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.
1214
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]
1213
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.
1214
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.