Chapter 14
Before we advance to a consideration of the true importance of the Twelfth Chapter, in order to have a complete understanding of its position in the line of progress toward parliamentary taxation, we are obliged to look at the method by which the common counsel of the kingdom was to be taken. Chapter Fourteen[83] lays down the rule according to which the assembly was to be called that should hold this power of assenting to scutages and aids. The method of summons was simple; it involved the issuance of writs, individually to the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and the greater barons, and collectively to the lesser barons through the agency of the royal sheriffs and bailiffs. The writs gave at least forty days’ notice as to the place and time of meeting, and specified the business which furnished the occasion for the Council. As for its composition, the answer is very simple; it was a gathering of tenants-in-chief of the king, of crown vassals. The line between the greater and the lesser barons was ill-defined. Roughly, however, it divided the baronage into classes, one of which included the baron whose holdings embraced the major part of a county, and the other the tenant of the king whose dwelling was a cottage set in his dozen acres. It is probable that the lesser barons played no considerable part in the assembly, and that their attendance or non-attendance was of little consequence. The light of the lesser folk was as yet hid under the bushel.
The advance toward Parliamentary taxation
It is a conclusion easily drawn from the text of the two chapters that this was a body of feudatories called together for the purpose of making feudal payments. The members of the Commune Concilium were the vassals of the crown and, save in rare instances, none other; the taxation to which they were to give their consent according to the terms of the Charter, included no carucage or other general tax, but only the scutages and aids which feudal tenants of the king by military service were expected to pay him as overlord. Furthermore, the idea of representation in the strictly technical sense into which present usage has frozen the word, was quite wanting. It is true that a consent by the barons gathered in the Council to an imposition levied in accordance with the notice stated in the summons, was binding upon the barons who did not attend, but this was on the principle that absence gave consent, not that the consent of the majority was binding upon a dissentient minority. The instance is quoted of the Bishop of Winchester who in Henry III’s time was relieved of his assessment because he had opposed the levy in the Council. John had introduced definite representation in his summons to the Oxford Council in 1213, by directing the sheriffs to send up “four discreet knights” from their counties to treat with him “concerning the business of his realm.” In respect of this, looking at it in the light of later progress, the Great Charter is positively retrogressive.
The conclusion is thus forced upon us that save in the two cases of scutages and extraordinary aids, with possibly the addition of a third in the shape of tallaging the city of London, supreme authority over general taxation remained in the hands of the king. The Charter provides solely for the financial incidents of the feudal relation, and that in the somewhat narrower aspect of tenure by chivalry. The only true taxes, carucage and John’s levy on movables known as the thirteenth, were not referred to. It is an anticipation of later history to read into the provisions of Magna Carta either a definite inauguration of national consent to taxation or of the representative principle.
But the wedge was driven in. Notwithstanding the omission of both the Twelfth and the Fourteenth Chapters in subsequent renewals of the Charter, the king lived up to the principles therein set down; and notwithstanding the absence in Magna Carta of provision for parliamentary taxation in fact, it was there in embryo. The nation, headed by the barons, had set itself to the correction of abuses, and it succeeded in attaining its immediate end. Greater purposes were to follow, born perhaps of the inspiration in the Charter, and with the purposes were to come also the means of attaining them. The nation, having once taken a sip of the cup of control over taxation, would not be content until at last it had drunk deep from the well itself.
III
THE CUSTOM OF PARLIAMENTARY GRANTS
1215-1272