The Great Turning Points of British History (8 page)

Above all, the charter met the grievances of the earls and barons. There were around a dozen earls in the early thirteenth century, and something between one hundred and two hundred barons. Tiny numbers, but they controlled a large part of the country’s wealth, and had mostly been in rebellion. Not surprisingly, they stamped their mark on the charter’s early clauses, making it very much a baronial document. Thus
Chapter 2
, as we have seen, fixed the relief of earls and barons at £100.
Chapter 4
protected baronial lands from exploitation by the king when they were in his hands during the minority of an heir.
Chapter 14
vested the power to consent to taxation in the hands of a largely baronial assembly. Indeed, only the greater barons, lay and ecclesiastical, were to receive individual letters of summons to it. The implication was that the earls and barons, commanding the allegiances of their tenants, could answer for the realm.

The charter thus reflected the structures of power in English society. It was also the product of ideas. The king should govern lawfully for the good of his people. He should only punish individuals after having obtained a judgement of their peers. A king who defied these principles could be regarded as a tyrant, and might be restrained or even deposed. By 1215 such concepts had a long pedigree and were commonplace among John’s opponents. They were sharpened and refined by the archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, an internationally famous academic, who played a key role in brokering the 1215 settlement, and in supporting the charter thereafter. It was these ideas, enshrined in the charter, that formed its essential legacy, a legacy first for England, and ultimately for the United Kingdom as a whole.

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Britain in the age of Magna Carta was full of contrasts, with profound differences in social structure between the uplands of Wales and Scotland and lowland England. Hence the way the English, living in nucleated villages and eating bread – product of their great corn-growing fields – could stigmatize the Scots as bare-buttocked Highlanders and ridicule the Welsh as dwellers in dispersed settlements, who consumed nothing but milk and meat.

Yet, in many ways, the peoples of Britain were becoming more alike. The structure of dioceses and parishes, and the houses of Benedictine and Cistercian monks, had spread through the island. The Scottish nobility had been transformed in the twelfth century by the king’s establishment of Anglo-Norman aristocrats, men of chivalric outlook. The castles, cavalry, armour, seals and documents of the Welsh rulers show how they had been influenced by their Anglo-Norman neighbours. Royal government in Scotland, however, was comparatively decentralized. Wales was divided between competing princes. Only in England was the power of the ruler so insistent and intrusive as to provoke demands for restraints.

The grievances dealt with in Magna Carta had a long history. Many were the product of the way kings since the Norman Conquest had manipulated the judicial process and exploited the rights and revenues that came to them from the new tenurial structures introduced by the Norman Conquest. Already in 1100 Henry I’s Coronation Charter dealt (unavailingly) with the issues of relief, widows, and wardships of children later tackled in Magna Carta. This was why the 1100 charter was brought out again by the opposition to King John.

John’s Angevin predecessors were also to blame. His father, Henry II (reigned 1154–89), had extended the royal forest, antagonizing wide sections of society. John’s brother Richard I, between 1194 and 1199, had placed novel financial burdens on the country. The need for money to preserve the continental empire against the power of the king of France was a constant problem facing these kings. Another was that the great base of land brought to the monarchy by the Norman Conquest had slowly been eroded as land was given away to reward followers. As a result, kings had to exploit other, more politically sensitive, sources of revenue. Of course, the Angevins gave as well as took; they had developed immensely popular legal procedures that lay at the heart of what was later called ‘the common law’. These were the assizes, which the charter sought to extend, not restrict. But here too was a problem, for the new procedures turned on due process of law. No free man was to lose his possessions ‘unjustly and without judgement’. The year 1215 was the moment when society turned on the king and demanded that he obey his own rules.

Early in his reign John suffered two blows, first a rapid inflation for which he was blameless, and then, in 1204, the loss of Normandy. Thereafter he spent ‘ten furious years’ trying to raise the treasure to regain Normandy. The treasure went in an abortive military campaign in France of 1214. The grievances remained and produced Magna Carta.

1204
John loses Normandy
. Normandy was finally conquered by Philip II of France. This was a pivotal event in European history – now the cross-channel Anglo-Norman state was over. King and barons, like everyone else, would be born and live only in England. They had far more time for the affairs of Britain. The English conquest of Wales in the 1280s and near-conquest of Scotland around 1300 was the result.

1216
Llywelyn dominates Wales
. Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, the ruler of Gwynedd, established his dominance over native Wales. His vision was of a principality in which he alone did homage to the king of England while the other native rulers did homage to him, in effect as prince of Wales. Two years later, in the Treaty of Worcester, Llywelyn’s territorial conquests and practical (if not theoretical) supremacy were recognized by the king of England.

1217
The throne is secured for John’s son
. Two victories, the first at Lincoln, the second at sea off Sandwich, secured the throne for John’s son, Henry III. Prince Louis, eldest son of Philip II of France, resigned his claims and returned to France. Had a French king ruled England, the political structure of Europe would have developed on incalculably different lines.

1221
The friars move in
. The first Dominicans arrived in England, soon followed by the Franciscans. By around 1300 there were more than a hundred Dominican and Franciscan houses in Britain. With an emphasis on poverty, preaching and university study, they transformed the religious life of the island. A sermon by an educated preacher now became an everyday part of town life.

1225
Magna Carta is reissued
. In 1216 and 1217 the minority government of Henry III had reversed John’s policies and issued new versions of Magna Carta. In 1225, yet another version was issued in return for a heavy tax that saved the dynasty’s continental possessions in Gascony. The 1225 version of the charter became definitive, the one confirmed by subsequent kings, clauses of which are on the statute book today.

1236
A strong queen emerges
. Henry III married Eleanor of Provence, laying the foundations for a remarkable resurgence of queenly power. No queen consort had played a role in English political life since Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1160s. Eleanor of Provence, made of far sterner stuff than her indulgent husband, changed that. Supporting, and supported by, her relations from Savoy, whom Henry established in England, she was a central figure in the politics of the reign.

1237
Treaty of York
. Alexander II of Scotland resigned claims to the northern counties of England, which Scottish kings had pursued for 200 years. In return he gained substantial territory in Tynedale. He consolidated the Anglo-Scottish peace (it lasted from 1217 to 1296), and was free to concentrate on the conquest of Galloway, where he had taken armies in 1235 and 1236, thus extending the reach of the Scottish state.

1240
End of a great Welsh leader
. This year marked the death of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, justly called in his own lifetime Llywelyn the Great. His death ushered in a period in which the king of England recovered his power in Wales. But Llywelyn’s vision of a Welsh principality under a single native ruler, the prince of Wales, was to be realized, if only for the ten years between 1267 and 1277, by his grandson.

1249
Scotland loses King Alexander
. King Alexander II of Scotland (who had come to the throne aged 16 in 1214) died on an expedition to wrest lordship of the Isle of Man and the Hebrides from the king of Norway. The expedition summed up the way Alexander had re-oriented Scottish kingship. It would expand not south into England but north and west. The acquisition of Man and Hebrides was ultimately achieved by his son, Alexander III, securing Scotland’s western borders. Together they had constructed a state strong enough to resist English attempts at conquest.

England was prosperous in the thirteenth century, with a growing population. Great monastic estates, such as those of Winchester Cathedral Priory, or of the Cistercian monasteries of Yorkshire, were doing very well, as were the estates of earls and major barons. Some knightly families, however, found it increasingly hard to maintain their status in society. More and more land was put under the plough, as agricultural activity expanded to feed an increasingly numerous populace. Fenland was drained and exploited.

The wool trade was booming. Italian merchants were attracted to England; they provided credit mechanisms that helped to fuel the expansion of trade. The urban economy thrived. New towns continued to be founded – if not at quite the rate of the first half of the century – and established towns expanded. This was an economic expansion driven by a commercially minded populace, above all in England, but also in Scotland and Wales.

By 1295, however, there were beginning to be indications that population growth was no longer matched by the expansion of resources and by levels of investment. The years of prosperity were coming to an end.

The major political crisis of this half-century in England began in 1258, and lasted until 1265, when the baronial leader, Simon de Montfort, was killed at Evesham. Edward I did much to restore the prestige of the crown after he came to the throne in 1272, but in his later years he faced political difficulties. War meant heavy taxation, both on wool exports and on personal wealth.

Growing prosperity helped enable Edward I to extend his political influence in Britain. He conquered Wales in two campaigns, in 1277 and 1282–3; rebellion in 1294–5 saw the embers of resistance flare up. Scotland was a different story. Relations between England and Scotland were peaceable for most of the thirteenth century. Edward I oversaw the hearings of the Great Cause in 1291–2, which determined that John Balliol, not Robert Bruce, should be king after the death of the heiress Margaret, the Maid of Norway. Scotland’s alliance with France led to Edward I’s invasion in 1296, and Balliol’s deposition, but in the next year William Wallace led a successful rebellion. The Wars of Independence had begun.

Relations with France were also peaceable until the 1290s. The war that began in 1294 was not of Edward I’s choosing. He was tricked by French diplomacy into thinking that a marriage alliance was about to be agreed; instead the French moved into his duchy of Gascony. The war, which saw heavy expenditure but no major battles, lasted until a truce was agreed in 1297. It was a precursor of the Hundred Years War that began in 1337, though in that conflict the English claim to the French throne provided an additional element.

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As the year 1295 opened, England’s King Edward I and his troops were wintering in Conwy Castle, besieged by Welsh rebels. Food was running low; all the drink that remained was one small barrel of wine, left for the king’s personal use. Edward had this distributed among his men, the action of a good commander.

The Welsh had been in rebellion since the previous autumn; they had taken advantage of English preoccupation with the war that had just started with France. The rising was a national one, headed by a then obscure figure, Madog ap Llywelyn. Wales had seemed conquered by 1283; now, the whole English achievement was under threat. Edward led a rapid raid from Conwy to the west, into the Lleyn peninsula, but it was elsewhere that the war was won. In March Madog was defeated in mid-Wales by forces under the earl of Warwick, at Maes Moydog. There, an English commentator noted that Madog’s forces were ‘the best and bravest Welsh that anyone has seen’. They met the English head on, but to no avail. English archers and men-at-arms were too powerful. Madog himself escaped. Edward went on a triumphant tour of Wales, receiving submissions from a defeated people. Eventually Madog was captured, and led to miserable captivity in the Tower of London.

The end of the Welsh rebellion was marked by the start of the building of a great new castle, Beaumaris in Anglesey, the last of the magnificent series of castles that marked Edward’s conquest. It was characterized by concentric lines of defences, two great twin-towered gatehouses, and a dock so that ships could supply the fortress. Edward’s great mason from Savoy, Master James of St George, was in charge of the project. In July the king returned from his circuit of Wales to see the work under way; accounts show that one evening there he enjoyed entertainment provided by an English harpist, Adam of Clitheroe.

Wales was only one of the immense problems that Edward faced; England’s war with France was another. In the previous year the French had taken over much of Edward’s duchy of Gascony in south-western France, and English forces there were hanging on with difficulty. His soldiers achieved a measure of success at the start of the year, but at Easter the French under Charles of Valois invaded. Rioms was besieged, and a sortie by the English garrison was driven back ‘like sheep into the fold’. English holdings in Gascony were reduced to a couple of towns near Bordeaux, and Bayonne in the south.

To make things worse, the French took the war directly to the English. There was alarm in April when messengers reported that a large fleet was gathering across the Channel to attack England. In the event, attacks were more limited, but in August French galleys raided Dover, and the town of Winchelsea was assaulted. Royal proclamations declared that the English language itself was under threat from the French.