It’s August twenty-fourth, a date that will live in…paperwork. It was the date in 1215 that the Pope declared the English Magna Carta invalid. The Pope got involved because, well, in those days the Pope got involved in everything. The Great Charter of Freedoms had been written by one of his crew, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to make peace between King John (who nobody liked) and a group of 25 barons who were pretty close to starting a war to replace the king.
According to the Magna Carta, everybody in England, and especially the barons, had some rights. So did the king, of course, but there were limitations, such as how much money he could demand from his subjects. Once all the details were written down, both sides of the conflict went on doing whatever the heck they wanted, completely ignoring the document. The Pope declaring it invalid was basically an act of throwing his hands in the air and saying “hey, guys, try something else.”
The something else they tried was called the First Baron’s War. The next King, Henry III, reissued the Magna Carta a couple of times, but after that it was again pretty much ignored until the 1500s. Around the same time, Henry VIII kicked the Pope out of England (figuratively of course; he’d never even been there) by creating the Church of England. If anything, the paperwork got even worse.
In 1662, Parliament passed the Act of Uniformity on August 24, setting out all the rules around just what you were supposed to do, Church of England-wise. It wasn’t easy to follow in at least one respect: it mandated that everybody use the Book of Common Prayer — but they meant the new 1662 edition, which hardly anybody had even heard of yet. There were a great number of other fiddly little details that you’d expect a more modern government would get rid of right away. But no, parts of the Act of Uniformity are still in force in England.
The great paperwork legacy of August 24 was just getting started. In 1815, the Constitution of the Netherlands was signed. Then the very next year on the very same date, the Treaty of St. Louis was signed in Missouri. Since the treaty was between the US government and native Americans, I’ll leave it to you to guess which one — the Netherlands Constitution or the treaty — is still in place.
Another treaty was signed on the 24th in 1821; it was the Treaty of Cordoba that established Mexico as an independent nation. As for constitutions, there was a rebellion on August 24th in 1820 in Portugal in an attempt to establish a constitution. It wasn’t successful, but there’s an interesting side note about it — in 1820 the capital of Portugal was Rio de Janeiro, in South America. The capital was moved there because Napoleon had captured Lisbon in 1807. When Brazil became an independent nation a couple of years later, Lisbon was once again the Portuguese capital city.
Governments seem to really hate it when there’s some part of the world that’s not covered by the paperwork system. The biggest was Antarctica, but that was fixed on August 24th in 1936 when the Australian Antarctic Treaty was signed. Then another big treaty went into effect exactly 13 years later when NATO was created on the 24th of August, 1949.
There was more paperwork, constitutional and otherwise, on the 24th in 1991 when Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union. Then, possibly in an attempt to make drafting all these government documents faster and easier, Windows 95 was released on August 24th, 1995. It was a good try, but unfortunately there was a snag. Whenever they started writing a new law or treaty, Clippy would say “It looks like you’re writing a letter…”
