Never before had royal authority been so fundamentally challenged. Eight centuries later, 63 clauses of the original Magna Carta are still in use. But this is not a dry treatise of this well-covered historical event: it is also what it was like to live in that momentous year. Fashion, food, religion, sex, education and medicine...Spectacles were invented...windmills were erected...Oxford became the first university and the cathedrals of Lincoln and Salisbury were built. Full of rich detail, from great matters of state to everyday domestic life.