Magna Carta and Its Gifts to Canada

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Carolyn Harris. Magna Carta and Its Gifts to Canada

Cover

Dedication

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Acknowledgements

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Notes

For Further Reading

Illustration Credits

Copyright

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For my parents, Richard and Sue Harris

— Prime Minister John Diefenbaker

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King John hunting a stag with hounds. During John’s reign, only the king had the right to hunt deer in England’s forests.

Throughout the medieval period, the average life expectancy was around forty. Those who survived to adulthood could expect to live into their sixties if they did not fall victim to war, childbirth, or infectious disease. Nearly one-third of English land in 1215 consisted of forest where the king enjoyed a monopoly over all management and distribution of resources. Some of this land was forest in the modern sense of the word, including Sherwood Forest, associated with the legends of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and the New Forest, which remains one of the largest tracts of woodland in England. Other thirteenth-century forests, however, consisted of inhabited countryside with villages and farmland. The rapidly expanding population resulted in demand for new villages and farmland in these regions, conditions that contributed to the reform of forest law in Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest.

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