I know, I know, I know… I just said I try not to post more than once a day. But this isn’t any day, so it doesn’t count, right?

I just found out that this is the 800th anniversary of the day King John of England set his seal to the Magna Carta, the Great Charter. I could have saved it for a 800-year Throwback Thursday, but that’s kind of pushing it, isn’t it?? Yeah, pretty sure. 😛

Now, I’m not British.

But us Americans are good at spotting holidays to… borrow, aren’t we?

So I’m just going to borrow this one and pretend its mine (don’t worry, England, I promise I’ll give it back when I’m done 🙂 )

Carpe diem.

Okay, school’s off, kids! We’ve got a holiday! Everybody, stay home from work… let’s go on vacation!! Throw parties, live it up, because its a HOLIDAY!!! I actually read that they’re having a big celebration across the water on the little island where this happened… I know, I’m late to the party. 😉

I’m kind of a history… geek? nut? maniac?? Something like that. So things like this are super cool for me. Like, I think I as the only one last year having my own little celebration (“Ooh, today’s the day!” <- me celebrating 🙂 ) of the 658th anniversary of the Battle of Poitiers (on August 8th).

So, in a very history nut way, I went and did some reading. On wiki, of course. I learned some very interesting things, and wanted to share the first paragraph (if you’re not into this dull history-geek stuff, you’ll probably want to skip this 😀 ). The links are wiki’s, not mine, but I left them in case, in a very history-nerd way, you wanted to follow up on things you didn’t know from the article and spend like 4 hours reading about something you’ll probably never use unless you’re a history teacher. 😉

Magna Carta… is a charter agreed by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215.[a] First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury to make peace between the unpopular King and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. Neither side stood behind their commitments, and the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons’ War. After John’s death, the regency government of his young son, Henry III, reissued the document in 1216, stripped of some of its more radical content, in an unsuccessful bid to build political support for their cause. At the end of the war in 1217, it formed part of the peace treaty agreed at Lambeth, where the document acquired the name Magna Carta, to distinguish it from the smaller Charter of the Forest which was issued at the same time. Short of funds, Henry reissued the charter again in 1225 in exchange for a grant of new taxes; his son, Edward I, repeated the exercise in 1297, this time confirming it as part of England’s statute law.

Cool, huh? The rest of the article is here. Thank you, Wiki, for an interesting educational experience! 🙂

Happy Magna Carta Day, everybody! 😛

~ Kat