The Great Turning Points of British History (7 page)

Although Adrian’s readiness to grant Ireland to the king of England has often been regarded as just the kind of thing an English pope would do, it probably reflected his zeal for church reform much more than his Englishness. He shared the view of the French Cistercian abbot, Bernard of Clairvaux, the most influential European churchman of his generation, who described the Irish as: ‘shameless in their customs, uncivilised in their ways, godless in religion, barbarous in their law, obstinate as regards instruction, foul in their lives, Christians in name, pagans in fact’.

By the time Henry II came to the throne, profound economic and social changes in much of Europe, including England, had led to those regions in which little had as yet changed being seen in a new and highly critical light. The Scots and the Welsh found themselves tarred by the same brush, but it was the Irish who suffered most. According to William of Malmesbury, ‘whereas the English and French live in market-oriented towns and enjoy a cultivated style of life, the Irish live in rural squalor.’ The acceptance of new laws of marriage in most of Europe – when in Ireland divorce and remarriage continued to be lawful – led to Anselm of Canterbury accusing the Irish of swapping wives ‘in the same way that other men exchange horses’. Ireland, formerly thought of as ‘the island of saints’, was being rebranded as the ‘island of barbarians’. It was the pope’s duty, as he saw it, to bring the Irish to a better way of life, a truer Christianity, and if that meant invasion and regime change, then so be it. This was the atmosphere in which Henry II calculated that even he could present himself as a good son of the Church.

As early as the tenth century, kings of England had liked grandiloquent titles such as ‘king of the English and of all other peoples living in the ambit of the British island’. But until 1171 these had remained just empty words. Now they had been given a new kind of reality – and this just when those peoples whose lands were being invaded had been stereotyped as immoral and primitive savages.

1152
Henry’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine
. The divorce of French King Louis VII and the 30-year-old duchess of Aquitaine in March was followed, just eight weeks later, by her marriage to the most ambitious young ruler in France, the 19-year-old Henry, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou. This marked the beginning of the Plantagenet connection with Bordeaux – and its wine trade – that was to last for the next three hundred years. Henry was now set to rule greater dominions than any previous king of England.

1153
Angevin invasion of England
. In January, despite the threats from enemies jealous of his recent good fortune, Duke Henry dared to sail to England to claim the kingdom that had belonged to his grandfather, Henry I. By August he had still made little progress when the unexpected death of King Stephen’s eldest son Eustace so disheartened the old king that he came to terms with Henry, recognizing him as his heir in return for his own life possession of the throne and a guarantee that his second son, William, could keep the family estate.

1166
Creation of a public prosecution service
. Henry II ordered sheriffs to empanel juries whose job it was to name those whom they suspected of serious crime. The sheriff was to bring suspects to trial before the king’s judges when they visited the shire. Those found guilty were punished by the ‘crown’. This legislation – the Assize of Clarendon – helped establish Henry’s reputation as a founder of the common law.

1173
Queen Eleanor’s rebellion
. The greatest threat to Henry II came from his own wife when she led their three eldest sons, Henry, Richard and Geoffrey, into revolt and into alliance with kings William of Scotland and Louis VII of France (her own ex-husband). After Henry’s eventual victory (summer 1174), he was reconciled with his sons, but Eleanor was kept a prisoner until he died. Her rebellion had challenged the authority of husbands everywhere.

1174
Canterbury and Scotland
. On 12 July Henry II was flogged by the monks of Canterbury Cathedral, his public penance for his involvement in the murder of Thomas Becket. The dead saint (Becket had been canonized in 1173) quickly accepted his apology. On 13 July Henry’s great enemy, King William of Scotland, was captured while leading an invasion of England. William was forced to accept the Treaty of Falaise (8 December), by which Scotland was subject to the king of England, whose troops now occupied Edinburgh, Berwick and Roxburgh.

1176
The first Eisteddfod
. Rhys ap Gruffudd of Deheubarth held what a Welsh chronicle called ‘a special feast at Cardigan, and he set two kinds of contests: one between the bards and the poets, and another between the harpists, pipers and players of other instruments. He set two chairs for the victors . . . and rewarded them with great prizes.’

1187
Fall of Jerusalem
. Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem on 2 October, the anniversary of Muhammad’s night journey into heaven from the holy city, shocked the Christian world. The kings of England, France and Germany vowed to go on crusade and, to fund the expedition, Henry II imposed a tax called the Saladin tithe, but died before departing. It was left to his son, Richard I, to lead the Third Crusade.

1189
Restoration of Scottish independence
. After his father’s death in 1189, Richard I decided that it was time to make peace with King William of Scotland. In December he restored both castles and Scottish independence in return for a hefty sum. In the words of the earliest Scottish historian, John of Fordun, Richard was ‘that noble king so friendly to the Scots’. When Richard was later held prisoner in Germany, King William even contributed to his ransom.

1199
A reforming chancellor?
John was crowned king of England on 27 May, and on the same day Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury, formerly Richard I’s most trusted minister, was appointed chancellor. As a result of his work as director of the royal secretariat, the first year of the new king’s reign saw an explosive proliferation of government records. This was to persuade many twentieth-century historians that John must have been an unusually business-like king.

The year of Magna Carta, 1215, when an English ruler was first subjected to the law, has resonated down the ages as a landmark in Britain’s constitutional history. Indeed, in
BBC History Magazine
’s 2006 poll, its anniversary was voted the most suitable date on which the nation should celebrate Britishness. The charter itself still lives. Its most fundamental chapters remain on the statute book of the UK as barriers to arbitrary rule. They condemn the denial, sale and delay of justice, and forbid imprisonment and dispossession save by lawful judgement of one’s peers (social equals), or the law of the land.

The charter was negotiated at Runnymede between 10 and 15 June 1215, with King John riding down each day from Windsor, and the barons encamped in their tents across the meadows beside the Thames. On 15 June, John, tricky to the end, refused more concessions and simply sealed the charter – ‘take it or leave it’ – thereby cleverly keeping the names of the twenty-five barons who were to enforce its terms out of the document, this because they had still to be chosen. John hoped the charter would become no more than a toothless symbol of his generosity to the kingdom; the barons hoped that its terms would be rigorously enforced and indeed extended. The result was civil war.

By September, John had got the pope to quash the charter. That month, the opposition barons deposed John and offered the throne to Louis, eldest son of King Philip II of France. He came to England in May 1216 and by the time of John’s death in October controlled more than half the kingdom. In the north Alexander II of Scotland had gained Carlisle, and was making good his claims to Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland. In Wales, Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, ruler of Gwynedd, had swept through the south and taken the royal bases of Cardigan and Carmarthen.

Yet John’s dynasty survived, and with it, paradoxically, the charter. Its implantation into English political life was the work of the minority government of John’s son, Henry III, who was only 9 on his accession. Magna Carta was also a British document. Both Alexander and Llywelyn had been with the rebels from the start, and both benefited from the charter’s terms, terms that acknowledged ‘the law of Wales’ and invoked for the Welsh, as for Alexander, the principle of judgement by peers. Ultimately, as Wales and Scotland became part of a United Kingdom, their peoples too were embraced by the charter’s protections. The charter, however, was no panacea. Since the clause setting up the twenty-five barons was left out from post-1215 versions of the document, it had no constitutional means of enforcement. It also said nothing about how the king’s ministers were to be chosen, patronage distributed and policy decided, major holes that defined the political battleground of the later middle ages.

The charter made a profound difference. It clamped down on various sources of revenue. Henceforth the ‘relief’ or inheritance tax paid by an earl or baron was to be £100, not the thousands of pounds sometimes demanded by John. It facilitated the spread of the common law and made justice less open to bargaining or bribery. It gave the gentry concessions they could exploit to make the running of local government more acceptable. Above all it asserted a fundamental principle: the king was subject to the law, the law that Magna Carta had made. As a result, arbitrary rule became more difficult and resistance to it more legitimate.

In 1214 John’s long-planned campaign to recover his continental empire had ended in disaster with his allies decisively defeated at Bouvines. John returned to England a sitting duck, his treasure spent. Suspicious and untrustworthy, a womanizer and a murderer, he was loathed by many of his barons. His huge financial exactions over several years had antagonized the wider political community. By early 1215 a large group of barons, many from the north, where his rule had seemed particularly severe, were in league, and were demanding reform. They were abetted by Scotland’s King Alexander and Llywelyn of Wales.

John played for time and summoned a council to meet at Oxford towards the end of April. Instead the barons met in arms at Stamford in Lincolnshire, from where on 5 May they renounced their allegiance to the king, the beginning of civil war. The war was transformed within a fortnight by the Londoners letting the baronial rebels into the city – its walls and wealth protected the baronial cause, and made any quick royalist victory impossible. Yet baronial victory too could not be quick. John retained his castles, many commanded by ruthless military experts. Shrewd use of patronage meant he also retained the loyalty of some of the greatest barons. So the result towards the end of May was a truce and the start of the negotiations that ended with the charter at Runnymede.

The charter was the product of the way John and his predecessors has ruled since the Norman Conquest. It also reflected the nature of early thirteenth-century English society, in part through its omissions. Take the place of women in the charter: they certainly appeared, for important clauses secured for baronial widows their dowers and inheritances and protected them from being forced into remarriage by the king. The clause reflected that baronial women did have property rights: they could inherit land; they received as dower a portion (usually a third) of their husband’s lands on his death. The clause had a real effect and the thirteenth century was graced by large numbers of baronesses who spent years as widows controlling extensive lands.

Yet the charter did nothing to alter the inequalities between men and women. Women only inherited if they had no brothers. They virtually never held office, and, for all their influence behind the scenes, played virtually no public part in politics. No women featured in the list of those who had counselled John to concede the charter. The clauses in the charter itself were designed not to liberate women, but to protect their male children from having their mother’s property carried off by second husbands.

Even less privileged were the peasants. They made up perhaps 75 per cent of the population, half of them ‘villeins’, which meant they were legally unfree. Peasants featured in Magna Carta – the stipulation that sheriffs should not force men and villages to work on bridges dealt specifically with their predicament. So did the clause which laid down that fines imposed on villeins were to be reasonable and assessed by men of their neighbourhood. To no one, John promised in one of the most famous clauses, would he sell, deny or delay justice. But there lay the rub, for it was the law itself that made half of the peasantry unfree, leaving them excluded from the king’s courts and at their lord’s mercy in anything concerning the terms on which they held their lands. The charter did nothing to alter this. Indeed, the protection it did afford peasants was exclusively against the oppressions of royal agents. They were protected from the king so that they could be exploited all the better by their lords.

Against its meagre concern for women and peasants, the charter catered abundantly for the great players. It gave freedom to the Church (which held over a quarter of England’s land), and reiterated John’s promise that bishops and abbots could be elected free from royal interference, thus dealing with a major grievance. The Church was to play a key part in publicizing John’s charter and in supporting the later versions made by Henry III. London, as we have seen, was the great baronial base. Its population early in the thirteenth century was perhaps as high as 40,000, making it Britain’s largest city. The charter protected the privileges of all the kingdom’s cities and boroughs but London’s alone were mentioned by name, and it received an additional promise that it should be free from arbitrary taxation.

Most striking of all was the charter’s treatment of the knights. In the 1200s there were about 5,000 of them in England’s counties, the backbone of local government. One contemporary chronicler, Ralph of Coggeshall, averred that all the barons who remained loyal to John were deserted by their knights; an exaggeration, but it shows the flow of the tide. The charter laid down that the king’s judges hearing assizes in the counties were to sit with four knights of each county, elected in the county court, a testimony both to the self-confidence of the knights and their determination to control the workings of justice in the localities. Another clause empowered twelve knights in each county, again elected in the county court, to investigate and abolish the evil practices of the king’s local officials. The zeal with which the knights went about their work was a major factor in John’s decision to abandon the charter.