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]
1214
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]