Magna Carta

by Dan Jones

  Undoubtedly de Vesci and FitzWalter had their reasons for plotting against the king. Gossip of the time suggested that John had attempted to seduce both de Vesci’s wife and FitzWalter’s daughter. Perhaps there was some truth in this. More pertinently, though, it seems that the opposition of these two lords represented two early strains of a more general disaffection with John’s reign and the whole system of Plantagenet government. De Vesci was a man of the North, a region of England that had been exposed for the first time, under John, to the full attention of a Plantagenet king, and an area that would provide many more rebel barons in the months to follow. As a group, England’s Northern barons felt most aggrieved at the level of royal incursion into previously lightly governed countryside. They had the least historical interest in Normandy – which was, after all, no nearer than Norway to many of them – and most resented the provision of troops or the paying of scutage for royal expeditions across the Channel. They had the greatest sense of themselves as an independent political group whose interests overlapped and could be threatened by outside interference.

  FitzWalter was not, though, a man of the North. Rather, he was one of the wealthiest barons in East Anglia and the South-East – indeed, in the whole of England – and had been close to John for many years. He was also a quarrelsome, violent, hard-headed man. A series of relatively petty clashes with the king would appear to have pushed FitzWalter to the fore of baronial opposition, where he remained as the crisis that produced Magna Carta escalated. He was hardly an ideologue, but he was nevertheless a product of an environment, largely of John’s creation, in which the English barons had become so disillusioned, exasperated and threatened by their king that they were prepared to countenance his murder.

  De Vesci and FitzWalter both fled with their families and households, running to Scotland and France respectively, when John discovered their plot. They were outlawed in the county courts. But they were not the only plotters, and their departure neither rid the realm of trouble nor soothed the increasingly agitated mind of the king.

  By 1213, then, John’s position was a great deal more precarious than it had been a year previously. In aborting his invasion of France the previous summer, he had handed the military initiative to Philip Augustus, who commissioned his son and heir Louis ‘the Lion’ to invade England and seize the crown, and then began raising a massive fleet of his own at Damme and in the mouth of the River Zwin. The French king was emboldened by John’s continued estrangement from Rome, for as an excommunicate heretic John was not protected by the pope’s blessing. In fact, the situation was quite the opposite: at the beginning of 1213, Innocent III had threatened to have John deposed and sanctioned the King of France to lead a mission against him as an enemy of Christ. For all that John had been courting Philip’s enemies, a counter-attack with all the righteous anger of a crusade now seemed to be imminent.

  In this circumstance John showed a flash of diplomatic genius. On 13 May 1213 he met the papal legate Pandulf Verraccio, who was serving as envoy to the English court, and agreed to return to the Church, accepting Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury and – most astonishingly of all – agreeing to hand over England and Ireland as fiefs of the papacy. On 15 May he humbly submitted in public to papal overlordship, paying a mere £1,000 by way of a tribute. This was nothing to a king as flush with coin as John, and although it must have caused him some personal vexation to swallow his pride and accept an end to his extortion of the English Church, the reward was that John could now claim special protection from all of his enemies as a personal vassal of the pope.

  The seal-die (left) and an example of the resulting seal belonging to Robert FitzWalter; beneath the mounted knight and shield bearing his arms is a ‘dragon retardant’. One of John’s chief enemies in the years leading up to 1215, FitzWalter was a powerful East Anglian baron who was implicated in a plot to do away with John. Later, he awarded himself the title ‘Marshal of the Army of God’ and held London against the king.

  For the English barons who opposed John, and for the French king who had been preparing to topple him from his throne, everything was now turned upside-down. The French invasion was finally seen off on 30 May when a number of English ships sneaked into the mouth of the Zwin and burned the French fleet as it bobbed at anchor there. Somehow, against all odds, John had survived a genuine crisis. But his relief would soon turn once again to despair.

  For all the trouble that his plans for continental warfare had caused him, John had no intention of leaving France alone. During the rest of 1213 he continued to fund – at vast cost – a proxy war between Philip and the barons of Flanders. At the same time, he plotted his next personal invasion. Once again, however, he found that a hard core of the English barons – particularly the Northerners – were entirely unmoved by his appeals for support. Others acquiesced, sending knights and paying scutage, but they did so uneasily. On 2 November 1213, following a short military tour of the Northern counties that was designed to overawe his subjects, John held a meeting with the Northern barons at Wallingford, in Oxfordshire. There he attempted both to mollify them by promising a programme of reform, and to scare them by surrounding them with his heavily armed knights. Once this heavy-handed business was finished with, John went back to assembling a fleet and an army to take Normandy from the south. It was an awesomely grand undertaking, and John threw all he had into it. He also took more from his subjects than ever before.

  In the months before his invasion of France, John extorted 10,000 marks from William FitzAlan in return for the latter’s right to inherit his family’s title. John de Lacy was charged 7,000 marks for a similar privilege. Widows were charged up to £1,000 to keep their dowers and to secure exemption from re-marriage. And then there was perhaps the most egregious fine of John’s whole reign, in the shape of the 20,000 marks levied on Geoffrey de Mandeville for marrying John’s jilted first wife. Each of these grossly inflated charges was underwritten by a promise on the payee’s part to forfeit all of his or her lands and tenements to the king if they could not keep up with payments.*1 Meanwhile, barons whom John suspected of disloyalty were forced to pledge lands, castles and their children as hostages as security for their good behaviour.1 Even by John’s standards this was a time of severity, mistrust, extortion and tyranny, which hardly inspired any greater love for him among his subjects. When he sailed for Poitou in February 1214, John left his castles in the North of England well garrisoned as a precaution against any immediate disquiet. He knew that his realm might spring into rebellion at any moment.

  The Battle of Bouvines on 27 July 1214, as depicted in a detail from the fourteenth-century manuscripts of the Grandes Chroniques de France. In this scene, John’s ally, Count Ferrand of Flanders, is captured. Other allies fled the battlefield. John effectively bet a decade’s worth of extraordinary wealth accumulation on a campaign to reconquer his lost French lands in 1214. He lost.

  A massive campaign was planned in France, in which the English king was to march north from his base in La Rochelle, bolstered by the men of Poitou, causing sufficient distraction that Emperor Otto and John’s Flemish allies could storm Paris before heading south to trap Philip Augustus’s armies in a pincer movement. Yet at the crucial moment, John’s Poitevin allies lost their nerve, decided against fighting the King of France, and scutt-led back to their homes. John had no choice but to pitch camp and follow the news from the north.

  But the news was not good. On a swelteringly hot Sunday, 27 July 1214, a coalition of John’s allies – including Otto, John’s illegitimate brother William Longspée (Earl of Salisbury), the counts of Boulogne and Flanders, the Duke of Brabant and assorted other expensively remunerated continental warlords – met the armies of Philip Augustus at Bouvines, a tiny village next to a bridge across the River Marcq, in what is today the Nord-Pas-de-Calais. The coalition troops rode in below a huge flag bearing Otto’s emblem of a dragon and eagle. The French marched beneath their sacred banner, the Oriflamme. There was no question t
hat this was a day of decisive importance. In an age of siegecraft and warfare by skirmish and attrition, full pitched battles were considered unpredictable and dangerous. They came along very infrequently indeed, and though many of the combatants would have had experience of fighting en masse in the mêlée of the tournament field, very few would ever have taken to the battlefield for real in their whole lives. Yet all would have known that to win a battle indicated a true confirmation of God’s favour.

  John’s allies lost at Bouvines. More than that, it was a rout. Otto and several of the other noblemen fled the field. The counts of Boulogne and Flanders and the Earl of Salisbury were captured, along with nearly thirty other high-ranking knights and noblemen and perhaps nine thousand others. For Philip Augustus, this was total vindication. ‘After this, no one dared wage war against him,’ wrote the chronicler known as the Anonymous of Béthune. For John, Bouvines was a catastrophe. He had gambled his reputation and most of his fortune on the outcome of a single battle in which the Almighty would speak to the rectitude of his cause. The God-given answer was that John was now a busted flush. He left French soil on 13 October and never came back.

  *1 ‘Tenement’ – land (perhaps including property) held by the tenant of a manor.

  7

  A Meadow Called Runnymede

  1215

  After the débâcle of Bouvines, John, his foreign-policy and military credentials now severely tarnished, returned to England to find the chorus of baronial anger at his high-handed brand of kingship louder than ever. His kingdom was teetering dangerously on the brink of civil war. It was a war he could neither avoid nor afford to pursue. John had either forsaken or exhausted his most lucrative sources of income during his preparations for the war that preceded Bouvines. Having lost that war, John had been forced – according to the chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall – to pay 60,000 marks for a five-year truce with Philip Augustus. There could not be a worse time to fund a war at home. Yet it was clear that his enemies, led by the barons of the North, expected a fight: they came armed to a conference in London in January 1215, demanding reform from the king. This worried John into taking loans from the Templars in order to raise an army of mercenaries from the continent with which he expected to have to defend his crown.*1

  Besides making desperate military preparations, John also began to seek political means by which to evade his barons’ anger. His brazen actions in 1213, in raising the papal Interdict by declaring himself a liege vassal of the pope, had given him a measure of protection from Rome. On 4 March John sought to deepen his bond with Innocent III even further by taking the solemn oath of a crusader. The idea of John emulating his brother Richard and taking an army east to smash the forces of the Infidel in the Holy Land was as improbable in reality as it sounded in theory. Nevertheless, John rightly calculated that by taking crusader status he would cloak himself in yet another layer of papal favour. A man who had more or less laughed in the face of his own excommunication was now gambling that his enemies in England would not risk the same papal opprobrium by daring to attack him.

  Events, however, were moving faster even than John’s devious mind. At some point between John’s return from the Bouvines campaign in October 1214 and the late spring of 1215, a document known today as the ‘Unknown Charter’ was drawn up by those in England determined to force the king to mend his ways.1 The Unknown Charter may reflect negotiations that were taking place between John’s men and the hostile barons in early 1215. Certainly it contains the germ of much that would find its way into Magna Carta just a few months later.

  The Unknown Charter begins by reciting the charter of liberties granted in 1100 by John’s great-grandfather Henry I on acceding to the throne, in which Henry had promised to ‘make the Holy Church of God free’, to allow his subjects to inherit on payment of a ‘lawful and just’ relief, to protect widows, to fix the financial penalties for crimes at some (poorly defined) ancient rate, to limit the extent of royal forests, and to keep the peace in the land in accordance with the laws of the last Saxon king, Edward the Confessor. But the Unknown Charter did not solely aim to turn back the clock 115 years. There was also a series of demands – some quite radical – which aimed to reform, or in some cases dismantle, policies that had been pillars of Plantagenet government since the beginning. These demands, written up as though the king had already assented to them, were introduced by a broad and idealistic statement, which would prove to be very close to what would become the famous clauses 39 and 40 of Magna Carta: ‘King John concedes that he will arrest no man without judgment nor accept any payment for justice nor commit any unjust act.’ After this, the Unknown Charter included draft commitments by the king to take only ‘just reliefs’ as payment for inheritance, to protect the rights of widows, to limit military service outside England to Normandy and Brittany ‘and this properly’, to limit scutage to one mark per knight’s fee, and to return all lands that had been ‘afforested’ (i.e. newly declared to be royal forest) under Henry II, Richard and John.*2

  …in prato quod vocatur Ronimed inter Windlesoram et Stanes – ‘in the meadow which is called Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines’. It was here in June 1215, beside the Thames, that Magna Carta was negotiated and subsequently granted by King John. This modern memorial to that event was commissioned by the American Bar Association, a testament to the profound and widespread impact of Magna Carta in the 800 years that followed.

  The Unknown Charter, although its date is (as its name implies) uncertain, tells us much about the thinking of John’s disgruntled subjects in the months immediately prior to Magna Carta. They were not only angling to rebel against a king who had treated them roughly and who had failed in war; they were also preparing to challenge a raft of political issues that reached to the very core of the Plantagenet system of government. Whoever drew up the Unknown Charter was reading English history as a succession of perversions and betrayals committed since Henry II’s accession in 1154, in which the spirit of the ‘good old days’ – specifically the reigns of Henry I and Edward the Confessor – had been lost. They wished to make a number of specific amendments to policy, setting limits to the king’s ability to tax and fine his subjects. But they also sought to set out grand and sweeping philosophical statements concerning the king’s basic duties towards Church and people. It is unlikely that all of the aims were shared by all of John’s opponents. Some, no doubt, simply wished to be revenged on a man who had extorted, bullied, blasphemed and murdered his way through life and kingship for far too long. But others – and there were without doubt many – saw in the immediate crisis of 1215 a chance to change their world in a more fundamental way. It was the alliance of these interests that would make the baronial reform movement of 1215 irresistible.

  *

  On the great tournament field in Brackley, Northamptonshire, on 5 May 1215 a group of barons formally renounced their fealty – their feudal loyalty – to King John. It was ten days since John had failed to appear at a scheduled conference at Northampton, where he had been due to reply to a set of demands that were probably very like those laid out in the Unknown Charter. By abandoning their oath of duty to the king, the barons were effectively declaring themselves free to make war upon him. It was a position from which they would find it hard to retreat.

  On 9 and 10 May John offered to submit to various forms of arbitration – either by the advice of men he considered faithful, or by his own courts, or else by a panel of eight barons convened under the ultimate authority of the pope. None of these was deemed acceptable by the rebellious barons, so on 12 May John ordered his men to lay siege to rebel castles. This was war. And England’s great men were now forced to choose sides. Did they stand behind a crusader king with the backing of the pope, who had offered peace, albeit on terms weighted heavily in his favour? Or did they take up arms against a tyrant who had oppressed them, and would no doubt continue to do so if left unchecked?

  A good number chose the path of loyalty, seeing that to oppose a
king with the backing of Rome was a risky business, and that the alternative to obedience was anarchy. William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, had been a servant of the Plantagenets since John was born and, despite having fallen out with the king over the de Briouze affair, was not prepared to turn against him. Nor were other great men such as William, Earl Warenne. John also had by his side a man who spoke with the pope’s authority: Pandulf Verraccio. Nevertheless, ranged against the king and his supporters was a very formidable coalition of the disaffected. It included the plotters of 1212, Eustace de Vesci and Robert FitzWalter; the latter had decided to adopt the pompous title of Marshal of the Army of God. Alongside them were more recognized ‘Northerners’ – men like William de Mowbray, Richard de Percy and Roger de Montbegon – and other major landowners based elsewhere in the country, such as Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk; Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford; and Saer de Quincy, Earl of Winchester (who had, until January 1215, been one of John’s closest advisers). Crucially, the rebels also included the men of London. The City gates were opened to rebels under FitzWalter on Sunday 17 May – a deed apparently done by trickery while many of the citizens were occupied at mass.

  Between the king and the rebels – although clearly leaning towards the latter – sat Stephen Langton, the archbishop who had been at the root of so many of John’s earlier problems. Langton would be an important mediator, and would subsequently make a profound intellectual contribution to the final charter that appeared in June 1215.2