monarchs advised by a private council: first, the Anglo-Saxon ‘Witan’, and from 1066 the Norman curia regis, ‘king’s court’, the origin of parliament in the 13th century.

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