Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (28 page)

The principal centres of revolt were the north, the west and East Anglia; but the barons did not necessarily form distinct or coherent groups. Family was divided against family; district was opposed to district. A group of 39 barons, out of a total baronage of 197, were in open revolt against the Crown; approximately the same number were its faithful supporters. The remainder were uncertain, and probably fearful of the future.

The rebels did find an unexpected champion in the new archbishop, however; on his return to England Stephen Langton restated the old principles enshrined in the document known as
Leges Henrici Primi
that nothing can be taken or demanded by the king except ‘by right and reason, by law of the land and justice and by a court’s judgment’. That, clearly, had not been King John’s manner of proceeding.

The king and the rebellious barons met on various occasions, making little if any progress. The pope was persuaded to write to the rebels, forbidding the use of force or violence against their anointed king. He also wrote to Stephen Langton, accusing the archbishop of taking the side of the barons. The king then engineered what he must have considered a master stroke. On 4 March 1215, he assumed the cross of the crusader. Who could ride against a knight of Christ?

The manoeuvre did not succeed. On 5 May the barons renounced their fealty to the king and, under the leadership of Robert Fitzwalter, opened hostilities. They besieged Northampton Castle, a royal stronghold, and on 17 May occupied London.
This was in itself a notable achievement, and tilted the balance of military power clearly in favour of the barons. More of them declared against the king.

John decided to procrastinate in the well-known form of conducting negotiations. He asked Stephen Langton to arrange a truce, so that some form of settlement might be reached. It is clear enough, however, that he never had any intention of honouring any such agreement. He believed himself to be upholding the rights of a sovereign king against rebellious subjects. In this belief, he was joined by the pope. The barons, however, accepted his invitation. Let the day be the fifteenth of June, they replied. Let the place be Runnemead. Runnemede, or Runnymede, is a meadow on the Surrey side of the river Thames near Windsor; there is a small island or eyot in the middle of the river, where the bargain was supposed to be sealed. A yew tree that was growing there in 1215 still stands.

Some informal notes survive that appear to have been taken down at the time of preliminary negotiations; they may reflect the words the king actually used. Early on it is declared that ‘King John concedes that he will not take a man without judgment nor accept anything for justice, nor do injustice’. The barons wished to readjust the balance of power in their favour. They wanted to be secure in their lands and castles, unmolested by the king or the king’s men. They also wished to be freed from the financial exactions imposed by John.

Various meetings were held between the opposing parties, with Stephen Langton acting as mediator. A preliminary document was then drawn up, by a chancery clerk, known as the ‘Articles of the Barons’. The Magna Carta, or Great Charter, emerged from the baronial articles. It was called great because of its length, not because of its importance. Yet it was the work of highly intelligent and experienced administrators who in an almost literal sense stood at the king’s side to urge compromise and restraint. They were also instrumental in persuading the barons to come to terms wider than their own private interests. By 19 June the agreement had been reached. The barons gave their king the kiss of peace, and then he granted the charter.

Over the next five days several copies were made and sent over
the kingdom; four of them can still be seen. One of those, preserved in the Cottonian Library of the British Library, contains some eighty-six lines (with additions) written on a skin of parchment, measuring 14½ inches (36.8 centimetres) in breadth by 20½ inches (52 centimetres) in length. It is much shrivelled and mutilated, and has survived at least one fire that reduced the seal to pulp. It is said to have been purchased by Sir Robert Cotton at the beginning of the seventeenth century, for the sum of fourpence, from a tailor who was about to cut it up for his own purposes. Once the copies had been completed by the clerks, they were proclaimed by the sheriffs in their various county courts.

But this was not a new code of law. It was not even a summary of the great principles of legislation. It was essentially an attempt by the barons to return to the state of affairs before the dominance of the Angevin kings. It did not represent some spirit of ‘progress’ or ‘development’ in human affairs. None of the participants would have known what those words meant. It was in part a reactionary document. Villeins and slaves, the most numerous portion of the kingdom, were never mentioned. The unfree were of no consequence. Their ‘progress’ over the centuries was slow and uncertain. This was a charter for the
liber homo
or free man.

Many specific measures were adopted within its sixty-three clauses. The old liberties of the Church were to be respected. Taxes, known as scutages or aids, should not be levied on the nation without the approval of the common council; some have seen this as the emergence of the principle of ‘no taxation without representation’, but the common council consisted only of archbishops, bishops, earls, barons and tenants-in-chief. They were not ‘the people’ of a self-governing kingdom.

The charter also stipulated that no man should be made a judge or sheriff without adequate knowledge of the law. The courts of law should be convened in one place, rather than follow the king. The towns and cities of the kingdom were to be granted their ancient liberties. Free men were to be allowed to travel freely. Forest law was to be alleviated, and all the forests created in the king’s reign were to be opened. The thirty-ninth clause states that ‘no free man shall be taken or imprisoned, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land’. The fortieth clause
declares that ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.’ Three declarations of the Magna Carta still remain on the statute book of England.

Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice at the beginning of the seventeenth century, wrote that ‘as the gold refiner will not out of the dust or shreds of gold, let pass the least crumb, in respect to the excellence of the metal; so ought not the reader to pass any syllable of this law, in respect of the excellency of the matter’. Since Coke forced the Petition of Right upon a reluctant Charles I, later enshrined in the Bill of Rights of 1689, and since his writings were instrumental in the drawing-up of the American Constitution, we may take seriously his alleged claim that ‘Magna Carta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign’.

Yet he was writing 400 years after the event. The thirty-ninth and fortieth clauses of the charter may have been the most pertinent and significant, but at the time they were simply part of a miscellaneous and haphazard collection of principles taken from canon law and common law and custom equally. It is not at all clear that the negotiators knew precisely what they were doing. They were more concerned with correcting manifest wrongs than proclaiming evident rights. They made a heap of all they found. Not for the first time have great events and doctrines emerged from ambiguous and adventitious circumstances. The charter had no central doctrine. It was piecemeal. Therefore it was adaptable. Its meaning or meanings could be reinterpreted. Its underlying consequences were understood only gradually and slowly. It was reissued three times, with various amendments, and only the final version of 1225 became law. It was ratified thirty-eight times by various kings, the last of them being Henry VI.

Yet even before the moment he sealed it, King John had determined to ignore it. The sixty-three clauses meant nothing to him. He had hoped that by apparently coming to agreement with the barons, he would be able to divide his opponents and purchase a breathing space in which he could reassert his sovereignty. No sooner had he affixed his seal to the document than he sent an emissary to the pope, claiming that every concession won from him was an insult to the pontiff himself whose unworthy vassal he was. He ordered that all of his castles should be provisioned and
fortified. He sent commanders to Flanders, Poitou and elsewhere to hire mercenary soldiers. War against his barons could be renewed. On 24 August 1215, Pope Innocent III sent letters annulling the provisions of the Magna Carta as an insult to his authority over England. ‘With the advice of our brethren,’ he wrote, ‘we altogether reprove and condemn this charter, prohibiting the king under pain of anathema from observing it, the barons from exacting its obligations.’

It came too late. The king and the barons were already at war. The Cornish lands of Robert Fitzwalter, the leading rebel, were seized. At this juncture the military advantage lay decidedly with the king; he possessed by far the largest number of fortified castles and he had at his command a professional mercenary army. A party of rebels took refuge in the castle at Rochester; John besieged it, and helped to undermine it by strapping burning torches to a number of pigs. The animals were herded into wooden galleries built beneath the stronghold and set it ablaze. This was one of the less formal techniques of medieval warfare.

Many of the rebel barons took refuge in London. It might have been possible for the king to lay siege to the capital, but London was not Rochester. The undertaking was filled with risk. Instead John decided to destroy the castles of the rebels one by one. He marched to the north, from where many of the barons came, and laid waste the land from Nottingham to Berwick; he left a trail of blood and ruins wherever he ventured. Only one rebel castle, that of Helmsley in Yorkshire, was left standing.

From their stronghold of London the barons called upon the aid of King Philip of France. They resolved to offer the crown to his son, Louis, whose wife was connected in blood to the Plantagenets. In the spring of 1216 Louis landed at Dover and marched unopposed to Rochester. His success was followed by his capture of Guildford, of Farnham, and, most importantly, of Winchester. It must have seemed that God, or good fortune, was on his side. The great earls of the kingdom, many of them hitherto supporters of the king, submitted to him. John retreated to the west, and spent the summer months of 1216 in various sorties throughout Dorset and Devon. In the early days of September he broke out and led his army to the east; he went into Norfolk and Lincolnshire,
without achieving any great success. From this last expedition comes the now accepted legend that he lost his treasure in the Wash, when the tide rose too rapidly. It was reported that the crown itself was engulfed by the swirling waters. It was a very convenient story for those of his immediate entourage, who would have been happy to enrich themselves on the principle of
sauve qui peut
. The truth is also lost in the shifting tide.

He must in any case have known that he was reaching the end of his days. Kings die when they feel that their power is fading. He became ill of a fever, and of dysentery; he died in the fortress of the bishop of Lincoln at the age of forty-nine. ‘Hell’, wrote one chronicler, ‘felt herself defiled by his admission.’ John had another destination in mind. He was interred in the cathedral at Worcester and at his own request his tomb lay in the shadow of the shrine of the eleventh-century English saint, Bishop Wulfstan. In 1797 the king’s sepulchre was opened by curious antiquaries. It was reported that ‘the remains of the Illustrious Personage appear entire’. His height was 5 feet and 5 inches (1.65 metres). On one side of him lay his sword, in knightly fashion, with ‘the bones of his left arm lying on his breast, his teeth quite perfect’. He was the first king, since the time of the Normans, both to be born and to die in England.

What can be said of a king whose memory has been universally execrated by the chroniclers of his own time and of subsequent centuries? In his rapacity and greed he did not materially differ from his predecessors. He was characterized by the harshness and inflexibility of all previous Norman and Angevin rulers. Yet it was his misfortune to aspire to royal domination in singularly unhappy circumstances – his loss of the Angevin Empire at the hands of a wealthier and mightier king, the havoc of steeply rising prices, and the alienation of his barons, all darkened the picture of his reign. It needed only a few vignettes of his rapacity or cruelty to complete the chroniclers’ description of an utterly unfit king.

Yet out of his rule emerged a new or at least an intensified sense of the nation. That is the meaning of the Magna Carta. The English people of the early thirteenth century were already familiar with the notion of
ius commune
or common law; they were accustomed to the role of guilds and fraternities. John himself, in pursuit
of the throne, had in 1191 accepted the right of London to form its own commune as a self-governing and self-elected body of the richer citizens. From this time forward communal archives and records were placed in the guildhall. The momentum of the age was behind this new form of identity. Many other towns asserted their own
communitas
during the reign of John, with the election of mayors and the creation of municipal seals. The members of the commune swore an oath to preserve the town and its liberties.

So it was perhaps inevitable that the barons, in rebellion against the king, would assert the values of the
communa
of England and would introduce the concept of the
communa totius terra
with its attendant liberties. It became known, in the thirteenth century, as ‘the community of the realm’. There even grew, at the end of that century, a recognition of ‘the community of the vill’ or village. These were all stages in the growing self-consciousness of England. This is the meaning of the ‘field full of folk’ that William Langland invokes at the beginning of
Piers Plowman
. He saw, in vision, a community.