In November the barons came together at St. Edmundsbury, and in the abbey church “they swore on the high altar that if the king sought to evade their demand for the laws and liberties of the charter of King Henry I., 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 these 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 every man returned to his own home.” (Roger of Wendover.)
John kept Christmas at Worcester, but his court was very small, and he realised that he stood alone. All through the years of the interdict the pope’s ban had not kept the nobles from attendance on the king; it was now when he stood reconciled to the Church that John found himself deserted. He moved to London at the new year, and there on the Epiphany came the confederate barons, making display of arms, and praying that the laws and liberties of Edward the Confessor written in the charter of Henry I. might be confirmed. John urged that the question was too big and too difficult to be settled off hand, and asked that it should be put off till Easter. This was agreed to on condition that the king pledged himself by three sureties to fulfil his promises. Archbishop Stephen, William the Marshall and the Bishop of Ely were accepted as sureties, and in accepting the post Langton proved his great statesmanship. There was no question of going over to the king’s side. The barons knew the archbishop as their chief ally, but John knew that Langton was to be trusted as implicitly as he trusted William the Marshall. Langton’s one desire was to see the written enactment granting constitutional liberties, and ending the worst of the royal abuses.
John did not waste the time allotted to him, but worked his hardest to gain friends and supporters against the barons, and to break up the confederacy. It was all to no purpose. His commissioners to the County Courts—in the southern and midland shires, sent to explain the king’s cause—met with no success. Nobles and churchmen alike stood aloof, and all John could do was to write to the knights at Poitou to send him mercenaries, and to appeal to his liege lord, the pope, against his rebellious subjects. Finally, he took the cross, hoping for the favours awarded to a crusader. These efforts were all of no avail. The mercenaries were inadequate. The pope’s letters of rebuke to the barons for their conspiracies and conjurations were unheeded, and at Easter, John (whom the pope had warned to harken to “just petitions”) was driven to send the primate and the Marshall for a definite statement of the laws and liberties demanded.
The barons, who were assembled at Brackley, presented “a certain schedule,” probably compiled with Langton’s assistance, and this was read to the king by the primate. “They might as well ask for my kingdom at once,” was John’s reply to the various items, and he swore he would never grant liberties that would mean his own enslavement. Both Langton and the Marshall strove to persuade the king to yield, but to no purpose; and all that remained was to return to the barons and to state that the king refused their demands. Then the barons, on hearing this, flew to arms, formally renounced their homage and fealty to the king, and chose a military leader for themselves—Robert Fitz-Walter. London welcomed the insurgents on May 24th, and John, with a handful of mercenaries, had the whole baronage against him. Capitulation was inevitable. From Windsor John sent envoys to the barons in London, promising, for the sake of peace and for the welfare and honour of his realm, to concede the laws and liberties demanded, and advising the appointment of time and place for a meeting for “the settlement of all these things.” The barons at once fixed the meeting for June 15th, in a meadow called Runnymead, between Staines and Windsor, and there, in the presence of well-nigh all the baronage of England, of Archbishop Stephen, and seven bishops, and “a multitude of most illustrious knights,” the Great Charter was signed. It was the work of Langton.[30] It was he who had inspired the movement, had framed the articles, and had brought the struggle to a successful issue.
“One copy of the Great Charter still remains in the British Museum, injured by age and fire, but with the royal seal still hanging from the brown, shrivelled parchment. It is impossible to gaze without reverence on the earliest monument of English freedom which we can see with our own eyes and touch with our own hands, the Great Charter to which from age to age patriots have looked back as the basis of English liberty.” (J. R. Green.)
Yet the Charter itself was in the main but the old charter of Henry I. writ large. It set up no new rights and conferred no new privileges. It sanctioned no constitutional changes, and proclaimed no new liberties. Its real importance is in the fact that it was a written document—“this great table of laws, won by the people of England from a tyrannous king, was the first great act which laid down in black and white the main points of the constitution and the several rights and duties of king and people.” (F. York Powell.)
“The bonds of unwritten custom, which the older grants did little more than recognize, had proved too weak to hold Angevins; and the baronage now threw them aside for the restraints of written law. It is in this way that the Great Charter marks the transition from the age of traditional rights, preserved in the nation’s memory and officially declared by the primate, to the age of written legislation, of parliaments and statutes, which was soon to come.” (J. R. Green.)
The first article of the Charter guaranteed the freedom of the English Church, and, in especial, the freedom of elections, “which was reputed most requisite.”
By the Great Charter the feudal rights of the king over his vassals were defined and settled, and the tenants of the barons were protected in similar way from the lawless exactions of their lords.
No scutage or aid was to be levied by the crown, “save by the common council of the realm”—except the three customary feudal aids for the ransoming of the king, the knighting of his eldest son, and the marriage of his eldest daughter. This common council, consisting of bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons, was to be summoned by special writ. The free rights of London and the other chartered towns were fully admitted.