Ki ore vaurroit oïr l’ocoison de la guerre dont li rois Jehans moru deshiretés de la plus grant partie d’Engletierre, bien le poroit oïr en cest escrit.
Hist. des Ducs de Normandie, p. 145.
Intervenientibus itaque archiepiscopo Cantuariensi cum pluribus coepiscopis et baronibus nonnullis, quasi pax inter regem et barones formata est.
R. Coggeshall, p. 172.
On May 26, 1214, John had issued writs for the collection of a scutage of three marks per fee from all tenants-in-chief, royal demesnes, vacant bishoprics, lands in royal wardship, and escheats, except those fees which were personally represented in the army in Poitou; on these the scutage was, as usual, to be remitted by royal warrant.[926] Those northern barons who had refused to serve now refused to pay. They adhered to their contention that they were by their tenure exempt from the obligation to foreign service, and they argued that, in consequence, they were also exempt from the obligation to payment in substitution for such service.[927] Whether they claimed this double exemption as a privilege peculiar to themselves, or as common to the whole baronage, is not quite clear. In either case the claim would have been difficult, if not impossible, to prove. There is nothing to indicate that the fiefs in northern England had been originally granted on different conditions from those in the south. On the other hand, there are, indeed, some slight indications of the possible existence in some quarters, in the days of both Richard and Henry, of a theory that the obligation to foreign service—and therefore to payment of scutage for a foreign war—did not form part of the regular obligations of military tenure; in other words, that tenants-in-chivalry were not legally bound to serve in, or to pay for, any war save one of defence. But no general attempt had ever been made even to formulate such a theory, far less to carry it out to its logical consequences; and it is obvious that those consequences would have made it practically impossible for the kings of England to carry on any continental warfare at all. When John in reply to the northern recalcitrants insisted that “it always used to be so done”—that is, foreign service had been rendered or scutage paid in its stead—in his father’s and brother’s days,[928] he was unquestionably right; and he might have added that it had also been so done, over and over again, in the early years of his own reign. The protest of the northern barons seems to have been made to him in a personal meeting very soon after his return to England; we are told that “the matter would have gone further, had it not been checked by the presence of the legate.” It seems indeed to have gone further notwithstanding that obstacle, for the same chronicler adds: “There was brought forth a certain charter of liberties given to the English by Henry I., which the said barons asked the king to confirm.”[929]
If we may believe a report which was current a few years later, this demand had been first suggested to the barons, more than a year before, by Archbishop Stephen of Canterbury. On August 25, 1213; he had gathered the bishops, abbots and other ecclesiastical dignitaries, with some of the lay magnates, around him in S. Paul’s cathedral that they might receive his instructions concerning a partial relaxation of the interdict, which he was empowered to grant, pending the arrival of the legate. It was said[930] that he had afterwards called aside the lay members of the assembly to a secret meeting in which he laid before them a yet weightier matter. “Ye have heard”—thus he was reported to have addressed them—“how, when I absolved the king at Winchester, I made him swear to put down bad laws and enforce throughout his realm the good laws of Edward. Now, there has been found also a certain charter of King Henry I. by which, if ye will, ye may recall to their former estate the liberties which ye have so long lost”:—and he caused the document in question—the coronation-charter of Henry I.—to be read aloud before them. “And when this charter had been read through and interpreted to the barons, they rejoiced with very great joy, and all swore in the archbishop’s presence that when they saw a fitting time they would fight for those liberties, if it were needful, even unto death; the archbishop, too, promised them his most faithful help to the utmost of his power. And, a confederacy being thus made between them, the conference was dissolved.”[931] This story is given by Roger of Wendover only as a rumour; but whether the rumour were literally true or not, it was at any rate founded upon a fact: the fact that the movement which was to result in the Great Charter owed its true impulse to the patriotism, as it owed its success to the statesmanship, not of any of the barons, but of Stephen Langton.
During eight months out of the fourteen which elapsed between the archbishop’s return and that of the king, the administration of government was in the hands of Peter des Roches, and he ruled the country with a rod of iron.[932] But Peter’s vice-regal tyranny was only the final outcome of a state of things which had been growing worse from year to year for more than a quarter of a century. England in the sixteenth year of King John was suffering under an accumulation of grievances consisting, as Ralph of Coggeshall truly says, of all “the evil customs which the king’s father and brother had raised up for the oppression of the Church and realm, together with the abuses which the king himself had added thereto.”[933] No doubt these last formed the worst part of the evil, and it was the addition of them that gave such an increase of bitterness to all the rest. The obligation laid upon all men to attend the Forest courts, when summoned, whether subject to their jurisdiction or not, had been a hardship ever since it was imposed by Henry II. in 1184; the working of the Forest laws had been a source of suffering from a period much earlier still; but the area of the hardship and the suffering was rendered more extensive by the new afforestations made by John.[934] The inconvenience caused by the old practice of making common pleas “follow the king”—that is, of holding trials of civil causes only before the justices who accompanied the king, wheresoever he might be—had been felt in Henry’s time, and Henry had tried to remedy it by setting up a permanent bench of justices in a fixed place to deal with such causes. But the right retained by the sovereign of calling up suits from this tribunal to his own presence was exercised by John to a degree which his restless and erratic movements—almost more restless and erratic than those of his father—seem to have rendered extremely vexatious to litigants.[935] The precise limits of the king’s rights over his tenants-in-chief as to military service, scutage, control over their castles, and such-like matters, had been more or less in dispute throughout the two preceding reigns; but the bitterness of such disputes was intensified by John’s personal dealings with his barons, his subtle contrivances for stealing from them their rights over their own tenants and their own lands, his interference with their domestic life by his continual demands for hostages, and, above all, in many cases, by a desecration of their homes which blood alone could expiate.
Again, the corrupt administration of the sheriffs had been matter of complaint under Henry; but it was far worse under John; for whereas Henry, and after him Hubert Walter acting for Richard, had endeavoured by various means to check the independent action and curtail the powers of the sheriffs, now the king himself was almost openly in league with those officers, and their usurpations and extortions were not merely condoned, but encouraged, if not even directly instigated, by him for his own interest. Owing to the rise in the value of land and a variety of other causes, the sheriffs’ annual receipts had for many years past been generally in considerable excess of the sum—fixed under the Norman kings on the basis of the Domesday Survey—for which they were accountable to the royal treasury as ferm of the shire. Whatever they received beyond this fixed sum seems to have been originally, in theory at least, their own profit. But a share of it was naturally soon claimed by the Crown; and this was done, not by putting the ferm at a higher figure, but by charging the sheriff with an additional lump sum under the title of crementum, or, in John’s time, proficuum.[936] Whatever proportion the increment thus paid to the Crown may have borne to the actual receipts of the sheriffs, it is clear that under a sovereign of John’s character an arrangement which made king and sheriff partners in gain would make them also partners in extortion. The partnership began when the sheriff entered upon his office; he was appointed to it by the king alone, he held it during the king’s pleasure; John had no trouble in finding sheriffs after his own heart. As the improvement of the royal demesnes and the legitimate proceeds of royal jurisdiction were inadequate to produce increment on a scale such as is shown in some of the Pipe Rolls of the reign, these men fleeced the people of their shire by every means they could devise, for the joint profit of the king and themselves; and the king connived at and abetted every possible usurpation of the sheriffs, that they might wring out of the shire a larger amount of money for him. They set at nought the restrictions which John’s predecessors had placed upon their action. They took upon themselves to keep the pleas of the Crown, without reference to the coroners to whom that duty had been specially intrusted under Richard.[937] They accused men of offences and sent them to the ordeal without more ado, in defiance of Henry’s ordinance limiting the employment of that mode of trial to cases in which the charge was made on the presentment of a sworn jury.[938] The corrupt and extortionate rule of the sheriffs had been strongly condemned by the bishops and magnates in the king’s name at the council at S. Albans in August 1213, and it is said that after the coming of the legate some attempt was made to check these abuses by removing the most glaring offenders from office;[939] but a mere change of officers was of little avail; the fault lay not only in the persons who worked the system, but also in the system itself; and the evil extended far beyond the sphere of the sheriffs’ activity.
The whole judicial administration of the realm was corrupt. There was very distinctly one law for the rich and another for the poor.[940] Justice was sold, delayed, or refused altogether, at the king’s will.[941] Proceedings for which the presence of only the parties concerned in the suit, and a certain number of jurors, was legally necessary, were made a pretext for summoning other persons,[942] evidently for the sake of exacting fines from them if they failed to attend, and were protracted[943] so as to make attendance as vexatious as possible, that there might be the more defaulters and the more fines. The course of justice was subjected to constant interference through the summary evocation of causes from the lower courts to that of the king, at the instance of any suitor who could afford to pay for the writ of “praecipe” whereby the sheriff was authorized to effect the transfer.[944] Fines were imposed without regard either to the scale of the offence or the offender’s means of paying, so that men of all classes were reduced by them to ruin, being unable to make up the required sum except by selling their sole means of livelihood—the free yeoman his tenement, the villein his cart, the merchant his stock in trade;[945] clerks were amerced to the full value not only of any lay tenement which they possessed, but also of their ecclesiastical benefices.[946] Henry’s Assize had given to the Crown only the chattels of a convicted felon; but now the Crown took his land also, without compensation to the mesne lord to whom it ought to have reverted.[947]
The exactions and usurpations of the Crown were of the most various kinds, and affected every class of society. Reliefs of arbitrary and unreasonable amount were again, as in the Red King’s days, exacted from tenants-in-chief on succession to their estates.[948] Sub-tenants holding land which formed part of an escheated honour were made to pay relief not as other sub-tenants paid to their immediate lord, but as if they held in chief of the Crown.[949] The widows of tenants-in-chief could not obtain the dowry to which they were legally entitled without payment to the king for its assignment,[950] and were forced into second marriages against their will.[951] The wardship and marriage of minor heirs was given, or sold, by the king to his friends without regard to the honesty or dishonesty of the guardian and the interests of the minor and his family.[952] By an ingenious piece of intentional confusion the Crown arrogated to itself the right of wardship in cases where it had no such right. If a man held land of the Crown by a non-feudal tenure, and also held other land under another lord by knight-service, the distinction between his holding in chief and his holding in chivalry was ignored for the king’s benefit, and the custody of all the man’s lands was appropriated to the Crown.[953] Distraints for debt to the Crown were made in the most arbitrary way; the king’s bailiffs would, if it so pleased them or their master, seize a debtor’s land instead of his chattels, though the value of these latter sufficed to discharge his debt; or they would distrain a debtor’s sureties, although he himself was able to pay.[954] When a freeman died, they assumed as matter of course that he was in debt to the king, and without inquiring to what amount, they seized his chattels, to be restored to his executors or next-of-kin only when the royal claim was satisfied, and not always then.[955] John, like William Rufus, “would be every man’s heir.” If a man died in debt to the Jews, and leaving an heir under age, those usurers were suffered to exact interest upon their debt during the minority of the heir, so that if through the death of the Jewish creditor the debt should fall into the king’s hand (the Crown being the legal heir of all Jews), there should be as much for the king as possible; and in such cases he claimed payment of the uttermost farthing that was set down in the Jew’s account-book, although he might thereby leave the Christian debtor’s widow and children to starve.[956] Exorbitant tolls were exacted from merchants.[957] Fines were laid upon towns for the making of bridges, in places where no such obligation had existed in times past.[958] Weirs were placed in the rivers that the king might keep to himself the profits of fishing.[959] Monasteries not of royal foundation were taken into the king’s custody during vacancy, in defiance of the rights of their founders’ representatives.[960] The king’s bailiffs compelled men to give their corn and other goods for the use of the king or his servants, their horses and carts for the carriage of burdens in his service, their wood for the construction of his buildings, whether the owners were willing or not, and seemingly without payment.[961] Free men were arrested, imprisoned, ejected from their lands, even exiled or outlawed, without legal warrant or fair trial.[962] Individuals were forbidden to enter or quit the realm at the mere will of the king.[963] Some barons whom he specially favoured, or wanted to propitiate, received licences to impose arbitrary taxes on their sub-tenants, without regard to the limits of feudal custom,[964] just as the king himself imposed taxes on his subjects according to his will and pleasure. In a word, the entire system of government and administration set up under the Norman kings and developed under Henry and Richard had been converted by the ingenuity of John into a most subtle and effective engine of royal extortion, oppression and tyranny over all classes of the nation, from earl to villein.
The only class which was as yet capable of making any corporate opposition or protest was the baronage; and hitherto the discontent of the barons had shown itself only in the resistance of some of their number to the king’s demands on certain special occasions and in reference to certain special points which affected them personally as tenants-in-chief. But there was now one man in England who looked at the questions at issue between them and the king from a higher standpoint than theirs, and in whose eyes those questions were only small parts of a much wider and deeper question, on the solution of which he had set his mind from the very hour of his landing in the realm. One chronicler relates that John’s first impulse on hearing of Archbishop Stephen’s arrival in England had been to withdraw himself to some remote place and put off their meeting as long as possible, and that he had only been induced to abandon this intention by the remonstrances of some of the barons.[965] Whether this particular story be true or not, it seems plain that John’s conduct throughout his quarrel with the Church was to a great extent dictated by personal dislike to the archbishop. This feeling must have been mainly instinctive; for the two men had never seen each other till they met at Winchester on July 20, 1213. The instinct, however, was a true one: it was Stephen Langton who was to give the first impulse to the work which was destined—though not till long after he had passed away—to make the rule of such a king as John impossible in England for evermore.
The archbishop was determined to be satisfied with nothing short of a literal fulfilment of the promise on which he had insisted as a condition of the king’s absolution, the promise that to “all men” their rights should be restored. He saw that this end could be gained only by the instrumentality of the barons; he also saw that it could be gained only by a policy based on clearer and firmer, as well as broader and nobler, lines than any of them were capable of designing. They, indeed, had no definite scheme of policy; nor had they any leader able to furnish them with such a scheme. The men of highest standing among the magnates, such as the earls of Salisbury, Chester, Albemarle, Warren, Cornwall and William the Marshal,—the men of highest standing among the official class, such as the heads of the houses of Aubigny, Vipont, De Lucy, Basset, Cantelupe, Neville, Brewer[966]—had either gone to the war or paid their scutage for it without a murmur, and stood utterly aloof from the group of “Northerners,” among whom the most conspicuous were two barons of secondary rank, Eustace de Vesci and Robert Fitz-Walter. Both Eustace and Robert are said to have had just grounds for bitter personal resentment against John; but Robert Fitz-Walter had twice already shown himself to be both a traitor and a coward; and on the second occasion, in 1212, Eustace de Vesci had done the like. The pardon and restoration of both these men in the following year was a matter of policy, but was not due to any merits of their own.[967] It was not under the inspiration and guidance of such men as these that the liberties of the English people could be won, nor even that the barons could succeed in their struggle for the privileges, pretended or real, of their own order. Another guide offered himself to them in the person of Stephen Langton, and offered to them at the same time a definite basis of action in the charter of Henry I. Whether the offer was made at the meeting in S. Paul’s in August 1213, or at some later date and in some other way, is of little consequence; it is enough that antecedent probability and after-history alike justify the general belief of which Roger of Wendover is the spokesman:—that it was Langton who brought to light the charter of which the very existence seems to have been forgotten, and it was from him that the barons adopted it as the basis of their demands.
The next step which they took in so doing was weightier than, probably, they themselves had any idea of. At first glance the charter seems to have little or no bearing upon the immediate subject of dispute between them and the king; it contains no mention whatever of either scutage or military service beyond sea. But it does contain a series of clauses regulating the relations between the tenants-in-chief and the Crown; and thus it furnished them with a substantial ground for insisting that all violations of its provisions on the part of the Crown must be redressed before any further burdens could be binding upon them. It was even possible for them to argue that any demands on the king’s part other than those expressly sanctioned in the charter were an encroachment on their privileges as therein defined. For the greater purpose which Langton had in view, the value of the charter lay in its opening of the way to wider reforms by the incidental clauses which bound the tenants-in-chief to extend to their sub-tenants the same benefits which they themselves received from the king, and in the comprehensive sentence which declared the abolition of “all evil customs whereby the realm was unjustly oppressed.”[968] The more thoughtful among the confederate barons may perhaps by this time have begun to see that, even from a selfish point of view, they had nothing to lose, and might have something to gain, by identifying their cause with that of the nation as a whole. Many of the grievances which touched the lower classes touched the higher also, though not always in the same way. Moreover, although the people were as yet powerless to initiate any corporate action in their own behalf, their support had saved more than one earlier sovereign in a struggle against the barons; it might prove no less useful to the barons in a struggle against the king. But whatever the barons may have thought about these matters, the king was statesman enough to see as clearly as the primate how weighty and far-reaching might be the consequences involved in the demand for a renewal of the charter. He therefore postponed its discussion till after Christmas.[969]
Such is the brief statement of the Barnwell annalist. In its stead, Roger of Wendover gives us a dramatic scene in S. Edmund’s abbey. “The earls and barons of England,” he tells us, came together in that sanctuary, “as if for prayer; but there was something else in the matter, for after they had held much secret discourse, there was brought forth in their midst the charter of King Henry I., which the same barons had received in London, as hath been before said, from Archbishop Stephen of Canterbury. Then they went all together to the church of S. Edmund the King and Martyr, and beginning with the eldest, they swore on the high altar that if the king sought to evade their demand for the laws and liberties which that charter contained, they would make war upon him and withdraw from fealty to him till he should, by a charter furnished with his seal, confirm to them all that they demanded. They also agreed that after Christmas they would go all together to the king, and ask him for a confirmation of the aforesaid liberties; and that meanwhile they would so provide themselves with horses and arms that if the king should seek to break his oath, they might by seizing his castles compel him to make satisfaction. And when these things were done they returned every man to his own home.”[970]
John was at S. Edmund’s on November 4;[971] it is possible therefore that his meeting with the barons may have been held there, and that the scene described by Roger may have taken place after the king’s departure. He kept Christmas at Worcester, and returned to London at the opening of the new year.[972] There, at Epiphany, the confederate barons came to him in a body, “in somewhat showy military array,” and prayed him “that certain laws and liberties of King Edward, with other liberties granted to them and to the English Church and realm, might be confirmed, as they were written in the charter of King Henry I. and the laws aforesaid; moreover they declared that at the time of his absolution at Winchester, he had promised those ancient laws and liberties, and thus he was bound by his own oath to the observance of the same.” John cautiously answered that “the matter which they sought was great and difficult, wherefore he asked for a delay till the close of Easter, that he might consider how to satisfy both their demands and the dignity of his crown.”[973] He then seems to have tried to persuade them—no doubt each man singly—into giving him a written promise “never again to demand such liberties from him or his successors”; but to this no one would consent except the bishop of Winchester, the earl of Chester, and William Brewer.[974] At last the proposed adjournment till the close of Easter was agreed upon, but not till the king had, “against his will,” pledged himself by three sureties to fulfill his promise by giving reasonable satisfaction to all parties at the date thus appointed.[975]
The king’s sureties were the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of Ely, and William the Marshal. The choice of the archbishop as one of them was good policy on John’s part; and Langton’s acceptance of the office implies no wavering or double-dealing on his side. In so far as it was his inspiration that gave a new force to the enterprise of the barons, by raising it from a struggle for their own privileges into a struggle for the liberties of the English nation, he was in truth, as Roger of Wendover says, their “chief ally”;[976] and for the achievement of its end as he himself conceived it, he did indeed “give them his most faithful help to the utmost of his power.” But the help which he gave them was not that of a partisan; Stephen Langton was at once too true a churchman and too great a statesman, and held too lofty a conception of his proper constitutional functions as primate of all England, to identify himself with any party. The right and the duty of the archbishop of Canterbury was to be the partisan of neither king nor people, but the guide and monitor of both, so far as they would accept his guidance and listen to his admonitions, and the mediator between them whenever mediation was needed. He was by virtue of his office the first adviser of the Crown as well as the guardian of the nation’s rights; and it was only by standing firmly at his post by the king’s side in the former capacity that he could be truly efficient in the latter. Langton’s attitude was evidently understood by both parties at the time. From the moment when the northern barons first asked the king to confirm his great-grandfather’s charter, if not before, John must have known that the hand of the primate was with them in the matter. But he was quite as much alive as they were to the value of such a helper; moreover, he seems to have had the somewhat rare gift of being able to recognize in another man qualities which were conspicuously absent from his own character. Much as he hated Langton, he evidently trusted to his honour and loyalty as implicitly as he trusted to that of William the Marshal. He therefore continued to the end the policy which he had pursued ever since the archbishop’s coming to England. He treated Langton with every mark of confidence and respect; he carefully avoided any step which might have forced him into opposition on ecclesiastical grounds; and in his diplomatic dealings with the barons it was Langton whom he employed as his chief commissioner and representative.
The king, however, was even more prompt than the barons in preparing to back diplomacy by force. Immediately after the Epiphany meeting he ordered a renewal of the oath of allegiance throughout the country; and this time it was to be taken in the form of an oath of liege homage, binding his subjects to “stand by him against all men.” This, it is said, was an unwonted addition, which was generally opposed as being “contrary to the charter”—the standard by which all things were now tried.[977] It may have been in connexion with this matter that the king sent {Feb. 10} to the men of sixteen southern and midland shires commissioners “to explain his business” to them;[978] but he ended by withdrawing his demand, “not deeming the time opportune for exciting a tumult among the people.”[979] That tumults would nevertheless arise before long he knew full well; and to meet this danger he had already called to his aid the loyal “barons and bachelors” of Poitou.[980] The summons must have been issued immediately after, if not even in anticipation of, his meeting with the English malcontents at Epiphany, and the response must have been as prompt as the summons, for on February 8 he had already heard of the arrival in Ireland of some troops sent to him by Savaric de Mauléon, and was issuing orders to the archbishop of Dublin for the payment of their passage to England.[981] On February 19 the king gave a safe-conduct to “the barons of the North” that they might come to Oxford to speak with the primate, the other bishops and the Earl Marshal on Sunday the 22nd.[982] Whether this conference took place, or what came of it, we are not told; but on March 13 John wrote to the barons and bachelors of Poitou that the matter for which he had summoned them was now settled, and he therefore, thanking them for their readiness to obey his call, bade those of them who had not yet set out remain at home, and those who had started go home again, with the assurance that he would indemnify them for their expenses.[983]
It is possible that the barons may have asked for the conference at Oxford in order to remonstrate against the warlike preparations of the king, and that it may have resulted in some temporary arrangement which compelled him to dismiss the Poitevins. It is also possible that this dismissal may have been prompted by tidings from Rome. The prospect of some such crisis as the present one had almost certainly been in the minds of king and barons alike when John performed his homage to the Pope; and both alike now sought to make their profit out of that transaction, each side appealing to the Pope, as the common overlord of both, to use his authority in compelling the other to yield. An envoy from John, William Mauclerc, had reached Rome on February 17. Eleven days later Eustace de Vesci and two other representatives of the malcontent party arrived with letters for the Pope. In these letters—so Mauclerc reported to his master—the confederate barons besought Innocent, “since he was lord of England,” to urge and, if needful, compel the king to restore the ancient liberties granted by his predecessors and confirmed by his own oath. They recited how at the meeting in London at Epiphany John had not only refused to grant these liberties, but had endeavoured to make the petitioners promise never to ask for them again. They begged that the Pope would take measures to help them in this matter, “forasmuch as he well knew that they had at his command boldly opposed the king in behalf of the Church’s liberty, and that the king’s grant of an annual revenue and other honours to the Pope and the Roman Church had been made not of free will and devotion, but from fear and under compulsion from them.”[984] Of what John wrote, or charged his envoy to say, to Innocent in his behalf, no record remains; but Innocent’s letters show what the tenour of John’s argument must have been. With his usual dexterity the king made capital out of the secret meetings held, or said to have been held, by the malcontents; and he also brought into special prominence the one point of discussion which was quite clearly defined, and in which he unmistakeably had precedent on his side—the question of the scutage. On March 19 Innocent wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury and the other English bishops, expressing his surprise that they had not checked the quarrel between the king and “certain magnates and barons,” and reproving them for their failure to do so; he strongly condemned the “conspiracies and conjurations” which the barons were reported to have made, and ordered the bishops to quash all such conspiracies and urge the barons to proceed only by fair and lawful means. On the other hand, he besought the king “to treat the aforesaid nobles graciously, and mercifully to grant their just petitions.” On the same day he wrote to the barons, informing them of the contents of his letter to the bishops.[985] On April 1 he wrote to the barons again, avowedly in consequence of the king’s complaint of their refusal to pay the scutage for the Poitevin war; he reproved them for their contumacy in this matter, and “warned and exhorted” them to satisfy the king’s claims without further delay.[986]
By the middle of April the two former of these letters must have reached England, the second being probably brought back by Eustace de Vesci and his companions. The third letter was scarcely needed to show the barons that their cause was lost at Rome. John, moreover, had secured its ruin in that quarter by taking the Cross[987]—partly, no doubt, as a protection against personal violence, but still more as a means of enlisting the Pope’s strongest sympathies in his behalf, and holding up his enemies to execration as hinderers of the crusade. They grew desperate; they held another council among themselves, at which they determined, without waiting for their promised interview with the king, that they “would deal civilly with him no longer”;[988] and in Easter week they assembled at Stamford in arms.
Five earls and forty barons are mentioned by name as present at the muster, “with many others”; they all came with horses and arms, and brought with them “a countless host,” estimated to comprise about two thousand knights, besides other horsemen, sergeants-at-arms, and foot soldiers.[989] “And because for the most part they came from the north, they were all called Northerners.” From Stamford they marched to Northampton, but without doing any act of violence.[990] John, who had spent Easter in London,[991] sent the primate and some other bishops and magnates to parley with them.[992] Several meetings appear to have taken place. The deliberations evidently turned chiefly on the Pope’s letters. No allusion is made by the chroniclers to the letter about the scutage, which perhaps had not yet arrived; but, on the one hand, Innocent’s condemnation of secret conspiracies could not be ignored; and on the other, the barons urged his injunction to the king to hearken to their “just petitions.”[993] At length John—secure in the consciousness that he could refuse every petition on the plea that it was not just—authorized his commissioners to demand of the barons, in his name, a categorical statement of the laws and liberties which they desired.
This message was delivered to the insurgents by the primate and the Marshal, at Brackley, on Monday April 27—the day after that originally fixed for the meeting of the barons and the king. “Then they [the barons] presented to the envoys a certain schedule, which consisted for the most part of ancient laws and customs of the realm, declaring that if the king did not at once grant these things and confirm them with his seal, they would compel him by force.”[994] This “schedule” was no doubt a kind of first draft, prepared under the direction of Langton himself in his conferences with the insurgents during the previous week, of those “Articles of the Barons” from which we chiefly learn the grievances of the time, and most of which were ultimately embodied in the Great Charter. Langton and the Marshal carried it back to the king, who was now in Wiltshire.[995] One by one the articles were read out to him by the primate. John listened with a scornful smile: “Why do these barons not ask for my kingdom at once?” he said. “Their demands are idle dreams, without a shadow of reason.” Then he burst into a fury, and swore that he would never grant to them liberties which would make himself a slave. In vain the archbishop and the Marshal endeavoured to persuade him to yield; he only bade them go back to the barons and repeat every word that he had said. They performed their errand;[996] and the barons immediately sent to the king a formal renunciation of their homage and fealty,[997] and chose for themselves a captain-general in the person of Robert Fitz-Walter, to whom they gave the title of “Marshal of the army of God and Holy Church.”[998] They then marched back to Northampton, occupied the town and laid siege to the castle.[999]
The king was not behindhand in his preparations for war. His friends were already mustering at Gloucester; on April 30 he requested them to proceed thence on the following Monday (May 3), well furnished with horses and arms, and with “all the men they could get,” to Cirencester, there to await his further commands.[1000] Orders were issued for strengthening the fortifications of London, Oxford, Norwich, Bristol and Salisbury.[1001] The earls of Salisbury, Warren, Pembroke and others perambulated the country to see that the royal castles were properly fortified and manned;[1002] help was summoned from Flanders[1003] and from Poitou.[1004] Early in May the king returned for a couple of days to London;[1005] and as fourteen years before he had won the support of its citizens in his struggle with Richard’s chancellor by granting to them the “commune” which they desired, so now he endeavoured to secure their adhesion by confirming their liberties and adding to them the crowning privilege of a fully constituted municipality, the right to elect their own mayor every year.[1006] Meanwhile the “northern” barons had found Northampton castle too strong to be taken without military engines which they did not possess; so at the end of a fortnight they had raised the siege and moved on to Bedford. Here the castle was given up to them by its commandant, William de Beauchamp.[1007] Their forces were rapidly increasing in number; the younger men especially, sons and nephews of the greater barons, joined them readily, “wishing to make for themselves a name in war”; the elder magnates, for the most part, clave to the king “as their lord.”[1008]
On May 9 the king—now at Windsor—proposed that the quarrel should be decided by eight arbitrators, four to be chosen by himself and four by “the barons who are against us,” with the Pope as “superior” over them; he offered the earl of Warren and four bishops as sureties for his own acceptance of the award, and promised that until it was delivered he would take no forcible measures against the insurgents, “save according to the law of the realm and the judgement of their peers in his court.”[1009] This proposal seems to have been rejected at once, for two days later John ordered the sheriffs to seize the lands, goods and chattels of “his enemies” in their several shires and apply them to his benefit.[1010] Almost immediately afterwards he seems to have commissioned the archbishop of Canterbury to negotiate a truce for a few days. On the 16th he appointed his brother, Earl William of Salisbury, to act as his representative in London.[1011] The object of William’s mission evidently was to secure, if possible, the loyalty of the “mayor, aldermen and other barons of London,” which John suspected to be wavering. His suspicion was correct; a plot for the betrayal of the city was already ripe, and on the very next morning—Sunday, May 17—the insurgents were masters of the capital.[1012] The first use they made of this success was to fill their pockets with plunder taken from the king’s partisans in the city, and from the Jews; the next was to pull down the Jews’ houses and use the stones for repairing the city walls. They then sent letters to all the earls, barons and knights who still adhered to the king, “bidding them, if they cared to retain their property and goods, forsake a king who was perjured and in rebellion against his barons, and join with them in standing firmly and fighting strongly for the peace and liberty of the realm; threatening that if they neglected so to do, they, the writers, would direct their banners and their arms against them as against public enemies, and do their utmost to overthrow their castles, burn their dwellings, and destroy their fishponds, orchards and parks.” These invitations and threats brought over to the winning side all who had been waiting to see which way the tide would turn, and they, of course, made a right goodly company.[1013]
Still the king did not lose heart. He had gone from Berkshire into Wiltshire,[1014] and was at his hunting seat of Fremantle—“a house which stands on a height, and in the heart of a forest”—when, on May 18 or 19, a party of Flemish knights under Robert de Béthune found their way to him and offered themselves for his service. He gave them a joyous welcome, and hearing that a sudden rising had taken place in Devon, despatched them under the command of the earl of Salisbury to deal with it. The insurgents were reported to be besieging Exeter, whence the earl was bidden to dislodge them; but they had, in fact, already taken it; and when Earl William reached Sherborne, he was told that they were lying hidden in a wood through which his road lay, in such numbers that he and his followers had no chance of escape if they fell into the ambush; whereupon he went back to the king at Winchester.[1015] “You are not good at taking fortresses!” said John scornfully when he heard the tale. A few days later he again bade the same party go and drive the “Northerners” out of Exeter. Again they were met at Sherborne by alarming accounts of the increased numbers of the enemy; but this time the Flemings, stung by the king’s taunt, insisted upon going forward to “conquer or die”; and the “Northerners,” though they are said by the contemporary Flemish chronicler to have been ten to one, evacuated Exeter at the mere tidings of their approach.[1016]
This second expedition to Exeter probably started from Winchester on the same day (May 24) on which John issued a notice that any persons who came to his service from over sea were to place themselves under the orders of his chamberlain, Hubert de Burgh.[1017] He had summoned a part of his forces to muster on May 26 at Marlborough; but on the 25th they were bidden to proceed to “the parts of Odiham and Farnham,” there to receive his commands; while others, who were to have come to Reading, were to await his orders sent through Jordan de Sackville. On the same day John wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury, urgently, but very courteously, entreating that he would temporarily waive his right to the custody of Rochester castle and allow the king to garrison it with men of his own.[1018] To this request Langton acceded.[1019] By this time he had negotiated another truce, and two days later {May 27} John gave him a safe-conduct for himself and for whatever persons he might bring with him to Staines “to treat of peace between ourself and our barons.”[1020]
The object of all these changes of front on the king’s part was to gain time for assembling new forces and devising a new policy. On the same day on which he gave the safe-conduct to the archbishop, he despatched an urgent appeal to all “his knights, men-at-arms, and friends who were coming to join him” from over sea, entreating them to come as speedily as possible, and promising that they should be well rewarded for so doing.[1021] On May 29 he again wrote to the Pope, complaining of the rebellious attitude of the barons, which made it impossible for him to fulfil his vow of crusade.[1022] On Whitsun Eve, June 6, he bade his favourite captain of mercenaries, Falkes de Bréauté, send four hundred Welshmen to Salisbury to meet its earl by the following Tuesday,[1023] seemingly to be ready for action on the Thursday, when the truce would expire.
John knew, however, that the game was lost. Four bodies of insurgents were now in the field, and none of them seem to have paid any regard to the truce. The townsfolk of Northampton had risen against the royal garrison of the castle and slain several of them. The force which occupied London was besieging the Tower; and now, in this Whitsun week, another body seized Lincoln.[1024] The king was almost deserted; at one moment he is said to have had only seven knights left in his suite; the sessions of the Exchequer and of the sheriffs’ courts throughout the country had ceased, because no one would pay him anything or obey him in any matter.[1025] He had come up on May 31 from Odiham to Windsor, doubtless to meet the archbishop at Staines; on June 4 he went back into Hampshire.[1026] On Whit-Monday, June 8, he issued from Merton a safe-conduct for envoys from the barons to proceed to and from Staines from Tuesday the 9th till Thursday the 11th. On Wednesday the 10th he returned to Windsor, and the truce was prolonged from Thursday to the following Monday, the 15th.[1027] Finally, he despatched William the Marshal and some other trusty envoys to tell the barons in London “that for the sake of peace and for the welfare and honour of his realm, he would freely concede to them the laws and liberties which they asked; and that they might appoint a place and day for him and them to meet, for the settlement of all these things.” The messengers “guilelessly performed the errand which had been guilefully imposed on them”; and the barons, “buoyed up with immense joy,” fixed the meeting to take place on June 15 in a meadow between Staines and Windsor,[1028] called Runnimead.[1029]