Magna Carta

Ralph Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317873945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This new history is the first to tell the story of Magna Carta 'through the ages'. No other general work traces its continuing importance in England's political consciousness. Many books have examined the circumstances surrounding King John's grant of Magna Carta in 1215. Very few trace the Charter's legacy to subsequent centuries and even fewer look at the fate of the physical document. Turner also underlines its great influence outside the United Kingdom, especially in North America. Today, the Charter enjoys greater prestige in the United States, the land of lawyers, than in Britain. U.S. citizens claim Magna Carta as a source of their liberties, guaranteeing 'due process of law' and condemning 'executive privilege'.

chapter 1
England under the Angevin Kings: Henry II and His Sons, Richard I and John

Two dates in English history that school children once memorized are 1066 and 1215. Of course, the latter date is King John's grant of Magna Carta to his barons, and the former marks William the Conqueror's invasion of England, culminating in the death of the last Anglo-Saxon king at the battle of Hastings. Not merely a change in ruling dynasties, the Norman Conquest was an upheaval that altered drastically the nature of English government, social structure and landholding patterns, giving rise to the kingdom that John ruled from 1199 to 1216. Post-Conquest England retained a base of Old English laws and governmental institutions, particularly in local government, but surmounting its Anglo-Saxon base was a Norman or French superstructure to expedite the invaders' exploitation of their new lands and subject people.

It is often said that the Norman conquerors of England introduced 'feudalism', a confusing term for historians and their readers alike, for definitions of feudalism have fluctuated over the years with changes in fashions in historical interpretation. Indeed, some authorities today deny that it ever existed. Essentially, the term refers to the network of ties linking medieval lords to their vassals or knights, mounted warriors, and to the peasants who worked their lands. Ties of mutual obligations bound together lords and their knights, symbolized by homage and the oath of fealty. This pattern of dependent relationships is traditionally believed to have taken shape in western Europe with the so-called 'feudal transformation' of the eleventh century, when regional princes who had usurped the authority of the later Carolingian rulers could no longer enforce law and order. Castellans, minor nobles with their own castles, recruited bands of knights to seize control of the countryside surrounding their fortified centres.

Once the castellans succeeded in defying the old public officials' authority, anything resembling a state collapsed, and public services performed today by public authorities apparently fell into private hands. With effective power reduced to the range of knights riding out from a castle, government lost its present-day meaning. It was localized in the hands of amateurs, keeping no written records. Safety for the head of a family depended on cementing ties of vassalage to a strong lord; no longer did allegiance to an impersonal state or to a faraway emperor or king afford security. A consequence of everyone's seeking protection from lords was a hierarchically structured society, a great chain of ties of dependency. In the Middle Ages, no one questioned this social structure of unequal ranks, rising from non-free peasants to the landed aristocracy and the royal family. Today debate rages among historians about the consequences of this failure of the state. Some deny such a complete collapse of public authority, others find the network of lordship ties and mutual obligations fostering a spirit of community that provided social stability, while some still describe chaotic conditions of fighting among the warrior class and lords' merciless exploitation of agricultural labourers.

This pattern of weak government was far from universal, for princes in different regions preserved differing degrees of Roman or Carolingian traditions of public authority. In Normandy, the duke lost less power than some other French dukes or counts, retaining much of his position as a public official responsible for the general welfare. William the Conqueror succeeded in subduing the Norman nobles and forcing them to fulfil their obligations owed as his vassals. Neither did the general pattern of feudalism prevail in England before the Normans landed there. English resistance to the Danish threat in the ninth and tenth centuries had not produced a collapse of central authority, but resulted rather in Alfred the Great's unification of the country. The eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon kingdom preserved such typically Carolingian characteristics as direct ties of lordship linking the monarch to the free landholders and the royal household exercising effective control over the chief local officials, the sheriffs.

The government that William the Conqueror and his sons devised for their new kingdom across the Channel was powerful, constructed with native Anglo-Saxon materials mixed with features imported from Normandy. When Henry II took the English throne in 1154, he built on this foundation to erect a superstructure of 'administrative kingship', staffed by literate professionals functioning apart from the royal household. With such a structure, he and his sons Richard Lionheart and John Lackland would wield almost autocratic powers threatening their great nobles' privileges and oppressing them as well as lesser subjects with heavy financial burdens. Such accumulated grievances would culminate in an uprising against King John, triggered by his military defeat in 1214.

The king

The fundamental fact of political life in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England was that government was in the hands of a monarch, crowned in a religious ceremony that set him above all his subjects and conferred on him an aura of sanctity derived from his anointing in imitation of Old Testament kings. The coronation ceremony stressed both the king's God-given authority over his subjects and his responsibility as a Christian to protect his subjects and the Church. This view of kingship, tracing back to the fifth century, stressed the monarch's responsibility to God for his subjects' care as if he were their parent or guardian. Although the eleventh-century reform movement of the Church had blunted the king's sacred character, its effect on English kings' traditional authority over the spiritual sphere was minimal. Not even the long and bitter conflict between Henry II and his archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, resulted in major loss of royal control over the Church.

Some English royal clerks continued to support royal supremacy throughout the twelfth century, promoting near-absolutist ideas of kingship lingering from the late Roman Empire. These clerics recognized the king's responsibility for his subjects' general welfare and concluded that he could override the law in emergencies, for example by imposing extraordinary levies on his subjects. The late-twelfth-century Dialogue of the Exchequer, authored by a longtime royal financial official, states that God entrusts the king with 'the general care of his subjects'; it admitted that rulers sometimes act arbitrarily, but denied that their subjects had a right 'to question or condemn their actions'.¹ Although some royal servants promoted theories stressing the king's duties toward his subjects, most entered his household because they saw opportunities for enriching themselves and their families through graft, influence peddling or outright theft. Despite survival of Roman concepts of the state as a provider of public services, twelfth-century rulers took little responsibility for the public welfare; kings did little more than defend their possessions and conquer new ones, protect their subjects from foreign threats, and maintain a modicum of law and order to safeguard their wealthier subjects' property. Even though created by coronation ceremonies emphasizing the public responsibilities of kingship, a medieval monarch rarely distinguished his kingdom from his private property, and he viewed it as a family legacy to be passed down intact to his heirs, or enlarged if possible.

The diverse sources of medieval ideas about kingship, a mixed bag of classical and Christian doctrines mingled with Germanic tribal traditions, sent confusing messages about the nature of royal power. The late-twelfth-century lawbook Glanvill illustrates this confusion. On one hand, its author cites the Roman law maxim, 'What pleases the prince has the force of law'; yet on the other hand, he asserts that England's laws were made 'on the advice of the magnates'.² The English coronation ceremony emphasized the divine source of royal power, but included oaths that subjected the king to obligations, notably his duty to protect his people and give them justice. The notion of the king as the guardian of his subjects implied that any rights or liberties that they enjoyed were due to grants by him. Early on, monastic houses, knowing the value of written records, sought royal charters confirming royal grants of their properties and privileges. This desire for charters specifying royal responsibilities spread to the baronage, and Henry I (1100-35) issued a charter on his coronation, renouncing his predecessor's unjust rule and promising good government.

Henry I's coronation charter and collections of old English laws circulated by the early thirteenth century to nourish notions of the ruler's subjection to law, and some contemporary writers condemned the Angevin kings as tyrants who ruled by their own will, not in accordance with the law. Although the doctrine of the law's supremacy acknowledged that a king could do wrong, his subjects had no machinery for righting a tyrannical ruler's wrongs against them or for forcing him to submit to the law. The lawbook Bracton, authored by a royal judge active in the 1220s and 1230s, pointed to a solution, proposing that the baronage act to curb a law-breaking monarch. A frequently cited passage declared that the king has a superior, namely God, but also the law and the earls and barons who constituted his great council. The author had lived through both the baronial rebellion against King John (1215-16) and the first crisis of Henry III's personal rule (1232-34), two early attempts to restrain the king with the bridle of the law.

Contributing to English notions of kingship were ties of mutual rights and responsibilities between aristocratic lords and their knightly vassals, key aspects of a feudal society. England's feudal institutions were unique in Europe because the work of the Anglo-Saxon kings in preserving and strengthening royal governance survived. The Anglo-Norman kings (1066-1154), as well as their successors, the early Plantagenet or Angevin kings, preserved their native English predecessors' authority as public officials. Late Roman and Frankish traditions of state power also inspired post-Conquest rulers to construct mechanisms for exercising effective power. Once Henry II attained the English crown, he moved quickly to curb the power of earls and barons who had taken advantage of the confusion during the disputed reign of his predecessor, Stephen of Blois (1135-54). They had defied royal agents in the counties, recruited armed bands, constructed private castles, and consolidated control over their lands. Henry besieged unauthorized baronial castles and constructed new royal castles, a work continued by his sons that brought half of the kingdom's castles under the king's control before the end of the twelfth century. These royal fortifications stood as solid reminders of a shift in power away from the barons and toward the monarch.

Under Henry II (1154-89), a process of converting the magnates' personal ties of loyalty to the king into tenurial relationships proceeded, and they were forced to admit that they held their estates from the king in return for services, chiefly supplying quotas of knights for his army. The barons' landholding position as the king's tenants-in-chief overtook their traditional role as his vassals, bound by personal loyalty. In effect, the post-Conquest kings 'territorialized' obligations owed by their baronage and loaded ever heavier military and fiscal burdens on them as conditions by which they held their baronies. Paradoxically, it was the public authority of the Norman monarchs and their Angevin successors that garnered the resources that they required to enforce these personal obligations on their baronage.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, England was the sole European kingdom where public tribunals capable of handing down conclusive and impartial decisions survived and where the king exercised effective power to carry out public courts' judgements. None the less, great landholders even in England, by virtue of their standing in local communities, exercised considerable responsibility for justice and for other services that public agencies provide in modern times. Anglo-Norman aristocrats maintained their own tribunals that settled the disputes of their knights and other dependants. Longstanding custom that survived the post-Carolingian collapse of public authority insisted that judgements in such private courts be a collective finding by the lord with his vassals or knights. The aim was to settle property disputes with amicable agreements, negotiated by panels of spokesmen for the community. Such a pattern of collective judgement, common in earlier primitive societies, prevailed in many judicial processes before the twelfth-century revival of Roman law. The jury, a feature of Henry II's legal innovations, preserved this concept of collective judgement.

Creation of machinery to strengthen central authority began with Henry I, if not earlier, and his reign marks the beginnings of 'administrative kingship',³ as such specialized offices as the exchequer, staffed with literate and numerate servants auditing his financial accounts, separated from the king's household and his direct supervision. When Henry II and his sons Richard I (1189-99) and John (1199-1216) were absent fighting in France, the justiciar acted as both head of the administration and as regent, a post formerly held by the queen or another close relative. Authority was divided, with the justiciar at Westminster overseeing royal finances, justice, and local agents in the counties, while royal servants travelling with the king's household abroad dealt with matters of war and diplomacy. By Henry II's reign, growth of agencies binding the shires to the royal court – chancery clerks issuing royal writs and charters, the exchequer auditing sheriffs' accounts, and itinerant justices taking royal justice to the people – constituted a revolution in government.

Henry's legal innovations transformed England's law from customary norms into a legal system, a common law for the kingdom. They threatened magnates' traditional control over their vassals or tenants, for knights and other free landholders could purchase royal writs transferring their lawsuits from their lords' courts to the king's court. The shire courts became temporary royal tribunals when justices from the king's court arrived on their circuits about the counties. Wider access to royal justice began to undermine freeholders' dependent relationship with their lords and to change their relationship into a reciprocal one of landlords' and tenants' rights. At the same time that the common law's protection of free men's property was weakening lords' domination of their tenants, it was also strengthening the direct ruler—subject relationship. Strong governmental structures enabled the Angevin kings to rule in an authoritarian, if not absolutist manner even when absent for long periods, thereby setting twelfth-century England apart from France, where the monarch was too weak to control his outlying provinces.

England's precocious professionalization or bureaucratization of government under the three Angevin kings was driven less by principles of good government than by their need for enormous sums of money for almost continuous warfare on the continent. War was a medieval monarch's vocation, his route to fame, and the Angevin rulers spent English treasure on protecting the frontiers of their Norman duchy, their county of Anjou, and the inheritance of Henry II's queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, in southwestern France. All these Angevin-held lands lay within the kingdom of France, and the French monarch was technically their lord. The Capetian kings were reasserting royal authority over these territories, posing a growing threat to Henry and his sons. The first French monarch powerful enough to challenge them was Philip II or Philip Augustus (1180-1223), and he seized every opportunity to undermine their position within their continental possessions.

Henry II and his sons viewed their English kingdom as a vast treasure trove to supply funds for conflicts in France. They needed ever more resources to pay mercenaries defending the Norman and Angevin borders against the Capetians and crushing rebellious nobles in the queen's provinces of Poitou and Gascony. By the end of the twelfth century, the French ruler's resources equalled those of Richard Lionheart, and Philip Augustus eventually overtook John in wealth, enabling him to deal John decisive defeats. Contributing to increased costs of warfare in the twelfth century was a shift away from mounted knights in heavy armour, supplied by the barons, and toward reliance on mercenaries, paid infantry companies and specialists in siege engines.

The medieval English kings had three types of revenues from which to raise funds for their wars. First was income derived from their position as public officials, a legacy lingering from the Roman political tradition that yielded less than in pre-Conquest times. General taxes collected regularly by Anglo-Saxon kings were allowed to lapse after Henry II's early years, but he and his sons still profited from a royal monopoly over mints and coinage and from royal responsibility for justice. The king did not provide courts for his subjects merely out of a sense of duty, for royal justice was a product to be sold. The profits were substantial, including confiscated goods of condemned felons and numerous fines from convicted criminals, as well as fees charged for the new common law procedures in civil cases. A second source of royal revenue was the king's private income from his own estates, peopled by peasants owing him labour services and periodic payments. The king, like lesser lords, had the privilege of assessing arbitrary payments known as tallages on the villagers of his lands whenever he felt necessary, and this source of revenue became more and more profitable because some villages sited on the royal domain grew into prosperous towns, royal boroughs. The borough inhabitants soon became wealthy enough to bargain with the king for a lump sum to pay as tallage and to negotiate a collective annual rent for their royal grant of rights of self-government.

The third category was the king's feudal income centred on his lordship over the earls and barons, for they owed him financial obligations as well as loyalty and military service. Henry II and his sons exploited vigorously these financial resources, triggering increasing resistance from the baronage. As the character of warfare changed, Henry, Richard Lionheart and John preferred to forgo their vassals' military service in favour of collecting scutage or shield-money, payments that could be used to hire mercenary soldiers. Over time, scutage came to be levied so often that it resembled a tax on the nobility; King John levied eleven scutages in sixteen years. The king's feudal position as lord over England's great landholders gave him other financial advantages. Custom sanctioned a lord's demand of extraordinary levies from his knights in emergencies, the so-called gracious aids demanded on the knighting of the lord's eldest son, on the marriage of his eldest daughter, and on his ransoming if captured in battle. Like other lords, the king could collect an aid from his barons in other emergencies, but only after taking counsel with them. Perhaps because of this requirement, John never sought a gracious aid from his great men; instead, he exploited the 'feudal incidents', occasional financial opportunities for a lord to exploit a tenant's lands. These included relief, a fee that a vassal's heir paid to his lord for his acceptance of the heir's succession to his father's land. Both Richard and John demanded exorbitant sums from baronial heirs, especially when an heir's legal claim was shaky; and as a result, many young nobles were driven deeply into debt. Another of the feudal incidents was the lord's wardship of minors and control of their marriage, rights that arose when a baronial tenant died leaving an underage heir. The lord then took custody of minor children and the widow, keeping the late tenant's estates in his hands and taking all profits until the heir came of age. In cases of noble widows' custody, the king had the right to arrange their marriages, sometimes selling them off to the highest bidder. Closely related to wardship of noble children was the royal right to custody of vacant bishoprics and abbacies. Royal exploitation of vacant ecclesiastical lands triggered complaints from religious reformers and clerical writers.

Competition with Philip Augustus of France forced Richard Lionheart and his brother John Lackland to weigh down the baronage with ever more burdensome feudal payments and services, collected by zealous royal servants. As the nature of their rule increasingly became military, they seemed to draw little distinction between their subjects and their enemies; they demanded hostages from friends as well as from foes, and all in the kingdom, even great aristocrats, lived in fear of the royal wrath. The Angevin monarchs engaged in a gigantic shakedown of great landholders to extort excessive amounts of money, arbitrarily seizing barons' land without judgement if they failed to make payments or perform services. Those offending the king might find themselves also falling into 'the king's mercy', subject to crushing fines. For such victims of the king's ill-will, their only recourse was to purchase restoration to his goodwill by offering him a handsome gift of horses, falcons or cash – in effect, a bribe. Even with these extortionate steps, the aristocracy alone could not meet the need for additional revenues, and experiments w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF PLATES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHRONOLOGY
• introduction MAGNA CARTA: DISENTANGLING HISTORY FROM MYTH
• chapter 1 ENGLAND UNDER THE ANGEVIN KINGS: HENRY II AND HIS SONS, RICHARD I AND JOHN
• chapter 2 THE REIGN OF KING JOHN, 1199–1216
• chapter 3 THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF MAGNA CARTA, 1215–16
• chapter 4 THE FIRST CENTURY OF MAGNA CARTA
• chapter 5 MAGNA CARTA IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES AND THE TUDOR PERIOD
• chapter 6 MAGNA CARTA'S REVIVAL IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER
• chapter 7 MAGNA CARTA IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
• chapter 8 MAGNA CARTA IN THE NEW WORLD
• APPENDIX: MAGNA CARTA, 1215 TEXT IN TRANSLATION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX