Medieval and Modern Compared: Why the Change Matters

1The source: one charter, two societies

On 15 June 1215, at Runnymede near Windsor, King John of England sealed a charter drawn up to make peace with rebel barons. It promised to protect the rights of the Church, to protect the barons from illegal imprisonment, to give swift and impartial justice and to limit the payments the Crown could demand, all overseen by a council of 25 barons. It was a thoroughly medieval document: a deal between a king and his great vassals, written in Latin, about feudal payments.

As a peace treaty it failed at once. Neither side kept its promises, Pope Innocent III annulled it, and war followed. But it was reissued in 1216 and again in 1225, and in the following centuries lawyers and politicians reread it as a statement of liberty. In 1956 the English judge Lord Denning called it "the greatest constitutional document of all times—the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot".

Analyse it. The same parchment means one thing in its medieval context (a failed bargain among nobles) and another in its modern afterlife (a symbol of the rule of law). This is the key skill of this lesson: separating change from continuity.

2Differences: what changed

3Similarities: what carried on

• Monarchy: most "modern" states of the 16th to 18th centuries were still ruled by kings and queens.
• Inequality: modern societies also rested on unequal labour: serfdom gave way to wage labour in Europe and to slavery in the colonies (lesson 3). Women were excluded from politics in both.
• Religion stayed central to most people's lives, even when the Church lost political power.
• Farming remained the work of most Europeans until industrialisation in the 18th and 19th centuries.
• Institutions: universities (teaching at Bologna began about 1088), parliaments and charters such as Magna Carta were medieval creations that modern societies kept and reshaped.

4Case study: why a Rwandan student studies European periods

The diagram shows the first problem: the European labels do not fit Africa. While Europe was "medieval", Ethiopia built Lalibela and Mali became a great empire (Unit 3). Europe's "early modern" age brought Africa the Atlantic slave trade, and Europe's "modern" age brought the Berlin Conference (15 November 1884 to 26 February 1885) and colonial conquest, which reached Rwanda with German rule from 1897.

So why study these periods? Four reasons stand out:

1. To understand Rwanda's own colonial history. The modern European state, its schools, churches, written law and identity documents arrived in Rwanda through colonial rule (Units 5 to 8). So did 19th-century European pseudo-scientific race theories, which colonial rulers used to divide Rwandans into fixed "ethnic" categories (Unit 8). You cannot judge those changes without knowing where they came from.
2. To trace the origins of today's institutions: parliaments, universities, constitutions, the rule of law and human rights.
3. To understand how societies change: printing, science and new ideas transformed Europe; Rwanda's own development choices can be compared with that experience.
4. To think critically: questioning labels such as "Dark Ages" or "discovery", and weighing sources such as Magna Carta in their context.