Magna Carta Week: John: A Restless Tyrant

John: A Restless Tyrant 

by Rich Price

With Magna Carta, it's inevitably the lurid banner headlines that attract people to the history of John's dramatic and chequered reign – the cauldron of resentment, treachery and violence that provoked and sustained the Barons' War, gruesome killings and starvation in dark castle dungeons, or the near-total loss of a vast empire, all set against the background canvas of the bell, book and candle of excommunication and papal interdict.

Our modern democratic minds tend to cast the rebel barons as heroic freedom fighters, when they were nothing of the sort. Their leadership was unimpressive and often disreputable, even by the standards of the time, but they found some kind of unity in their visceral hatred of John and his overbearing greed for their money - and, say some, for their wives and daughters. To cap it all, there are the redtop tabloid tales in the contemporary chronicles of the frothing rages of a paranoid autocrat ruled by passion, greed and lust, and, perhaps, by the icy, uncaring narcissism of the psychopath, all of it generously seasoned with the spite of a spoilt, angry and neglected younger brother.

King John pores over the Magna Carta
 before sealing it

Like all medieval monarchs, John used violence, illegal acts, financial rapine and extortion, espionage and treachery – and in all these things he's not greatly different from his predecessors or successors, sometimes better, sometimes worse. William of Normandy would have shrugged at much of John's royal bad behaviour but would probably still have despised him as a serial loser. But, of course, the more you find out about him, the easier it becomes to see Bad King John as much more than the melodrama villain he's normally caricatured as.

John, possessed of what we'd now call a seriously abrasive 'A Type' personality, was a demanding, micromanaging administrator, constantly on the move and, in his day-to-day work of ruling and travelling, dealing with complex problems and decisions on the hoof (literally) in an age when news travelled no faster than the king himself. Like his father Henry and mother Alienor, he had enormous energies and stamina and was utterly convinced of his right to govern his empire by his own 'vis et voluntas', force and will. And, yes indeed, he was greedy – for power, naturally, but for money above all, to maintain that power and to finance the ruinously expensive series of wars he fought in his ultimately doomed attempts to recover his lost lands in France.

To achieve the control he needed, John and his administrators relied on coherent and comprehensive details of his own and his court's actions and decisions, as well as of the intricate financial dealings - the taxes, fines, debts and disbursements - on which his survival depended. It's from his reign that the patchier information we have from earlier reigns becomes a flood of records in the form of the various Exchequer and Chancery rolls, the 'filing cabinets' of the time. These are formidable factual historical resource and reference points. Whilst the contemporary chronicles, the op-eds of the time, usually reflect the prejudices of their monkish writers - most of them no great fans of a king who pillaged church funds when he had the chance - the rolls are the hard facts of John's day-to-day business, all filed and dated and showing where John was on that date.

These are typical of the rolls
kept in the National Archives
in leather casing

And it's this, the minutiae of John's everyday actions and decisions in these documents, that drew me to John's reign, not the broad historical and political sweep of the route to Magna Carta. For some 18 months now I've followed John's letters in the Patent Rolls, the Chancery files of the king's 'open' correspondence. I'm lucky in that I can read Latin (sometimes erratically), the business language of the Middle Ages, but the original rolls still require being able to understand the handwriting of the time.

Fortunately, thanks to Thomas Duffus Hardy, a 19th century civil servant and scholar at the Records Office, the Letters Patent (as well as many other documents) have been transcribed and printed – and many are available on the internet. The Patent rolls are the file records of a huge variety of royal business, ranging from ecclesiastical appointments, hostages, prisoner releases, instructions to John's soldiers, servants and statesmen, right down to banal receipts for money or equipment. They are written in what is very close to a medieval 'text speak' or shorthand, filled with abbreviations and symbols that would have been expanded fully in the original letters but saved time and work for the clerks when making their file copy.

The example here records John's gift of war horses on the 17th of May 1215 to his lords of the Welsh March, stipulating in which order they should choose one from John's stables at Gloucester Castle. As well as giving the date, the last line locates John at Freemantle in Hampshire on that day.

From evidence like this, Hardy used the rolls to create a relatively comprehensive itinerary for John's reign, for the king rarely stayed in one place for very long, sometimes travelling as much as 40 miles or more each day and regularly 25 or so, accompanied by his travelling circus of courtiers and knights, clerks and crossbowmen, servants, women and hangers-on. Along with them came the wagons and pack-animals, loaded with kitchen equipment, the portable chapel, John's bed, bath, urinal, travelling library and locked chests full of valuables and money - anything and everything the king might need or want, no doubt including his dressing gown. The rolls, lacking a word for such a new thing, record its purchase: 'For the surcoat of the lord king, for getting up in the night, 20 shillings'.

Another example in the National Archives

Eight hundred years before mass communication he needed, like all medieval monarchs, to make his power visible and tangible to his powerful lords and tenants by personal appearances in their territories. Peter of Blois, an influential Angevin courtier in Henry II's reign, bemoaned the indignities and unpredictability of being in the king's train on journeys like this. The saddle-sore minor clerks of John's Chancery, like Peter, would have wondered where they would sleep that night, perhaps in the itchy straw of some castle stable or, worse perhaps, in an even itchier peasant house, commandeered for the night.

Julie Kanter, in her doctoral thesis of 2011, calculated the details of John's incessant movements. Throughout his 18-year reign he travelled nearly 80,000 miles in total, rarely staying anywhere more than a couple of nights, often less. The daily average distance is between 12.5 and 14.9 miles. To put it all into a modern context:

The average distance travelled per person in Great Britain in 2006 was 7,133 miles or 19.5 miles per day. Therefore, John's average distance per day was 64% of the average distance travelled per day of a resident of Britain in 2006, for whom cars, trains and planes were all available. … J.C. Holt remarked that John did not usually remain in the same location for long, stating that 'Usually after two or three nights, or frequently one, he was off again'. But was this actually the case? In a word, yes. The average length of time that John spent at a location per visit was a mere 2.1 days.

John's 16-day stay at Windsor Castle for the Magna Carta negotiations is understandably long, though not remotely the norm. The longest time John ever stayed in one place, an exceptional 55 days, almost eight weeks, was through force majeure, during his siege of Rochester castle from October to December 1215. So when you contemplate the huge implications of Magna Carta for our modern ideas on justice and right, spare a kindly thought, too, for John's exhausted and long-suffering staff and courtiers, finally getting the chance to rest and recuperate for a fortnight from their endless perambulations - and for Thomas Duffus Hardy, whose lifetime studies made so much of John's reign easily accessible to us.

(NB: I'd like to express my huge gratitude to novelist Elizabeth Chadwick for introducing John's itinerary to me through her fascinating daily Facebook postings on the topic. She got me completely hooked and my first job of every day now is to check the itinerary and decipher the letters patent of the day.)

King John's tomb

Reference Cited:

Kanter J. E. Peripatetic and Sedentary Kingship: The Itineraries of the Thirteenth Century English Kings. Doctoral thesis, King's College. London: 2011

*********

Richard is now retired after 26 years working as a staff counsellor at a southern university and as a social worker before that. He occupies himself with historical reenactment as a member of Regia Anglorum, photography, and a lifelong and wide-ranging interest in ancient and medieval history. His BA degree was in Latin.

*********

The Review would like to thank Rich Price for taking the time to write his excellent piece

on the life and character of King John

Magna Carta Week: The Eternal Legacy of Magna Carta

The Eternal Legacy of Magna Carta

By Sharon Bennett Connolly

On 1 April 2015 Lincoln Castle reopened its doors after an extensive refurbishment. The renovations included a new purpose-built, state-of-the-art, underground vault for its most prized possession: one of only four surviving copies of the original 1215 Great Charter – the Magna Carta.

The Magna Carta’s new home cannot fail to emphasise the importance of this charter in the history of not only England, but also the rest of the world. Two films - Magna Carta: Challenging the Power of the King and Magna Carta: Meaning and Myth – reconstruct the events leading up to Magna Carta and chart its significance through the centuries, respectively.

But what is Magna Carta? And what makes it so important?

In many ways, the reign of King John had been a continuation of that of his father, Henry II, and of his brother, Richard I, with one significant difference. Early in his reign John had lost the French part of the great Angevin empire: Normandy and Aquitaine were now held by France. In 1214 King John returned to England following his defeat by the French at the Battle of Bouvines. The battle ended the king’s hopes of regaining the lost empire.

Added to this catastrophe was the character and personality of John himself. By nature John was paranoid, secretive and distrustful. John’s cruelty is widely known. He is accused of killing his nephew and rival claimant to the English throne, Arthur of Brittany; he hanged 28 Welsh hostages (sons of rebel chieftains) and he hounded William de Braose and his family all the way to Ireland and back. De Braose’s wife and son died in one of John’s prisons, probably from starvation.

The History of William Marshal, a biography of the great knight and statesman, states of John: ‘He kept his prisoners in such a horrible manner, and in such abject confinement that it seemed an indignity and a disgrace to all those with him who witnessed such cruelty’.

Although John faced the fallout of Magna Carta, many of the injustices targeted by the barons can be seen in the reigns of his predecessors. Heavy taxes, arbitrary fines and the exploitation of wardships were long-established royal revenue earners. However, where Henry and Richard had a whole empire to exploit, John’s need for money had to be met by England alone.

Even John’s disagreement with the Church can see parallels in the reign of Henry II and his clashes with Thomas Becket. John opposed the election of Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, and refused to allow his consecration. Pope Innocent III went so far as to excommunicate John and place England under interdict; in 1213 Philip II of France was even invited to depose him.

John finally came to an agreement with the Church in May 1213, swearing that the liberties established under Henry I would be strictly observed and allowing Langton to take up his post as archbishop. However, John broke his oath almost immediately and Langton became one of the leaders of the opposition to the king.

The barons’ objections to John were almost beyond number. He had failed to face the French and had lost not only his family’s Continental possessions, but also those of his barons. Few had forgotten his treachery against his brother – his attempt on the throne whilst Richard was away on Crusade. His barons even complained that he forced himself on their wives and daughters.

The barons had had enough.

The rebels were ready to fight. After occupying London they made one final attempt to prevent war, presenting the king with a list of their demands.

Following further negotiations a long detailed document was produced, dealing with particular grievances of the time and with injustices in general. It touched on the whole system of royal government. And it was granted to ‘all free men of the realm and their heirs forever’.

Magna Carta

Of its 63 clauses, some terms were asking for immediate remedies, such as the removal of corrupt administrators and the sending home of foreign mercenaries. The clause stating that fighting outside of the kingdom could not be imposed by the king was a reaction to John’s recent attempts to force his English barons to help him recover his Continental domains.

Others had long-term aims. The document sought to guarantee the privileges of the Church and the City of London. Restrictions were placed on the powers of regional officials, such as sheriffs, to prevent abuses. The royal court was fixed at Westminster, for justice to be obtainable by all, and royal judges were to visit each county regularly. Taxes could no longer be levied without the consent of the Church and the barons.

Clauses included the fixing of inheritance charges and protection from exploitation for under-age heirs; the king was to take only what was reasonable from an estate (although ‘reasonable’ remained undefined). From henceforth a widow was to be free to choose whether or not to remarry and her marriage portion (dowry) would be made available to her immediately on her husband’s death. Another clause sought to prevent the seizure of land from Jews and the king’s debtors.

Magna Carta even went so far as to regulate weights and measures. It also reduced the size of the king’s forests and limited the powers of forest justices.

Although most of the 63 clauses of Magna Carta are now defunct, three still remain as major tenets of British law, including ‘to no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice’. That no person could be imprisoned, outlawed or deprived of his lands except by judgement of his peers and the law of the land has remained the cornerstone of the English legal system ever since.

Magna Carta was sealed at Runnymede, Berkshire, on 15 June 1215. John ordered that the charter be circulated around the towns and villages.

As a peace agreement between King John and his rebellious barons, however, it failed miserably. By July John was appealing to the Pope for help. Pope Innocent III’s response arrived in England in September. The treaty was declared null and void; it was 'not only shameful and demeaning but also illegal and unjust'. By the time the letter arrived in England, the dispute had already erupted into the Barons’ War.

Deciding they could no longer deal with John’s perfidy, the rebel barons invited the King of France, Philip II, to claim the throne. Philip’s son and heir, the future Louis VIII, accepted the offer. Having landed on the south coast, he marched for London, where he was proclaimed King of England on 2 June 1216.

John’s fortuitous death at Newark in October 1216 turned the tide against Louis and the rebels. The highly respected knight and statesman, William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, was appointed regent for John’s nine-year-old son, Henry III. Marshal’s staunch loyalty was renowned throughout Europe; he was the embodiment of the chivalric code. Many barons who had previously sided with Louis saw the opportunity to come back from the brink, and rally around the young king. Marshal reissued Magna Carta and faced and defeated the joint French and rebel army at Lincoln on 20 May 1217.

Afterwards, the English were able to dictate peace terms to Louis, and the French went home. Magna Carta was issued a third time, along with a new Forest Charter (also on display at Lincoln Castle). Its reissue in 1225, on Henry III attaining his majority, is the one that made it onto the statute books.

The Legacy of Magna Carta

It is hard to overstate the enduring significance of Magna Carta. Although it was initially a document conceived by rebel barons, the regents of Henry III exploited Magna Carta as a royalist device to recover the loyalty of the rebel barons. However, once it was issued it was used as a curb to all regal excesses. In 1265 it was invoked to create the first parliament.

By the late 1200s Magna Carta was regarded as a fundamental statement of English liberties.

Magna Carta set the precedent for future reform programmes, such as the Provisions of Oxford of 1258, the Ordinances of 1311, the Petition of Right of 1628 and the Grand Remonstrance of 1641.

The influence of Magna Carta has spread far beyond England’s shores. It can be seen in the United States’ 1791 Bill of Rights, in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights.

Although a failure in the short term, in the long term, Magna Carta established defined limitations to royal rights, laying down that standard to be observed by the crown and its agents.

It is the closest thing England has to a Constitution.

*********

Sharon Bennett Connolly has a lifelong fascination with history, and has recently discovered a love of writing. She has combined these two in her blog, History…the interesting bits!

Marsha's Favorite Books

My three favorite authors have written books that have impacted my life greatly. I found these three authors at about the same time that I moved to England. This move to England was a dream come true for me. I had always been interested in history, especially anything to do with castles and knights, but moving to a place so rich in history made me seek out books on the subject. I did read many non-fiction history books but this search led me to three historical fiction writers who wrote such brilliantly crafted stories, which in turn propelled my love of medieval history to even greater heights. Not only did these authors and their novels make me thirst for more knowledge of the medieval time period, but they also led me to visit places mentioned in these books.

The first author that I found was Sharon Kay Penman. Ms. Penman wrote a series of books on the Plantagenets or the Angevins starting with the aptly titled When Christ and his Saints Slept, which covers the anarchy of King Stephen's reign to the crowning of Henry Plantagenet. The second book in the series is Time and Chance recounts the tumultuous marriage of Henry and Eleanor of Aquitaine. This book covers Henry's early reign and his conflict with his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. This conflict led to Becket's murder in Canterbury Cathedral. Book three, Devil's Brood, covers the last years of Henry's reign and the family conflicts that affected that time. Book four is titled Lionheart, a novel highlighting Henry and Eleanor's son, Richard. Sharon Kay Penman will continue the Angevin saga with her March release of A King's Ransom, which continues Richard's story.

Penman is a master storyteller who is meticulous in her research and has a writing style that flows effortlessly. Through her writing I was determined to visit Canterbury Cathedral where Becket was murdered. I wanted to immerse myself in the history of the spot and imagine what happened when the four knights of King Henry confronted Becket. The beauty of the cathedral is awe inspiring and the spot of Thomas' martyrdom evokes sadness, bringing Penman's books to life. Here are a few photos of my visit to the cathedral.

 The next author I found was Elizabeth Chadwick. Chadwick writes a series of books about the Marshal family starting with a Place Beyond Courage which details John Marshal and the turbulent times of King Stephen's reign. The Greatest Knight and The Scarlet Lion cover the remarkable life of William Marshal, John's son. I have to say after reading about William's life he is a hero of mine now. Elizabeth Chadwick's writing is also meticulous in research and this meticulous accounting of the facts inter woven with a fabulous story enriches her novels. After reading these superb novels I had to visit one of William's castles. I traveled to Wales and visited Pembroke Castle. I loved to imagine myself walking in William's footsteps. It was a fantastic journey into Wales and William's world.

 The last author I found on my search for quality historical fiction is Helen Hollick. Hollick wrote a novel based on Harold Godwinson/ King Harold II called I am the Chosen King. This novel covers the life of Harold up to his death on the field of Hastings. This poignant and well researched telling of Harold's life prompted me to make the trek to Battle where the English forces met William the Conqueror and the Norman invaders on October 14th, 1066. Walking the battlefield and seeing the remains of the abbey that was built on orders of King William was so emotional for me. One cannot quite grasp the carnage that happened more than 900 years ago on this peaceful field we see today.

These three brilliant authors and their superbly written books made me fall more in love with medieval history, made me research the lives they wrote about, and made me want to travel to the places mentioned in the books, making history come alive for me. I am so appreciative to Sharon Kay Penman, Elizabeth Chadwick, and Helen Hollick for sharing their talent and enriching my life with their books. Without excellent books such as these my life would be the poorer for it.