Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John / With an Historical Introduction

This chapter is the first of several which redressed abuses springing from one root, namely, the exercise of the royal right of purveyance by the various agents of the local government.

I. Purveyance in General. The Norman and Angevin kings of England were compelled by their administrative duties and induced by the pleasures of the chase to move their courts constantly from district to district. During these royal progresses the difficulties must have been great of finding sufficient food for the enormous retinues surrounding the king in times of peace, and for his armed levies in time of war. It was to the interests of the community as a whole that the work of government and of national defence should not be brought to a stand-still for want of supplies. No opposition was made when the king arrogated to himself the privilege of appropriating, under fair conditions, such necessaries as his household might require. Such a right, not unlike that enjoyed in modern times by the commander of an army encamped in an enemy’s country, was allowed to the kings of England in their own land in times of peace, and was known as the prerogative of purveyance.^[681] Unfortunately, the conditions under which supplies might be requisitioned were left vague: the privilege was therefore subject to constant abuse. In theory it was always spoken of as merely a right of pre-emption; the provisions seized were to be paid for at the market rate: but practice tended to differ lamentably from theory. In the absence of a neutral arbitrator to fix the value of the goods, the unfortunate seller was often thankful to accept any pittance offered by royal officials, who might subsequently indeed charge a higher rate against the Crown. Payment was often indefinitely delayed or made not in coin but in exchequer tallies, “a vexatious anticipation of taxation,” since these could only be used in payment of Crown dues. What was worse, in the hurry of the moment, the king’s purveyors often omitted the formality of paying altogether.

Magna Carta did not abolish purveyance, and placed no restrictions whatever upon its use for the legitimate and original purpose of supplying the king’s household. Some slight attempt to control its exercise was made sixty years later in the Statute of Westminster I.; but without producing much effect.^[682] The grievances connected with purveyance continued throughout four centuries as a fertile source of vexation to the people and of friction between parliament and the king. An attempt, made by the House of Commons to induce James I. to surrender this prerogative for a suitable money grant, ended in failure, with the abandonment of the abortive treaty known as “the Great Contract.” In the general re-settlement of the revenue, however, at the Restoration, purveyance and pre-emption, which had fallen into disuse during the Commonwealth, were abolished.^[683] Yet in the following year a new statute^[684] virtually revived one branch of the right under essential modifications: when royal progresses were necessary in the future, warrants might be issued from the Board of Green Cloth, authorizing the king to use such carts and carriages as he might require, at a fair rate of hire specified in the Act of Parliament.

II. Branches of Purveyance restricted by Magna Carta. A practice tolerated in spite of its burdensome nature because of its absolute necessity, when confined to its original purpose of providing for the needs of the king’s household, became intolerable when claimed by every castle-warden, sheriff, and local bailiff for his own personal or official needs. The annoyance and hardships inseparable from such arbitrary interference with the rights of private property were thus increased tenfold, while ample discretionary authority was vested in a class of officials least qualified to use it, unscrupulous foreign adventurers hired by John to intimidate the native population, responsible to no one save the king, and careful never to issue from their strongholds except at the head of their reckless soldiery. The Great Charter contained a few moderate provisions for checking the abuses of purveyance as an instrument of local administration.

(1) The provisioning of castles. Commanders of fortresses were left perfectly free by Magna Carta to help themselves to such corn and other supplies as they deemed necessary for their garrisons. Immediate payment, however, must be made in current coin (not in exchequer tallies) for everything they requisitioned, unless the owner, on whom a compulsory sale was forced, consented to postpone the date of payment. The Charter of 1216 made a slight modification in favour of castellans. Payment for goods taken from inhabitants of the town where the castle was situated might be legally delayed for three weeks, a term extended in 1217 to forty days. Such relaxation was perhaps necessary to meet the case of a warden with an empty purse called on to provide against an unexpected siege or other emergency; but the peaceful townsmen, over whose dwellings the dark walls of a feudal stronghold loomed, would not prove creditors who pressed unduly for payment. Under Henry’s Charters, as under that of John, immediate payment had to be tendered to owners of goods who lived elsewhere than in this neighbouring town.^[685]

(2) The requisitioning of horses and carts. The provisions of chapter 30, modified in subsequent re-issues, sought to prohibit sheriffs from exacting compulsory cartage from the property of freemen.

(3) The appropriation of timber. The succeeding chapter confined the king and his officers to the use of such wood as they could obtain from the royal demesnes.^[686]

III. Branches of Purveyance not mentioned in Magna Carta. A wide field was left alike for the use and the abuse of this prerogative, after due effect had been given to these moderate provisions. In addition to the constant friction kept up through many centuries by its employment as a means of supplying the wants of the king’s household, two minor aspects of purveyance came into special prominence in later history.

(1) The requisition of forced labour. Hallam points out that the king’s rights of pre-emption over such goods as he required were extended, by analogy, to his subjects’ labour. "Thus Edward III. announces to all sheriffs that William of Walsingham had a commission to collect as many painters as might suffice for ‘our works in St. Stephen’s chapel, Westminster, to be at our wages as long as shall be necessary’; and to arrest and keep in prison all who should refuse or be refractory; and enjoins them to lend their assistance. Windsor Castle owes its massive magnificence to labourers impressed from every part of the kingdom. There is even a commission from Edward IV. to take as many workmen in gold as were wanted, and employ them at the king’s cost upon the trappings of himself and his household."^[687] Perhaps, however, such demands did not form a branch of purveyance at all, but were merely instances of illegal royal encroachments.

(2) Billeting of soldiers in private houses. This practice, which may be considered a branch of purveyance, has always been peculiarly abhorrent to public opinion in England. It is as old as the reign of John; for when that king visited York in 1201 he complained bitterly that the citizens neither came out to meet him nor provided for the wants of his crossbow-men. His threats and demands for hostages were with difficulty turned aside by a money payment of £100.^[688] Charles I. made an oppressive use of this branch of what seems to have been once a perfectly legal prerogative, punishing householders who opposed his unpopular measures by quartering his dissolute soldiery upon them, a practice branded as illegal by the Petition of Right in 1628.^[689]

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

Nullus constabularius distringat aliquem militem ad dandum denarios pro custodia castri, si facere voluerit custodiam illam in propria persona sua, vel per alium probum hominem, si ipse eam facere non possit propter racionabilem causam; et si nos duxerimus vel miserimus eum in exercitum, erit quietus de custodia, secundum quantitatem temporis quo per nos fuerit in exercitu.

Castle-guard, or the liability to serve in the garrison of a royal fortress, formed part of the feudal obligations of the owners of certain freehold estates. This service was sometimes due in lieu of attendance in the army; more usually the tenant who owed garrison duty owed knight’s service as well.^[690] It was probably this duplication of duties that prevented castle-guard from hardening into a separate tenure.^[691] The right to enforce these obligations was naturally entrusted to the constables of the various castles whose duty it was to keep their garrisons at their full strength. John, however, preferred to commute personal service of castle-guard for money payments (analogous to the scutage paid in lieu of knight’s service), and to man his feudal towers with soldiers of fortune rather than with rebellious Englishmen. Castellans were, therefore, in the habit of demanding money even from those who offered personal service. What was worse, when the freeholder had followed John on distant service, he was mulcted in a money payment because he had not stayed at home to perform garrison duty during the same period. Both forms of this abuse were absolutely forbidden in 1215. In certain circumstances, however, this prohibition would have deprived the king of what was equitably due to him. Suppose he had granted two fiefs to the same tenant—one by simple knight’s service, the other by castle-ward. A double holding implied double service; the tenant could not in fairness plead that the service of one knight rendered abroad operated as the full discharge of the services of two knights due from his two separate fiefs. Castle-guard must in such a case be performed by an efficient deputy, or else the usual compensation be paid. The reissue of 1217 amended John’s Charter to this effect. Service with the army abroad operated as a discharge of castle-guard at home, but not where the tenant owed two services for two distinct fiefs.^[692]

Nullus vicecomes, vel ballivus noster, vel aliquis alius, capiat equos vel carectas alicujus liberi hominis pro cariagio faciendo, nisi de voluntate ipsius liberi hominis.

The Charter here returned to the subject of purveyance, one branch of which it practically abolished, except as affecting villeins. No carts or horses belonging to a freeman were to be requisitioned by any sheriff or bailiff for the use of the Crown without the owner’s consent; that is to say, they could not be requisitioned at all. The clause, however, was carefully limited to freemen; the inference is plain, that the horses and implements of villeins were left at the disposal of the Crown without leave asked or price paid for their use. The relative chapter of the reissue of 1216 practically restored this branch of purveyance; consent of the owner, even when a freeman, need not be obtained, provided hire was paid at the rates sanctioned by ancient custom. Those rates, however, were definitely stated, namely, 10d. per diem for a cart with two horses, and 1s. 2d. for one with three.^[693] Thus the prerogative, though restored, was not to be abused.

In 1217 it was again slightly restricted in favour of the upper classes. No demesne cart of any “parson” (ecclesiastica persona), or knight, or lady, could be requisitioned by the bailiffs. The “demesne” carts were, of course, those that belonged to the owner of the manor as opposed to the carts of the villeins. Here again we have evidence of care to make it clear, if not that villeins were to have no part or parcel in the benefits of the great Charter, at least that their rights, if they had any, could not stand against the more important rights of the Crown. Yeomen and small freeholders were also left exposed to this annoying form of interference. Abuses continued. Purveyors would occasionally lay hands on all available horses and carts in the countryside—far more than they required—choosing perhaps the season of harvest or some equally busy time. The owners, who urgently required them for their own purposes, would pay ransom money to regain possession. Edward I. enacted that perpetrators of such deeds should be “grievously punished by the marshals,” if they were members of his household, and therefore amenable to the summary jurisdiction of his domestic tribunal, or, if not members, then they should pay treble damages and suffer imprisonment for forty days.^[694]

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE.

Nec nos nec ballivi nostri capiemus alienum boscum ad castra, vel alia agenda nostra, nisi per voluntatem ipsius cujus boscus ille fuerit.

Purveyance of timber growing elsewhere than on royal estates is here prohibited in absolute terms. In marked contrast with the limited restrictions placed upon other branches of purveyance, this branch is taken away, not merely from local officials, but from the king himself.^[695] There was an obvious reason for greater stringency in this case: the king’s own extensive demesne woods furnished timber in abundance, whether for building purposes or for firewood, leaving him no excuse for taking, especially if for nothing, the trees of other people.

The purveyors of James I., shortly after his accession, transgressed this provision of Magna Carta by requisitioning timber for repairing the fortifications of Calais. A decision against the Crown was given by the Barons of Exchequer in the second year of James’s reign, and a proclamation was issued, bearing date 23rd April, 1607, disclaiming any right to such a prerogative. The guilty purveyors were brought before the Star Chamber.^[696]

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO.

Nos non tenebimus terras illorum qui convicti fuerint de felonia, nisi per unum annum et unum diem, et tunc reddantur terre dominis feodorum.

I. The Crown’s Claim to the Property of Felons. The Crown had gradually established certain rights, not too clearly defined, in the property of all criminals formally indicted and sentenced for felony. John, here as elsewhere, took full advantage of the vagueness of the law to stretch prerogative to its utmost limit. Magna Carta, therefore, attempted to define the exact boundaries of his rights. The old customary law seems invariably to have given the chattels of a condemned man to the owner of the court which tried him, and the desire for such perquisites must have created an unfortunate bias against the accused. It was not possible, however, to adopt so simple a rule with regard to the real estate of felons, for this was claimed as escheat by the feudal lord from whom the lands were held. Custom gave the land of a felon to his feudal lord, and his chattels to the lord who tried him. The Crown gradually encroached on the rights of both, claiming the real estate of felons, as against mesne lords, and their personal estate, as against the lords who had jurisdiction.

(1) The felon’s lands. No difficulty arose when Crown tenants were convicted, since there the king was lord of the fief as well as lord paramount, and claimed the whole lands as escheat. When the condemned man was the tenant of a mesne lord, however, a conflict of interests occurred, and here a distinction, which gradually became hard and fast, was drawn between treason and felony.^[697] Treason was an offence against the person of the sovereign, and it was probably on this ground that the king made good his claim to seize as forfeit the entire estate, real and personal, of every one condemned to a traitor’s death. With regard to ordinary felons, what looks like a compromise was arrived at. The king secured the right to lay waste the lands in question and to appropriate everything he could find there during the space of a year and a day; after which period he was bound to hand over the freehold thus devastated to the lord who claimed the escheat. Such was the custom during the reign of Henry II. as described by Glanvill, who makes it perfectly clear that before the lands were given up at the expiration of the year, the houses were thrown down and the trees rooted up, thus purging away the taint of crime and enriching the exchequer with the price of the timber and building materials.^[698] The exercise of this right of waste inflicted upon the lord of the escheat an amount of damage out of all proportion to the benefit it brought to the king. The lord, when at last he entered into possession of the escheated lands, found a desert, not a prosperous manor.^[699]

Coke has attempted to give a more restricted explanation of the Crown’s rights in this respect, maintaining that the “year and day” was not an addition to, but a substitute for, the earlier right of “waste,” that the king renounced his barbarous claims in return for the undisputed enjoyment of the ordinary produce for one year only, and agreed, in return for this, to hand over the land with all buildings and appurtenances intact.^[700] The authorities he cites, however, are inconclusive, and the weight of evidence on the other side leaves little room for doubt. Not only does the phrase “year day and waste” commonly used, create a strong presumption; but Glanvill’s words in speaking of the earlier practice are quite free from ambiguity, while the document known as the Praerogativa Regis is equally explicit for a period long after Magna Carta.^[701] Waste, indeed, was a question of degree, and the Crown was not likely to be scrupulous in regard to felons’ lands, when it allowed wanton destruction even of Crown fiefs held in honourable wardship.^[702] A year was by no means too long for a thorough exercise of the right of waste.

Wide as were the legal rights of the Crown, John extended them illegally. When his officers had once obtained a footing in the felon’s land, they refused to surrender it to the rightful lord after the year and day had expired. In 1205, Thomas de Aula paid 40 marks and a palfrey to get what he ought to have had for nothing, namely the lands escheated to him through his tenant’s felony.^[703] Magna Carta prohibited such abuses for the future; prompt evacuation must henceforth take place when the year was over; and this settled the law for centuries.^[704] The Crown long exercised its rights, thus limited, and Henry III. sometimes sold his “year day and waste,” for considerable sums. Thus, in 1229 Geoffrey of Pomeroy was debited with 20 marks for the Crown’s rights in the lands of William de Streete and for his corn and chattels. This sum was afterwards discharged, however, on the ground that the king, induced to change his mind, doubtless by a higher bid, had bestowed these rights on another.^[705]

(2) The felon’s chattels. From an early date the king enjoyed, like other owners of courts, the right to the goods of the offenders he condemned. When Henry II. reorganized the entire system of criminal justice, and formulated, in the Assizes of Clarendon and Northampton, a scheme whereby all grave offenders should be formally indicted, and thereafter reserved for the coming of his own justices, he established what was practically a royal monopoly of jurisdiction over felons; and this logically implied a monopoly over their chattels as well—an inference confirmed by the express terms of article five of the earlier Assize. As the list of “pleas of the Crown,” which is in this connection identical with the list of “felonies,” grew longer, so this branch of royal revenue increased proportionately at the expense of the private owners of “courts leet.” Even in the ten years between the criminal codes of 1166 and 1176, two new offences were added to the list, forgery and arson. The goods of all outlaws and fugitives from justice likewise fell to the exchequer—the sheriff who seized them being responsible for their appraised value.^[706]

The magnates in 1215 made no attempt to interfere with this branch of administration, tacitly acquiescing in Henry II.’s encroachments on their ancestors’ criminal jurisdictions and perquisites. Under Henry III. and Edward I. the forfeited goods of felons continued to form a valuable source of revenue. In 1290 the widow of a man who had committed suicide, and therefore incurred forfeit as a felo de se, bought in his goods and chattels for £300, a high price, in addition to which the Crown specially reserved its “year day and waste.”^[707]

II. Indictment, Conviction, and Attainder. The Crown could not appropriate the property of men merely suspected of crime, however strong might be the presumption of guilt. Mere accusation was not enough; a formal judgment was required. The Charter refers to the lands of a “convicted” offender, and conviction must be distinguished from indictment on the one hand, and from attainder on the other; since these formed three stages in the procedure for determining guilt.

(1) Indictment. It has already been shown^[708] how Henry of Anjou tried to substitute, wherever possible, indictment by a jury for private appeal in criminal suits. The Assize of Clarendon authorized such indictments to be taken before sheriffs, and we learn from Bracton that immediately the formal accusation had been made the sheriff became responsible for the safety of the accused man’s property, both real and personal. With the help of the coroners and of lawful men of the neighbourhood he must have the chattels appraised and inventoried, and hold them in suspense until the “trial,” providing therefrom in the interval “estovers,” that is, sufficient sustenance for the accused and his family.^[709]

If the prisoner was acquitted or died before conviction, then the lands and chattels were restored to him or to his relatives, the Crown taking nothing. Reginald of Cornhill, sheriff of Kent, was discharged in 1201 from liability for the appraised value of the goods of a man who, after indictment for the burning of a house, had died in gaol non convictus. As the Pipe Roll clearly states, his chattels did not pertain to the king.^[710]

(2) Conviction. If the sheriff presided over all preliminary procedure connected with indictment, only the justices could “try” the plea, that is, give sentence according to success or failure in the test appointed for the accused man to perform.^[711] Prior to 1215 the usual test, in accordance with the Assize of Clarendon, was the ordeal of water in the ordinary case, or of the red-hot iron in the case of men of high rank, or of women. If the suspected man failed, sentence was a mere formality; he had “convicted” himself of the felony. As a consequence of the condemnation of ordeal by the Lateran Council of 1215, the verdict of guilty pronounced by what was virtually a petty jury, became the normal “test” which branded an offender as convictus. This was long looked on as an innovation, and accordingly the law refused to compel the accused, against his will, to trust his fate to this new form of trial. He might refuse to “put himself upon his country,” and by thus “standing mute,” as the phrase was, make his own “conviction” impossible, saving himself from punishment and depriving the king of his chattels and “year and day.” For centuries those responsible shrank from the obvious course of treating silence as equivalent to a plea of guilty; but while liberty to refuse to submit to a jury’s verdict was theoretically recognized, barbarous measures were in reality adopted to compel consent. The Statute of Westminster in 1275^[712] directed that all who refused should be imprisoned en le prison forte et dure. The object seems to have been to ensure that obstinate offenders should not escape altogether unpunished, although they saved their property by avoiding a technical conviction. This statutory authority for strict confinement, however, was very liberally interpreted by the agents of the Crown, who treated it as a legal warrant for revolting cruelties, aimed at compelling the stubborn to put themselves upon a jury. Food and drink were virtually denied to them, a little mouldy bread and a mouthful of impure water only being allowed them upon alternate days; and at a later date the prisoner was slowly crushed to death under great weights “as heavy, yea heavier than he can bear.” Brave men, guilty, or mayhap innocent, but suspicious of a corrupt jury, preferred thus to die in torments, that they might save to their wives and children the property which would upon conviction have fallen to the Crown. The fiction was carefully maintained that the victim of such barbarous treatment was not subjected to “torture,” always illegal at common law, but merely to peine forte et dure, a perfectly legal method of persuasion under the Statute of 1275. This procedure was not abolished until 1772; then only was an accused man for the first time deprived of his right to "have his law"—his claim to ordeal as the old method of proving his innocence. Until that date then, a jury’s verdict was treated as though it were still a new-fangled and unwarranted form of “test” usurping the place of the ordeal, although the latter had been virtually abolished early in the thirteenth century.^[713]

(3) Attainder. Coke in commenting on this passage draws a further distinction between “conviction” which resulted immediately either from a confession or from a verdict of guilty, and “attainder” which required in addition a formal sentence by the judge. In his age, apparently, it was the sentence of attaint which implied the forfeiture; looking as usual at Magna Carta through seventeenth-century glasses, he seems surprised to find “convicted” used where he would have written “attainted.” Yet this distinction, if recognized at all in 1215, must have been quite immaterial then. It was under the Tudor sovereigns that the doctrine of the penal effects of attainder was fully elaborated. When sentence was passed on a felon, a blight as it were fell immediately upon him: his blood was henceforth in the eye of the law impure, and his kindred could inherit nothing that was his or that came through him. No one could be treated as a blood relation of one whose entire blood was tainted; and the Crown naturally reaped the profit.^[714]

A series of statutes of the nineteenth century modified the harshness with which this rule bore on the felon’s innocent relations;^[715] and finally the Forfeiture Act of 1870^[716] abolished “corruption of blood” and deprived the Crown completely of all interest in the estates of felons, alike in escheats and in chattels. Thus the word “attainted” has become practically obsolete, and the distinction insisted on by Coke has ceased to have any importance in modern law. A criminal who is fulfilling the term of his sentence is known, not as a man attainted, but simply as a “convict,” the same word as was used in Magna Carta.

Omnes kydelli de cetero deponantur penitus de Tamisia, et de Medewaye, et per totam Angliam, nisi per costeram maris.

The object of this provision is open to no reasonable grounds of doubt; it was intended to remove from rivers all obstacles likely to interfere with navigation. The full importance of such a measure can only be understood when the deplorable condition of the few roads which existed in the Middle Ages is kept in view. The water-ways were the great avenues of commerce; when these were blocked, the townsmen and traders suffered loss, while those who depended on them for their necessaries, comforts, and luxuries, shared in the general inconvenience. Magna Carta intervened in the interests of all classes, and demanded the immediate removal of obstructions which interrupted inland traffic. Only one class of impediments indeed was mentioned, “kydells” (or fish-weirs), not because of the purposes to which these were put, but because they were the form of obstruction which called for repressive measures at the moment. This word, whatever narrower technical meaning it may have borne in later days, seems to have been used by the framers of Magna Carta in a wide general sense, as applying to all fixed and bulky contrivances or “engines” intended to catch fish, and likely to interfere with the free passage of boats.^[717]

It has been gratuitously assumed that the motive for prohibiting these “kydells” must have been of a similar kind to the motive for constructing them; and that therefore the object of the present chapter was to prevent the Crown or others from acquiring a monopoly of rights of fishing to the exclusion of the public. Law courts and writers on jurisprudence for many centuries uniformly endorsed this mistaken view, and treated Magna Carta as an absolute prohibition of the creation of “several” (or exclusive) fisheries in tidal waters.^[718] Although this legal doctrine has been frequently and authoritatively enunciated, it rests undoubtedly on a historical misconception. The Great Charter sought to protect freedom of navigation, not freedom of fishing; and this is obvious from the last words of the chapter: kydells are to be removed from Thames and Medway and throughout all England “except upon the sea-coast.” It would have been a manifest absurdity to allow the creation of monopolies of taking fish in the open seas, while insisting on perfect freedom of fishing in rivers, the banks of which were private property. The sense is quite clear: no objection was taken to “kydells,” whatever they might be, so long as they did not interfere with navigation.

The erroneous view, however, had much to excuse it, and acquired plausibility from the circumstance that the destruction of obstacles to the free passage of boats incidentally secured also free passage for salmon and other migratory fish; and that later statutes, when legislative motives had become more complicated, were sometimes passed with both of these objects in view. The change is well illustrated by a comparison of the words of two statutes of 1350 and of 1472 respectively. The first of these repeats the substance of this chapter of Magna Carta, and thus explains its object:—“Whereas the common passage of boats and ships in the great rivers of England be oftentimes annoyed by the inhancing of gorces, mills, weirs, stanks, stakes, and kydells.”^[719] Here there is no allusion to fish or rights of fishing. The later act, while confirming, under penalties, previous statutes for the suppression of weirs, not only states its own intention as twofold, namely, to protect navigation of rivers, and “also in safeguard of all the fry of fish spawned within the same,” but retrospectively and unwarrantably attributes a like double motive to Magna Carta.^[720]

So far as the Thames and Medway were concerned, this provision contained nothing new. To the Londoners, indeed, the keeping open of their river for trade was a matter of vital importance. The right to destroy all kydelli in the Thames and Medway had been purchased from Richard I. for 1500 marks, and a further sum had been paid to John to have this confirmed. The charter of Richard I. is dated 14th July, 1197; and that of John, 17th June, 1199. Each king declared, in words practically identical, that Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, and others had pointed out “that great detriment and discommodity hath grown to our said city of London, and also to the said realm by occasion of the said kydells.” Accordingly each charter declared that the king has “granted and steadfastly commanded that all kydells that are in the Thames be removed wheresoever they shall be within the Thames; also we have quit-claimed all that which the Warden of our Tower of London was wont yearly to receive from the said kydells. Wherefore we will and steadfastly command that no warden of the said Tower, at any time hereafter, shall exact anything of any one, neither molest nor burden nor make any demand of any person by reason of the said kydells.” John’s charter of 1199 went further than that of Richard, making it clear that the prohibition referred to the Medway as well as to the Thames, and granting the right to inflict a penalty of £10 upon anyone infringing its provisions.^[721]

Magna Carta merely confirmed, and extended to all rivers, a prohibition already secured by the Londoners specially for their own river. The provision was repeated in the reissues of Henry III. The citizens, however, did not rest content with a clause in a general enactment, but purchased for 5000 marks three new charters exclusively in their own favour. One of these, dealing with kydells in Thames and Medway, was issued by Henry on 18th February, 1227, in terms almost identical with those of Richard and John.^[722]