The other great abuse which John introduced into the levying of scutage was his subversion of the theory that the payment of it by the vassal wholly acquitted him of his obligation to the king for that occasion. John endeavored in a number of instances to make him liable for personal service in addition, and for fines in case he failed to be present in his train. In 1199 John exacted fines from those who did not accompany him to Normandy; in 1201 he accepted money-payment as a substitute for service; in 1205 he fined the tenants-in-chivalry after he dismissed them from service in the host. In these years scutages were laid as well.[67]
Thus did John make over scutage; it had become a heavy impost upon the lands of demesne tenants, an almost annual charge, and a tax foreign to its original character as a commutation for personal service. A rebellion culminating in the exaction from John of a written contract between him and the baronage, detailing their mutual relations was the natural consequence.
But the knights were by no means the only body of Englishmen whom John alienated by his frequent levy of taxes. Antagonism of the clergy The clergy, already irritated by John’s quarrel with the Pope and his seizures of ecclesiastical property, were ready to combat the king in any further attempt to tax them. At a Great Council at London on the 8th January, 1207, the king asked “the bishops and abbots to permit the parsons and the beneficed clergy to give to the king a fixed sum from their revenues.”[68] The prelates did not consent, and John brought the matter up again at a second Great Council which he convened at Oxford on the 9th February. There were present an “infinite multitude of prelates of the church and magnates of the realm,” and John again addressed the ecclesiastics. The bishops “unanimously answered that the English church could in no wise sustain what was unheard of in all the ages before.” The king, “taking wise council,” withdrew his demand, but he did not abandon his project.General demand of a thirteenth of movables “Afterward he ordained generally throughout the kingdom that every man ... give a thirteenth part to the king” of revenue and movables. The demand applied to all men, no matter from whom they held their lands.[69] Against the imposition, the earlier analogues of which were the Saladin Tithe and Richard’s ransom, “all murmured, but none dared to contradict” the king, except Geoffrey of York; he did not consent, but openly refused, and then had to fly from England to escape John’s anger.[70] The writ for the assessment of the thirteenth has it that the tax was provided “by the common advice and assent of our Council at Oxford.”[71] How whole-souled was the assent is revealed by the Chronicler; “none dared to contradict.”
The time was at hand when men would not longer endure the extortionate exercise of an unchallenged royal right. Normandy is lost There were a number of conditions and circumstances aside from the burdensome taxes which were pointing toward Runnymede and Magna Carta. By 1204 John had come to the end of his day in France. Normandy was lost. The effect upon England was marked; the Norman baronage was obliged to choose between England and the Continent. Hereafter tyranny and good-rule of the English kings were alike felt solely at home, and the barons cast their eyes not across the Channel, but upon their lands in England. The English were for England and the nation was born, the first conscious act of which was to be the enactment of Magna Carta.
During the seven years from 1206-1213 John had his disgraceful quarrel with the pope, a quarrel which ended in the enfeoffment of England with Innocent as feudal overlord. The matter is foreign to the subject in hand, save as the struggle, especially in the early development of it, gave John a pretext for confiscating the ecclesiastical holdings and thereby relieving the barons of a scutage for the space of about four years.
John, conceiving that peace with the Pope meant full mastery of affairs, was seized with an ambition to reconquer Normandy. To this end he tried to induce the barons to follow him into Poictou. They refused, first on the ground that John was not yet fully absolved from his excommunication; and then, after this objection was removed by Stephen Langton on the 20th July, 1213, they raised the old plea that they were not bound by their tenure to follow the king abroad. John determined to enforce their attendance upon him by show of arms.
Council at St. Albans, 4th August, 1213
Before he started to the north, where the seditious movement had its center, an assembly was held at St. Albans on the 4th August by Archbishop Langton, and the justiciar Geoffrey Fitz-Peter. Its purpose was to assess the amount due to the ecclesiastics in consequence of the damage sustained by church property during the quarrel with the Pope. But its great importance lay in the body of men who made it up. It is in so far as we have record, the first occasion that representatives of the lesser folk were summoned to a National Council.[72] Beside the bishops and barons who attended, there were present the reeve and four men from each township on the royal demesne. The Council advanced somewhat beyond the simple purpose for which it was summoned; the justiciar issued an edict against unjust exactions, to be observed as the sheriffs valued their lives and limbs, and commanded the observance of the good laws of Henry I.[73]
Non-noble representatives called to Oxford, 1213
Later in the year to Oxford, the non-noble representatives were again called, and at the initiation of John himself. John hoped to win to himself by this act of respect the support of the smaller landowners against the threatening barons. The sheriffs were to send up, beside the knights holding from the king, four discreet men from each county “to talk with us,” as the writ had it, “concerning the business of our realm.”[74] This, provided subsequent events had kept pace with it, was an immensely long step forward; indeed the provisions of Magna Carta themselves do not advance to the point thus falteringly and unworthily reached by John. It provided a precedent for the representation of the third estate in the councils of the nation; and though it is not known whether or not any action was taken relative to the levying of taxes, or even whether the council was held at all, nevertheless the fact that representation for the moment was provided for, marks the step in the light of the present, as of great, almost of profound, importance in the consideration of parliamentary taxation.