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| The Cheshire Magna Carta |
‘Both
by royal permission and the virtues of its earls’, wrote the monk of Chester
abbey, Lucian, about 1195, Cheshire ‘is accustomed to answer in its assemblies more
to the sword of its prince than the crown of the king’.[i]
There has been much debate over how far the earl of Chester - described here as
a ‘prince’ - enjoyed exceptional, autonomous, authority in Cheshire in the
decades prior to its takeover by the crown in 1237 and the development
thereafter of a ‘palatinate’ tradition by a county community keen to assert
claims to special privileges. The first formal record that we have of Cheshire
as a ‘county palatine’ does not come until the 1290s.[ii]
Be that as it may, Lucian’s statement is testimony to a
perception of Cheshire, during the earldom of Ranulf III (1181-1232, though a
minor until 1187) as separate from the rest of the kingdom. The issue by Earl
Ranulf of a ‘Magna Carta’ for the county, almost certainly in 1215, as a local
counterpart to the Runnymede Magna Carta granted by King John, is an example of
that separatism in practice. It is fitting, therefore, that Cheshire Local
History Association has chosen to mark the 800th anniversary by
publishing The Magna Carta of Cheshire,
a booklet of just over 100 pages which includes a new translation of Earl
Ranulf’s charter, accompanied by a detailed commentary on its context and
content. Some of the key features of the charter are also highlighted in the Feature of the Month for May.
In terms of number of words, Earl
Ranulf’s charter was about one-third the length of King John’s Magna Carta.
There were far fewer chapters or clauses, but among them were some which
addressed issues familiar from Runnymede: safeguarding the interests of widows
and minors, relaxing restrictions within the earl’s forests and limiting obligations
to castle-guard. There was also a promise that concessions should extend beyond
the immediate beneficiaries, the Cheshire barons, to their own knights and free
tenants - seemingly a deliberate echo of Magna Carta cap. 60 and, if so, good
evidence that those who framed the Cheshire charter intended that it would
stand within the county in place of the king’s. Alongside these were concessions
which had no parallel with those made at Runnymede, including two dealing with
claims over ‘avowers’ - fugitives settling in the county - and a remarkable chapter
in which the earl itemised those baronial petitions he had turned down. Among
these, if the phraseology has been interpreted correctly, was a bid to have
hare-coursing laid on whenever the barons were summoned to Chester! Even some
of the chapters for which there were precedents at Runnymede incorporated
distinctive Cheshire concerns. There was protection of the right to plead
‘thwertnic’ (‘I deny it all’) in the earl’s court, which appears to have had
the effect of frustrating prosecutions, and a guarantee that military service
would not be enforced beyond the Lyme, the sharply-defined area of wooded
upland which delineated Cheshire’s eastern and south-eastern frontier with the
rest of England.
It is fair to say that the Magna Carta of Cheshire, though
twice published in scholarly editions during the twentieth century[iii]
and duly mentioned in passing in several books on Magna Carta, has not until
now received the attention it deserves. It offers us an insight into the hopes
and fears of the landholding class in an under-populated frontier shire, away
from the main centres of royal power in early thirteenth-century England.
[i] Liber Luciani de Laude Cestrie, ed. M.V.
Taylor (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, LXIV, 1912), p. 65.
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