I'll re-iterate some comments I made on this a few years ago, somewhat altered to suit this thread:
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Regarding the historical importance of the Magna Carta:
There's one school of thought that considers the Magna Carta to have been of crucial importance. There's another that considers it insignificant: merely one of the many charters of rights/privileges/liberties of the aristocracy that were common throughout Europe (and one whose historical "reputation" simply happened to grow vastly, long after the fact).
The truth is probably in the middle somewhere. The Magna Carta wasn't unique by a long shot, and was initially hardly as special as we now imagine it to be in common historiography, but the fact that it grew in cultural significance over time
did influence English political thought -- and thus history -- in major ways. The larger conflict between the interests of the crown and the interests of the aristocracy is fairly universal, but the way this played out in England (the evolution of parliamentarianism, the Civil War, the deposition and execution of a monarch, the Protectorate, the Restoration, and later on the Glorious Revolution) was significantly influenced by the tradition that had both produced the Magna Carta and had later come to be shaped by it.
Which isn't to say that the Magna Carta was somehow the only factor (or even the biggest one) in shaping the relevant events I mentioned above, but rather that without it, ATL events pertaining to the same fundamental power-struggle would have played out differently. Without the Magna Carta, England might eventually hew closer to a moderate quasi-absolutism, with the Crown successively making certain concessions in a gradual process, but without anything like the Civil War ever coming about. After all, many countries resolved the issue of the power dynamic between the Crown and the aristocracy in a gradual,
ad hoc process without the matter of royal power ever becoming the cause for a civil war.
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Regarding the historical context and place of the Magna Carta:
One may well argue that the latter-day romantic notions of "proud Anglo-Saxons wanting to throw off the Norman yoke" were pure revisionism, but the idea that such things as the Magna Carta were in part inspired by an "ancient English constitution" protecting certain freedoms, going back to the days of the Anglo-Saxons, is not actually that far-fetched. This notion has been lauded at times, more recently it has been criticised, but I am noticing a reversal of that trend. A certain continuity of tradition can be identified.
The main work that is known for really all-out defending this point of view is the great big 19th century classic:
The Constitutional History of England, by William Stubbs. It has since been attacked, often viciously, for its perceived "Germanist" bias. I disagree. The work's main weakness is that it's a product of its time, and it is thus dated. But Stubbs has written a masterpiece, and if you take it with a grain of salt, it's eminently worth a read.
There is is, of course, more modern fare. T
he Roots of Liberty: Magna Carta, Ancient Constitution, and the Anglo-American Tradition of Rule of Law, edited by Ellis Sandoz, for instance. It's a very interesting read, although I've known some people to shun it on account of its publisher being an institute advocating libertarian-ish politics.
What they nowadays call a "golden oldie" is, from 1914 (so still quite modern compared to Stubbs!),
Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John, with an Historical Introduction, by William Sharp McKechnie. Also a classic, and more nuanced (but in my opinion, somewhat less eloquent).
A.K.R. Kiralfy, in
The English Legal System, and as editor of
Potter’s Historical Introduction To English Law And Its Institutions, stresses the importance of the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, and its continuity into the Norman era. It would be a bit much to get the whole book for just a couple of pages on the relevant topic, however!
Nicholas Vincent has furthermore stressed the importance of the precedent of king Henry's coronation charter in various lectures, which had previously guaranteed the rights of the nobility. This charter, in turn, is very typical of the kind of confirmation of rights that we see in all of Germanic Europe. (In the Low Countries, for instance, we had similar charters, referred to as a
Groot Privilege: "great privilege", where "privelege" has the literal meaning, and refers to the rights of the nobles to make their own laws.) This all goes back to Germanic law, codified back in Charlemagne's day. In Anglo-Saxon England, it was no different. Even after Christianisation, old Germanic law prevailed, and the liberties of the nobility in particular remained a guarantee. The coronation charter of King Henry and the Magna Carta, then, certainly have their roots in these Germanic principles dating far back.
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In the context of this thread, that last bit may lead us to the conclusion that the Magna Carta didn't just come out of nowhere, and that even if it had been nixed entirely -- never existing at all -- that would still not rule out that other documents like it, inspired by the same "background culture", would be drafted anyway. The roots of these ideas, as I've argued, go deep. And they tend to enjoy periodic revivals. As I pointed out when I posted the above comments over three years ago: Thomas Jefferson explicitly cited Anglo-Saxon liberties as the basis for the rights of Englishmen, and proposed putting Anlo-Saxon chiefs Hengist and Horsa on the Great Seal of the United States, because (he believed) every freedom in the Declaration of Independence ultimately owed its survival to
them.
(Which is funny, because as
@Circle of Willis has noted, during the Civil War, the South sought to portray themselves as Normans, and denounced the Anglo-Saxons as commoners. But to Jefferson, the Normans were thugs, and the Anglo-Saxons were the progenitors of everything
good that the USA sought to embody. Personally, I'm with Jefferson on that...)
