Magna Carta

by Dan Jones

  With London under rebel command, John was forced to turn to negotiation, for he could not very well take England’s capital, stoutly defended and packed with his enemies, by siege. Therefore, shortly after London fell to rebel control, John issued warrants of safe conduct for Saer de Quincy and Archbishop Langton, allowing them to approach him as baronial diplomats. On 29 May he again offered unsuccessfully to submit to papal arbitration. By now the king was staying in the area around Windsor, half a day’s ride upriver from London. And by the first week of June a regular meeting place for the king’s party and the barons had been established. A few miles south-east of Windsor was a large meadow, which today stands green and lush, shaded by tall leafy oak trees, flanked by the slow-moving Thames on one side and low, gently sloping hills on the other. This is the place that Magna Carta refers to as in prato quod vocatur Ronimed, inter Windlesoram et Stanes – ‘the meadow called Runnymede between Windsor and Staines’. For the first week and a half of June, messengers rode back and forth to, and through, this meadow, travelling between the king’s party and the barons in London. They were toiling their way towards a solution to the stand-off – a means by which the full horror of civil war could be avoided. And slowly but surely the skeleton of a peace treaty began to form.

  The exact sequence of events during the days that led up to the agreement and production of Magna Carta, and to the proclamation of peace between king and barons that it allowed, remains muddied by the uncertainty of 800 years’ distance.3 But a sensible reconstruction of events would seem to be as follows.

  From the end of May 1215 both John and his barons accepted that peace had to be made, on something loosely similar to the terms of the Unknown Charter. For the next ten days the deal between the sides was drafted and redrafted by royal clerks. One such draft – clearly very close to a final version of Magna Carta – survives in the form of a document that was authenticated with the king’s Great Seal and which Langton subsequently seems to have kept safe for posterity: this document is known as ‘The Articles of the Barons’.4 Unlike the Unknown Charter, it no longer included a copy of Henry I’s concessions. But on matters of immediate dispute between king and barons it was much more sophisticated and detailed. It ran to forty-nine clauses, each of which went into considerable technical detail about the rates of reliefs for inheritance, widows’ rights, the treatment of debtors to the Crown, levels for scutage, feudal aids and rents, the extent to which certain writs could be used by the Crown, procedures for dealing with debts to Jewish lenders – and more, down to apparently trivial matters of reform such as weights and measures, the protocol for funding the rebuilding of bridges, and the placement of fish-weirs along the rivers Thames and Medway.

  The Articles of the Barons also included the statement that ‘the body of a free man be not arrested or disseized or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimized, nor shall the king attack or send anyone to attack him by force, except by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land’.*3 Just as with the Unknown Charter, it is clear that the king’s enemies were feeling their way now very closely towards a generalized statement that would commit the king to refraining from tyranny. Equally importantly, the Articles included the draft of what would become Magna Carta’s most ambitious clause of all: a security clause (61). This proposed to set up a council of twenty-five barons who would effectively become the trustees of the peace, empowered by law to respond to royal breaches of the law by ‘distrain[ing] and distress[ing] the king in all ways possible’.

  The undated document known as the Articles of the Barons. Its contents were effectively a working draft for Magna Carta in June 1215. They do not contain the clauses about protecting the freedom of the Church – which were most likely the result of Archbishop Langton’s later influence – but nevertheless the Articles are clearly the product of advanced negotiations between the king and his barons.

  The negotiations at Runnymede were not easy, and the whole process was almost certainly extremely irksome to John, whose mood is captured – perhaps fancifully, but quite believably all the same – by the Benedictine chronicler Matthew Paris, who wrote that when the king was entreating with his opponents he behaved calmly, but behind the scenes ‘he gnashed his teeth, rolled his eyes, grabbed sticks and straws and gnawed them like a madman’. However, if John did rage privately in this way it was pointless. By Wednesday 10 June, the broad terms of the Articles of the Barons had been accepted by both sides, and John had extended his peace to the barons until the following Monday morning, 15 June. This delay probably served two purposes. In the first place it gave time for the interested parties – the king, the various voices within the rebel faction, and the representatives of the Church, led by Stephen Langton – to iron out remaining wrinkles within the terms of the proposed peace. In the second place it allowed time for all to prepare for a gathering that was larger and nobler than the meetings between envoys that had been taking place until that point. This was to be the formal and final creation of the treaty – the agreement that we now call Magna Carta.

  If we believe what is stated in King John’s voice at the end of each of the four surviving copies of the 1215 Magna Carta, then Monday 15 June was the day on which the great charter was ‘given by our hand’. In other words, this is the day upon which Magna Carta came into being, and on which the first copies of the document were produced. Despite what is often supposed, Magna Carta was never ‘signed’, in the manner of the great peace treaties of the twentieth century. It was ‘given’ (i.e. formally assented to by the king), ‘engrossed’ (i.e. written up on a large piece of parchment in a fair hand, so that it might easily be read by others and reproduced by chancery clerks) and certified by the attachment of the royal seal. These three stages were part of a single process, and they probably happened on 15 June.

  Yet this was not the end to the peace-making. It was only on the Friday of the same week, 19 June, that the rebellious barons assembled before the king and renewed the homage that they had abandoned at Brackley, thereby signalling their acceptance of the terms in the charter that the king had given. We may assume that the four days that elapsed between 15 and 19 June were taken up on the rebel side by arguments over whether to accept the deal that had been put in front of them or not. Clearly, a large number of the barons did so. But some did not. For certain men, particularly hardline Northerners, the king remained a tyrant and an enemy, and his charter was not worth the parchment it was written on. These hardliners returned to the North in disgust and prepared to fight on against a king they would never learn to trust. In a sense, they were right. Within six weeks John had overturned the deal that was made at Runnymede and the war that everyone had tried to avoid was sweeping through England.

  *1 ‘Templars’ – the Knights of the Temple were the earliest of Christendom’s monastic military orders, their original purpose being to protect Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. They garnered patronage and support, making them extremely wealthy.

  *2 ‘Knights fee’ – a unit of land considered sufficient to support the livelihood of a single knight for a year. Its size depended on the location and value of the land.

  *3 ‘Disseize’ – to strip someone of their land or property holdings .

  8

  A Charter of Liberties

  Magna Carta

  1215

  Four parchment versions, ‘engrossments’, of the Magna Carta as assented to by John on 15 June 1215 at Runnymede survive today. Two are held in the British Library (one of them badly damaged by a fire in 1731, although it still has its seal attached); a third is held in Salisbury Cathedral, and a fourth belongs to Lincoln Cathedral and is kept nearby in the secure environment of Lincoln Castle. There are small variations between the four documents – including an unusual handwriting style used in the Salisbury copy – but essentially all are replica agreements, and all would once have carried the solemn royal stamp of authenticity in the form of a large, double-sided waxen seal attached to the bottom of the document
with a short length of silk cord.

  There would once have been many more copies of the 1215 Magna Carta – and indeed, many copies and later reissues of the charter survive in archives across the world. But precisely how many more of the ‘original’ charters once existed is unknown. It is also hard to say if there was ever one original ‘master’ document sealed in the sort of ceremony which is often romantically imagined, painted or re-enacted. In fact, we must probably abandon altogether the image of King John seated before his great document, a medieval version of a modern footballer about to sign a lucrative playing contract. No king of John’s era would have stooped to such a lowly task as sealing his own documents. This was a specialized task carried out by a member of the Chancery called a spigurnel.1 Magna Carta was most likely agreed in its terms, symbolically put into action with the renewal of the barons’ homage to John on 19 June and then distributed to the counties and towns of England during the last days of the month. The process of making peace and agreeing constitutional principles was messy, and it took time.

  Ragged as this aspect of Magna Carta’s history and mythology may be, the contents of the charter were still extremely significant, as would have been very obvious to all who read the charter – or more commonly, heard it read aloud to them. Its words – more than 4,000 of them, in Latin – dealt with a vast wealth of political, legal, judicial, ecclesiastical, economic and feudal matters, often in great detail. Although the original charter was in continuous prose, it is now customary to subdivide it into clauses (or chapters), of which there are sixty-three (see Appendix I). Read in sequence, they feel like a great jumble of issues and statements that barely follow one from the other. Read together, however, they form a critique of almost every aspect of Plantagenet kingship in general and the rule of John in particular.

  Magna Carta begins with a preamble, in which John, still claiming his titles of Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and Count of Anjou, addresses all the great men of his kingdom – ‘archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons’ – as well as his own servants – ‘justices, foresters, sheriffs, reeves… [and] bailiffs.’2 Innocuously, but very importantly, the charter is also addressed to omnibus… fidelibus suis – to all John’s ‘faithful subjects’. This faithfulness is crucial. The charter that follows this introduction is about granting the king’s peace and the confirmation of many long-desired liberties. But these two privileges, it is made plain, are only to be enjoyed by those who submit to John’s rule, accepting his lordship and – where necessary – seeking reconciliation. No one could have fooled themselves that John was granting Magna Carta to his people with an entirely glad and open heart. All the same, by drawing on the term fidelus John was ensuring that this was an agreement that traded some quite serious dents to his royal prerogative for unequivocal submission on the part of his enemies.

  Next comes a list of those men whom John says have advised him on the document. There are twenty-seven names in total (see Appendix II), most of whom were bishops and barons who had remained loyal during the stand-off of the preceding weeks. These men are also named in Clause 62 as the witnesses to the charter. At the top of the list was Archbishop Stephen Langton, ‘Primate of all England and Cardinal of the Holy Roman church’. Langton had, of course, been the prime mediator at Runnymede. It is therefore appropriate that the opening clause of Magna Carta is the one that most obviously bore his stamp:3

  Firstly, we have granted to God and confirmed by this, our present charter, for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free.

  These first words, of the first clause, are of immense importance, for here was an attempt by Langton to settle for good the argument that had raged between Plantagenet kings and their archbishops ever since Henry II and Thomas Becket first clashed in the 1160s. Generally speaking, the reference to the Church and its liberties echoed the opening remarks of Henry I’s coronation charter, which had been a formative influence on Magna Carta.4 More specifically, Langton was securing from the king a promise to avoid interfering in Church elections – and clearly Langton’s personal experience gave him ample cause for this. Yet just as important is the fact that at the end of this clause, once his vows to refrain from meddling with the Church have been made, John effectively re-introduces the charter, stating that ‘we have also granted to all the free men of our realm… all the liberties written below’. John’s contract with the Church and with his lay subjects was therefore separated. His promises to the Church were placed above all others – awarded pre-eminence and perhaps even special protection.

  In the earlier Articles of the Barons there was no mention anywhere of Church freedom. In Magna Carta, by contrast, the issue is elevated above all others. Langton’s hand, late in the negotiations, had lifted his own political concerns directly to the top of the list. And for the avoidance of doubt of the special place in which John’s promises to the Church were to be regarded, the sixty-third and final clause restates the fact: ‘we wish and firmly command that the English Church shall be free and that men in our kingdom have and hold all the aforesaid liberties’. Magna Carta is often thought to be a document concerned with the secular rights of subjects or citizens – yet in 1215 its religious considerations were given pride of place.

  Next, Magna Carta deals with one of the biggest issues of dispute between John and his barons: that of reliefs for inheritance. Here, John agrees to limit his demands for allowing earls, barons and the kingdom’s other great men to inherit to ‘£100 for the whole barony’ or 100 marks in the case of a knight. No longer would men like William FitzAlan be charged outlandish sums like 10,000 marks to have their inheritance. No longer, equally, was John to be allowed to force his great men into effective bankruptcy as a means of political control. No more were John’s bailiffs to ‘seize any land… for any debt, so long as the debtor’s chattels are sufficient to pay the debt’ (Clause 9). The process for assessing the wealth of the freshly dead – and therefore the inheritance tax due to the king – was spelled out, in an attempt to blunt the teeth of aggressive royal officials (clauses 26 and 27). In other words, the power of the Exchequer – which had grown markedly under John – to extort, bully, and ruin anyone whom the king happened merely to dislike, was now placed under strict supervision.

  An eighteenth-century engraving, in which John signs Magna Carta at Runnymede while Archbishop Langton and others look on. But the quill-pen alone tells us that things were not quite like this. In subsequent folklore, the idea of the king ‘signing’ a single, unique charter took hold – but the charter was never ‘signed’ and there may not even have been a single ‘master’ copy. Medieval kings did not sign documents, and indeed there is no surviving example of any kind of writing by John.

  Other major political issues can be traced throughout Magna Carta. The county ‘farm’ – the fixed tax taken by royal sheriffs – was to be fixed at its ‘ancient’ (antiquas) rates, although what these rates would be is not defined (Clause 25). The occasions on which the king could take scutage – the military tax John had levied eleven times during his relatively short reign – were limited to paying a ransom for his person, ‘the knighting of our first-born son or the first marriage of our first-born daughter’ (Clause 12). Much more importantly, in terms of England’s later constitutional development at least, was the promise that the king would only take scutage at a ‘reasonable’ rate and after taking ‘the common counsel of our realm’ (per commune consilium regni nostri) – counsel which was to be summoned according to a newly defined protocol in Clause 14. During the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the notion that tax was only to be taken when the kingdom had agreed on it – in Parliament, as the formal meetings between king and subjects later became known – would emerge as one of the most sacred ideas in English political thought and practice.

  Other clauses in the charter dealt with different aspects of the law and custom of inheritance. Widows (in clauses 7 and 8) were to have their ‘marriage portion and inheritance straight
away and without difficulty’ and without being forced to pay the king a fine for the privilege, and they would not be forced to marry against their will. (Magna Carta was not entirely liberal-minded with regard to women, however – Clause 54 stated that ‘no man shall be arrested or imprisoned because of the appeal of a woman for the death of anyone but her husband.’) Young men (Clause 3) who were under the legal age of majority at the time that they inherited their lands were not to be charged fees to come into their inheritance when they grew up, and the king agreed not to seize young men and claim them as his wards without good feudal reason (Clause 37). Men who were granted the wardship of such young heirs were to treat their parks, woods and farmland with respect and diligence, preserving the inheritance rather than simply milking the land for quick profit (clauses 4 and 5).

  Other issues touched upon in Magna Carta included debt to Jewish moneylenders, and the king was forbidden from taking over high-interest loans and pursuing the interest on them with his own officials (clauses 10 and 11). London – whose citizens had played such an important role in bringing John to the point of negotiation with his enemies – had its ancient liberties confirmed ‘both on land and on water’ (Clause 13) and the City’s merchants were granted freedom of movement and an exemption from ‘evil tolls’ (malis toltis) in clauses 41 and 42. The Court of Common Pleas – the highest court in the land – was to have a fixed home, rather than requiring people seeking justice to find John wherever his caravan court might then be resting. County courts were also to be held at fixed times and in fixed places throughout the year (clauses 17–19) and the fines (known as ‘amercements’) that they imposed for offences were to be reasonable (clauses 20–22). Clause 23 regulated bridge-building, while Clause 33 banned fish weirs – the wooden traps that blighted river transport – from the Thames and Medway. In Clause 35 weights and measures were regulated for the most important things in life: corn, cloth and ale. Magna Carta forbade the hated practice of purveyance – by which royal officials, and particularly the garrisons of the king’s many castles up and down the land, took goods, crops, horses and carts for the king’s use without paying (or intending to pay) for them (clauses 28, 30 and 31.) And it touched briefly upon the contentious laws of the English forest, pledging not to use forest judges to try men who lived outside forest land (Clause 44), to investigate corruption among forest officials (Clause 48), and to reverse the creep of forest boundaries that had taken place in John’s reign (Clause 47) – although, crucially, not that which had taken place under Henry II and Richard I.