The realities of King John's rule revealed

Clause 39 of Magna Carta 1215 is perhaps the most famous of the Charter’s 60-odd clauses: ‘No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any other way ruined, nor will we go against him or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.’

Setting out the principle that the government should be bound by the law – that the ruler could not simply attack his subjects as and when he pleased – it has long been held up as a shield against arbitrary government in those countries where the Charter’s principles have informed the relationship between ruler and ruled.

Injustices committed under King John, as depicted by Matthew Paris

But what was the context for this demand in 1215? Anyone with a passing familiarity with the period might cite the tyrannical government of ‘Bad King John’. Famous examples easily come to mind: John’s harrying of the Briouze family, and his imprisonment and starvation of Matilda de Briouze and her eldest son, being one of the most notorious.

But the reality of John’s rule was, in fact, more brutal than even cases such as this would suggest. In preparing his commentary on clause 39 for the Magna Carta Project, Henry Summerson has undertaken a thorough investigation of how John ruled on a day-to-day basis. The result is a picture of a government that was systematically aggressive, violent and arbitrary.

The ability and willingness to provide justice to those who sought it was, as far as the king was concerned, a tool for exercising his power: 

‘What mattered... was his ability to variously advance the men he trusted, fend off those he did not, and play upon the hopes and fears of both in such a way as enabled him to retain their loyalty, or at any rate frustrate their disloyalty.’

The king’s court might follow sound procedure and provide justice to those who sought it, although not if it was the king himself who had inflicted an injustice upon one of his subjects – which was all too often the case. But Angevin kingship was as much personal as it was procedural. The king’s good will (benevolentia) and his ill will (malevolentia) were fundamental to the operation of royal rule: 

‘The world of the Angevin court and government was one of violent, almost black-and-white, antitheses, in which benevolence and malevolence were polar opposites, with little neutral ground between them – anybody who lost the one stood in immediate danger of incurring the other, and of seeing his affairs go to ruin in consequence, exposed to the caprices of an administration which was always heavy-handed and often downright violent as well.’

The effects of the king’s anger could be devastating. Henry II and Richard I demanded vast sums of money from their greater subjects to buy back the king’s good will, often for unspecified offences or in the pursuit of their grudges. But King John pushed these arbitrary methods of government much further.

One of John’s favoured tools was dissesin – the repossession of a subject’s lands. This was a severe blow to the subject’s prestige and social status but the financial consequences were also severe: 

‘anyone disseised on the king’s orders faced the loss of all his or her movable assets... [and potentially] the complete devastation of the property.  Thus in 1215 the houses on the land of Henry of Braybrooke were to be completely demolished, while a year later order was given that all the lands of William of Hastings were to be wasted, his demesnes destroyed and his castle pulled down.’ 

It was not only earls and barons who suffered at John’s hands: 

‘What sets John’s kingship apart from that of his two predecessors is the number of lesser men who were similarly targeted... almost any offence, whether real or not, could result in dispossession, carried out on orders whose arbitrariness was if anything underlined by the frequency with which they were said either to have originated in the king’s malevolence’

Henry has uncovered a catalogue of examples that reveal how ‘disseisin had become a well-nigh automatic reaction on the part of the king and his agents to any misdeed or suspicious act which came to their attention.’ 

Imprisonment and physical violence, and the threat thereof, were also tools readily used by the king. When the kingdom was placed under an interdict, in 1208, John 

'encouraged, or at least countenanced, assaults on the clergy (the Barnwell Chronicle referred to clerks suffering through swords and gibbets), and then he forbade such attacks, with the hardly less intemperate declaration that if he could lay hands on anyone responsible, "we will have him hanged on the nearest oak".'

In 1215, John was able to capture Belvoir Castle 'by threatening to have its lord (and his prisoner), William d’Aubigné, starved to death if his men did not surrender.’

But the king’s threat of violence had also become a normal tool of administration, threatened as punishment for relatively trivial offences that merely inconvenienced the kings’ household: 

‘In 1201 the men of Gloucester had to pay forty marks to recover the king’s good will, lost because they did not provide him with the lampreys he had ordered for his visit in late October.’ 

In 1205, the king ordered Reginald of Cornhill to buy wine for him and send it to Nottingham, warning him to "know that if the wines are not good we will betake ourselves against you for it". Clearly 'John’s government seems to have expected, or even wanted, to arouse fear.’

The extent to which the government deployed violent and aggressive methods actually led to confusion, as the king and his officials struggled to keep track of whom they had attacked and why. In fact John seems to have encouraged a policy of ‘disseise first and ask questions later’ in his officials, as when 

‘he ordered Falkes de Bréauté to restore his wife’s inheritance to Roger Corbet, apparently a Gloucestershire landowner, but concluded by commending Falkes’s prudence "in that you disseised him and notified us of it".’

Although chroniclers decried John’s rule in general terms, 

‘it is in the records of that government that the evidence for its activities... is mostly to be found.  Those records are full of gaps, and in any case the personal character of John’s government means that many of its actions were not formally recorded.  But despite these difficulties, which make quantification impossible, it seems likely that the level of demands and penalties, reinforced by threats, rose markedly in the later years of John’s reign.’

Henry’s commentary reveals, perhaps for the first time, not only the sheer scale of John’s arbitrary treatment of his subjects but also its routinisation. For this reason clause 39 was of fundamental importance, for it 

‘aimed to subject intrusions of policy and personality to the constraints of due process.  By doing so it proclaimed, and helped to install, regularity, routine and impartiality as qualities fundamental to the administration of justice, while in the longer term it set in motion developments which resulted in law ceasing to be no more than an agency of government.’

Read Henry's commentary in full on the Magna Carta Project website. To find out how Henry goes about researching the commentaries, see his earlier feature on the Project blog. 

Podcast: Magna Carta: what more is there to say?

Professor Nicholas Vincent (UEA)

In this podcast, recorded in 2012 at the National Archives, the Magna Carta Project's Principal Investigator, Professor Nicholas Vincent, discusses the context and legacy of Magna Carta, his work in tracing originals of the Charter and the work of the Magna Carta Project on the charters of King John.

Listen here to Nicholas Vincent's podcast via the National Archives website

Henry III's Confirmation of Magna Carta in 1237



On 28 January 1237, Henry III confirmed Magna Carta in a great assembly at Westminster. This was the first confirmation of the 1225 issue of Magna Carta – the version that was to endure throughout the thirteenth century and parts of which remain on the statue books today.

 

By the end of 1236, Henry was in desperate need of cash. His marriage to Eleanor of Provence in January 1236 had been expensive and he had promised £20,000 to Emperor Frederick II as the marriage portion of his sister, Isabel. In line with clause 12 and clause 14 of Magna Carta 1215, the only way to secure a tax was by the consent of his prelates and magnates. Accordingly, Henry fixed a date of January 1237 for an assembly (or, rather, a ‘parliament’, for this was the first meeting described as such in official records).

 

According to the St Albans chronicler Matthew Paris, ‘an infinite multitude of nobles’ attended the parliament, which took place at the palace of Westminster. When they were all seated, William Ralegh (the king’s most senior judge) rose and, ‘as if a mediator between the king and the magnates of the kingdom’, set out Henry’s request. As with other taxes of this period, the king didn't have a specific sum in mind but a proportion (that is, a proportion of the value of people’s moveable goods). The sum requested was a thirtieth.

 

The king’s demand was met with an angry response from bishops and barons. They complained ‘indignantly’ about the various taxes they had been made to pay in recent years, as well as Henry’s neglect of their interests. Disturbed by this outburst, Henry promised that in future he would abide by the counsel of his native magnates. He fervently denied rumours of any attempt to procure an annulment of Magna Carta from the pope and promised, there and then, to observe the Charter.

 

Henry did acknowledge, though, that his behaviour over the previous few years had not been spotless. In fact, his tendency to listen to bad counsel might well have caused him to fall under the general sentence of excommunication that had been pronounced in 1225 by the then archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, against all who violated Magna Carta. Accordingly, Henry arranged for the sentence to be renewed by the current archbishop, Edmund of Abingdon. This was done in a solemn ritual held in St. Katherine’s chapel in Westminster abbey (this was the old building, founded by Edward the Confessor - Henry didn’t start work on his new abbey until 1245). The king stood with his right hand on the Gospels and his left hand clutching a lighted candle and swore to observe Magna Carta from that day onwards. The archbishop and prelates proclaimed ‘Let it be done’ and threw down their own candles to extinguish them. This caused a great amount of smoke and an unpleasant smell that irritated the eyes and nostrils of the audience. The archbishop, though, recognised this as a teachable moment and declared: ‘Thus let the condemned souls of those who violate the Charter, or who interpret it improperly, be extinguished, and let them likewise smoke and stink.’

 

Henry was to confirm the 1225 issue of Magna Carta again in 1253 and 1265, both times enforced by a sentence of excommunication.

Behind the Scenes on the Magna Carta Project: Henry Summerson on producing clause-by-clause commentary on Magna Carta 1215

As well as making available a new English translation of Magna Carta 1215, The Magna Carta Project is producing expert commentaries on every clause of the Charter, with versions available for schools, the general public and scholars.  For this blog, Dr Henry Summerson, Research Associate on the Magna Carta Project, describes his role in writing the commentaries. 
  
I see my role in the Magna Carta Project as that of an all-rounder who has been recruited to support a team of specialists.  The authors of the commentary on a number of chapters pretty well choose themselves – Paul Brand for the ones dealing with legal matters, Louise Wilkinson for those relating to matters like inheritance and marriage, David Carpenter for chapters which link politics and government, and so on.  But that still leaves about half of the chapters which make up the Charter unassigned, some of them concerned with issues which have never received much scholarly attention – Number33, for instance, about fish-traps in the Thames – while others are celebrated ones which have been repeatedly debated from the seventeenth century onwards, like Number 40, in which King John promised that he would not sell, defer or deny justice.  Obscure and famous alike, they make up my responsibility, to be researched and interpreted, for what seems like the first time in some cases, for the umpteenth times in others.

 

If I’m to have any chance of saying something new about the well-known chapters, or of shedding light on the obscure ones, I’ve got to research them all as fully as possible.  Fortunately practically all the available sources (of which there are surprising, and sometimes alarming, amounts) are in print.  Less fortunately, what are probably the most important ones, the volumes published by the Record Commission in the 1830s and 1840s, which record the day-by-day workings of King John’s government, came out before the invention of the subject index.  They’ve got impressively detailed indexes of people and places, but that is all.  This means that unlike present-day publications of, say, the Selden Society or the Pipe Roll Society, they offer no lists of headings to guide me round their contents, and the only way I can discover what is in them is to read them, all of them, again and again.  To do that for every chapter in turn would be an impossibly time-consuming undertaking, and so I tackle them in batches, dealing with four or five chapters at a time.  This is still a slow business, but it has the advantage of enabling me to keep an eye out for things which I missed in earlier trawls – one of the great advantages of electronic publishing is that it’s easy to correct or amplify texts which have been put up on-line.

 

So for each batch I start by reading right through the Record Commission editions of the Close Rolls, Patent Rolls, Fine Rolls etc., noting down relevant material as I go, and then – with some relief – I turn to the Pipe Rolls.  These do have subject indexes, admittedly rather rudimentary ones for the years before 1189, but very full ones for later years, and I start by going through these, though I always end up skimming the complete text as well, since even the best subject index can’t be expected to cover every possible issue.  I treat the Curia Regis Rolls, which have impressively detailed indexes, in much the same way, and also relevant Selden Society volumes.  For ecclesiastical affairs I turn principally to the English Episcopal Acta series.  Then there are administrative records like the Book of Fees, and texts like Glanvill and the Dialogue of the Exchequer, the latter reinforced by Thomas Madox’s Antiquities of the Exxhequer – some 250 years old now, in its second edition, but based on a reading of twelfth- and thirteenth-century records so extensive as to make it practically an original source in its own right.  

 

After that I turn to the narrative sources, the contemporary accounts of the reigns of the Angevin kings by men like Roger of Howden, Gervase of Canterbury and Roger of Wendover.  Of varying reliability, and often wildly prejudiced, the likely biases of these chronicles have always got to be kept in mind, though they also help to give them vitality, and may in any case reflect opinions held by others besides those of the men who wrote them.  Many of these texts are available in the Rolls Series, or have been published by Nelson/Oxford Medieval Texts, but some important chronicles – the History of William Marshal, for instance, or the Histoire des ducs de Normandie – have to be consulted in free-standing editions.  All these works can present problems of interpretation; for help in understanding individual words, and what they signified in the years round 1200 (some commonly-used words could have five or six different meanings), I make continual use of the recently completed Medieval Latin Dictionary. I always leave reading secondary material until last, since I like to form my own impressions of the issues represented by a chapter in Magna Carta before finding out what other historians have made of them.  Every generation has its own point of view – or sometimes several points of view - about the Charter, and some great historians have given expression to it, from Stubbs and Maitland in the late nineteenth century via McKechnie, Jolliffe, Stenton (both of them) and Mitchell, down to Sidney Painter and Sir James Holt in recent times, and indeed beyond, to scholars working today.   I don’t think of myself as engaged in a debate, still less a quarrel, with what eminent scholars of past generations have written about Magna Carta, but I do need to know what their views were, and (if possible) why they held them.  And at a less exalted level, I also need to keep an eye out for what can be very valuable material published in specialist journals (when working on the fish traps, for instance), or by county record societies.  The Royal Historical Society’s on-line bibliography is a great help in tracking down sometimes recondite books and articles.  I’ve got to be selective in the books and articles I consult if I’m ever to write anything myself, but here, as in other respects, I’m helped by the organisation of the Magna Carta project, since everything I write is read by my colleagues, who can draw my attention to anything important I’ve missed.

 

I’m also helped, in a different way, by my additional responsibility for providing commentaries for general readers and for secondary school pupils.  My principal task involves writing commentaries for an academic readership of scholars like myself and my colleagues, but the project has a wider remit, to put its learning at the disposal of people who want to know about Magna Carta, but not necessarily all about it.  I compose these supplementary commentaries last, basing them on, and constantly referring back to, the longer texts I’ve just composed, and the need to express myself concisely and clearly, without using technical language, makes them a valuable control on these – I’ve often picked up mistakes and inconsistencies, and realised that I’ve been vague just where I need to be precise, while doing this.  And when all that’s done, the commentaries can finally go up on the project website.  I’ve had no feedback yet, but look forward to getting some, even if it does make corrections necessary – it will all help in the task of interpreting Magna Carta, a process that has never ceased and is not likely to.

 

Explore Henry's commentaries on Magna Carta 1215 here.