Once upon a time two reptiles sat by the river. One was a lizard which could open great frills around its head to appear much larger than it was. The other was a chameleon, constantly changing its colours to match its surroundings.

So might have opened Rudyard Kipling, the poet of empire, who had quite a fondness for animal fables. Instead, when he made his contribution to the legend of the riverbanks ahead in 1922, his preferred imagery was less animal, more animist:

To which we might reply: well go on then?

Seventy-five years later, in 1997, I arrived to find an England rapt in triumphalist swagger. The Soviet Union had fallen. A fresh-faced Tony Blair had just swept to power. They had won. Their stories had won. They had won history.

To any suggestion that this country had serious problems, let alone that it was not as free and democratic as it claimed to be, the standard response was mocking hostility. The scorn for dissent and difference here alienated me even before its deeper structural cruelties, especially of gender, made that alienation catastrophic over the years to follow.

And then that history burst from the grave and clamped its bloodied hands round their necks on 9/11. Real history had kept going, indifferent to their myths, and in their reverie it totally blindsided them. It then unleased two of the most distressing episodes in England’s modern history, and these, at last, have shaken the general population’s confidence to its roots.

One was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. No-one who lived through that here will have forgotten the ugliness it brought down on the English social atmosphere (which nevertheless pales before what it did to Iraqis). The other is the unfinished Brexit-austerity-racism nightmare of the 2010s, whose most potent symbol is the blistering eruption of Grenfell Tower, a funeral pyre of something which, for its absence, the English psyche now unravels. The least that can be said coming out of these bloodbaths is that the gulf between England’s self-congratulatory myth of democracy and human rights on the one hand, and its inveterate tendencies to casual and mean-spirited violence on the other, appears to trouble far more of its people than it did at the turn of the millennium.

I didn’t have to wait twenty years for that. In 1997 my instruction in the gap between myth and reality was immediate, traumatic, and lasting. Entering an English boys’ school brought me in contact not with accountable leaders but a bristling-moustached, foam-at-the-mouth adult authoritarianism the likes of whose bellowing arrogance I had never encountered, even in a far less likely bastion of democracy, colonial Hong Kong. And the pupils, far from being a courteous and enlightened citizenry that knew its way round a social contract, exhibited instead a barbarism that was hysterical, violent and sometimes plain racist, eagerly following their scripts in that divine-right-of-adults diorama. If it was all to meld into a single message, it would have been this: We are a democracy, so STFU.

In that shock and turmoil one image has never left my memory. The back wall of the history classroom, packed floor to ceiling with parchments. Each was brown with a red wax seal, and though the handwriting varied, each’s text began, in huge capital letters, with the words: ‘JOHN, BY THE GRACE OF GOD, KING OF ENGLAND…’ before the text size diminished to illegibility.

English history was a morass to me. I had had next to no exposure to it and its contents were totally foreign. Kings with weird numbers after their names instead of Chris Patten; cryptic symbols everywhere like lions (but they don’t have any?) and fleur-de-lis (but they don’t like France?); important people named after places they had nothing to do with and weren’t pronounced how they were spelt, and endless random wars for no sensible reason. I went by the English name John then – were those suspicious documents directed at me? What would I want with the grace of their god? My history teacher’s name was also John. Was this about plastering his authority all over the wall, revering him as no less than their king?

That wall of charters, unexplained and ever-present, loomed over two years of English history lessons which, for lack of foundation and context, left me lost at sea. It was only much later that I pieced together what it was about. It was what they had studied the previous year, which I had missed on the other side of the world. It was the foundation. And the foundation revolved around a single document, one they deemed so important that they got each boy to re-create his own, dunk it in some yellowy-brown chemical to make it look historic, then hoist it high with the others so as to dominate the visual experience of the history classroom through all the centuries of material that followed.

Eventually I managed to put a name to it. Magna Carta. In English imagination, possibly the greatest story of all – the key word, of course, being imagination.

There are facts, and there is myth. Both matter in history. In this particular history, the myth has mattered a hundred times more.

But charters are made of paper, and paper, real or mythic, has two sides. The English’s claims to democracy and rule of law are writ on the sunlit side. How often do they look on the shadowed side? They do not – because it screams. It screams a racial exceptionalism which wetted the chops of undying English authoritarianism and drove it on a genocidal rampage across the Earth. They do not look, because it still burns their eyes.

Oh yes. Today’s journey through the meadows where Magna Carta was verbally agreed (not signed – signatures as a binding instrument came much later) shall not be the same pilgrimage made by a neverending crocodile of approved storytellers, excited lawyers and awestruck schoolchildren. My path is the dark path and here it leads through the underworld. Come, if you dare face a reckoning with the Runnymede Horror.

Start:Staines Bridge (nearest station: Staines)

End:Windsor Bridge (nearest stations: Windsor and Eton Riverside; Windsor and Eton Central)

Length: 12km/7.5 miles

Location: Surrey – Borough of Runnymede; Berkshire – Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead

Topics: The Magna Carta – history and mythology in Runnymede and Dark Runnymede; Old Windsor, Datchet, Windsor Castle, the Charter of the Forest

Runnymede lies across Staines Bridge. Eight hundred years ago a party of barons, armed to the teeth, went this way too. Look again at the map: a battlefield waiting to happen. Starting positions: the monarchy at Windsor, the rebel barons at Staines. Runnymede is in the middle.

Let’s have the facts first. The central figure in the Magna Carta story is King John (1166-1216), third in the Plantagenet Dynasty, specifically its Angevin line. Angevin means from Anjou and reminds us that this was not yet England the island country. At this stage it was a shambolic territory sprawled across half of both what is now Britain and what is now France, an unresolved product of the succession crises and power struggles that had plunged the realm of the Norman conquest into strife.

So we can dispense straight away with the idea of Magna Carta as a confrontation to established autocracy. The Plantagenet kings were murderous authoritarians but their authority was nascent, thrashing, threatened and oftentimes desperate, not some state-of-nature tyranny come rearing out of prehistoric ooze. It was constrained by the realities of controlling a turbulent realm of shifting borders, seething duchies and chiefdoms out for pieces of one another, and the regular flash of daggers in the dark. Political Christianity was a further constraint, not only in the moral dimensions of the king’s mandate but in the concrete power it gave a foreign leader, the Pope, to interfere with English life in a parallel structure that would exasperate the monarchs here again and again till it was brought down by Henry VIII’s wrecking ball.

This would-be polity’s glue was not any kind of national consciousness such that exists in today’s world, but rather a network of hard-headed give-and-take feudal relationships. The only way for a king to maintain a semblance of central authority in that world was through deals and compromises with the barons and priests who actually controlled (and quite often, oppressed) people by collecting their taxes, running their courts, filling them with fear of God instead of the king and arming them to fight for – or when their mood changed, against – the monarch’s behalf. The Magna Carta was not the first of these deals and it certainly would not be the last.

This was the world of King John, who the English storytellers, so reverently awestruck by other authoritarians like Henry VIII, sneer at with a singular disdain. John appears to have crossed some unspoken line by being not only authoritarian but bad at it, so irredeemably so that he forfeits even that precious number after his name (seriously – hardly any English or British royals have named their heirs John in the 800 years since because of him). No offence of John’s was more symbolic than his loss of the part of Europe that had bound the English territorial destiny to it in the first place, Normandy, setting off a two-and-a-half-century agony in which they would lose the rest of their continental territory, and that destiny with it, piece by piece to the rising kingdom of France – thus leaving them to chase after a new vision instead: the island country.

By most accounts John was also simply abusive, spiteful, incompetent and bewilderingly petty. He is said to have seized land and property and extorted money from his subjects with wanton brazenness, driving them into debt then blackmailing them, taking their relatives hostage, obsessively ruining or imprisoning anyone who got in his way; goaded the Pope into excommunicating him and putting humiliating religious restrictions on the English faithful; made arbitrary and sometimes downright vengeful misuse of the justice system; personally murdered his nephew Arthur and dumped his body in the Seine; and of course, raised huge taxes and armies to pour down the drain of the wars in France he kept losing. Their favourite anecdote of all is that he insulted the Irish kings by tugging on their long beards while roaring with laughter (which sadly turned out one of the least of the wrong things the English would do in that country). It is very difficult now to draw the line between fact and embellishment in this sorry catalogue, but what mattered, in short, is that John behaved such as to alienate every group of people he relied on for effective rule.

By the time John lost Normandy in 1214 the barons had had enough and organised a rebellion. In April 1215 they went for it, seizing several major cities including London. John and his staff escaped upriver to Windsor Castle. The barons followed him up and camped at Staines. In a foreshadowing of the great civil wars five centuries later, the barons, like the later parliament, presented themselves not as rebels but defenders of the true English order, based on supposed finest Anglo-Saxon traditions in which the king was bound by rules of good conduct. In the later round Charles I would say no and raise an army, but John had exhausted his money, arms and authority with his misadventures in France and was left in no position to do so. With no choice but to hear the barons out, he agreed to meet them at Runnymede.

At Bell Weir and Lock, built in 1818 and named after weir keeper and innkeeper Charles Bell, the legacy of John’s meeting with the barons begins its takeover of the scenery.

By this lock an information board declares that ‘a stone’s throw from here is a place symbolic of freedom and liberty’. This is broadly correct if one emphasises the key word symbolic. It then goes on to state the Magna Carta ‘gave legal rights to all – the first English constitution’, and this is plain mistaken. In a single paragraph the fact of Magna Carta is conflated with the myth of Magna Carta. As on this signboard, so in popular consciousness.

The last thing before Runnymede is a curvy meander occupied by the pleasure grounds of Egham, an old agricultural hamlet whose name comes from Ecga’s farm and which likely grew up as a satellite of Staines.

When John met the barons here that national romance did not yet exist. But perhaps fragments of the qualities it describes did make this a suitable venue. In edgy times this probably was a place of relative security: a middle ground which gave neither side an obvious military advantage. Its name also offers clues. Mede is a meadow but Runny does not mean what it sounds like, rather appearing to come from Anglo-Saxon Old English runieg: a regular council or meeting place. It is conceivable that this was already a well-established spot to hold such meetings, in some accounts going back as far as King Alfred’s witenagemot councils in the ninth century. Maybe that was where it got the name Runnymede in the first place.

The battery of demands the barons put before their king – in French, of course – had nothing to do with the well-being of the majority of the population. Nor did it express any broader constitutional principle. Rather it was but one more beat in a multi-generational dance of power, with the barons taking advantage of the king’s weak position to constrain his power in the moment and advance their own. The formal name of their forced agreement, which it didn’t receive till some years later, was Magna Carta Libertatum: the Great Charter not of liberty as in freedoms, but Liberties as in privileges. The point was that these powers were defined exclusively as the entitlements of the powerful baronial class against the king, not inclusively spread out to most people in the manner of the later human rights movements (hence human rights).

Most English with any serious familiarity with this history will tell you the same: that there was little wider attempt here to fundamentally rearrange English political forms. The story the barons couched their rebellion in was conservative: a return to tradition, not a revolution. Yet the myth that has grown up to dominate memory of the Magna Carta today tells the exact opposite story. Look again at the signs around here. ‘Birthplace of freedom’. ‘Eight Centuries of the Rule of Law’. At its extreme, the myth has it that that 1215 was the moment when the embryo of modern democracy, liberty and human rights, whether in England or the entire world, chewed its way out of the bloody womb of traditional autocracy.

  

Of this random mishmash only a tiny handful of slivers survived to become material for later mythmakers. The most prominent, which still exist in the laws of England and certain other countries, are clauses No. 39 and 40:

The very first clause is also still active, and contains this:

Needless to say, the significance of phrases like no free man and judgement of his equals was again not to include, but to exclude. These were meant as the privileges of a tiny class at the top of English society, not the rights of the wider body of a predominantly peasant populace. Again this is not news to any of the English who have taken a closer look. They gave perhaps their most accurate interpretation in a classic parody of their own history, 1066 and All That, in 1930:

Magna Charter was therefore the chief cause of Democracy in England, and thus a Good Thing for everyone (except the Common People).

Was the later appeal of this contract simply that its articulation of the powers in question – access to due process, habeus corpus (no physical detention outside such a process) and freedom of religion – was so eloquent? Eloquent enough, in that case, to support the irony of it getting raised as a totem of its exact opposite intent by the democracy movements which only gained political momentum half a millennium later. By then, where Magna Carta had been drawn up to establish these powers as the privileges of a ruling class, the democracy movements sought to rel