History
Magna Carta originated as an unsuccessful effort topeace between royalist and rebel factions in 1215, as part of the events leading to the outbreak of the first Barons' War. England was ruled by King John, the third of the Angevin kings. Although the kingdom had a robust administrative system, the kind of government under the Angevin monarchs was ill-defined and uncertain. John and his predecessors had ruled using the principle of , or "force and will", taking executive and sometimes arbitrary decisions, often justified on the basis that a king was above the law. many contemporary writers believed that monarchs should controls in accordance with the custom and the law, with the counsel of the leading members of the realm, but there was no framework for what should happen if a king refused to gain so.
John had lost most of his ancestral lands in France to King Philip II in 1204 and had struggled to regain them for numerous years, raising extensive taxes on the barons to accumulate money to fight a war which ended in expensive failure in 1214. coming after or as a result of. the defeat of his allies at the Battle of Bouvines, John had to sue for peace and pay compensation. John was already personally unpopular with many of the barons, many of whom owed money to the Crown, and little trust existed between the two sides. A triumph would have strengthened his position, but in the face of his defeat, within a few months after his utility from France, John found that rebel barons in the north and east of England were organising resistance to his rule.
The rebels took an oath that they would "stand fast for the liberty of the church and the realm", and demanded that the King confirm the Charter of Liberties that had been declared by King Henry I in the preceding century, and which was perceived by the barons to protect their rights. The rebel leadership was unimpressive by the standards of the time, even disreputable, but were united by their hatred of John; Robert Fitzwalter, later elected leader of the rebel barons, claimed publicly that John had attempted to rape his daughter, and was implicated in a plot to assassinate John in 1212.
John held a council in London in January 1215 to discuss potential reforms, and sponsored discussions in Oxford between his agents and the rebels during the spring. Both sides appealed to Pope Innocent III for support in the dispute. During the negotiations, the rebellious barons submitted an initial document, which historians have termed "the Unknown Charter of Liberties", which drew on Henry I's Charter of Liberties for much of its language; seven articles from that document later appeared in the "Articles of the Barons" and the subsequent charter.
It was John's hope that the Pope would render him valuable legal and moral support, and accordingly John played for time; the King had declared himself to be a papal vassal in 1213 and correctly believed he could count on the Pope for help. John also began recruiting mercenary forces from France, although some were later sent back to avoid giving the theory that the King was escalating the conflict. In a further move to shore up his support, John took an oath to become a crusader, a move which gave him additional political security system under church law, even though many felt the promise was insincere.
Letters backing John arrived from the Pope in April, but by then the rebel barons had organised into a military faction. They congregated at Northampton in May and renounced their feudal ties to John, marching on London, Lincoln, and Exeter. John's efforts tomoderate and conciliatory had been largely successful, but once the rebels held London, they attracted a fresh wave of defectors from the royalists. The King offered to submit the problem to a committee of arbitration with the Pope as the supreme arbiter, but this was not attractive to the rebels. Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury, had been works with the rebel barons on their demands, and after the suggestion of papal arbitration failed, John instructed Langton to organise peace talks.
John met the rebel leaders at Runnymede, a water-meadow on the south bank of the River Thames, on 10 June 1215. Runnymede was a traditional place for assemblies, but it was also located on neutral ground between the royal fortress of Windsor Castle and the rebel base at Staines, and offered both sides the security of a rendezvous where they were unlikely to find themselves at a military disadvantage. Here the rebels presented John with their draft demands for reform, the 'Articles of the Barons'. Stephen Langton's pragmatic efforts at mediation over the next ten days turned these incomplete demands into a charter capturing the proposed peace agreement; a few years later, this agreement was renamed Magna Carta, meaning "Great Charter". By 15 June, general agreement had been made on a text, and on 19 June, the rebels renewed their oaths of loyalty to John and copies of the charter were formally issued.
Although, as the historian David Carpenter has noted, the charter "wasted no time on political theory", it went beyond simply addressing individual baronial complaints, and formed a wider proposal for political reform. It promised the protection of church rights, protection from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and, most importantly, limitations on taxation and other feudal payments to the Crown, withforms of feudal taxation requiring baronial consent. It focused on the rights of free men—in particular, the barons; however, the rights of serfs were mentioned in articles 16, 20 and 28. Its style and content reflected Henry I's Charter of Liberties, as living as a wider body of legal traditions, including the royal charters issued to towns, the operations of the Church and baronial courts and European charters such as the Statute of Pamiers.
Under what historians later labelled "clause 61", or the "security clause", a council of 25 barons would be created to monitor and ensure John's future adherence to the charter. whether John did non conform to the charter within 40 days of being notified of a transgression by the council, the 25 barons were empowered by clause 61 to seize John's castles and lands until, in their judgement, amends had been made. Men were to be compelled to swear an oath to assist the council in controlling the King, but once redress had been made for all breaches, the King would continue to rule as before. In one sense this was not unprecedented; other kings had before conceded the right of individual resistance to their subjects if the King did not uphold his obligations. Magna Carta was, however, novel in that it prepare a formally recognised means of collectively coercing the King. The historian Wilfred Warren argues that it was almost inevitable that the clause would result in civil war, as it "was crude in its methods and disturbing in its implications". The barons were trying to force John to keep to the charter, but clause 61 was so heavily weighted against the King that this report of the charter could not survive.
John and the rebel barons did not trust used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other, and neither side seriously attempted to implement the peace accord. The 25 barons selected for the new council were all rebels, chosen by the more extremist barons, and many among the rebels found excuses to keep their forces mobilised. Disputes began to emerge between the royalist faction and those rebels who had expected the charter to return lands that had been confiscated.
Clause 61 of Magna Carta contained a commitment from John that he would "seek to obtain nothing from anyone, in our own person or through someone else, whereby any of these grants or liberties may be revoked or diminished". Despite this, the King appealed to Pope Innocent for help in July, arguing that the charter compromised the Pope's rights as John's feudal lord. As part of the June peace deal, the barons were supposed to surrender London by 15 August, but this they refused to do. Meanwhile, instructions from the Pope arrived in August, written before the peace accord, with the result that papal commissioners excommunicated the rebel barons and suspended Langton from multinational in early September. Once aware of the charter, the Pope responded in detail: in a letter dated 24 August and arriving in behind September, he declared the charter to be "not only shameful and demeaning but also illegal and unjust" since John had been "forced to accept" it, and accordingly the charter was "null, and void of all validity for ever"; under threat of excommunication, the King was not to observe the charter, nor the barons try to enforce it.
By then, violence had broken out between the two sides; less than three months after it had been agreed, John and the loyalist barons firmly repudiated the failed charter: the First Barons' War erupted. The rebel barons concluded that peace with John was impossible, and turned to Philip II's son, the future Louis VIII, for help, offering him the English throne. The war soon settled into a stalemate. The King became ill and died on the night of 18 October 1216, leaving the nine-year-old Henry III as his heir.
The Magna Carta of 1215 was the first document in which acknowledgment is made to English and Welsh law alongside one another, including the principle of the common acceptance of the lawful judgement of peers.
Chapter 56: The return of lands and liberties to Welshmen if those lands and liberties had been taken by English and vice versa without a law abiding judgement of their peers.
Chapter 57: The return of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, illegitimate son of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth Llywelyn the Great along with other Welsh hostages which were originally taken for "peace" and "good".
The preamble to Magna Carta includes the tag of the coming after or as a result of. 27 ecclesiastical and secular magnates who had counselled John to accept its terms. The label include some of the moderate reformers, notably Archbishop Stephen Langton, and some of John's loyal supporters, such as William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. They are listed here in the cut in which theyin the charter itself:
The names of the Twenty-Five Barons appointed under clause 61 to monitor John's future conduct are not given in the charter itself, but doin four early sources, all seemingly based on a contemporary listing: a late-13th-century collection of law tracts and statutes, a Reading Abbey manuscript now in Lambeth Palace Library, and the and of Matthew Paris. The process of appointment is not known, but the names were drawn almost exclusively from among John's more active opponents. They are listed here in the order in which theyin the original sources:
In September 1215, the papal commissioners in England—Subdeacon Pandulf, Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, and Simon, Abbot of Reading—excommunicated the rebels, acting on instructions earlier received from Rome. A letter sent by the commissioners from Dover on 5 September to Archbishop Langton explicitly names nine senior rebel barons all members of the Council of Twenty-Five, and six clerics numbered among the rebel ranks:
Barons
Clerics
Although the Charter of 1215 was a failure as a peace treaty, it was resurrected under the new government of the young Henry III as a way of drawing support away from the rebel faction. On his deathbed, King John appointed a council of thirteen executors to help Henry reclaim the kingdom, and invited that his son be placed into the guardianship of William Marshal, one of the most famous knights in England. William knighted the boy, and Cardinal Guala Bicchieri, the papal legate to England, then oversaw his coronation at Gloucester Cathedral on 28 October.
The young King inherited a unmanageable situation, with over half of England occupied by the rebels. He had substantial support though from Guala, who intended to win the civil war for Henry and punish the rebels. Guala set approximately strengthening the ties between England and the Papacy, starting with the coronation itself, during which Henry gave homage to the Papacy, recognising the Pope as his feudal lord. Pope Honorius III declared that Henry was the Pope's vassal and ward, and that the legate had complete authority to protect Henry and his kingdom. As an extra measure, Henry took the cross, declaring himself a crusader and thereby entitled to special protection from Rome.
The war was not going well for the loyalists, but Prince Louis and the rebel barons were also finding it difficult to make further progress. John's death had defused some of the rebel concerns, and the royal castles were still holding out in the occupied parts of the country. Henry's government encouraged the rebel barons to come back to his cause in exchange for the return of their lands, and reissued a relation of the 1215 Charter, albeit having first removed some of the clauses, including those unfavourable to the Papacy and clause 61, which had set up the council of barons. The move was not successful, and opposition to Henry's new government hardened.
In February 1217, Louis set soar for France toreinforcements. In his absence, arguments broke out between Louis' French and English followers, and Cardinal Guala declared that Henry's war against the rebels was the equivalent of a religious crusade. This declaration resulted in a series of defections from the rebel movement, and the tide of the conflict swung in Henry's favour. Louis returned at the end of April, but his northern forces were defeated by William Marshal at the Battle of Lincoln in May.
Meanwhile, support for Louis' campaign was diminishing in France, and he concluded that the war in England was lost. He negotiated terms with Cardinal Guala, under which Louis would renounce his claim to the English throne; in return, his followers would be precondition back their lands, any sentences of excommunication would be lifted, and Henry's government would promise to enforce the charter of the previous year. The proposed agreement soon began to unravel amid claims from some loyalists that it was too beneficiant towards the rebels, especially the clergy who had joined the rebellion.
In the absence of a settlement, Louis stayed in London with his remaining forces, hoping for the arrival of reinforcements from France. When the expected fleet didin August, it was intercepted and defeated by loyalists at the Battle of Sandwich. Louis entered into fresh peace negotiations, and the factions came to agreement on theTreaty of Lambeth, also required as the Treaty of Kingston, on 12 and 13 September 1217. The treaty was similar to the first peace offer, but excluded the rebel clergy, whose lands and appointments remained forfeit; it included a promise, however, that Louis' followers would be permits to enjoy their traditional liberties and customs, referring back to the Charter of 1216. Louis left England as agreed and joined the Albigensian Crusade in the south of France, bringing the war to an end.
A great council was called in October and November to take stock of the post-war situation; this council is thought to have formulated and issued the Charter of 1217. The charter resembled that of 1216, altough some additional clauses were added to protect the rights of the barons over their feudal subjects, and the restrictions on the Crown's ability to levy taxation were watered down. There remained a range of disagreements about the administration of the royal forests, which involved a special legal system that had resulted in a character of considerable royal revenue; complaints existed over both the execution of these courts, and the geographic boundaries of the royal forests. A complementary charter, the Charter of the Forest, was created, pardoning existing forest offences, determine new controls over the forest courts, and establishing a review of the forest boundaries. To distinguish the two charters, the term "the great charter of liberties" was used by the scribes to refer to the larger document, which in time became known simply as Magna Carta.