IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 230

On 15 June 1215, in a meadow beside the River Thames at Runnymede, a party of rebellious barons met representatives of King John of England. The result of their meeting was a document on parchment, written in Latin and sealed with the royal seal rather than signed, which has come to be known as Magna Carta, or the Great Charter. Nothing about the occasion suggested that it would be remembered. The king and his leading subjects had met to settle a quarrel, and within a few months the settlement had collapsed.

John had become king in 1199 and had lost most of his lands in France by 1204, including Normandy, the ancestral territory of his family. To recover them he demanded money from his barons with increasing frequency, through taxes on their land and through payments that could be imposed almost at will. He quarrelled with Pope Innocent III over the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in 1208 the Pope placed England under an interdict, suspending most church services; the following year John was excommunicated. By 1215 a group of northern barons had had enough, and their grievances, though expressed in the language of custom, were above all about money.

The charter was drafted in haste. A list of the barons' demands, known as the Articles of the Barons, had been presented to the king earlier in June, and the final text, containing sixty-three clauses, was produced in little more than a week. Most of it was not concerned with abstract principles at all. Particular clauses promised that widows should not be forced to remarry, fixed standard measures for wine, ale and cloth, ordered the removal of fish weirs from the Thames, set limits on the debts owed to Jewish moneylenders and regulated the royal forests. These were the practical grievances of a landed elite.

Two clauses, however, have been quoted ever since. The thirty-ninth provided that no free man should be arrested, imprisoned, deprived of his property or exiled except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. The fortieth promised that the king would not sell, deny or delay right and justice to anyone. Read in context, these were not a declaration of universal human rights. They protected a privileged class from arbitrary punishment by an unpredictable king, and the 'free man' they referred to was a small minority in a society in which most people were unfree peasants bound to the land.

Nor did the charter establish any ordinary method of enforcement. A committee of twenty-five barons was empowered, if the king broke his promises, to seize his castles and lands until the matter was put right. John had agreed to this only under duress, and he at once sent messengers to Rome asking the Pope to annul the charter. Innocent III, who regarded the barons as rebels, obliged in August 1215, declaring the document void. The country slid into civil war.

John died of dysentery at Newark in October 1216, and the throne passed to his son Henry III, who was nine years old. The men governing in the boy's name reissued the charter within weeks, with the most controversial clauses removed, in the hope of winning over the rebels.

A second version followed in 1217, and in 1225 Henry, now old enough to rule, issued a third in return for a grant of taxation. This last version, much shorter than the original, became the one that lawyers cited, and it was confirmed by Edward I in 1297. Of the four original documents of 1215, two are held in the British Library and one each at Lincoln and Salisbury cathedrals.

For three centuries the charter was largely forgotten as a political text. It was revived in the early seventeenth century, when Sir Edward Coke, a lawyer and judge who had fallen out with the crown, used it to argue that the king was subject to the law. Coke's interpretation was generous: he read the promise of justice for free men as a guarantee of trial by jury and of limits on imprisonment without charge, neither of which the charter actually contained. His account was widely accepted, and it gave Magna Carta a new authority in the struggle between Parliament and the Stuart kings.

The idea crossed the Atlantic. When the American colonies broke away from Britain, several of their new state constitutions borrowed language from the charter, and the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1791, guaranteed that no person should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. In the twentieth century the charter's reputation became global. Its example was invoked in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, and its name now appears in documents and declarations around the world.

Historians today are more cautious. They point out that the charter was a conservative document, designed to restore customs that the barons believed had existed under earlier kings, and that it said nothing about the majority of the population. Yet something of it has survived in law. Three clauses of the 1297 version remain on the statute book in England and Wales, including the guarantee of justice without delay. When the eight-hundredth anniversary was marked in 2015, the meadow attracted visitors and dignitaries from many countries, an occasion that revealed more about later generations than about 1215.

Bronze is an alloy of copper with tin, often with a little lead added to help it flow when molten. In China, as in Europe and western Asia, it was the metal of the first states: harder than pure copper, it could be cast into shapes. Yet the Chinese bronze age is unusual in what its metalworkers chose to make. Elsewhere bronze was used above all for weapons, tools and figurines, while in China the most elaborate efforts of generations of founders went into vessels used in rituals honouring the dead.

The earliest Chinese bronzes come from sites of the Erlitou culture in the Yellow River valley, dated to the centuries around 1600 BCE, and they are already technically accomplished. Under the Shang dynasty, which ruled from about 1600 to 1046 BCE, casting developed into a large-scale enterprise. Shang kings moved their capital several times; the last of these capitals, at Anyang in modern Henan province, was occupied from about 1300 BCE. Excavations there have produced thousands of vessels. Some held grain, others meat, wine or water, and each shape indicated how the vessel was used in the ancestral cult.

The technique by which these vessels were made was distinctive. A founder began with a model of the finished vessel in clay, shaped and decorated with carved or impressed patterns. While the clay was still soft, sections of mould were pressed against it, and once these had dried they were lifted away and fired, becoming hard ceramic.

The model itself was then shaved down to form a core, slightly smaller than the finished object. Mould sections were reassembled around this core, and small pieces of bronze, known as spacers, held the two apart so that molten metal could flow between them. When the bronze had cooled, the ceramic was broken off and the seams where the mould sections had met were polished away.

In western Asia and the Greek world, founders generally used the lost-wax method: a model was made in wax, covered in clay, and the wax melted out to leave a cavity into which bronze was poured. Chinese workshops could have used this technique and, for the most part, did not. The mould method had advantages for the kind of vessel the Shang admired. Because the decoration was carved into the mould itself, it appeared on the finished bronze as raised ornament, and the dense patterns of spirals and animal masks that cover Shang vessels were cast, not added afterwards.

The evidence for all this comes from rubbish as much as from treasure. The foundry workshops at Anyang have yielded thousands of fragments of used moulds, which can be pieced together, and in some cases the layers of clay show that a mould was repaired and used again. X-ray images of finished vessels reveal the joints where separately cast parts, such as handles and legs, were attached. Experiments in the twentieth century, in which scholars cast vessels themselves, showed that a mould of this kind can reproduce the fine detail of Shang decoration, and that a team of several people is needed to keep the metal hot and pour it before it solidifies.

The largest object of the kind is a rectangular vessel with four legs, known as the Houmuwu ding, which was found at Anyang in 1939 and weighs more than 800 kilograms. Casting it in one operation would have required an enormous volume of molten bronze at once, and scholars disagree about how this was organised. There is no evidence of a single furnace large enough, so several may have poured simultaneously into a common channel. The uncertainty is typical of the field: the objects survive, but the organisation of the workshops that made them has to be inferred.

Where the metal came from is a further puzzle. Copper was available within the Chinese world: the ancient mines at Tonglushan in Hubei province, where shafts and smelting remains have been found, were worked over a long period. Tin is rarer, and no major source has been identified near Anyang. Lead isotope analysis, which compares the chemical signature of a bronze object with that of ores from known deposits, has suggested that some of the metal in Shang bronzes was brought from distant regions, though the results are not conclusive and the source of the tin remains uncertain.

Many Zhou vessels carry inscriptions, cast into the mould along with the decoration. These texts, often fewer than a hundred characters, record a king's gift of land, horses or servants, a military campaign, or a legal dispute settled at court. Because they were made of metal and buried in tombs, they have survived where texts written on bamboo and silk have perished, and historians treat them as the closest thing to contemporary archives. They are not neutral: they were commissioned by the families that owned the vessels, and they present their owners in the most favourable light.

The vessels were also political objects. A set of ding, the three-legged cauldrons used for meat, stood for the authority of a lineage, and in the Zhou world the number a nobleman was entitled to own was fixed by rank. In 606 BCE, according to a text compiled later, a ruler of the southern state of Chu, whose power was growing, asked an envoy of the Zhou king how heavy the royal ding were. The question was a challenge: the envoy replied that a dynasty held its position by virtue, not by the weight of its bronze.

Biography is usually written about the dead. The subjects of most biographies have long been safely buried, and the biographer's freedom to say what they like depends on that fact. In recent decades, however, more and more historians have turned to people who are still alive: former presidents and prime ministers, artists, scientists, campaigners and survivors of terrible events. Each of these books raises a question that the profession has never settled. Should historians write about the living at all, and if so, on what terms?

The first objection is that a life is not a shape until it is over. A biographer of the dead can see the whole arc: the early failure that made later success possible, the compromise that turned out to matter. A subject who is still working may reverse everything in the following decade. A book that presented a politician as the coming man may look foolish within a few years, and a reputation built on a single achievement may be undone by what comes next.

The second objection is about harm. A book can damage a living person in ways that no obituary can. The person who is written about cannot revise the impression the book creates: the portrait hardens while the life goes on, and the subject must live with a version of themselves that they did not choose. Those close to the subject suffer too. Relatives and colleagues who never sought attention may be exposed in ways they cannot answer, and a historian may print a rumour about a living person that would be unprintable about a dead one.

There are legal constraints as well. The law of defamation protects the living and not the dead, and a statement that would be unremarkable in a book about a Victorian statesman can be actionable when made about a sitting minister. Publishers, mindful of this, may ask for cuts that weaken the argument, and the mere threat of a claim can be enough to remove a paragraph. Archives create a different obstacle: official papers are normally closed for years after they are written, so a historian working without cooperation must rely on what happens to be in the public record.

Against all this stands the strongest argument for writing about the living: if historians wait, the evidence disappears. Letters are thrown away, diaries are lost, and the memories of those who took part fade or are reshaped. The history of the last fifty years cannot be written from archives alone, because the archives are largely shut. Interviews with living participants are therefore not a luxury but a necessity, and the historian who refuses to approach them is choosing to write a poorer account, not a purer one.

Yet testimony is not the same as truth. People forget, and they forget in convenient directions. An interview records what a person wishes to remember on a particular afternoon, and the most fluent witnesses are not always the most accurate. The historian's task is to treat an interview as one piece of evidence among others, to be checked against documents and against other accounts. Applied consistently, that discipline makes oral history invaluable; without it, testimony becomes a channel for the subject's own version of events.

The third argument is about power. People who hold office or command armies make decisions that affect millions, and those decisions ought to be examined while the people making them can still be questioned. To wait for death is to hand the powerful an advantage: by the time a full account can be written, the reputation is settled and the consequences may be irreversible. Here, however, a distinction matters. The case for scrutiny is strongest for those who exercise public power over others, and weakest for those who happen to be connected to them, or who are caught up in events as victims rather than authors.

Cooperation with a subject raises a further difficulty. A historian who has been given exclusive access to a subject's papers is poorly placed to write something the subject will dislike, and readers are seldom told what conditions were attached. Access is valuable, and the resulting book may be better informed than any rival, but it is not the same thing as an independent one. The honest solution is disclosure: the biographer should say what was given, what was withheld and whether the subject read the manuscript before publication.

My own view is that historians should write about the living, but that such books belong to a distinct genre with its own rules. They should be openly provisional, describing what the evidence shows now rather than announcing what a life means. They should be candid about the access they have had. Above all, the test should be the subject's power rather than the subject's fame: a minister who shapes policy deserves examination, a private person who happens to have suffered a disaster deserves protection. Applied honestly, these rules do not weaken the genre; they make it possible.

None of this solves the problem of the unfinished life. A book about a living person will always be a report rather than a verdict, and it will sometimes be wrong. But waiting is also a decision, and it is not a neutral one: it costs witnesses, documents and the chance to challenge the powerful. The question, then, is not whether historians should write about the living, but how honestly they admit what they cannot yet know.