identity of municipal rights. Oxford had already passed through the
earlier steps of her advance towards municipal freedom before the
conquest of the Norman. Her burghers assembled in their own
Portmannimote, and their dues to the crown were assessed at a fixed sum
of honey or coin. But the formal definition of their rights dates, as in
the case of London, from the time of Henry the First. The customs and
exemptions of its townsmen were confirmed by Henry the Second "as ever
they enjoyed them in the time of Henry my grandfather, and in like manner
as my citizens of London hold them." By this date the town had attained
entire judicial and commercial freedom, and liberty of external commerce
was secured by the exemption of its citizens from toll on the king's
lands. Complete independence was reached when a charter of John
substituted a mayor of the town's own choosing for the reeve or bailiff
of the crown. But dry details such as these tell little of the quick
pulse of popular life that beat in the thirteenth century through such a
community as that of Oxford. The church of St. Martin in the very heart
of it, at the "Quatrevoix" or Carfax where its four streets met, was the
centre of the city life. The town-mote was held in its churchyard.
Justice was administered ere yet a townhall housed the infant magistracy
by mayor or bailiff sitting beneath a low pent-house, the "penniless
bench" of later days, outside its eastern wall. Its bell summoned the
burghers to council or arms. Around the church the trade-gilds were
ranged as in some vast encampment. To the south of it lay Spicery and
Vintnery, the quarter of the richer burgesses. Fish-street fell noisily
down to the bridge and the ford. The Corn-market occupied then as now the
street which led to Northgate. The stalls of the butchers stretched along
the "Butcher-row," which formed the road to the bailey and the castle.
Close beneath the church lay a nest of huddled lanes, broken by a stately
synagogue, and traversed from time to time by the yellow gaberdine of the
Jew. Soldiers from the castle rode clashing through the narrow streets;
the bells of Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; processions of
pilgrims wound through gates and lane to the shrine of St. Frideswide.
Frays were common enough; now the sack of a Jew's house; now burgher
drawing knife on burgher; now an outbreak of the young student lads who
were growing every day in numbers and audacity. But as yet the town was
well in hand. The clang of the city bell called every citizen to his
door; the call of the mayor brought trade after trade with bow in hand
and banners flying to enforce the king's peace.
[Sidenote: St. Edmundsbury]
The advance of towns which had grown up not on the royal domain but
around abbey or castle was slower and more difficult. The story of St.
Edmundsbury shows how gradual was the transition from pure serfage to an
imperfect freedom. Much that had been plough-land here in the Confessor's
time was covered with houses by the time of Henry the Second. The
building of the great abbey-church drew its craftsmen and masons to
mingle with the ploughmen and reapers of the Abbot's domain. The troubles
of the time helped here as elsewhere the progress of the town; serfs,
fugitives from justice or their lord, the trader, the Jew, naturally
sought shelter under the strong hand of St. Edmund. But the settlers were
wholly at the Abbot's mercy. Not a settler but was bound to pay his pence
to the Abbot's treasury, to plough a rood of his land, to reap in his
harvest-field, to fold his sheep in the Abbey folds, to help bring the
annual catch of eels from the Abbey waters. Within the four crosses that
bounded the Abbot's domain land and water were his; the cattle of the
townsmen paid for their pasture on the common; if the fullers refused the
loan of their cloth the cellarer would refuse the use of the stream and
seize their cloths wherever he found them. No toll might be levied from
tenants of the Abbey farms, and customers had to wait before shop and
stall till the buyers of the Abbot had had the pick of the market. There
was little chance of redress, for if burghers complained in folk-mote it
was before the Abbot's officers that its meeting was held; if they
appealed to the alderman he was the Abbot's nominee and received the
horn, the symbol of his office, at the Abbot's hands. Like all the
greater revolutions of society, the advance from this mere serfage was a
silent one; indeed its more galling instances of oppression seem to have
slipped unconsciously away. Some, like the eel-fishing, were commuted for
an easy rent; others, like the slavery of the fullers and the toll of
flax, simply disappeared. By usage, by omission, by downright
forgetfulness, here by a little struggle, there by a present to a needy
abbot, the town won freedom.
[Sidenote: The Towns and Justice]
But progress was not always unconscious, and one incident in the history
of St. Edmundsbury is remarkable, not merely as indicating the advance of
law, but yet more as marking the part which a new moral sense of man's
right to equal justice was to play in the general advance of the realm.
Rude as the borough was, it possessed the right of meeting in full
assembly of the townsmen for government and law. Justice was administered
in presence of the burgesses, and the accused acquitted or condemned by
the oath of his neighbours. Without the borough bounds however the system
of Norman judicature prevailed; and the rural tenants who did suit and
service at the Cellarer's court were subjected to the trial by battle.
The execution of a farmer named Ketel who came under this feudal
jurisdiction brought the two systems into vivid contrast. Ketel seems to
have been guiltless of the crime laid to his charge; but the duel went
against him and he was hung just without the gates. The taunts of the
townsmen woke his fellow farmers to a sense of wrong. "Had Ketel been a
dweller within the borough," said the burgesses, "he would have got his
acquittal from the oaths of his neighbours, as our liberty is"; and even
the monks were moved to a decision that their tenants should enjoy equal
freedom and justice with the townsmen. The franchise of the town was
extended to the rural possessions of the Abbey without it; the farmers
"came to the toll-house, were written in the alderman's roll, and paid
the town-penny." A chance story preserved in a charter of later date
shows the same struggle for justice going on in a greater town. At
Leicester the trial by compurgation, the rough predecessor of trial by
jury, had been abolished by the Earls in favour of trial by battle. The
aim of the burgesses was to regain their old justice, and in this a
touching incident at last made them successful. "It chanced that two
kinsmen, Nicholas the son of Acon and Geoffrey the son of Nicholas, waged
a duel about a certain piece of land concerning which a dispute had
arisen between them; and they fought from the first to the ninth hour,
each conquering by turns. Then one of them fleeing from the other till he
came to a certain little pit, as he stood on the brink of the pit and was
about to fall therein, his kinsman said to him 'Take care of the pit,
turn back, lest thou shouldest fall into it.' Thereat so much clamour and
noise was made by the bystanders and those who were sitting around that
the Earl heard these clamours as far off as the castle, and he enquired
of some how it was there was such a clamour, and answer was made to him
that two kinsmen were fighting about a certain piece of ground, and that
one had fled till he reached a certain little pit, and that as he stood
over the pit and was about to fall into it the other warned him. Then the
townsmen being moved with pity, made a covenant with the Earl that they
should give him threepence yearly for each house in the High Street
that had a gable, on condition that he should grant to them that the
twenty-four jurors who were in Leicester from ancient times should from
that time forward discuss and decide all pleas they might have among
themselves."
[Sidenote: Division of Labour]
At the time we have reached this struggle for emancipation was nearly
over. The larger towns had secured the privilege of self-government, the
administration of justice, and the control of their own trade. The reigns
of Richard and John mark the date in our municipal history at which towns
began to acquire the right of electing their own chief magistrate, the
Portreeve or Mayor, who had till then been a nominee of the crown. But
with the close of this outer struggle opened an inner struggle between
the various classes of the townsmen themselves. The growth of wealth and
industry was bringing with it a vast increase of population. The mass of
the new settlers, composed as they were of escaped serfs, of traders
without landed holdings, of families who had lost their original lot in
the borough, and generally of the artizans and the poor, had no part in
the actual life of the town. The right of trade and of the regulation of
trade in common with all other forms of jurisdiction lay wholly in the
hands of the landed burghers whom we have described. By a natural process
too their superiority in wealth produced a fresh division between the
"burghers" of the merchant-gild and the unenfranchised mass around them.
The same change which severed at Florence the seven Greater Arts or
trades from the fourteen Lesser Arts, and which raised the three
occupations of banking, the manufacture and the dyeing of cloth, to a
position of superiority even within the privileged circle of the seven,
told though with less force on the English boroughs. The burghers of the
merchant-gild gradually concentrated themselves on the greater operations
of commerce, on trades which required a larger capital, while the meaner
employments of general traffic were abandoned to their poorer neighbours.
This advance in the division of labour is marked by such severances as we
note in the thirteenth century of the cloth merchant from the tailor or
the leather merchant from the butcher.
[Sidenote: Trade-Gilds]
But the result of this severance was all-important in its influence on
the constitution of our towns. The members of the trades thus abandoned
by the wealthier burghers formed themselves into Craft-gilds which soon
rose into dangerous rivalry with the original Merchant-gild of the town.
A seven years' apprenticeship formed the necessary prelude to full
membership of these trade-gilds. Their regulations were of the minutest
character; the quality and value of work were rigidly prescribed, the
hours of toil fixed "from day-break to curfew," and strict provision made
against competition in labour. At each meeting of these gilds their
members gathered round the Craft-box which contained the rules of their
Society, and stood with bared heads as it was opened. The warden and a
quorum of gild-brothers formed a court which enforced the ordinances of
the gild, inspected all work done by its members, confiscated unlawful
tools or unworthy goods; and disobedience to their orders was punished by
fines or in the last resort by expulsion, which involved the loss of a
right to trade. A common fund was raised by contributions among the
members, which not only provided for the trade objects of the gild but
sufficed to found chantries and masses and set up painted windows in the
church of their patron saint. Even at the present day the arms of a
craft-gild may often be seen blazoned in cathedrals side by side with
those of prelates and of kings. But it was only by slow degrees that they
rose to such a height as this. The first steps in their existence were
the most difficult, for to enable a trade-gild to carry out its objects
with any success it was first necessary that the whole body of craftsmen
belonging to the trade should be compelled to join the gild, and secondly
that a legal control over the trade itself should be secured to it. A
royal charter was indispensable for these purposes, and over the grant of
these charters took place the first struggle with the merchant-gilds
which had till then solely exercised jurisdiction over trade within the
boroughs. The weavers, who were the first trade-gild to secure royal
sanction in the reign of Henry the First, were still engaged in a contest
for existence as late as the reign of John when the citizens of London
bought for a time the suppression of their gild. Even under the House of
Lancaster Exeter was engaged in resisting the establishment of a tailors'
gild. From the eleventh century however the spread of these societies
went steadily on, and the control of trade passed more and more from the
merchant-gilds to the craft-gilds.
[Sidenote: Greater and Lesser Folk]
It is this struggle, to use the technical terms of the time, of the
"greater folk" against the "lesser folk," or of the "commune," the
general mass of the inhabitants, against the "prudhommes," or "wiser"
few, which brought about, as it passed from the regulation of trade to
the general government of the town, the great civic revolution of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. On the Continent, and especially
along the Rhine, the struggle was as fierce as the supremacy of the older
burghers had been complete. In Köln the craftsmen had been reduced to all
but serfage, and the merchant of Brussels might box at his will the ears
of "the man without heart or honour who lives by his toil." Such social
tyranny of class over class brought a century of bloodshed to the cities
of Germany; but in England the tyranny of class over class was restrained
by the general tenor of the law, and the revolution took for the most
part a milder form. The longest and bitterest strife of all was naturally
at London. Nowhere had the territorial constitution struck root so
deeply, and nowhere had the landed oligarchy risen to such a height of
wealth and influence. The city was divided into wards, each of which was
governed by an alderman drawn from the ruling class. In some indeed the
office seems to have become hereditary. The "magnates," or "barons," of
the merchant-gild advised alone on all matters of civic government or
trade regulation, and distributed or assessed at their will the revenues
or burthens of the town. Such a position afforded an opening for
corruption and oppression of the most galling kind; and it seems to have
been a general impression of the unfair assessment of the dues levied on
the poor and the undue burthens which were thrown on the unenfranchised
classes which provoked the first serious discontent. In the reign of
Richard the First William of the Long Beard, though one of the governing
body, placed himself at the head of a conspiracy which in the
panic-stricken fancy of the burghers numbered fifty thousand of the
craftsmen. His eloquence, his bold defiance of the aldermen in the
town-mote, gained him at any rate a wide popularity, and the crowds who
surrounded him hailed him as "the saviour of the poor." One of his
addresses is luckily preserved to us by a hearer of the time. In mediæval
fashion he began with a text from the Vulgate, "Ye shall draw water with
joy from the fountain of the Saviour." "I," he began, "am the saviour of
the poor. Ye poor men who have felt the weight of rich men's hands, draw
from my fountain waters of wholesome instruction and that with joy, for
the time of your visitation is at hand. For I will divide the waters from
the waters. It is the people who are the waters, and I will divide the
lowly and faithful folk from the proud and faithless folk; I will part
the chosen from the reprobate as light from darkness." But it was in vain
that he strove to win royal favour for the popular cause. The support of
the moneyed classes was essential to Richard in the costly wars with
Philip of France; and the Justiciar, Archbishop Hubert, after a moment of
hesitation issued orders for William Longbeard's arrest. William felled
with an axe the first soldier who advanced to seize him, and taking
refuge with a few adherents in the tower of St. Mary-le-Bow summoned his
adherents to rise. Hubert however, who had already flooded the city with
troops, with bold contempt of the right of sanctuary set fire to the
tower. William was forced to surrender, and a burgher's son, whose father
he had slain, stabbed him as he came forth. With his death the quarrel
slumbered for more than fifty years. But the movement towards equality
went steadily on. Under pretext of preserving the peace the
unenfranchised townsmen united in secret frith-gilds of their own, and
mobs rose from time to time to sack the houses of foreigners and the
wealthier burgesses. Nor did London stand alone in this movement. In all
the larger towns the same discontent prevailed, the same social growth
called for new institutions, and in their silent revolt against the
oppression of the Merchant-gild the Craft-gilds were training themselves
to stand forward as champions of a wider liberty in the Barons' War.
[Sidenote: The Villein]
Without the towns progress was far slower and more fitful. It would seem
indeed that the conquest of the Norman bore harder on the rural
population than on any other class of Englishmen. Under the later kings
of the house of Ælfred the number of absolute slaves and the number of
freemen had alike diminished. The pure slave class had never been
numerous, and it had been reduced by the efforts of the Church, perhaps
by the general convulsion of the Danish wars. But these wars had often
driven the ceorl or freeman of the township to "commend" himself to a
thegn who pledged him his protection in consideration of payment in a
rendering of labour. It is probable that these dependent ceorls are the
"villeins" of the Norman epoch, the most numerous class of the Domesday
Survey, men sunk indeed from pure freedom and bound both to soil and
lord, but as yet preserving much of their older rights, retaining their
land, free as against all men but their lord, and still sending
representatives to hundred-moot and shire-moot. They stood therefore far
above the "landless man," the man who had never possessed even under the
old constitution political rights, whom the legislation of the English
kings had forced to attach himself to a lord on pain of outlawry, and who
served as household servant or as hired labourer or at the best as
rent-paying tenant of land which was not his own. The Norman knight or
lawyer however saw little distinction between these classes; and the
tendency of legislation under the Angevins was to blend all in a single
class of serfs. While the pure "theow" or absolute slave disappeared
therefore the ceorl or villein sank lower in the social scale. But though
the rural population was undoubtedly thrown more together and fused into
a more homogeneous class, its actual position corresponded very
imperfectly with the view of the lawyers. All indeed were dependents on a
lord. The manor-house became the centre of every English village. The
manor-court was held in its hall; it was here that the lord or his
steward received homage, recovered fines, held the view of frank-pledge,
or enrolled the villagers in their tithing. Here too, if the lord
possessed criminal jurisdiction, was held his justice court, and without
its doors stood his gallows. Around it lay the lord's demesne or
home-farm, and the cultivation of this rested wholly with the "villeins"
of the manor. It was by them that the great barn was filled with sheaves,
the sheep shorn, the grain malted, the wood hewn for the manor-hall fire.
These services were the labour-rent by which they held their lands, and
it was the nature and extent of this labour-rent which parted one class
of the population from another. The "villein," in the strict sense of the
word, was bound only to gather in his lord's harvest and to aid in the
ploughing and sowing of autumn and Lent. The cottar, the bordar, and the
labourer were bound to help in the work of the home-farm throughout the
year.
But these services and the time of rendering them were strictly limited
by custom, not only in the case of the ceorl or villein but in that of
the originally meaner "landless man." The possession of his little
homestead with the ground around it, the privilege of turning out his
cattle on the waste of the manor, passed quietly and insensibly from mere
indulgences that could be granted or withdrawn at a lord's caprice into
rights that could be pleaded at law. The number of teams, the fines, the
reliefs, the services that a lord could claim, at first mere matter of
oral tradition, came to be entered on the court-roll of the manor, a copy
of which became the title-deed of the villein. It was to this that he
owed the name of "copy-holder" which at a later time superseded his older
title. Disputes were settled by a reference to this roll or on oral
evidence of the custom at issue, but a social arrangement which was
eminently characteristic of the English spirit of compromise generally
secured a fair adjustment of the claims of villein and lord. It was the
duty of the lord's bailiff to exact their due services from the villeins,
but his coadjutor in this office, the reeve or foreman of the manor, was
chosen by the tenants themselves and acted as representative of their
interests and rights. A fresh step towards freedom was made by the
growing tendency to commute labour-services for money-payments. The
population was slowly increasing, and as the law of gavel-kind which was
applicable to all landed estates not held by military tenure divided the
inheritance of the tenantry equally among their sons, the holding of each
tenant and the services due from it became divided in a corresponding
degree. A labour-rent thus became more difficult to enforce, while the
increase of wealth among the tenantry and the rise of a new spirit of
independence made it more burthensome to those who rendered it. It was
probably from this cause that the commutation of the arrears of labour
for a money payment, which had long prevailed on every estate, gradually
developed into a general commutation of services. We have already
witnessed the silent progress of this remarkable change in the
case of St. Edmundsbury, but the practice soon became universal, and
"malt-silver," "wood-silver," and "larder-silver" gradually took the
place of the older personal services on the court-rolls. The process of
commutation was hastened by the necessities of the lords themselves. The
luxury of the castle-hall, the splendour and pomp of chivalry, the cost
of campaigns drained the purses of knight and baron, and the sale of
freedom to a serf or exemption from services to a villein afforded an
easy and tempting mode of refilling them. In this process even kings took
part. At a later time, under Edward the Third, commissioners were sent to
royal estates for the especial purpose of selling manumissions to the
king's serfs; and we still possess the names of those who were
enfranchised with their families by a payment of hard cash in aid of the
exhausted exchequer.
[Sidenote: England]
Such was the people which had been growing into a national unity and a
national vigour while English king and English baronage battled for rule.
But king and baronage themselves had changed like townsman and ceorl. The
loss of Normandy, entailing as it did the loss of their Norman lands, was
the last of many influences which had been giving through a century and a
half a national temper to the baronage. Not only the "new men," the
ministers out of whom the two Henries had raised a nobility, were bound
to the Crown, but the older feudal houses now owned themselves as
Englishmen and set aside their aims after personal independence for a
love of the general freedom of the land. They stood out as the natural
leaders of a people bound together by the stern government which had
crushed all local division, which had accustomed men to the enjoyment of
a peace and justice that imperfect as it seems to modern eyes was almost
unexampled elsewhere in Europe, and which had trained them to something
of their old free government again by the very machinery of election it
used to facilitate its heavy taxation. On the other hand the loss of
Normandy brought home the king. The growth which had been going on had
easily escaped the eyes of rulers who were commonly absent from the realm
and busy with the affairs of countries beyond the sea. Henry the Second
had been absent for years from England: Richard had only visited it twice
for a few months: John had as yet been almost wholly occupied with his
foreign dominions. To him as to his brother England had as yet been
nothing but a land whose gold paid the mercenaries that followed him, and
whose people bowed obediently to his will. It was easy to see that
between such a ruler and such a nation once brought together strife must
come: but that the strife came as it did and ended as it did was due
above all to the character of the king.
[Sidenote: John]
"Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of John."
The terrible verdict of his contemporaries has passed into the sober
judgement of history. Externally John possessed all the quickness, the
vivacity, the cleverness, the good-humour, the social charm which
distinguished his house. His worst enemies owned that he toiled steadily
and closely at the work of administration. He was fond of learned men
like Gerald of Wales. He had a strange gift of attracting friends and of
winning the love of women. But in his inner soul John was the worst
outcome of the Angevins. He united into one mass of wickedness their
insolence, their selfishness, their unbridled lust, their cruelty and
tyranny, their shamelessness, their superstition, their cynical
indifference to honour or truth. In mere boyhood he tore with brutal
levity the beards of the Irish chieftains who came to own him as their
lord. His ingratitude and perfidy brought his father with sorrow to the
grave. To his brother he was the worst of traitors. All Christendom
believed him to be the murderer of his nephew, Arthur of Britanny. He
abandoned one wife and was faithless to another. His punishments were
refinements of cruelty, the starvation of children, the crushing old men
under copes of lead. His court was a brothel where no woman was safe from
the royal lust, and where his cynicism loved to publish the news of his
victims' shame. He was as craven in his superstition as he was daring in
his impiety. Though he scoffed at priests and turned his back on the mass
even amidst the solemnities of his coronation, he never stirred on a
journey without hanging relics round his neck. But with the wickedness of
his race he inherited its profound ability. His plan for the relief of
Château Gaillard, the rapid march by which he shattered Arthur's hopes at
Mirebeau, showed an inborn genius for war. In the rapidity and breadth of
his political combinations he far surpassed the statesmen of his time.
Throughout his reign we see him quick to discern the difficulties of his
position, and inexhaustible in the resources with which he met them. The
overthrow of his continental power only spurred him to the formation of a
league which all but brought Philip to the ground; and the sudden revolt
of England was parried by a shameless alliance with the Papacy. The
closer study of John's history clears away the charges of sloth and
incapacity with which men tried to explain the greatness of his fall. The
awful lesson of his life rests on the fact that the king who lost
Normandy, became the vassal of the Pope, and perished in a struggle of
despair against English freedom, was no weak and indolent voluptuary but
the ablest and most ruthless of the Angevins.
[Sidenote: Innocent the Third]
From the moment of his return to England in 1204 John's whole energies
were bent to the recovery of his dominions on the Continent. He
impatiently collected money and men for the support of those adherents of
the House of Anjou who were still struggling against the arms of France
in Poitou and Guienne, and in the summer of 1205 he gathered an army at
Portsmouth and prepared to cross the Channel. But his project was
suddenly thwarted by the resolute opposition of the Primate, Hubert
Walter, and the Earl of Pembroke, William Marshal. So completely had both
the baronage and the Church been humbled by his father that the attitude
of their representatives revealed to the king a new spirit of national
freedom which was rising around him, and John at once braced himself to a
struggle with it. The death of Hubert Walter in July, only a few weeks
after his protest, removed his most formidable opponent, and the king
resolved to neutralize the opposition of the Church by placing a creature
of his own at its head. John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, was elected by
the monks of Canterbury at his bidding, and enthroned as Primate. But in
a previous though informal gathering the convent had already chosen its
sub-prior, Reginald, as Archbishop. The rival claimants hastened to
appeal to Rome, and their appeal reached the Papal Court before
Christmas. The result of the contest was a startling one both for
themselves and for the king. After a year's careful examination Innocent
the Third, who now occupied the Papal throne, quashed at the close of
1206 both the contested elections. The decision was probably a just one,
but Innocent was far from stopping there. The monks who appeared before
him brought powers from the convent to choose a new Primate should their
earlier nomination be set aside; and John, secretly assured of their
choice of Grey, had promised to confirm their election. But the bribes
which the king lavished at Rome failed to win the Pope over to this plan;
and whether from mere love of power, for he was pushing the Papal claims
of supremacy over Christendom further than any of his predecessors, or as
may fairly be supposed in despair of a free election within English
bounds, Innocent commanded the monks to elect in his presence Stephen
Langton to the archiepiscopal see.
[Sidenote: The Interdict]
Personally a better choice could not have been made, for Stephen was a
man who by sheer weight of learning and holiness of life had risen to the
dignity of Cardinal, and whose after career placed him in the front rank
of English patriots. But in itself the step was an usurpation of the
rights both of the Church and of the Crown. The king at once met it with
resistance. When Innocent consecrated the new Primate in June 1207, and
threatened the realm with interdict if Langton were any longer excluded
from his see, John replied by a counter-threat that the interdict should
be followed by the banishment of the clergy and the mutilation of every
Italian he could seize in the realm. How little he feared the priesthood
he showed when the clergy refused his demand of a thirteenth of movables
from the whole country and Archbishop Geoffry of York resisted the tax
before the Council. John banished the Archbishop and extorted the money.
Innocent however was not a man to draw back from his purpose, and in
March 1208 the interdict he had threatened fell upon the land. All
worship save that of a few privileged orders, all administration of
Sacraments save that of private baptism, ceased over the length and
breadth of the country: the church-bells were silent, the dead lay
unburied on the ground. Many of the bishops fled from the country. The
Church in fact, so long the main support of the royal power against the
baronage, was now driven into opposition. Its change of attitude was to
be of vast moment in the struggle which was impending; but John recked
little of the future; he replied to the interdict by confiscating the
lands of the clergy who observed it, by subjecting them in spite of their
privileges to the royal courts, and by leaving outrages on them
unpunished. "Let him go," said John, when a Welshman was brought before
him for the murder of a priest, "he has killed my enemy." In 1209 the
Pope proceeded to the further sentence of excommunication, and the king
was formally cut off from the pale of the Church. But the new sentence
was met with the same defiance as the old. Five of the bishops fled over
sea, and secret disaffection was spreading widely, but there was no
public avoidance of the excommunicated king. An Archdeacon of Norwich who
withdrew from his service was crushed to death under a cope of lead, and
the hint was sufficient to prevent either prelate or noble from following
his example.
[Sidenote: The Deposition]
The attitude of John showed the power which the administrative reforms of
his father had given to the Crown. He stood alone, with nobles estranged
from him and the Church against him, but his strength seemed utterly
unbroken. From the first moment of his rule John had defied the baronage.
The promise to satisfy their demand for redress of wrongs in the past
reign, a promise made at his election, remained unfulfilled; when the
demand was repeated he answered it by seizing their castles and taking
their children as hostages for their loyalty. The cost of his fruitless
threats of war had been met by heavy and repeated taxation, by increased
land tax and increased scutage. The quarrel with the Church and fear of
their revolt only deepened his oppression of the nobles. He drove De
Braose, one of the most powerful of the Lords Marchers, to die in exile,
while his wife and grandchildren were believed to have been starved to
death in the royal prisons. On the nobles who still clung panic-stricken
to the court of the excommunicate king John heaped outrages worse than
death. Illegal exactions, the seizure of their castles, the preference
shown to foreigners, were small provocations compared with his attacks on
the honour of their wives and daughters. But the baronage still
submitted. The financial exactions indeed became light as John filled his
treasury with the goods of the Church; the king's vigour was seen in the
rapidity with which he crushed a rising of the nobles in Ireland, and
foiled an outbreak of the Welsh; while the triumphs of his father had
taught the baronage its weakness in any single-handed struggle against
the Crown. Hated therefore as he was the land remained still. Only one
weapon was now left in Innocent's hands. Men held then that a king, once
excommunicate, ceased to be a Christian or to have any claims on the
obedience of Christian subjects. As spiritual heads of Christendom, the
Popes had ere now asserted their right to remove such a ruler from his
throne and to give it to a worthier than he; and it was this right which
Innocent at last felt himself driven to exercise. After useless threats
he issued in 1212 a bull of deposition against John, absolved his
subjects from their allegiance, proclaimed a crusade against him as an
enemy to Christianity and the Church, and committed the execution of the
sentence to the king of the French. John met the announcement of this
step with the same scorn as before. His insolent disdain suffered the
Roman legate, Cardinal Pandulf, to proclaim his deposition to his face at
Northampton. When Philip collected an army for an attack on England an
enormous host gathered at the king's call on Barham Down; and the English
fleet dispelled all danger of invasion by crossing the Channel, by
capturing a number of French ships, and by burning Dieppe.
[Sidenote: John's Submission]
But it was not in England only that the king showed his strength and
activity. Vile as he was, John possessed in a high degree the political
ability of his race, and in the diplomatic efforts with which he met the
danger from France he showed himself his father's equal. The barons of
Poitou were roused to attack Philip from the south. John bought the aid
of the Count of Flanders on his northern border. The German king, Otto,
pledged himself to bring the knighthood of Germany to support an invasion
of France. But at the moment of his success in diplomacy John suddenly
gave way. It was in fact the revelation of a danger at home which shook
him from his attitude of contemptuous defiance. The bull of deposition
gave fresh energy to every enemy. The Scotch king was in correspondence
with Innocent. The Welsh princes who had just been forced to submission
broke out again in war. John hanged their hostages, and called his host
to muster for a fresh inroad into Wales, but the army met only to become
a fresh source of danger. Powerless to oppose the king openly, the
baronage had plunged almost to a man into secret conspiracies. The
hostility of Philip had dispelled their dread of isolated action; many
indeed had even promised aid to the French king on his landing. John
found himself in the midst of hidden enemies; and nothing could have
saved him but the haste--whether of panic or quick decision--with which
he disbanded his army and took refuge in Nottingham Castle. The arrest of
some of the barons showed how true were his fears, for the heads of the
French conspiracy, Robert Fitzwalter and Eustace de Vesci, at once fled
over sea to Philip. His daring self-confidence, the skill of his
diplomacy, could no longer hide from John the utter loneliness of his
position. At war with Rome, with France, with Scotland, Ireland, and
Wales, at war with the Church, he saw himself disarmed by this sudden
revelation of treason in the one force left at his disposal. With
characteristic suddenness he gave way. He endeavoured by remission of
fines to win back his people. He negotiated eagerly with the Pope,
consented to receive the Archbishop, and promised to repay the money he
had extorted from the Church.
[Sidenote: John becomes vassal of Rome]
But the shameless ingenuity of the king's temper was seen in his resolve
to find in his very humiliation a new source of strength. If he yielded
to the Church he had no mind to yield to the rest of his foes; it was
indeed in the Pope who had defeated him that he saw the means of baffling
their efforts. It was Rome that formed the link between the varied
elements of hostility which combined against him. It was Rome that gave
its sanction to Philip's ambition and roused the hopes of Scotch and
Welsh, Rome that called the clergy to independence, and nerved the barons
to resistance. To detach Innocent by submission from the league which
hemmed him in on every side was the least part of John's purpose. He
resolved to make Rome his ally, to turn its spiritual thunders on his
foes, to use it in breaking up the confederacy it had formed, in crushing
the baronage, in oppressing the clergy, in paralyzing--as Rome only could
paralyze--the energy of the Primate. That greater issues even than these
were involved in John's rapid change of policy time was to show; but
there is no need to credit the king with the foresight that would have
discerned them. His quick versatile temper saw no doubt little save the
momentary gain. But that gain was immense. Nor was the price as hard to
pay as it seems to modern eyes. The Pope stood too high above earthly
monarchs, his claims, at least as Innocent conceived and expressed them,
were too spiritual, too remote from the immediate business and interests
of the day, to make the owning of his suzerainty any very practical
burthen. John could recall a time when his father was willing to own the
same subjection as that which he was about to take on himself. He could
recall the parallel allegiance which his brother had pledged to the
Emperor. Shame indeed there must be in any loss of independence, but in
this less than any, and with Rome the shame of submission had already
been incurred. But whatever were the king's thoughts his act was
decisive. On the 15th of May 1213 he knelt before the legate Pandulf,
surrendered his kingdom to the Roman See, took it back again as a
tributary vassal, swore fealty and did liege homage to the Pope.
[Sidenote: Its Results]
In after times men believed that England thrilled at the news with a
sense of national shame such as she had never felt before. "He has become
the Pope's man" the whole country was said to have murmured; "he has
forfeited the very name of king; from a free man he has degraded himself
into a serf." But this was the belief of a time still to come when the
rapid growth of national feeling which this step and its issues did more
than anything to foster made men look back on the scene between John and
Pandulf as a national dishonour. We see little trace of such a feeling in
the contemporary accounts of the time. All seem rather to have regarded
it as a complete settlement of the difficulties in which king and kingdom
were involved. As a political measure its success was immediate and
complete. The French army at once broke up in impotent rage, and when
Philip turned on the enemy John had raised up for him in Flanders, five
hundred English ships under the Earl of Salisbury fell upon the fleet
which accompanied the French army along the coast and utterly destroyed
it. The league which John had so long matured at once disclosed itself.
Otto, reinforcing his German army by the knighthood of Flanders and
Boulogne as well as by a body of mercenaries in the pay of the English
king, invaded France from the north. John called on his baronage to
follow him over sea for an attack on Philip from the south.
[Sidenote: Geoffry Fitz-Peter]
Their plea that he remained excommunicate was set aside by the arrival of
Langton and his formal absolution of the king on a renewal of his
coronation oath and a pledge to put away all evil customs. But the barons
still stood aloof. They would serve at home, they said, but they refused
to cross the sea. Those of the north took a more decided attitude of
opposition. From this point indeed the northern barons begin to play
their part in our constitutional history. Lacies, Vescies, Percies,
Stutevilles, Bruces, houses such as those of de Ros or de Vaux, all had
sprung to greatness on the ruins of the Mowbrays and the great houses of
the Conquest, and had done service to the Crown in its strife with the
older feudatories. But loyal as was their tradition they were English to
the core; they had neither lands nor interest over sea, and they now
declared themselves bound by no tenure to follow the king in foreign
wars. Furious at this check to his plans John marched in arms northwards
to bring these barons to submission. But he had now to reckon with a new
antagonist in the Justiciar, Geoffry Fitz-Peter. Geoffry had hitherto
bent to the king's will; but the political sagacity which he drew from
the school of Henry the Second in which he had been trained showed him
the need of concession, and his wealth, his wide kinship, and his
experience of affairs gave his interposition a decisive weight. He seized
on the political opportunity which was offered by the gathering of a
Council at St. Albans at the opening of August with the purpose of
assessing the damages done to the Church. Besides the bishops and barons,
a reeve and his four men were summoned to this Council from each royal
demesne, no doubt simply as witnesses of the sums due to the plundered
clergy. Their presence however was of great import. It is the first
instance which our history presents of the summons of such
representatives to a national Council, and the instance took fresh weight
from the great matters which came to be discussed. In the king's name the
Justiciar promised good government for the time to come, and forbade all
royal officers to practise extortion as they prized life and limb. The
king's peace was pledged to those who had opposed him in the past; and
observance of the laws of Henry the First was enjoined upon all within
the realm.
[Sidenote: Stephen Langton]
But it was not in Geoffry Fitz-Peter that English freedom was to find its
champion and the baronage their leader. From the moment of his landing in
England Stephen Langton had taken up the constitutional position of the
Primate in upholding the old customs and rights of the realm against the
personal despotism of the kings. As Anselm had withstood William the Red,
as Theobald had withstood Stephen, so Langton prepared to withstand and
rescue his country from the tyranny of John. He had already forced him to
swear to observe the laws of Edward the Confessor, in other words the
traditional liberties of the realm. When the baronage refused to sail for
Poitou he compelled the king to deal with them not by arms but by process
of law. But the work which he now undertook was far greater and weightier
than this. The pledges of Henry the First had long been forgotten when
the Justiciar brought them to light, but Langton saw the vast importance
of such a precedent. At the close of the month he produced Henry's
charter in a fresh gathering of barons at St. Paul's, and it was at once
welcomed as a base for the needed reforms. From London Langton hastened
to the king, whom he reached at Northampton on his way to attack the
nobles of the north, and wrested from him a promise to bring his strife
with them to legal judgement before assailing them in arms. With his
allies gathering abroad John had doubtless no wish to be entangled in a
long quarrel at home, and the Archbishop's mediation allowed him to
withdraw with seeming dignity. After a demonstration therefore at Durham
John marched hastily south again, and reached London in October. His
Justiciar at once laid before him the claims of the Councils of St.
Alban's and St. Paul's; but the death of Geoffry at this juncture freed
him from the pressure which his minister was putting upon him. "Now, by
God's feet," cried John, "I am for the first time King and Lord of
England," and he entrusted the vacant justiciarship to a Poitevin, Peter
des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester, whose temper was in harmony with
his own. But the death of Geoffry only called the Archbishop to the
front, and Langton at once demanded the king's assent to the charter of
Henry the First. In seizing on this charter as a basis for national
action Langton showed a political ability of the highest order. The
enthusiasm with which its recital was welcomed showed the sagacity with
which the Archbishop had chosen his ground. From that moment the baronage
was no longer drawn together in secret conspiracies by a sense of common
wrong or a vague longing for common deliverance: they were openly united
in a definite claim of national freedom and national law.
[Sidenote: Bouvines]
John could as yet only meet the claim by delay. His policy had still to
wait for its fruits at Rome, his diplomacy to reap its harvest in
Flanders, ere he could deal with England. From the hour of his submission
to the Papacy his one thought had been that of vengeance on the barons
who, as he held, had betrayed him; but vengeance was impossible till he
should return a conqueror from the fields of France. It was a sense of
this danger which nerved the baronage to their obstinate refusal to
follow him over sea: but furious as he was at their resistance, the
Archbishop's interposition condemned John still to wait for the hour of
his revenge. In the spring of 1214 he crossed with what forces he could
gather to Poitou, rallied its nobles round him, passed the Loire in
triumph, and won back again Angers, the home of his race. At the same
time Otto and the Count of Flanders, their German and Flemish knighthood
strengthened by reinforcements from Boulogne as well as by a body of
English troops under the Earl of Salisbury, threatened France from the
north. For the moment Philip seemed lost: and yet on the fortunes of
Philip hung the fortunes of English freedom. But in this crisis of her
fate, France was true to herself and her king. From every borough of
Northern France the townsmen marched to his rescue, and the village
priests led their flocks to battle with the Church-banners flying at
their head. The two armies met at the close of July near the bridge of
Bouvines, between Lille and Tournay, and from the first the day went
against the allies. The Flemish knights were the first to fly; then the
Germans in the centre of the host were crushed by the overwhelming
numbers of the French; last of all the English on the right of it were
broken by a fierce onset of the Bishop of Beauvais who charged mace in
hand and struck the Earl of Salisbury to the ground. The news of this
complete overthrow reached John in the midst of his triumphs in the
South, and scattered his hopes to the winds. He was at once deserted by
the Poitevin nobles; and a hasty retreat alone enabled him to return in
October, baffled and humiliated, to his island kingdom.
[Sidenote: Rising of the Baronage]
His return forced on the crisis to which events had so long been
drifting. The victory at Bouvines gave strength to his opponents. The
open resistance of the northern barons nerved the rest of their order to
action. The great houses who had cast away their older feudal traditions
for a more national policy were drawn by the crisis into close union with
the families which had sprung from the ministers and councillors of the
two Henries. To the first group belonged such men as Saher de Quinci, the
Earl of Winchester, Geoffrey of Mandeville, Earl of Essex, the Earl of
Clare, Fulk Fitz-Warin, William Mallet, the houses of Fitz-Alan and Gant.
Among the second group were Henry Bohun and Roger Bigod, the Earls of
Hereford and Norfolk, the younger William Marshal, and Robert de Vere.
Robert Fitz-Walter, who took the command of their united force,
represented both parties equally, for he was sprung from the Norman house
of Brionne, while the Justiciar of Henry the Second, Richard de Lucy, had
been his grandfather. Secretly, and on the pretext of pilgrimage, these
nobles met at St. Edmundsbury, resolute to bear no longer with John's
delays. If he refused to restore their liberties they swore to make war
on him till he confirmed them by Charter under the king's seal, and they
parted to raise forces with the purpose of presenting their demands at
Christmas. John, knowing nothing of the coming storm, pursued his policy
of winning over the Church by granting it freedom of election, while he
embittered still more the strife with his nobles by demanding scutage
from the northern nobles who had refused to follow him to Poitou. But the
barons were now ready to act, and early in January in the memorable year
1215 they appeared in arms to lay, as they had planned, their demands
before the king.
[Sidenote: John deserted]
John was taken by surprise. He asked for a truce till Easter-tide, and
spent the interval in fevered efforts to avoid the blow. Again he offered
freedom to the Church, and took vows as a Crusader against whom war was a
sacrilege, while he called for a general oath of allegiance and fealty
from the whole body of his subjects. But month after month only showed
the king the uselessness of further resistance. Though Pandulf was with
him, his vassalage had as yet brought little fruit in the way of aid from
Rome; the commissioners whom he sent to plead his cause at the
shire-courts brought back news that no man would help him against the
charter that the barons claimed: and his efforts to detach the clergy
from the league of his opponents utterly failed. The nation was against
the king. He was far indeed from being utterly deserted. His ministers
still clung to him, men such as Geoffrey de Lucy, Geoffrey de Furnival,
Thomas Basset, and William Briwere, statesmen trained in the
administrative school of his father and who, dissent as they might from
John's mere oppression, still looked on the power of the Crown as the one
barrier against feudal anarchy: and beside them stood some of the great
nobles of royal blood, his father's bastard Earl William of Salisbury,
his cousin Earl William of Warenne, and Henry Earl of Cornwall, a
grandson of Henry the First. With him too remained Ranulf, Earl of
Chester, and the wisest and noblest of the barons, William Marshal the
elder, Earl of Pembroke. William Marshal had shared in the rising of the
younger Henry against Henry the Second, and stood by him as he died; he
had shared in the overthrow of William Longchamp and in the outlawry of
John. He was now an old man, firm, as we shall see in his after-course,
to recall the government to the path of freedom and law, but shrinking
from a strife which might bring back the anarchy of Stephen's day, and
looking for reforms rather in the bringing constitutional pressure to
bear upon the king than in forcing them from him by arms.
[Sidenote: John yields]
But cling as such men might to John, they clung to him rather as
mediators than adherents. Their sympathies went with the demands of the
barons when the delay which had been granted was over and the nobles
again gathered in arms at Brackley in Northamptonshire to lay their
claims before the King. Nothing marks more strongly the absolutely
despotic idea of his sovereignty which John had formed than the
passionate surprise which breaks out in his reply. "Why do they not ask
for my kingdom?" he cried. "I will never grant such liberties as will
make me a slave!" The imperialist theories of the lawyers of his father's
court had done their work. Held at bay by the practical sense of Henry,
they had told on the more headstrong nature of his sons. Richard and John
both held with Glanvill that the will of the prince was the law of the
land; and to fetter that will by the customs and franchises which were
embodied in the barons' claims seemed to John a monstrous usurpation of
his rights. But no imperialist theories had touched the minds of his
people. The country rose as one man at his refusal. At the close of May
London threw open her gates to the forces of the barons, now arrayed
under Robert Fitz-Walter as "Marshal of the Army of God and Holy Church."
Exeter and Lincoln followed the example of the capital; promises of aid
came from Scotland and Wales; the northern barons marched hastily under
Eustace de Vesci to join their comrades in London. Even the nobles who
had as yet clung to the king, but whose hopes of conciliation were
blasted by his obstinacy, yielded at last to the summons of the "Army of
God." Pandulf indeed and Archbishop Langton still remained with John, but
they counselled, as Earl Ranulf and William Marshal counselled, his
acceptance of the Charter. None in fact counselled its rejection save his
new Justiciar, the Poitevin Peter des Roches, and other foreigners who
knew the barons purposed driving them from the land. But even the number
of these was small; there was a moment when John found himself with but
seven knights at his back and before him a nation in arms. Quick as he
was, he had been taken utterly by surprise. It was in vain that in the
short respite he had gained from Christmas to Easter he had summoned
mercenaries to his aid and appealed to his new suzerain, the Pope.
Summons and appeal were alike too late. Nursing wrath in his heart, John
bowed to necessity and called the barons to a conference on an island in
the Thames, between Windsor and Staines, near a marshy meadow by the
river side, the meadow of Runnymede. The king encamped on one bank of the
river, the barons covered the flat of Runnymede on the other. Their
delegates met on the 15th of June in the island between them, but the
negotiations were a mere cloak to cover John's purpose of unconditional
submission. The Great Charter was discussed and agreed to in a single
day.
[Sidenote: The Great Charter]
Copies of it were made and sent for preservation to the cathedrals and
churches, and one copy may still be seen in the British Museum, injured
by age and fire, but with the royal seal still hanging from the brown,
shrivelled parchment. It is impossible to gaze without reverence on the
earliest monument of English freedom which we can see with our own eyes
and touch with our own hands, the great Charter to which from age to age
men have looked back as the groundwork of English liberty. But in itself
the Charter was no novelty, nor did it claim to establish any new
constitutional principles. The Charter of Henry the First formed the
basis of the whole, and the additions to it are for the most part formal
recognitions of the judicial and administrative changes introduced by
Henry the Second. What was new in it was its origin. In form, like the
Charter on which it was based, it was nothing but a royal grant. In
actual fact it was a treaty between the whole English people and its
king. In it England found itself for the first time since the Conquest a
nation bound together by common national interests, by a common national
sympathy. In words which almost close the Charter, the "community of the
whole land" is recognized as the great body from which the restraining
power of the baronage takes its validity. There is no distinction of
blood or class, of Norman or not Norman, of noble or not noble. All are
recognized as Englishmen, the rights of all are owned as English rights.
Bishops and nobles claimed and secured at Runnymede the rights not of
baron and churchman only but those of freeholder and merchant, of
townsman and villein. The provisions against wrong and extortion which
the barons drew up as against the king for themselves they drew up as
against themselves for their tenants. Based too as it professed to be on
Henry's Charter it was far from being a mere copy of what had gone
before. The vague expressions of the old Charter were now exchanged for
precise and elaborate provisions. The bonds of unwritten custom which the
older grant did little more than recognize had proved too weak to hold
the Angevins; and the baronage set them aside for the restraints of
written and defined law. It is in this way that the Great Charter marks
the transition from the age of traditional rights, preserved in the
nation's memory and officially declared by the Primate, to the age of
written legislation, of Parliaments and Statutes, which was to come.
Its opening indeed is in general terms. The Church had shown its power of
self-defence in the struggle over the interdict, and the clause which
recognized its rights alone retained the older and general form. But all
vagueness ceases when the Charter passes on to deal with the rights of
Englishmen at large, their right to justice, to security of person and
property, to good government. "No freeman," ran a memorable article that
lies at the base of our whole judicial system, "shall be seized or
imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or in any way brought to ruin:
we will not go against any man nor send against him, save by legal
judgement of his peers or by the law of the land." "To no man will we
sell," runs another, "or deny, or delay, right or justice." The great
reforms of the past reigns were now formally recognized; judges of assize
were to hold their circuits four times in the year, and the King's Court
was no longer to follow the king in his wanderings over the realm but to
sit in a fixed place. But the denial of justice under John was a small
danger compared with the lawless exactions both of himself and his
predecessor. Richard had increased the amount of the scutage which Henry
the Second had introduced, and applied it to raise funds for his ransom.
He had restored the Danegeld, or land-tax, so often abolished, under the
new name of "carucage," had seized the wool of the Cistercians and the
plate of the churches, and rated movables as well as land. John had again
raised the rate of scutage, and imposed aids, fines, and ransoms at his
pleasure without counsel of the baronage. The Great Charter met this
abuse by a provision on which our constitutional system rests. "No
scutage or aid [other than the three customary feudal aids] shall be
imposed in our realm save by the common council of the realm"; and to
this Great Council it was provided that prelates and the greater barons
should be summoned by special writ, and all tenants in chief through the
sheriffs and bailiffs, at least forty days before. The provision defined
what had probably been the common usage of the realm; but the definition
turned it into a national right, a right so momentous that on it rests
our whole Parliamentary life. Even the baronage seem to have been
startled when they realized the extent of their claim; and the provision
was dropped from the later issue of the Charter at the outset of the next
reign. But the clause brought home to the nation at large their
possession of a right which became dearer as years went by. More and more
clearly the nation discovered that in these simple words lay the secret
of political power. It was the right of self-taxation that England fought
for under Earl Simon as she fought for it under Hampden. It was the
establishment of this right which established English freedom.
The rights which the barons claimed for themselves they claimed for the
nation at large. The boon of free and unbought justice was a boon for
all, but a special provision protected the poor. The forfeiture of the
freeman on conviction of felony was never to include his tenement, or
that of the merchant his wares, or that of the countryman, as Henry the
Second had long since ordered, his wain. The means of actual livelihood
were to be left even to the worst. The seizure of provisions, the
exaction of forced labour, by royal officers was forbidden; and the
abuses of the forest system were checked by a clause which disafforested
all forests made in John's reign. The under-tenants were protected
against all lawless exactions of their lords in precisely the same terms
as these were protected against the lawless exactions of the Crown. The
towns were secured in the enjoyment of their municipal privileges, their
freedom from arbitrary taxation, their rights of justice, of common
deliberation, of regulation of trade. "Let the city of London have all
its old liberties and its free customs, as well by land as by water.
Besides this, we will and grant that all other cities, and boroughs, and
towns, and ports, have all their liberties and free customs." The
influence of the trading class is seen in two other enactments by which
freedom of journeying and trade was secured to foreign merchants, and an
uniformity of weights and measures was ordered to be enforced throughout
the realm.
[Sidenote: Innocent annuls the Charter]
There remained only one question, and that the most difficult of all; the
question how to secure this order which the Charter established in the
actual government of the realm. It was easy to sweep away the immediate
abuses; the hostages were restored to their homes, the foreigners
banished by a clause in the Charter from the country. But it was less
easy to provide means for the control of a king whom no man could trust.
By the treaty as settled at Runnymede a council of twenty-five barons
were to be chosen from the general body of their order to enforce on John
the observance of the Charter, with the right of declaring war on the
king should its provisions be infringed, and it was provided that the
Charter should not only be published throughout the whole country but
sworn to at every hundred-mote and town-mote by order from the king.
"They have given me five-and-twenty over-kings," cried John in a burst of
fury, flinging himself on the floor and gnawing sticks and straw in his
impotent rage. But the rage soon passed into the subtle policy of which
he was a master. After a few days he left Windsor; and lingered for
months along the southern shore, waiting for news of the aid he had
solicited from Rome and from the Continent. It was not without definite
purpose that he had become the vassal of the Papacy. While Innocent was
dreaming of a vast Christian Empire with the Pope at its head to enforce
justice and religion on his under-kings, John believed that the Papal
protection would enable him to rule as tyrannically as he would. The
thunders of the Papacy were to be ever at hand for his protection, as the
armies of England are at hand to protect the vileness and oppression of a
Turkish Sultan or a Nizam of Hyderabad. His envoys were already at Rome,
pleading for a condemnation of the Charter. The after action of the
Papacy shows that Innocent was moved by no hostility to English freedom.
But he was indignant that a matter which might have been brought before
his court of appeal as overlord should have been dealt with by armed
revolt, and in this crisis both his imperious pride and the legal
tendency of his mind swayed him to the side of the king who submitted to
his justice. He annulled the Great Charter by a bull in August, and at
the close of the year excommunicated the barons.
[Sidenote: Landing of Lewis]
His suspension of Stephen Langton from the exercise of his office as
Primate was a more fatal blow. Langton hurried to Rome, and his absence
left the barons without a head at a moment when the very success of their
efforts was dividing them. Their forces were already disorganized when
autumn brought a host of foreign soldiers from over sea to the king's
standard. After starving Rochester into submission John found himself
strong enough to march ravaging through the Midland and Northern
counties, while his mercenaries spread like locusts over the whole face
of the land. From Berwick the king turned back triumphant to coop up his
enemies in London while fresh Papal excommunications fell on the barons
and the city. But the burghers set Innocent at defiance. "The ordering of
secular matters appertaineth not to the Pope," they said, in words that
seem like mutterings of the coming Lollardism; and at the advice of Simon
Langton, the Archbishop's brother, bells swung out and mass was
celebrated as before. Success however was impossible for the
undisciplined militia of the country and the towns against the trained
forces of the king, and despair drove the barons to listen to Fitz-Walter
and the French party in their ranks, and to seek aid from over sea.
Philip had long been waiting the opportunity for his revenge upon John.
In the April of 1216 his son Lewis accepted the crown in spite of
Innocent's excommunications, and landed soon after in Kent with a
considerable force. As the barons had foreseen, the French mercenaries
who constituted John's host refused to fight against the French sovereign
and the whole aspect of affairs was suddenly reversed. Deserted by the
bulk of his troops, the king was forced to fall rapidly back on the Welsh
Marches, while his rival entered London and received the submission of
the larger part of England. Only Dover held out obstinately against
Lewis. By a series of rapid marches John succeeded in distracting the
plans of the barons and in relieving Lincoln; then after a short stay at
Lynn he crossed the Wash in a fresh movement to the north. In crossing
however his army was surprised by the tide, and his baggage with the
royal treasures washed away. Fever seized the baffled tyrant as he
reached the Abbey of Swineshead, his sickness was inflamed by a
gluttonous debauch, and on the 19th of October John breathed his last at
Newark.
END OF VOL. I.