This paper explores Oakeshott's account of Magna Carta, with a view to exploring his critique of abstract human rights. He argues that Magna Carta is the event recalled from the practical past and upon which the English legend of politics if centred. The legend recounts England’s political fortunes and, Oakeshott asserts, is ‘something to which our current political arguments and attitudes are always returning, and which is always in a process of enlargement and revision’.I Although Oakeshott never explicitly details what these fortunes may be, I posit that poetry constructs a legend or myth which recounts the story of English freedom. Fundamental to the moral of the legend, as exemplified by Magna Carta, is the principle that authority is subject to the law.
