There had been mention of the office of coroner as early as the late ninth and early tenth centuries although it has never been clear what powers the coroner would have other than as ‘crowner’ to preserve the authority of crown property, especially the collection of any death duties. The coroner as we would think of him or her in the twenty-first century dates quite specifically from September 1194 when Walker established the office, or at least put it on a proper constitutional and legal footing. It was also about this time that the civic bureaucracy was strengthened to include the office of Mayor of London. The first ‘Lord’ Mayor of London appeared in about 1191, a man called Henry fitz Ailwin. The importance of this new machinery of administration is clear: the king was no longer the single guarantor of law and order. But the law, the administration and the genius of Hubert Walter could not lessen Richard’s demands for funds for his war against Philip of France and his treacherous brother, John. And it was the need to finance this campaign that led to the death of the King.
In 1199, while laying siege to a castle at Châlus in France, Richard was hit in the neck by an arrow. He probably died from gangrene. He knew that he would not last and so made those about him swear allegiance to John (1166–1216), his brother and the favourite son of their father, Henry II. It is also said that on his deathbed, Richard pardoned the archer who had fired the fatal bolt. Much good it did either of them. Richard died in considerable discomfit and the archer was flayed alive. This was, after all, still the twelfth century.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1199–1216
The barons had strengthened their position during Richard I’s reign in spite of the celebrated administration reforms and curbs of Hubert Walter. They certainly did not like the crown taking extra powers and demanding money to fight wars. They were always ready to confront the new King, John. John had been known as John Lackland for the obvious reason that he actually possessed no great acreage, which is why Henry II, his father, had declared him Lord of Ireland. He had divorced his first wife, Avice of Gloucester. Avice (known as Isabel) gave John no heir, so he divorced her. She later married twice, the second time to one of the most powerful men in the history of the time, Hubert de Burgh (d.1243), who negotiated with the barons on behalf of King John and who led a small flotilla to defeat an invading French fleet in the Channel in 1217. The king’s second wife was Isabella of Angoulême, the mother of the future Henry III and Richard, Earl of Cornwall (1209–72). If John personally lacked land, he most certainly was a landless monarch when Philip II Augustus precipitated the loss of the English territories in France – Anjou, Brittany, Maine and Normandy.
How did this all come about after such a relatively stable inheritance? When John became King he immediately did what all heirs did in those days; he took control of the Treasury. Then he rode to Rouen and his investiture as Duke of Normandy. Next, he crossed the Channel, and on Ascension Day John was crowned King of England at Westminster. Not everyone applauded. Moreover, he did not have much support on the Continent. Matters were hardly improved when he married Isabella. She was supposed to have married Hugh the Brown of Lusignan. The House of Lusignan was insulted and John was too arrogant to pay them off, which was the normal way of going about these matters, and the family laid a formal complaint at the court of Philip, who gleefully summoned John to court. John, through his French titles, was a vassal of the French King. So under French law he should have answered the summons but he refused to go. That was how the lands were confiscated.
King John then had to face Arthur of Brittany (son of John’s brother Geoffrey) who now attempted to kidnap Eleanor, the King’s mother and his own grandmother. John rescued her and, most controversially, took Arthur prisoner. Arthur, aged sixteen, was perhaps the most serious threat to John’s own throne and he was sent to prison first at Falaise and then Rouen. It is said that John’s knights went to Rouen and castrated Arthur who died of shock during the crude surgery. The Bretons went into great revolt at the news of the murder of their duke. Philip of France watched as others withdrew their support from John. But Normandy was not ready to fall for the French King. It was rich, there were many loyal to John and reinforcements could be brought from England. But John was not an inspired leader. He appealed to Pope Innocent to rule against Philip of France. It came to nothing and then, in December 1203, John returned to England and by Midsummer’s Day, 1204, all that England had left of the Duchy of Normandy were the Channel Islands.
It was now, in 1205, that Eleanor died. She had almost single-handedly protected John’s interests as best she could in France. Of equal seriousness, Hubert Walter died. It was not in John’s gift to appoint the Archbishop of Canterbury. Pope Innocent III chose Cardinal Langton as the new Archbishop. King John, who preferred John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich, retaliated against the decision by seizing Church lands. In 1208, the Pope responded by laying England under an interdict, which meant that the whole country had been excommunicated. For six years, the churches remained closed. People couldn’t be given a Christian baptism, marriage or burial. John seized more property. The Pope excommunicated him. Philip of France was delighted: he was all ready to invade England. After all, with England outside the Church, such an adventure would be regarded as a Crusade. Instead of openly fighting the Pope, John suggested that England should be a fiefdom of Rome. The Pope was delighted. He accepted England and then returned the country to John to keep it safely as his vassal. Moreover, if the French attacked England, they would be attacking the Pope. That could not be done. As for Stephen Langton, he saw Rome taking over the English see. That could not happen, he thought, and so became an enemy of the very Vicar of Christ who had originally appointed him to Canterbury.
This was a very clever strategy by John, but if he was normally that astute, he should have been able to protect himself from the barons. He could not. They were the constitutional grandchildren of Henry II’s reforms. They now felt the time had come to make sure that arbitrary rule by one king could never again usurp the custom and law of the land and its peoples, especially if those peoples included the barons. Who would lead the barons? Stephen Langton, of course.
The result of all this was the Great Charter, Magna Carta. At St Paul’s Cathedral, Archbishop Langton produced the first list of demands and read it aloud to the barons. The barons took up the cry and promised they would enforce the liberties contained in that document. This was the start of the fight for what would be known as the Articles of the Barons and, eventually, the first Magna Carta (there were to be many). Most of the barons were not after removing the monarchy nor all its powers. They wanted to safeguard their own positions in the future when a new monarch with a leaning towards despotism or even a madman might be king.
The first document of the barons’ demands was short and drafted after a meeting at Runnymede. It is perhaps the most momentous single document in the history of these lands. Without it, there would have been no Magna Carta, no Great Charter. And we have it still, the very parchment that was at Runnymede: there are two copies in the British Museum, one in Salisbury Cathedral and one in Lincoln Cathedral. The parchment of forty-nine Articles begins with the simple statement: ‘These are the articles which the Barons ask for and the Lord King grants.’
The Charter reflects feudal law and feudal custom. The taxes (aids and scutage) are feudal, so too are the ways of raising and paying debts. The assizes were to be held more often; the liberty of the Church was to be respected. However, this is not an old document irrelevant to our twenty-first century times. We should today ever remember the original words and sentiment of Article 39:
No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised [legally disposed] or outlawed or exiled or victimized in any other way, neither will we attack him or send anyone to attack him, except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
On this Article alone rests much of what most in Britain in the twenty-first century believe as their rights and protection from a police state. In the thirteen
th century, Magna Carta promised the concept that any man shall be entitled to trial by the due process of the law.
In theory, the Charter’s great achievement was to establish that no one, not even a king was above the law. If he attempted to override the law, there now existed a process ‘To distrain and distress him in every possible way’. Curiously, Magna Carta had little immediate constitutional significance and some petty and cruel barons even attacked officers of the Royal Household who tried to implement the Charter.
With the barons having got the Charter, it might seem that there could be little reason for war. That supposes John felt fine about the Charter. He did not. It assumes that the barons felt fine about the King. They did not. What they really wanted was to rid themselves of the King. The recalcitrant barons were not republicans and, remember, the English aristocracy was also ‘French’, which was why a case could be made for calling the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Hundred Years War a civil war, not simply a conflict between France and England. So, we should not be surprised that the barons called upon Louis, the son of King Philip of France, to lead them against John and, if he was successful, to become king. Furthermore, the Scots led by Alexander and the Britons led by Llewellyn would join with the barons. So would the towns of London, Winchester and Worcester. The south-east Channel ports, the Cinque Ports of Rye, Winchelsea, Hastings, Hythe, Sandwich and Dover, if not for the barons, were subject to them. Clearly John was not enormously popular, but nor was he alone. Individuals, including William the Marshal, the Earl of Pembroke, could bring their troops. It was an altogether bloody affair. Louis was on his way from France and the Cinque Ports safely in command of his sponsors, but John took Rochester and with the help of money and mercenaries, mostly pillaging Flemings, at least held his ground, while his mercenaries laid waste to it. Louis, meanwhile, had landed and taken Winchester and Southampton, so in effect had control of key points in England with his supporters holding even more.
By Christmas 1215 John had reached Nottingham; by early January 1216 he was in York; and by the middle of the month he was as far north as Berwick. The new Scottish King, Alexander II, encouraged by the northern barons, raided across the border. For nearly two weeks, John’s troops struck into the lowlands, punishing the Scottish King by harrying his people. John then turned and marched south with his foreign mercenaries, who plundered their way through Lincolnshire and then East Anglia. The Flemings were not the only criminals of war. Local barons and squires used the war as an excuse to kill, maim, steal and land-grab. These travesties actually helped the King. He needed money to continue the war and so instead of physical punishments he imposed massive fines: 1,000 pounds from York and Beverley; 80 silver marks from Thirsk; another 100 from Melton Mowbray. Within three months King John had reconquered the north of his country. And then came the end, as described by one John de Erley, a squire of William the Marshal:
Finally, he the King, made his way towards Lindsey. On the way he was seized by illness. He was forced to stop at Newark. With him were the Bishop of Winchester, John of Monmouth, Walter Clifford, sire Roger, John Marshal and a number of other men of high rank. Feeling his illness growing worse, King John said to them: ‘My Lords, I must die; I cannot hold against this illness.’
The best evidence suggests that over-tiredness, too much food and too much wine left King John with dysentery. He died on 18 October 1216, exactly 150 years, almost to the day, after another king, Harold, had perished defending his realm against the invasion. John was dead and therefore so was one of the main reasons for the war. John’s successor was his son, Henry, who was nine years old. The barons had no quarrel with Henry. Rome and the de facto ruler after John’s death, William the Marshal, who would become a reluctant regent, decided that constitutional precedence must be followed, otherwise the ambition of others for the throne would send the realm into even bloodier civil war. Henry was crowned at Gloucester on 28 October 1216 and began a remarkable reign of more than half a century.
As for Louis of France, he still believed he could be King of England. In the winter of 1216 he returned to France for reinforcements and many of his English supporters deserted. On 20 May 1217, the remaining barons and Louis were defeated in the narrow streets of the Battle of Lincoln or the Fair of Lincoln, as it became known. Three months later the reinforcements raised by Blanche of Castile, Louis’s wife, put to sea under the command of the royalist traitor, Eustace the Monk. Royalist sailors came alongside the French ships, threw quicklime into the eyes of the French crews and seized the vessels. The intended invasion was over.
CHAPTER NINE
1217–72
Henry III was king for fifty-six years. For the first ten of them he was too young to rule. England was ruled by a Regency and was in need of firm government. When the nine-year-old Henry became King in 1216, England was still engaged in the Barons’ War. After Louis’s defeat (cushioned by 10,000 silver marks) all the King’s men started to put Henry’s house in order. Three of these were William the Marshal, Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Hubert de Burgh. However, they didn’t unquestioningly support the Crown. So, in 1216, we have the young King, formidably protected by Church, State, Treasury and sword. At first, William the Marshal and Guala, the Papal Legate, managed the task. But within two years of Henry’s coronation Guala left England. The following year, William the Marshal died.
So it was that Hubert de Burgh became the Justiciar, the chief officer of the realm. Hubert de Burgh had the full support and counsel of the Archbishop, Stephen Langton. And both led Henry to the point, in 1227, when he could confidently declare himself of age and rule his kingdom. Henry may not have been held responsible for his father John’s misadventures with finances and the authority of the monarch, but he was hardly without his violent critics. The country was not well run; there was hopeless fiscal management at the highest levels; there was particular anger at the intrusion into court and bureaucracy of foreigners, all favourites of Henry and of his wife, Eleanor of Provence (c.1223–91), whom he wed in 1236. The fact that Henry rebuilt Westminster in the name of Edward the Confessor meant presumably that he wished to be seen as a devout king. In piety there is little retribution for grievance.
The next twenty-four years were uneasy years. The relationship between the young King and the barons was rarely anything but unsettled. When he was a child, Henry’s Regency had to consult the barons. Once he became King, Henry, naturally, ruled in his own style and through the hand-picked servants of the Crown. The barons preferred the old way. Also, the barons believed that his Queen’s relations encouraged the King to think too much about his French claims. That meant spending money. It meant taxes and loans. And many of the barons no longer had direct interests in France. They also knew that Magna Carta, no matter how many times it was revised and reissued (it wasn’t a one-off document but more like a modern Act of Parliament which may be amended), wasn’t enough to control the King and force him to consult them on important matters, not even through the Great Council.
In theory the Great Council was a sort of Privy Council. But because the King could call anyone he liked to it, and therefore not call anyone he didn’t like, it did not have much power. Neither did the barons, or so they thought. In 1258 there was a constitutional confrontation, and it went on for seven years. The immediate result was the Provisions of Oxford.
The Provisions of Oxford were reforms rather than rules. They were issued by a committee appointed by the Oxford Parliament in 1258 (the Parliament sat in different places, not Westminster as today). It was in this year that the word ‘Parliament’ entered the language. The word comes from the Norman French, meaning a gathering to talk about important matters, to parley. It was a direct development of the Curia Regis, the royal court of the Norman kings. They were nothing like the modern Parliaments with Speakers, a government party, an opposition front bench or chief whips. Instead, the thirteenth-century Parliaments were the more important sessions of the Great Council.
> The Provisions of Oxford, drawn-up by a committee of twenty-four sound men, contain a series of oaths which illustrate something of the importance of the new Council of Fifteen and its Parliaments. For example:
There are to be three Parliaments a year. The first on the octave is Michaelmas. The second, the morrow of Candelmas. The third, the first Holy day of June, that is to say, three weeks before St John’s Day.
Power to appoint the Council would be chosen not by the monarch but by the Earl Marshal, Hugh Bigod, John Mansel and the Earl of Warwick instead:
And they are to have authority to advise the King in good faith on the government of the kingdom and all things pertaining to the King or to the kingdom, and authority to amend and redress all the things they see need to be redressed and amended. And authority over the chief Justiciar, and over all other people. And if they cannot be present, what the majority does shall be firm and established.
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