Magna Carta Week: The Magna Carta - A Childhood Memory

The Magna Carta: A Childhood Memory

by Louise Rule

Back in the day when I was a gangling nine-year-old, with a mass of freckles and the ubiquitous large bow in my hair, we had a Magna Carta Day at school. We were all so excited at the prospect of this. It was 15th June, 1956, a Friday it was, and we were allowed to wear our best clothes for the occasion.

We were lucky in having a teacher who had the knack of making every lesson interesting. Thinking back, I am sure she could have made the telephone directory interesting. She would just sit on the corner of her desk, and, well, just teach. Time flew in her class. Teachers like that are a gift to a child. She was my gift, and she nurtured my love of history. I will never forget her.

HRH Queen Elizabeth II

Queuing for sweets at 
the end of rationing

So, to continue; there hadn't been much to celebrate since WWII had ended, save for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, and another landmark of 1953 for us children was the end of sugar rationing. We formed endless queues outside the sweet shop to buy our humbugs, barley sugars, and gobstoppers. Just don't get me started on gobstoppers with a different colour for each layer.... Sorry, I digress... Magna Carta. We were all excited when our teacher told us of the poem that we would all learn. It was simply called 'King John', by Hugh Chestermann (b. 20.03.1884 - d. 03.11.1941). It can be found in Brian Moses' anthology Blood and Roses: British History in Poetry, which was published by Hodder Children's Books in 2004.

King John

We were given it as a print-out. The teacher put the copies on the front desk, and asked us to take a copy and pass the rest back. This we did, until we each had our own. We were a class in excess of 45 children, being 'baby-boomers'. We were informed that we would be reciting it as a 'round', where one child would recite the first two lines, then the next child, the next two lines, and so on. That is why it would be done as a 'round'. By the time it had been recited many times, it stuck in my head. Over the years, however, I have only remembered the first four lines, but on seeing it again, it all came back to me. 

So, the poem

'King John'

John was a tyrant, John was a tartar

John put his name to the Great Big Charter.

Every baron from Thames to Tweed

Followed the road to Runnymede.

Every baron had something to say

To poor perplexed King John that day.

"Pray sign your name," said Guy de Gaunt,

"It's easily done and it's all we want."

"A J and an O and an N" said Hugo, Baron of Harpenden.

Quietly spoke the Lord Ranbure, 

"Oblige Lord King with your signature."

"Your name my liege, be writ just here,

A mere formality," laughed de Bere.

"A stroke of the pen and the thing is done,"

Murmured Sir Roger of Trumpington.

"Done in a twinkling," sniffed de Guise.

Said Stephen Langton, "Sign if you please!"

So many people egging him on

I can't help feeling sorry for John.

(There is an alternative ending...)

Too many people he did wrong

We have no cause to pity John.

I think it is safe to say, that whichever ending of this poem you prefer, there has never again been a king named John.

I am sure that my continued love of history stemmed from my teacher's enthusiasm for our Magna Carta Day. It conjured up in my mind all the colourful costumes, and the striped tents with their pennants flying in the breeze. I had seen Quo Vadis and Knights of the Round Table at the cinema, starring Robert Taylor, and it was those Hollywood images that were in my mind.

The Great Charter of 1215 (From Wikipedia)

John met the rebel leaders at Runnymede near both the royal fortress of Windsor Castle and the rebel base at Staines, on 10th June 1215, where they presented him with their draft demands for reform, and 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 15th June, general agreement had been made on a text, and on 19th June, the rebels renewed their oaths of loyalty to John and copies of the charter were formally issued.

This from the Magna Carta Society:

[M]agna Carta matters. It is the foundation stone supporting the freedoms enjoyed today by hundreds of millions of people in more than 100 countries. Magna Carta enshrined the Rule of Law in English society. It limited the power of authoritarian rule. It paved the way for trial by jury, modified through the ages as the franchise was extended. It proclaimed certain religious liberties, "the English Church shall be free." It defined limits on taxation; every American remembers that "no taxation without representation" was the cry of the American colonists petitioning the king for their rights as free men. For centuries it has influenced constitutional thinking worldwide including in France, Germany, Japan, the United States and India as well as many Commonwealth countries, and throughout Latin America and Attica. Over the past 800 years, denials of Magna Carta's basic principles have led to a loss of liberties, loss of human rights and even genocide. It is an exceptional document on which democratic society has been constructed.

The original Great Charter was agreed by King John on 15th June 1215, when he acceded to barons' and bishops' demands to limit his powers and directed that it be sealed. This version of Magna Carta was revised several times in the 13th century. The 1297 version became part of English la[w.]

Magna Carta 1215

It is, indeed, a document that transcends all others, and the compiling of which has demonstrated how what we do now most definitely influences the future - not just our future, but everyone's future. It is like the ripples from the stone dropping into still water. If the Magna Carta had not been written, albeit amended, who is to say what our lives would be like now? It is only with the glories of hindsight, that we can imagine the destruction that would undoubtedly have occurred.

So, I say thank you to my teacher of 1956, for gifting me the love of history, and I say thank you, to every baron from Thames to Tweed, who followed that road to Runnymede, to make John put his name to the Great Big Charter, on 15th June 1215.

Louise E. Rule is author of Future Confronted. She can be found on her blog, Facebook, and Twitter.

Magna Carta Week: The Marshals and King John

The Marshals and King John

Lecture paper given by Elizabeth Chadwick at the 2015 Mortimer History Society Conference 

at Hereford Academy Saturday May 16^th

^[Excerpts]

I am going to begin with a quote from the Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal.

“Sire, I beg the Lord our God that, if I ever did anything to please him, that in the end he grant you to grow up to be a worthy man. And if it were the case that you followed in the footsteps of some wicked ancestor, and that your wish was to be like him, then I pray to God, the son of Mary, that he does not give you long to live and that you die before it comes to that.”

These are the words spoken to the 11-year-old King Henry III by William Marshal on his deathbed. The moment is reported in the Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal, a 20,000 line poem commissioned by the Marshal family, specifically, it is thought, by the Marshal’s eldest son William II, to commemorate his father’s great life and to glorify the family. It was completed around 1226. That “certain wicked ancestor” was the young king’s father, King John, who had died two and a half years earlier, leaving the country in almost bankrupt turmoil and rife with civil war.

The Marshal Histoire was intended to be read aloud on the anniversary of William’s death, to his family, and to those who shared their affinity, which rather demonstrates that in the mid-1220s and for a while afterwards, the reputation of King John was set at nought even while his son Henry III was entering manhood. 

Photo ©2015 Rosemary Watson

Courtesy of the author

Despite William Marshal’s  damning deathbed remarks in 1219,  he had served King John and indeed John’s brothers and father in a military capacity through thick and thin for more than 50 years. In some ways they were the reason for his being. No Henry II, no Richard and John, and there would have been no William Marshal Lord of Chepstow, Earl of Pembroke, ruler of Leinster, Lord of Bienfait, Longueville and Orbec in Normandy. All of these and more, plus various posts and fiscal rewards were payment for loyal and intelligent service, both on the battlefield and off it and all were dependent on the favour and patronage of the Angevin kings.

My main thrust today is William Marshal’s relationship with King John. The Histoire may be damning in those parting comments of the Marshal to the boy king,  and yet the Marshal had stood by John when everyone else was deserting him.

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William Marshall was about 20 years old when King John was born in December 1166 at Oxford [… W]hen John was in the care of his wet nurse Agatha, William was coming to young knighthood in Normandy under the tutelage of his distant kinsman William de Tancarville, who was the hereditary Chamberlain.

William entered Queen Eleanor’s household in 1168 after saving her from ambush at the cost of his own wounding and capture by the Lusignan family who were in rebellion. Patrick Earl of Salisbury was killed in the attack. Eleanor [, John's mother,] took a shine to William, paid his ransom and rewarded him with money, horses and weapons from her own purse. He became her man and entered her household. In 1170 he was promoted to the role of tutor in chivalry and marshal of the household of her eldest son Henry, known as the Young King because his father had had him crowned in his own lifetime. 

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Basically William would have watched John growing up from the sidelines with occasional moments of contact between child and man. Whether he had any sympathy for a younger son who would have to make his own way in the world, we don’t know but his main responsibility at this time was the Young King.

The brotherly love between John and young Henry became strained when their father stated his intention of endowing John with three castles that belonged to the Young King. It was one of the reasons that led to a rebellion of the older sons against their father, rebellion that swiftly spread to become a general civil war and resulted in the imprisonment of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was accused of fomenting an uprising with her three older sons. John, too young to be involved, remained out of it on the sidelines. Although Henry II prevailed and  reconciliations were made, the cracks were still deep and ugly. John seems to have remained in favour with his father, sometimes being found in his company and sometimes under the tutelage of Ranulf de Glanville, one of Henry’s able courtiers and lawyers. Throughout this time William Marshal would have continued to be an observer towards his lord’s attitude to his youngest brother and would have encountered John on occasion at gatherings.

The Young King rebelled against his father again in 1183, and this time died during the conflict.  

William Marshall (Drawing)
by Diana Popovic Disco
Photo ©2015 Elizabeth Chadwick
Courtesy of the author

Following his death, William Marshal went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and when he returned took up employment with Henry II. During the period between 1186 and Henry II’s death in 1189, William would have had further time to get to know John as the king’s youngest son developed into young manhood. William was with Henry II at the bitter end when the king died. Richard was now in rebellion against him and had actively hounded him. At one point William had had to face down the hotly pursuing Richard by killing his horse under him and stopping him in his tracks. But at least Richard’s intentions were clearly signaled.

When Henry II died, he was alone. His naked corpse had been robbed by his servants while his household was elsewhere. John by this time had seen the writing on the wall and had deserted the sinking ship. His father is supposed to have asked for a list of those who had betrayed him, and on seeing John’s at the top of it, had turned his face to the wall and died.

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Richard, however, was preparing to go on crusade and left William Marshal as one of several justiciars to help run things in Richard’s absence […] Without going into too much convoluted political detail,  Richard had left the government of England partially in the hands of his chancellor, William Longchamp, bishop of Ely […] William and the other justiciars had to try and maintain a balance of power […T]hen came the news that Richard had been captured while returning from crusade, and a massive ransom for his return was being demanded by the Emperor of Germany.

John tried to persuade everyone that Richard was dead and that he wasn’t coming back. His mother, meanwhile, convinced that Richard was very much alive, was scrambling to raise the enormous ransom demanded of 150,000 marks. For a time John played along but in secret was negotiating a deal with Philippe of France to try and keep Richard imprisoned. The men offered  Emperor Heinrich various monetary bribes that they couldn’t possibly fulfil in order to keep Richard incarcerated. 

When that didn’t work and Richard started out for home, John decamped to France and tried to make further deals with King Philippe that basically resulted in him selling out Normandy from under Richard’s feet.

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William, however, weathered Richard’s return and continued in the king’s high favour. He accompanied him to Normandy where Richard was reconciled with John. Richard’s way round the problem of his rebellious brother was to call John a child who had been badly advised. John was by this time heading for 30 and hardly a child, so it may have galled him to have this attitude taken toward him, but at the same time it got him off the hook.

Between 1194 and 1199 William’s relationship with John was a working one as Richard strove to restore the damage done while he was on crusade. John served him to all intents and purposes faithfully and well during this time – indeed was an asset. He and William Marshall worked together and were at the Siege of Milly where they captured the castle - this is the one where William supposedly ran up a siege ladder and then, tired after his exertions on the battlements and a fight with the constable whom he defeated, sat on him to keep him down while William recovered. This is reported in the Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal as being an event where Richard was present, but in actual fact John was the other military commander there. The Histoire, however, seldom has anything good to say about John, and avoids mention of him in a positive military role. The fact stands though, despite the Histoire, that William and John worked well together during the years between 1194 and 1199, and would have built up a working relationship and even rapport.

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Photo ©2015 Rosemary Watson

Courtesy of the author

In 1199 Richard died while besieging the Castle of Chalus in the Limousin. He was struck in the area of the collarbone by a crossbow bolt which festered and he died soon after of blood poisoning or gangrene. While still lucid, he sent word to William Marshal and Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, who were in Rouen telling them to secure the Treasury there. The Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal tells us that William and Hubert Walter had a discussion about who should inherit the throne – Arthur of Brittany who was Richard’s teenage nephew, or John who was 33 years old, a man and an accomplished warrior. Hubert Walter thought that Arthur had the better right to the Crown but William Marshall argued for John. In the event William Marshal won out and John was chosen. 

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His own honeymoon with John at the outset of the reign was not to last […] John lost Anjou, Maine and Normandy to the French. Whereas his brother Richard had won the battle for the hearts and minds of his people, John did not have the same propensity nor the same leadership qualities and military nous.

He did have a stroke of luck when he captured his nephew Arthur who was besieging his grandmother, John’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, at the Castle of Mirebeau, 20 miles from Poitiers,  but afterwards John ruined the advantage by treating those he captured with such shocking cruelty that men were horrified at his behaviour. “The king kept his prisoners in such a horrible manner and such abject confinement that it seemed an indignity and a disgrace to all those with him who witnessed his cruelty,”  says the Histoire. 

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William was in the act of building up a patrimony for his sons and to this end when John’s grip on Normandy went down the pan, William did a deal with Philippe of France to try and keep his estate intact but it meant swearing allegiance to Philippe for his lands on the Norman side of the channel. John took a dim view of this and the relationship between him and the Marshal became strained. John saw William’s action as a desertion of duty and moreover double-dealing. William saw it as a prudent act to preserve his land, but even so was sailing close to the wind. When John planned an invasion of France in 1206, William refused to go. In the event so did most of John’s nobility but John knew who the ringleader was. The Marshal said to the other barons at the height of the quarrel at Portsmouth, “My lords look at me, for, by the faith I owe you, I am for you all this day an exemplar and model. Be on your alert against the king: what he thinks to do with me he will do to each and every one of you, or even more if he gets the upper hand over you.” That John did not move against William was largely down to the fact that William had a mass of support behind him, and at this stage John didn’t feel strong enough to test men’s loyalty.

Not long after this, William requested permission to go to Ireland [… John] demanded a hostage of William Marshal - his oldest son before he would let William cross […] in 1206. William handed over the youth and continued preparations to leave. John, not wanting William to sail at all, demanded his second son, too […] William’s handing over of his children probably saved his skin. When a son was demanded of de Braose’s wife she replied that she would not hand any child of hers over to the man who had murdered his own nephew. That sealed her death sentence and John went after her with a vengeance. She and her eldest son were eventually to starve to death in the dungeon of Corfe Castle, or some say Windsor […] William Marshal’s own wife Isabel de Clare was not happy at handing over their sons, but William’s will prevailed.

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William was left after that to his own devices in Ireland for several years. It wasn’t exactly retirement, but it was a retreat from the fray, like entering one of the refuges at a tourney. His sons, however, were still hostages and one has to wonder how they were being brought up away from the Marshal enclave and what their opinion of King John was. And William himself: did he want his boys being raised away from his influences among men he did not trust? Learning ways he might consider not to be good for them? Certainly their mother would have been concerned. She didn’t want them to go and left to her own devices might have refused to hand them over with disastrous consequences.

By 1212, with interdicts and rebellions happening on the mainland, John requested William’s help, and offered to return his sons to their family – they’d been away around five years. William agreed and moved back to England to serve John in both a military and diplomatic capacity and was received back into the fold. Why this volte face by the king? Perhaps he realised how few allies he had in his pocket.  William could have refused the summons. Or he could have accepted, taken his sons and run, and then declared for the rebels, but he didn’t. He chose to stand by John and act as a military commander and adviser. It could be that, presented with a sow’s ear he was willing to take the challenge of making it into a silk purse. Someone had to trouble shoot and repair this terrible fix they were in.

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Now that the crisis was over a large rebellious faction of barons were protesting about the harshness of John’s rule – the unfair taxes, the abuses of rights, the ridiculous fines. What had been a half mark fine in the days of Henry II and Richard now sometimes amounted to hundreds of marks. John would impose multi-thousand pound fines on barons to keep them in their place, and if they couldn’t pay, he’d use it as an excuse to take over their castles. He employed mercenaries to do his bidding. He demanded money with menaces basically and receiving justice depended on how much you could pay to get it.  This was the birth of the notion of Magna Carta, to bring the king under the law and stop these abuses.

Magna Carta
Wikipedia

King John was clearly against the Magna Carta – anything that limited his powers was not going to be flavour of the month, but with the French threatening and his barons in rebellion, he had little choice but to negotiate. This I think is where William comes in. John had used him before as a diplomat when it came to negotiating with the King of France and the way William had woven his way through the tricky mid years of the 1200’s was a testament to his cool head and diplomatic abilities. He also had strong Templar connections and the Templars were a kind of neutral party – like the United Nations today, where both sides could meet to discuss their differences. I believe that while William had no say in drafting the clauses of Magna Carta, he did have input in negotiating the terms and at least bringing King John to the table at Runnymede.  Without William driving the diplomacy, there might not have been a Magna Carta at all. In other words both sides were willing to trust him. He had been through the fire with King John, and the king’s relationship with him was now cordial – as far as the king was concerned. Everyone knew about his trouble with the king, and that while acting on John’s behalf, he was also one of them. Ever the diplomat, William maintained a neutral façade.

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William continued to stick by King John as the French landed and the battle for England became a civil war. He never wavered. It wasn’t out of love for John, whom he made clear on his death bed that he detested, but possibly it was for the monarchy as a whole – for who had the right. Perhaps even out of loyalty to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the liege lady who had given him his first boost up the ladder and is one of the few women mentioned in the Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal. This was her last remaining son, for better or worse.

When John was dying, he named William Marshal one of the executors of his will and the Histoire puts its hero in the forefront and has John asking William to take care of the country for him. The wording is clearly propaganda bigging up its hero, but there is a germ of truth there, too. William was one of the stalwarts and one of the few people capable of repairing the hole in the fabric. 

Although in his 70’s William took on the job of regent to the young Henry III and reissued Magna Carta, removing or moderating the clauses that were proving to be sticking points, and gradually drawing everyone back into the fold and dealing with the French, both by battle at Lincoln and Sandwich in 1217, and by diplomacy in making a peace treaty with Prince Louis of France. 

William Marshal
Cast Court replica effigy
Victoria and Albert Museum
Photo ©2015 Elizabeth Chadwick

Courtesy of the author

William’s role as caretaker of the realm and of the young Henry III came to an end when he fell ill in either late 1218 or early 1219 and was borne home to his manor of Caversham to slowly die as winter turned to spring and spring looked toward summer. Here too, the Young King Henry III was brought from Reading to William’s sickbed and the words uttered about the “wicked ancestor.”

To sum up the relationship between William Marshal and King John, I would say that it was one of reciprocity that at times faltered because of ambition and suspicion, but was weathered by the diplomacy of the Marshal. The latter had no love or even liking for his liege lord, but he had a wider loyalty to the monarchy, a pattern perhaps set in his own childhood by his father’s sacrifices at Wherwell and Newbury, and then his own early service to Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Young King. It was a default in the Marshal that wasn’t to translate to his sons and their relationship with Henry III.  

Were I to compare the Marshal with a modern-day political leader, I’d have to say Nelson Mandela. What strikes me is their ability to cut through the personal dislikes and past injuries to see the big picture and do their best for national stability.

To read in its entirety Elizabeth Chadwick's fascinating article about the relationship between King John and William Marshal, please follow the link to her blog, Living the History. 

Elizabeth Chadwick developed a fascination for the Middle Ages in her teens and began writing historical fiction as a hobby. In her thirties that hobby became a career when she was taken on by a leading literary agent and her first novel, The Wild Hunt, won a Betty Trask Award. Her novel The Greatest Knight was a New York Times bestseller, and its sequel, The Scarlet Lion, was nominated as one of the top 10 historical novels of the decade by Historical Novel Society founder Richard Lee. To Defy a King won the Romantic Novelists' Association (RNA) Best Historical Fiction of the Year Award in 2011. She is currently writing the third novel in a trilogy about Eleanor of Aquitaine, stripping back the years of old varnish and embellishment before adding fresh colours and nuances to that particular area of historical storytelling.

Chadwick has also reviewed Dan Jones's Magna Carta: The Making and Legacy of the Great Charter, which can be found at The History Girls. You can learn more about this author and her works at her website; her blog, Living the History; on Facebook and at Twitter. She also runs a Facebook group dedicated to William Marshal, his life and times, which is open to all.

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

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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.

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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.

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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!