Rebellion and Magna Carta

It is against this background that we need to view the outbreak of rebellion against King John in the spring of 1215. A sworn coalition of barons, commanding the sympathy if not the active support of leading figures within the Church, seized London in May 1215 with the cooperation of the city’s men, forcing the King into negotiations at Runnymede, a location halfway between London and the royal castle at Windsor. On 15 June, John agreed the issue of a document, under negotiation for at least the previous six months, which was intended to impose restrictions upon the future exercise of arbitrary royal rule. The document itself is known as Magna Carta (‘The Big Charter’) and, broken down into its individual chapters, runs to more than sixty clauses. It is undoubtedly the most famous document in English history. Yet what did it signify?

It was most certainly not the first written statement intended to limit the King’s authority or freedom of action, an accolade that perhaps belongs to the coronation charter of Henry I issued more than a century earlier. It was not even the first such written statement issued by King John. Throughout his reign, John had offered charters of liberties to individual franchise-holders, to the men of London, for example, to many of the great cities and towns of England or Aquitaine, or to communities, such as the royal charters awarding privileges within the King’s forests to the men of Devon or the tenantry of the honour of Lancaster. An assize for the men of the Channel Islands, supposedly issued by King John after 1204, attempted to regulate several aspects of Channel Islands law from the appointment of twelve ‘jurats’ to hear the pleas of the crown, a system still in operation today, to the restriction of the period during which conger eels might be salted. In April 1215, before the issue of Magna Carta, John issued a charter establishing communal self-government for the men of Bayonne, guaranteeing widespread liberties and privileges to the most important city of Aquitaine south of Bordeaux including detailed provisions for the city’s governance by a mayor and a council of 100 citizens, the city already having acquired its own naval council set to monitor such matters as the price of freight between Spain and Flanders or the whaling fleets of the Bay of Biscay. Such documents can be linked not only to the discipline of law, and to the demands by churchmen, by Stephen Langton for example, that kings be bound by a Leviticus just as the kings of the Old Testament were bound. They also reveal the twelfth century’s growing fascination with categories and definitions. The sixty or more clauses of Magna Carta not only imposed definitions and categories of this sort but resembled the division into clauses of the Old Testament books of law, a system attributed to Stephen Langton, or the law codes of the pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon kings.

Many of the clauses of Magna Carta are concerned with the King’s financial regime: the limitation of the fines that he could charge his barons when they inherited their father’s estates, the protection of wards and widows, the restriction of the King’s ability to charge arbitrary taxes, known as ‘aids’, without the consent of his barons and the Church. At the same time, a surprising number of clauses were targeted at particular interest groups whose demands the King sought to satisfy. The Church was to have its ancient liberties. The barons were to be free from arbitrary royal demands. The merchants of London might trade without unreasonable hindrance. Certain clauses might seem especially ephemeral: clause 33, for example, demanding the removal of all fish weirs on the rivers Thames or Medway. Why these two rivers in particular? To the men of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his estate at Maidstone, it was essential that these rivers remain navigable, and the building of mills or weirs threatened such navigation. Special interests were at stake. Clause 50 of the 1215 charter included a long list of names of foreigners, Girard d’Athée and his associates, who were to be dismissed from office, and under clause 51 banished from England. These were in fact the most important of the King’s French constables, recruited from the region of the Loire valley, essential to John’s military control over England and as links to his lost continental domain. One of them, Philip Mark, is still a familiar figure in English history, albeit known by his title rather than his name, as King John’s sheriff of Nottingham, adversary of the mythical Robin Hood.

Only a very few of the charter’s clauses can be read as general statements of principle, the most important being clause 39:

Of more pressing concern to both barons and King was the question of how to bind the King to the future observance of the charter’s promises. Here, the charter included a ‘sanctions’ clause, clause 61, according to which a committee of twenty-five barons was to be appointed to oversee the charter’s implementation. Should the King in any way infringe the charter’s terms or fail to heed baronial warnings, then the twenty-five might rise against him and seize his resources, short of causing him or his family physical injury. A charter issued by the King as God’s supposed vicar on earth was thus made to impose a baronial committee of twenty-five extremely angry and self-ishly motivated barons between God and the King.

With this sanctions clause at its climax, there could be no question that the charter itself would survive. The King almost immediately repudiated it. Pope Innocent III, confronted by a document that threatened to institute rebellion as a constitutional instrument and to place limitations upon the God-given authority exercised by all sovereigns, from popes to kings, not only annulled Magna Carta but ordered the suspension of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton. If not exactly responsible for encouraging the barons in their claims, or for writing any particular clauses of the charter, Langton had failed to lend the King the unconditional support that the papacy believed was John’s due. Like the very idea of reducing English custom to writing, as a sort of Plantagenet Leviticus or code of laws, some of the statements of principle expressed in Magna Carta, such as the insistence under clause 60 that customs and liberties granted by the King to his barons be extended by the barons to their own men, have an ecclesiastical stamp to them. To this extent, Langton’s Parisian background was crucial in the formulation of the most detailed statement of English ‘liberties’ yet attempted. Meanwhile, born in June 1215, Magna Carta died ignominiously and ignored, within only three months of its issue. So at least the King believed.