Magna Carta
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Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Introduction: The Fame of Magna Carta
Chapter 1: England Reordered, 1154–1189
Chapter 2: War and Taxes, 1189–1199
Chapter 3: Empire’s End, 1199–1204
Chapter 4: The King in His Kingdom, 1204–1205
Chapter 5: Interdict and Intimidation, 1206–1212
Chapter 6: Crisis and Machinations, 1212–1214
Chapter 7: A Meadow Called Runnymede, 1215
Chapter 8: A Charter of Liberties – Magna Carta
Chapter 9: War and Invasion, 1215–1216
Chapter 10: Afterlife of the Charter, 1215–2015
Appendix I: The Text of Magna Carta, 1215
Appendix II: The Men of Magna Carta
Appendix III: The Enforcers of Magna Carta
Appendix IV: Timeline: 800 Years of Magna Carta
Notes on the Text
Further Reading
Index and Picture Credits
Acknowledgements
About this Book
Reviews
About the Author
Also by this Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
Introduction
The Fame of Magna Carta
Eight hundred years after it was first agreed beneath the oak trees of Runnymede, by the fertile green banks of the River Thames, Magna Carta is more famous than ever. This is strange. In its surviving forms – and there are four known original charters dating from June 1215 – Magna Carta is something of a muddle. It is a collection of promises extracted in bad faith from a reluctant king, most of which concern matters of arcane thirteenth-century legal principle. A few of these promises concern themselves with high ideals, but those are few and far between, vague and idealistic statements slipped between longer and more perplexing sentences describing the ‘customary fee’ that a baron ought to pay a king on the occasion of coming into an inheritance, or the protocols for dealing with debt to the Crown, or the regulation of fish-traps along the Thames and the Medway.
For the most part, Magna Carta is dry, technical, difficult to decipher and constitutionally obsolete. Those parts that are still frequently quoted – clauses about the right to justice before one’s peers, the freedom from being unlawfully imprisoned and the freed om of the Church – did not mean in 1215 what we often wish they would mean today. They are part of an agreement drawn up not to defend, in perpetuity, the interests of national citizens, but rather to pin down a king who had been greatly vexing a very small number of wealthy and violent barons. Magna Carta ought to be dead, defunct and only of interest to serious scholars of the thirteenth century.
Yet it is very much alive, one of the most hallowed documents in the world, revered from the Arctic Circle to the Antipodes, written into the constitutions of numerous countries, and admired as a foundation stone in the Western traditions of liberty, democracy and the rule of law. How did that happen?
This book tells the story of Magna Carta – its background, its birth, its almost instantaneous failure, its slow resurrection and its mutation into the thing it is today: a historical palimpsest onto which almost any dream can be written. It looks at Magna Carta’s place in the history of medieval England and modern Britain. It describes briefly how the charter was exported to America and the wider world. It considers how Magna Carta is discussed in the popular media today, as we enter the ninth century of its existence. It also presents the text in its Latin form and, more accessibly, in English translation, so that readers can, as it were, go straight to the horse’s mouth.
Mostly, though, this book seeks to explain the historical context from which Magna Carta emerged in the early thirteenth century, during the reign of King John. His rule was a litany of troubles, which included the loss of Normandy in 1204, a great argument with Pope Innocent III (in the course of which England’s churches closed and John himself was excommunicated), vicious personal squabbles with barons whom the king had once called his friends, an utterly miserable invasion of France in 1214, and finally civil war in 1215–17, as a result of which Magna Carta was produced and Johnsuccumbed to fatal illness. I have told this story in detail, and have tried to describe how the policies John pursued built towards Magna Carta in 1215, and why his barons felt so compelled to shackle him as they did.
This book does not attempt to drastically rehabilitate John, who was satirized so deliciously in Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That as ‘an awful king’. It does, however, aim to show that Magna Carta had far deeper roots than John’s reign. While John’s own, often appalling, behaviour was much to blame for the chaos that rained down upon him during his final years, he was not by any means the sole architect of his woes. This is a point recognized both by modern historians and by men who lived in the age of Magna Carta. The chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, writing in the middle of the thirteenth century, observed that Magna Carta was not created simply to restrain John but also to end ‘the evil customs which the father and brother of the king had created to the detriment of the Church and kingdom, along with those abuses which the king had added’.1 Gerald of Wales, who was always inclined to anti-Plantagenet hysteria in his writing, agreed, calling John a ‘tyrannous whelp,’ but admitted that he had ‘issued from the most bloody tyrants’.2 This was typical Geraldic exaggeration; nevertheless, it nods us in the direction of an important historical truth: we cannot simply view Magna Carta as a bill of protest and remedy aimed merely at the scandalous and unlucky John, but as a howl of historical complaint that was directed, at least on some level, against two generations of perceived abuse.
To begin this story, therefore, we must reach back sixty years before 1215, to the time of John’s father, Henry II.
Dan Jones
Battersea, London
October 2014
1
England Reordered
1154–1189
King John’s father, Henry II, was a man who made an impression. It is true that physically he was not much to look at: a little more than middling height, solidly built, with bowed legs and grey eyes that were said to flash when he grew angry. The force of his character, however, made him unforgettable. Henry possessed near-boundless energy. ‘Perpetually wakeful and at work,’ wrote the courtier and chronicler Walter Map; but this scarcely did justice to his sheer will and determination.1 By the time Henry Plantagenet was crowned King of England on 19 December 1154, aged twenty-one, he had already laid claim to the titles of Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine – by virtue of marriage in 1152 to Eleanor of Aquitaine – and Count of Anjou.*1 During his reign he would take effective command of Brittany and assert his right to the lordship of Ireland. His power therefore stretched from the borders of Scotland to the Pyrenees, and they encompassed virtually the entire western seaboard of greater France. Indeed, Henry’s political tentacles stretched even further afield than that, for he had interests and alliances from Saxony to Sicily, and from Castile to the Holy Land. Few European monarchs since Charlemagne had exercised control over such vast territories, and few medieval kings would rule with such political agility, ruthlessness and skill.
Henry’s physical stamina allowed him to spend almost his whole life moving about his lands, ‘tolerant of the discomforts of dust and mud… travelling in unbearably long stages’, and enjoying, according to Walter Map, the fact that his physical exertions prevented him from getting fat.2 He astonished his rival rulers with the ability to pop up where they least expected him, and he both charme
d and scared those who worked for him, by dint of his tendency to slip in an instant from bluff good humour to foaming rage. During one infamous tantrum, Henry thrashed about on the floor of his chamber, gnawing at the straw from his mattress. But it was Henry’s born talent for politics and government that most struck those who met him. Writing after the king’s death, the Yorkshire chronicler William of Newburgh opined that the king ‘seemed to possess notable wisdom, stability, and a passion for justice,’ and that even from ‘his earliest days’ Henry ‘conveyed the impression of a great ruler’.3
Henry inherited the English crown in a political deal to end a civil war that had raged for nineteen years. Contemporaries called the war the ‘Shipwreck’. Historians now refer to it as the ‘Anarchy’. Either way, it was a struggle waged between two grandchildren of William the Conqueror – Henry’s mother, Matilda, and her cousin, King Stephen, both of whom claimed to be the legitimate heir of Henry I (r. 1100–35).*2
Neither contender for the throne could summon enough military or political support to enforce their claim, and as a result England was torn for a generation between two hostile factions. Royal authority across the realm collapsed, and the horrors of civil war descended: arson, torture, bloodshed, murder, robbery, laying waste the land, starvation, economic turmoil and a widespread failure of justice. ‘Every man began to rob his neighbour,’ wrote the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. ‘It was said openly that Christ and his saints were asleep.’4 The Treaty of Winchester (1153) brought an end to the conflict by naming Henry as Stephen’s royal heir. When Stephen died the following year and Henry took power, his first duty was to restore firm royal rule to a land that had not known effective governance for a generation.
A miniature from ‘Claudius D. II’, a legal treatise in the Cotton collection of medieval manuscripts now housed in the British Library. It shows Henry II remonstrating with Thomas Becket, while knights ominously finger their swords. Henry established a Plantagenet empire around the English Crown, and developed an intense and efficient system of government to rule it. But, as did John later on, he fell into dispute with the English Church, represented here by Becket. In 1215 Magna Carta would be as much an attempt to rein back Henry’s legacy of royal power as it was an attempt to curtail John’s more recent abuses.
There were three basic, determining conditions to Henry II’s rule in England. The first was his urgent need to impose order after the Anarchy. The second was his need to create a political system that would allow him to rule his kingdom efficiently while he travelled across the rest of his territories fighting his enemies, chief among them being Louis VII, King of France. The third was a constant need to raise money. Henry approached these problems with a natural instinct for strong, centralized government and a knack for financially squeezing his subjects – particularly those in England, the richest part of his empire. In doing so, he put his personal stamp on the style and substance of all royal government in a way that would come to define the sixty years before Magna Carta.
Henry loved control. Although in England, as in the rest of his lands, he was happy to delegate the business of government to trusted advisers, he made it very clear from the beginning that power stemmed ultimately – and only – from the king. At his coronation he imitated his Norman predecessors by issuing a charter that promised to protect ‘all the concessions and grants and liberties and free customs’ granted to the Church and the great men of the kingdom by Henry I, and likewise to abolish all the ‘evil customs’ that had sprung up in the realm. But this was the last such concession that he would make. Although Henry II made a great effort to rally to his side as many of the great men of England as he could, he was also prepared to break the power of the handful of English barons who dared to defy him, while leaving the rest in no doubt to whom they owed their positions of wealth and prestige. He razed castles that had been built during the civil war and expelled foreign mercenaries. He reissued the coinage and imposed heavy penalties on those who forged or clipped his coins.*3 He cancelled all grants of land and office that had been made under Stephen; those he saw fit to re-grant were given back explicitly under his own authority. He refused to relinquish command of any territory or property where it might result in his own power being diminished, and he took great pains to punish anyone who opposed him. And most importantly for the long-term history of England, Henry oversaw a legal and administrative revolution that allowed his authority to be felt in the realm even when he was absent – as he would be for around two-thirds of his thirty-five-year reign.
‘Wealth is obviously necessary not only in wartime but also in peacetime,’ wrote Richard FitzNigel, royal treasurer and Bishop of London, in a practical guidebook to royal finance known as ‘The Dialogue of the Exchequer’. FitzNigel (also known as FitzNeal) completed his book in the late 1180s, around the time that Henry II died, and his words reflect a lifetime in service to a king whose need for money was always pressing. Under Henry’s rule, the Exchequer became the most important institution of royal government, for it was there that royal revenues were accounted, on a large table, ten feet by five feet, which was covered with a cloth resembling a chessboard, and it was through the Exchequer that the king could levy heavy fin-ancial penalties on those subjects who displeased him. It received fines imposed by the king’s judges and it handled bribes paid by landholders who sought royal favour in disputes with their neighbours. Feudal dues – customary payments made by aristocrats for the king’s permission to marry or inherit – came across the chequered cloth-covered table, and so did taxes such as ‘scutage’, also known as ‘shield-money’, a payment made by barons to avoid sending their loyal knights to fight in royal armies (and which, in theory, might then be used to buy mercenaries).*4
During the civil war, the Exchequer had lost its teeth: sheriffs – key royal officials in the shires of England – had stopped rendering their accounts before it, and the barons of England had avoided paying their feudal dues. But this decline was dramatically reversed under Henry. FitzNigel’s handbook shows us just what a wide array of business came before Henry’s Exchequer. Its officials counted and sorted silver coins, audited sheriffs’ accounts for revenues raised in the shires, received scutage and fines paid by communities for murders committed (where there was no culprit discovered), as well as taking in fines paid for abuses committed in royal forest land. They took receipt of falcons and hawks given as gifts to the king and they handled ‘queen’s gold’ – a tax of 1 mark of gold for every 100 marks of silver owed to the king.*5
The Exchequer was a huge and complex government department. Yet it is clear that Henry regarded it as not only a financial institution, but also as a political tool. The Marshal of the Exchequer had the power to arrest those who came before it insolvent. Powerful subjects could be ruined without taking up arms against them, simply by calling in large debts they owed to the Crown. Equally, the king could reward men who were in his favour by reducing, rescheduling or cancelling their debts. Very few barons paid everything they owed the Exchequer. Indeed, some of the king’s close associates – such as Robert, Earl of Leicester and Reginald, Earl of Cornwall – paid nothing at all on their debts.5 Despite these selective exemptions, however, Henry’s general insistence on tight financial governance bore fruit. Early in his reign, about £13,000 a year crossed the Exchequer table. By the 1180s the flow of money stood at £22,000 – testament not only to rising revenue, necessary to help the king defend his vast lands, but also to a king exerting a much tighter royal grip, even in absentia, on the great men of his realm.6
Having reformed royal finance, Henry set about changing the way that royal justice worked. Starting in 1163–6, sweeping reforms affected the way that the king’s subjects interacted with royal law.*6 The Assize of Clarendon – a legal Act of 1166 – commanded that all crimes in England were to be investigated by the Crown, regardless of any local jurisdictions held by the great lords of the realm. The investigating was done not by potentially corruptible sheriffs and lo
cal officials, but by a high-powered commission of royal judges who travelled on a circuit known as the General Eyre, and who investigated cases with juries of twelve local men rather than committing defendants to judgment by ordeal of fire or by ‘compurgation’, as had been the case in the past.*7 Most importantly the assize meant that all murder, robbery and theft now came under royal jurisdiction; ten years later the Assize of Northampton added arson, forgery and counterfeiting to this list.
A collection of tally sticks, which were used in accounting in the medieval English Exchequer. Each stick was split between the Exchequer and the other party, and the notches in both parts were supposed to align, showing the status of loans and payments. The king’s Exchequer could ruin barons in a single day by calling in all the debts that were owed to the Crown, and John’s exploitation of this power would earn him the hatred of many of his subjects. (In 1834, the fire that burnt down the Houses of Parliament began as a controlled bonfire of old tally sticks.)
It was not only the scope of criminal law that expanded under Henry. There was also a revolution in the way that civil law in England operated. Land disputes were the source of a huge volume of litigation during the Middle Ages, and Henry made the process by which the Crown could intervene in cases smoother, easier and more profitable. Since before the Norman Conquest it had been possible to apply for royal justice by seeking a ‘writ’ from the government department known as Chancery. A writ was a short chit, which could initiate legal action in royal courts or command a royal sheriff to carry out some form of action to remedy a wrong. These were generally ad hoc, non-standard official devices. Henry made a series of standardized writs available, most importantly the writs of ‘novel disseizin’, ‘mort d’ancestor’ and the writ of right: respectively these protected landholders from having their land illegally seized by lords or third parties, asserted the right to inherit land, and instructed a sheriff to ‘do right’ by the holder of the writ. They were simple, formulaic and straightforward to obtain, whether or not the king was in the country. The reach of the Crown thus began to extend deep down into English society, as the royal law became more available, desirable and widely used than ever before. Moreover, writs cost money, and their increasing popularity brought the Crown a handsome profit from litigants’ fees and fines. Best of all, none of this required Henry’s personal presence. A money-making bureaucratic machine was born.