Magna Carta, Bad King John, and an English Crusade

This episode places Magna Carta in its historical context, explains why it really isn't the foundation of Anglo-American liberty, reaffirms John's status as a really bad king (and person), and discusses how the Magna Carta baronial rebellion led to the only Crusade to be fought on English soil.

Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com

Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada

If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com

Transcript

MAGNA CARTA, BAD KING JOHN, AND AN ENGLISH CRUSADE

I was recently invited to give a short talk at the annual meeting of two genealogical societies, the Baronial Order of the Magna Carta and the Military Order of the Crusades, although the only nobility that I can claim in my personal lineage are some Ashkenazi rabbis.

Ellen: And I’m the proud descendant of a long line of Irish peasants! But, seriously, Richard and I met some very nice and interesting people, including a really impressive second year law student who was the recipient of a fellowship the Societies sponsor to promote public service.

Richard: I wanted to give a talk that would somehow bridge the two societies, and, oddly enough, the key was William Marshal.

Ellen: Hmm, that’s a surprise.

Richard: A former student who heard this podcast said that he wasn’t at all surprised that I did episodes on William Marshal. The nice thing about a podcast is that I can pursue some of my personal enthusiasms. At any rate, when I was rereading the “History of William the Marshal” in preparation for those episodes, it struck me that the battlefield oration that he supposedly gave before the battle of Lincoln in 1217 is filled with the language of Crusade, and that was because the First Barons’ War sparked by King John’s repudiation of the Magna Carta became an English Crusade. Given the role Magna Carta plays in democratic discourse and the popular reputation of Bad King John of Robin Hood fame, one might say, of course. The rebel barons were crusaders for freedom, a lot like Mel Gibson’s William Wallace. But that just isn’t the Middle Ages. Historically, it was the supporters of King John and his son King Henry III who carried the mantle of crusaders and the rebel barons who were the enemies of Christ and the Church. And that’s what I would like to talk about today, the connection between Magna Carta, William Marshal, and the only crusade fought on English soil.

In 2015 the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron celebrated the 800th anniversary of King John signing the Magna Carta in a short speech: SOUND CLIP

Cameron was immediately accused of cynicism and hypocrisy for hijacking the official celebration for political purposes. The Tory government was at the time pushing for a British bill of rights to replace the European Human Rights Act. As one Labour MP said,

“Magna Carta is rightly seen by people across the world as the historic foundation of our democratic rights. Some of it remains in legislation, including the right to justice and a fair trial. It’s a wonderful thing and it’s right that we mark its 800th anniversary.

“The British-authored European convention on human rights was built on the principles from Magna Carta and was drawn up in the aftermath of the horrors of the second world war so we would never again stand for abuse of our common humanity on European soil. The prime minister should be proud of spreading our historic human rights tradition across Europe and the world, rather than trying to rip it up.”

Meanwhile, across the pond, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., prominently displays a copy of the 1297 reissue of Magna Carta.  Its website explains why:

The Magna Carta's principles of due process, trial by jury, habeas corpus, and no representation without taxation, among others, were central to British common law. And that common law was the foundation of our own democracy. For that reason, each of the colonies embodied most of these principles in their governing structures, and the Founding Fathers also placed them in the heart of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (and, later, the Bill of Rights).

Ellen: I have a feeling that you don’t entirely agree.

Richard:  Magna Carta as a cornerstone for Anglo-American democracy and freedom is fiction. The historical fact is that what King John was forced to sign at Runnymede in 1215 was a conservative if not reactionary feudal document.

Ellen: I thought medieval historians aren’t allowed to use the word feudal anymore.  You wrote an article about that a while ago.

Richard: Yeah, feudalism has become the F-word for academic medievalists. Part of the reason is that there is no one definition for the term. For Marxists and French historians, feudalism describes a system in which a landowning aristocracy enjoys economic and juridical privileges over a subordinate peasantry, whose labor they exploit. Most American and British historians, myself included, define feudalism differently.  For us feudalism is a short hand to describe a political, military, and social system that bound together the warrior aristocracy of Western Europe between ca. 1000 and ca. 1300. This system only gradually took shape, and differed in detail from region to region. Its key institutions were lordship, vassalage, and the fief. Lordship and vassalage represent the two sides of a personal bond of mutual loyalty and military service between nobles of different rank. The superior in this relationship was termed a lord, and the subordinate, who pledged loyalty and military service to his lord, was his “vassal.” A “fief” was a grant of land tenure that was held by a vassal from a lord, whose property, in theory, the lands and estates remained. In return, the fief holder owed specified services, which were usually a combination of military and social duties (e.g. attendance at the lord's court, hospitality to the lord and his men) and miscellaneous payments (“feudal incidents”) that reflected the lord's continued rights over the property. At least in theory, the most important of the services required from a fief-holder was knight service.  When summoned to war by his lord, the holder of a fief was obliged to send to the lord’s host or retinue the quota of knights owed from his fief. These knights were then to render the lord military service for a period of time fixed by custom, which amounted to forty days in thirteenth-century France and England.  

You can find something like this written in every medieval history textbook published before the 1970s. That’s changed. Historians have grown more aware that lordship was only one type of social relationship in the High Middle Ages, and in many circumstances wasn’t even the most important. Research shows that in the early Middle Ages most land was owned outright rather than held as fiefs in return for service. But I think that the historical pendulum has swung too far against feudalism. No construct ever perfectly matches what is on the ground, whether that construct is capitalism, socialism, or feudalism. Where I see feudalism as approximating reality is in late twelfth-century England, Norman Sicily, and the Latin states in the Levant settled by crusaders. In a sense, Henry II and his sons were responsible for the feudal pyramid that instructors used to draw on the blackboard, with the king on top, barons beneath him, knights beneath the barons, and peasants on the bottom. They did this by promoting a political ideology of royal liege lordship in which all land ultimately belonged to the king and was either held directly or intermediately from him. By extension, the king was the liege, that is the primary lord, of all free landholders in the realm. What made this was plausible for England was the Norman Conquest. Henry II inherited a kingdom won by Conquest. Between 1066 and 1086, King William the Conqueror redistributed to his Norman and French followers about 90% of the land held before the Conquest by the Anglo-Saxon nobility. Because Henry II himself had come to the throne after a violent and chaotic civil war, the nobility of England were receptive to a political ideology that promoted tenurial stability. This very useful political ideology was subsequently adopted by the kings of France and Germany in the late twelfth century. 

Ellen: Okay, so how is Magna Carta a feudal document?

Richard: 22 of Magna Carta’s 63 clauses are concerned with “feudal incidents.” The barons were tenants-in-chief, that is, they held their lands directly from the king. King John was not only their king but their feudal lord. This meant that they had to pay what was called a relief, the feudal version of an inheritance tax, before they could take up their fathers’ fiefs.

Ellen: They also had to swear an oath of fealty and perform homage, kneeling before John and literally placing their hands within his. This was the ritual that created the lord-man bond. 

Richard:  Once they became a tenants-in-chief, they owed John what was called “aid,” monetary help if a lord had a pressing need for cash. Aids were customarily given to ransom a lord, or to defray the costs of the knighting  of his son and the marriage of his daughter.

Ellen: King John, like all feudal lords, also had the right to name the guardians for his tenants-in-chief’s underage heirs and arrange marriage for their heiresses.  Wardship and marriage were really valuable prerogatives, because John could use them to raise cash by auctioning them off. They could also be used to reward followers for loyal service without costing the king a penny.

 Richard: In the view of the rebel barons, King John was abusing every one of his rights as their feudal overlord. He required heirs to pay exorbitant reliefs, exploited the feudal obligation of aid by demanding money from his tenants-in-chief on a regular basis, usually to fund his wars, and insisting on the payment of scutage, the commutation of owed knight service for cash, instead of accepting the knight service owed to him. That was because John, like his father and brother, preferred mercenaries.

Ellen: Preferred mercenaries? I thought that lords gave fiefs to their vassals because they needed a ready supply of well-trained and fully armed knights on horseback.

Richard: That was the traditional explanation for the emergence of feudalism, and, in theory, feudalism could be viewed as a military recruitment system. If that had ever been really the case, it was no longer true by the late twelfth century. When people think of medieval warfare, they probably imagine a cavalry charge in battle featuring heavily armored knights on horseback. The reality was a lot less cinematic. Medieval warfare mainly involved ravaging the enemy’s countryside and laying siege to his major castles and walled cities. Mercenary foot soldiers were perfect for that type of work. Knights on horseback were essential in the rare instances in which a battle took place, and were useful for reconnaissance and to guard against relief armies during sieges, but foot soldiers were better for the boring and dirty jobs of laying waste to a countryside or besieging or defending castles and towns. Mercenaries today have a terrible reputation, due in part to Machiavelli’s hatchet job on them. But as counterintuitive as it might sound, in the High Middle Ages mercenaries were more reliable than feudal knights. A feudal levy was obligated for only forty days of service, after which they could return home. Mercenaries, who made a living from warfare, served as long as they got paid. War meant wages and the opportunity for loot. Mercenaries were especially valuable in civil wars. Barons and their tenants had to think about the lands they might lose if they chose the wrong side. Mercenaries didn’t, and since mercenaries were usually foreigners, they had no reservations about looting, pillaging, and setting fire to towns and villages.  The Church saw mercenaries as enemies of the Christian world order, likening them to wolves, which is why they were condemned alongside heretics at the Third Lateran Council in 1179. That condemnation had as much effect upon the hiring practice of kings as the Church’s prohibition against tournaments had.

          Some tenants-in-chief undoubtedly preferred to pay cash than to personally answer the summon to war with the quota of knights they owed the king. But many didn’t, and it pissed them off that Henry II, Richard, and John didn’t give them the choice.  

Ellen:  So John’s demand for scutage in lieu of knight service was nothing new. What he was doing as king doesn’t seem that different from what his father and brother had done. Henry II and Richard were just as likely as John to impose heavy reliefs and to reward loyal followers with wardships of minors and marriages to heiresses. That’s how William Marshal, a landless serving knight until he was nearly 40, got to marry the wealthy heiress Isabel de Clare.  

Richard: Exploiting to the extreme royal prerogatives for financial gain and to control their barons was the hallmark of Angevin kingship. This is why discontented barons couched their demands as a return to the good ancient customs of King Henry I’s day. Henry II pioneered the new governmental system. He demanded outrageous reliefs from the heirs to baronies, but—and this is a big but—he accepted modest down payments. If the heir proved loyal, the debt would either be substantially reduced or forgiven entirely. It was a cheap way to reward service and a really effective tool for guaranteeing loyalty. Richard was less forgiving, because he needed money to go on crusade and to wage war in France. 

Ellen: Not to mention the 100,000 pounds that King Henry VI of Germany demanded for Richard’s ransom, which roughly was the annual wages of 50,000 laborers. But, I guess, that “aid” was collected by Richard’s mother Eleanor.

Richard: The main difference between John’s exploitation of his feudal prerogatives and those of his father and brother, is that Henry II and Richard were successful and the barons shared in the profits of war. John wasn’t, and they didn’t.

Ellen: The weird thing is that Magna Carta sounds like it was John’s idea. It begins with,  “John, by the grace of God, king of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and count of Anjou” makes these concessions “out of reverence for God and for the salvation of our soul and those of all our ancestors and heirs, for the honor of God and the advancement of holy Church, and for the reform of our realm.”  That’s hardly a stirring call to revolution. 

Richard: The Magna Carta was drafted to sound like something King John’s chancery would have voluntarily issued. The political ideology expressed in it was actually Angevin royalist. The barons accepted King John’s claim to be the liege lord of all free men of the realm. That is why “John” in Magna Carta could order the barons to extend the privileges he is granting them to their own tenants, and it’s how he can guarantee justice to all free men, regardless of their immediate lord.  The rebel barons also conceded that John, as tyrannical as he had been, nonetheless ruled by “grace of God.” As their feudal overlord, John had a contractual relationship with them, but as an anointed king, he was answerable only to God. The barons weren’t trying to create a new form of government. They lacked the theory for it. They were just trying to bind King John to royal law, to place him under his own word and will, and to compel him to respect his coronation oath. John, like his predecessors,  swore that for all the days of his life he “would observe peace, honor, and reverence towards God, the Holy Church, and its ordinances; that he would exercise true justice and equity towards the people committed to his charge; and that he would abolish bad laws and unjust customs, if any such had been introduced into his kingdom, and would enact good laws, and observe the same without fraud or evil intent.” 

Ellen: How would you respond to David Cameron about Magna Carta being the basis for our ideas about human rights and liberty?

Richard: The Magna Carta wasn’t even about the rights of Englishmen, let alone human rights. And it doesn’t have anything to do with  what we think of as “liberty.” The full title of Magna Carta is Magna Carta Libertatum—“The Great Charter of Liberties. Liberties, not Liberty. Medieval Latin “libertas,” “liberty,” is best translated as “privilege.” Lots of charters of liberties survive from the Middle Ages. Most are royal grants to churches and monasteries freeing them of royal dues or the jurisdiction of royal officials. Kings and counts also issued charters of liberties to towns or, as they are called in England, boroughs which allowed townsmen to hold markets, have borough courts, elect town officials, impose taxes on marketplace transactions, and to hold and inherit property in return for paying rent.  Whether granted to an abbey, a town, or to barons a charter of liberties freed the recipient of obligations or  transferred to them the exercise of fiscal or judicial rights that belonged to the Crown. Magna Carta’s guarantees that no free man should be imprisoned, have his property seized, exiled, or declared an outlaw except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land, and that justice is not to be sold, denied, or delayed, are still statute law in Britain. But, again, these are not natural rights or even ancient rights of Englishmen, but liberties granted by a king to his subjects.

          Magna Carta is in form a royal grant of liberties because the rebel barons could not conceive of rights and liberties as originating from 'nature' or even directly from God. The idea that all “men are created equal” and are endowed by God with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was completely alien to the barons’ worldview.  

Ellen: So how did a feudal document become the foundation for Anglo-American rights and liberty?

Richard:  In a sense, Magna Carta is an expression of the sovereignty of the law, but it did not assume its role as the foundational document for Anglo-American freedom and representative government until the seventeenth century, when a new set of unhappy propertied Englishmen sought historical justification for their grievances against the authority of a king. 

We owe that mostly to an early seventeenth-century common law jurist named Edward Coke [COOK]. Against the absolutist claims of King James I,  Coke contended that England has an ancient unwritten constitution and a common law of the realm that stretch back to the Anglo-Saxons. The Norman Conquest had for a time suppressed the ancient rights and common law of Englishmen—the so-called Norman Yoke that plays an important part in the Robin Hood story. According to Coke, Magna Carta was the reassertion of the ancient rights of Englishmen against the tyranny of King John and his Norman predecessors. It established that the common law, and not a king, was truly sovereign. Supporters of Parliament who challenged King Charles I’s arbitrary arrests and imprisonment of critics of his policies, cited Magna Carta’s guarantees to trial by a jury of one’s peers and against arrest without independent evidence of wrongdoing.  

Ellen: In other words, the writ of habeas corpus. Okay, I can see how that could be cited by the opponents of Charles I, but the only other clause even remotely relevant to the conflict between Parliament and the Crown in the seventeenth century is the prohibition against the levying of scutage or aid without the common counsel of the realm, except to ransom the king, or to help fund the knighting of his eldest son and marriage of his eldest daughter. I know that this is called the origin of “no taxation without representation,” but give me a break.  The only way this could apply to “taxes” is if one argued that between 1215 and 1600 scutages and aids had evolved into taxes, and to make that work you have to completely ignore the clause’s reference to ransom, knighting, and marriage.  But  guess it’s not quite as big a stretch to equate Magna Carta’s “common counsel of the realm” with the House of Lords.  

Richard: That’s what lawyers are for! As a lawyer you should appreciate that. The actual liberties granted in Magna Carta were less important than the document as a symbol of the ancient rights of Englishmen. This is how it was used by the supporters of Parliament during the English Civil War of the 1640s and by the Americans who challenged the authority of King George III in the 1760s and 1770s. Precedent is all important in common law, and opponents of royal authority in seventeenth-century England and late eighteenth-century America used Magna Carta to legitimate their resistance to what they termed royal tyranny. 

Ellen: I don’t think that the Founding Fathers’ use of the Magna Carta would have passed the textualist or originalist scrutiny of a Justice Scalia or the current conservative Supreme Court Justices. This reeks of the judicial philosophy of pragmatism.

So the Magna Carta wasn’t a revolutionary political manifesto, but why do you characterize it as reactionary?

Richard: The rebel barons’ major demand was that King John restore the 'good ancient law and custom of the realm' embodied by the coronation charter of his great grandfather, King Henry I. Much of Magna Carta is a list of grievances against the “bad customs” that had been introduced into the realm since then. These mainly had to do with King John’s abuse of feudal prerogatives and the misgovernment of the officials he appointed. In short, Magna Carta was an attempt to force a bad royal overlord to live up to his contractual obligations to his vassals. Magna Carta thus was an attempt to constrain King John to act according to his own laws and to respect custom. Magna Carta was both an expression of the barons’ grievances and the instrument by which those grievances would be addressed.  The First Barons War was the barons’ reluctant acknowledgment that they could not achieve their goals except through force.

Ellen:  What about the popular conception of Bad King John? I thought that some modern historians have good things to say about him as an administrator.

Richard:  John is a medieval king that only institutional historians could love.  While popular conceptions of the Magna Carta and the First Barons War may be anachronistic, the popular view of King John as a terrible king and awful person is closer to the mark. Despite a real talent for administration, a flair for strategic planning, and a dedication to the judicial responsibilities of kingship, John was a wretched failure as king. In part this was a matter of temperament and personality, which were far more important politically in the thirteenth century than they are today. All medieval kings, including John, ruled through a combination of reward through royal patronage and threat of the loss of royal favor or, in more drastic cases, the confiscation of an offender’s lands. Cruelty was not necessarily a vice in medieval rulers. Henry I, John's great grandfather and the rebel barons’ ideal of a just king, ordered the mutilation of royal agents who abused their offices, cut off the hands of minters who produced counterfeit coins, and blinded traitors. But he did so with consistency and at least the veneer of justice. His cruelty was the firm hand of a rex pacificus (a king of peace) who, to quote Scripture, 'did not bear the sword in vain'  (Paul to the Romans 13, which makes obedience to rulers a Christian duty and rebellion defiance of God’s authority.) 

Ellen:  Archbishop Stephen Langton somehow managed to get around that. 

Richard: Just goes to show the value of a good scholastic education. Langton both studied and taught theology at the University of Paris. But back to John's cruelty. His cruelty, unlike Henry I’s, was capricious and disproportionate, stemming more from an intemperate, erratic, and vindictive nature than from his responsibility to maintain order and justice. 

Ellen: John’s treatment of William de Braose [Browse] really makes that point. Like his good friend William Marshal, William de Browse was a Marcher lord, one of the barons who held lands on the Welsh border. He had a reputation as a fierce warrior, and had been one of John's closest 'friends' in the early years of his reign. He had the distinction of having captured in battle John's rival for the throne, his young nephew Count Arthur of Brittany. As warden for the captive kid, de Browse was one of the few people who knew what happened to him. If John murdered his nephew with his own hands as was rumored, de Browse was the only witness. 

John rewarded de Browse's loyalty and service by showering him with land grants and offices, and making him one of the most powerful barons in southern Wales. The king arranged advantageous marriages for de Browse's children, secured a bishopric for one of his younger sons, and gave William the great earldom of Limerick in Ireland and the lordship of Bramber in Sussex. 

Richard: It was good to be the favorite of a medieval English king.

Ellen.  But that changed suddenly. Six years after the battle of Mirabeau, William de Braose fell from favor. It may have begun because he supported the cause of his friend William Marshal when John accused Marshal of treachery. That convinced John to demand that de Browse give the king his eldest son as a hostage.  De Braose's wife Mathilda refused,  telling the king’s messenger that she would 'not deliver up my sons to your lord, King John, because he basely murdered his nephew Arthur.' Though William attempted to silence his wife, her retort was carried back to the furious king, who responded by launching a vendetta against the de Browse clan. William had offered 5000 marks, that is 3,333 pounds, for the Irish province of Limerick. This was an enormous sum of money—the average income of a baron was about 200 pounds—but the expectation was that the bulk of the debt would eventually be forgiven as a reward for good service. King John now demanded full payment, and when William defaulted, John confiscated all of de Browse’s lands. William, Mathilda, and their children fled to Ireland before they could be seized.

In 1210 John sent an army to Ireland after William de Browse and the Irish barons who had offered him shelter. William fled to Wales, leaving his wife and children in the protection of his neighbor Hugh de Lacy, lord of Ulster, and sent messages to John offering him the impossibly large sum of 33,333 pounds for the king's peace. John refused, and ordered his forces into Ulster. Mathilda and her eldest son escaped to Scotland, where they were captured and handed over to John. The lady offered John 33,333 pounds as a ransom, but William de Browse was unable to raise the money. Sick and worn out, William fled to France where he died in 1211. Mathilda and her eldest son were (according to a number of contemporary chronicles) starved to death in prison.

John was a nasty piece of work. 

[insert Men in Tights]

Richard: I’m not sure who the historical consultant was for “Robin Hood, Men in Tights.”  John may not have emitted a foul stench throughout the realm, but he was a terrible king. John was incapable of trust and incapable of inspiring trust, a fatal flaw in a medieval king. John alienated the kingdom’s lay and ecclesiastical magnates with his high handed acts and extortionate financial demands. To be sure, a strong king kept his barons in check, imposing his peace upon them; but he was also expected to seek and act upon their advice, and to enrich them through his wise rule. Instead, John sought advice and filled royal offices with lesser nobles from Poitou, and relied upon foreign mercenary captains as his military advisors. The English barons were cut off from the patronage they saw as their due. The turning point in John’s reign was his loss of Normandy and Anjou to King Philip Augustus of France in 1204. It not only earned him the insulting nickname “Soft sword,” but, more significantly, cost many English barons their hereditary lands in France. Over the following decade, John spent a fortune of his English subjects’ money trying to recover the lost lands. If he had been successful we wouldn’t have Magna Carta. But all of John’s military efforts failed, and baronial resentment grew with each new demand. In 1212 John’s plans for an invasion of France were derailed by a rumor of an assassination plot. John believed it, and so do I.

The final straw was the disastrous Bouvines campaign of 1214. John had assembled and financed a coalition of the counts of Flanders and the Low Lands, headed by his nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV.  John’s strategy was clever but too ambitious for a thirteenth-century campaign as it depended upon the proper timing of invasions on two fronts.  John would invade Anjou from Poitou, drawing Philip Augustus’ forces away from the Ile de France. Otto IV would then descend upon an undefended Paris from the north. But it took more time than expected for the coalition forces to assemble in Flanders. By the time they were ready to invade, John’s diversionary invasion had ground to a halt, allowing Philip to rush north to intercept the invading coalition army. The battle of Bouvines on the Franco-Flemish border near Lille was one of the few truly decisive battles of the High Middle Ages.  Philip’s victory shaped the political landscape of Western Europe for decades to come. Philip retained the throne of France and possession of Normandy and Anjou.  Otto IV lost the Holy Roman Empire to his young Hohenstaufen rival, Frederick Barbarossa. 

John’s response to the debacle was to demand payment of scutage from those who had not joined the expedition to Poitou. The northern barons in particular had ignored John’s summons.  They refused on the grounds that, by custom, they didn’t owe knight service for campaigns outside the borders of the kingdom.  John cited precedent from the reigns of his father and brother showing that they had. John gave force to his demands for the unpaid scutage by distraining—that is legal seizing—lands of recalcitrant barons.  

[sound cop] I really like Oscar Isaac’s portrayal of King John in Russell Crowe’s historically challenged Robin Hood movie of 2010—But Claude Rains in the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood is still my favorite John.

The soon to be rebel barons answered custom with yet older custom. Perhaps at the suggestion of Archbishop Stephen Langton, they demanded that John confirm the coronation charter of King Henry I.  Two dozen or so northern barons with their households and knights marched south to confront the king. Along the way they picked up support.  By early June 1215 the rebel barons were in control of London, and their demands had crystalized and written down in a document called the Articles of the Barons, a rough draft for the Magna Carta.  John had little choice but to give in to their demands—at least on vellum. He regarded the oath he gave to the barons as worth less than the vellum upon which the Magna Carta was inscribed, as it had been coerced and not given freely. 

Ellen: Clearly the barons were worried that John was paying them only lip service. The strangest clause in Magna Carta is number 61. “For the reform of the realm and the better settling of the quarrel that has arisen between us and our barons,” King John gives and grants the following security: the barons are to choose any 25 of their members to serve as an enforcement committee, “to observe, maintain and cause to be observed the peace and liberties to hear complaints about violations of Magna Carta by the king or his officers. If King John fails to redress violations of the charter within forty days, “the twenty five barons together with the community of the whole land shall distrain and distress us in every they can, namely, by seizing castles, lands, possessions, and in such other ways as they can, except for harming our person and the persons of our queen and out children, until, in their opinion, amends have been made and when amends have been made, they shall obey us as they did before.” In other words, I, King John, am giving you, my barons, permission to use force against me if I transgress the liberties I am here granting you.

Richard: If a revolt is permitted by law, is it still a revolt? In fact, John never had any intention of submitting to the oversight of the 25 barons or forgiving anyone. He was merely playing for time. He believed he had an ace up his sleeve: the papacy. While William Marshal and John’s other negotiators were attempting to hammer out an agreement with the rebels in London, John and the barons were both petitioning the papal curia to intervene on their behalf.  The rebel barons presented themselves as defenders of the good ancient customs of the realm against a tyrannical king. This was not how King John, or his feudal overlord Pope Innocent III, viewed them.

Ellen: Some historical context is needed here. John’s relationship with the papacy was really complicated. For a period of nearly six years, he was engaged in a cold war with the papacy over Pope Innocent III’s selection of Stephen Langton to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. John believed that as king it was his right to appoint the bishops of his realm. Pope Innocent III disagreed. The Church was to be free, which meant that prelates were to chosen by clergy, not laity, not even kings. When John closed the ports of England Langton, the pope placed England under interdict, in effect ordering a work stoppage of the clergy. When John still would not budge, the pope excommunicated him.  John took advantage of the situation by pocketing the revenues of vacant sees and abbacies to the tune of Ė100,000 pounds. Showing a cynical sense of humor, he further milked the Church by fining clerics who had mistresses for defying the discipline of their order.  In 1213 John, however, was forced by the threat of war to take the matter seriously. News that King Philip Augustus of France was preparing to invade England and fear that the pope would turn that invasion into a crusade, led John to submit to the pope. But John went beyond the demands of the papacy to accept Langton and the other exiled clerics and to make financial restitution.  Declaring himself unworthy, he gave England and Ireland to the see of St. Peter and received them back from the papal legate Pandulf as papal fiefs, in recognition of which John would pay the papacy 1000 marks a year. This was a brilliant diplomatic move. An attack on England would now be an attack on the papacy.

Richard: Knowing Pope Innocent III’s commitment to raising a new crusade to the East, John solidified papal support against the French and his discontented baronage by taking the cross io Ash Wednesday in March 1215.  Sewing a white cross onto his outer garment, just as his brother and father had done, John proclaimed himself a crusader and acquired the protections that the Church traditionally extended to all pledged to defend the Holy Land..  The Crowland chronicler reports that John was widely supposed to have acted not out of piety, but in order to outwit his political opponents. This may be true. But John’s intent to depart on crusade is evidenced by a letter he sent in January 1215 ordering the outfitting of a ship for the Holy Land.

.         It is little wonder that pope Innocent III was receptive to King John’s pleas against the claims of the discontented barons. As overlord of the kingdom and protector of a vassal king who had taken a crusader’s vow, Innocent III sent a string of letters to England ordering the excommunication of the rebels. Upon learning of the Magna Carta, Pope Innocent III issued a papal bull on 24 August 2015 annulling Magna Carta and threatening excommunication for all those who tried to enforce it.  He berated the barons for their betrayal of their lord and freed John of his oath. ‘By such violence and fear as might affect the most courageous of men’, he declared, the king’s disloyal vassals had forced him to accept an agreement ‘illegal, unjust, harmful to royal rights and shameful to the English people’. The Pope declared Magna Carta ‘null, and void of all validity forever’, a judgement which reached England the following month. He also summoned Stephen Langton to Rome and suspended him as archbishop for his support of the rebels.

Ellen: For Pope Innocent III the barons who opposed John were literally damnable traitors.  Betrayal of a sworn lord, the sin of Judas, was the most wicked act that a man could commit in the medieval theological worldview. Dante reserved the lowest circle of hell for those who betrayed their lords. The rebel barons argued that the tyranny of a king justified feudal defiance, the renunciation of the oath of fealty. The Church agreed that a tyrant was not a true king, but the power to absolve oaths of fidelity did not belong to subjects but to the Pope as God’s vicar on earth.  John in a letter to Pope Innocent III reminded the pontiff that England was a papal fief, and implied the barons’ rebellion stemmed from his submission of England to the Pope’s overlordship. 

Richard: Complementing the Pope’s order of excommunication, John confiscated the lands of all barons who refused to renew their oath of loyalty to him.  When the rebel barons offered the Crown to Prince Louis of France—the future Louis VIII—in 1216, Pope Innocent’s successor Honorius III declared the defense of England to be a defense of the Church, and offered a crusader’s indulgence to all those who fought against the invaders and their English supporters.  The First Barons War in a sense became a Crusade in which the rebels and the French played the role of the infidels, and those who defended the royalist cause were Crusaders.

Ellen: Finally you got to Crusade!

Although the term “crusade” is most associated with the series of European military expeditions from the late eleventh through thirteenth centuries against the Muslim rulers of Syria and Egypt to recover Jerusalem and preserve it in Christian hands, crusading was not confined to the Holy Land.  A crusade was not defined by geography but by its religious intent.  It was a

1.    holy war authorized by the papacy and 

•      2) directed against the enemies of Christ and his Church.

“Crusades” were also 

•      3) penitential wars that earned those who participated in them a plenary indulgence, that is remission of all sins and penances

In the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries there were crusades against Muslims in Spain, heretics in southern France, pagans in the Baltic, and political enemies of the papacy in Italy. 

          The ethos of crusading is most clearly expressed in a speech that the 70 year old William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, gave to his troops before the battle of Lincoln.  When John died in 1216 leaving the guardianship of his son to the papacy, the great men of the realm chose William Marshal to act as regent for the child Henry III, and to serve as his guardian alongside the papal legate to England, Csrdinal Guala. Despite his great age—and I say that with a smile, as Marshal was pushing 70—William Marshal was a natural choice. In the final years of his reign, King John had relied upon Marshal for advice and support. Marshal had been John’s chief negotiator with the rebel barons, and his name leads the list of lay royal advisors named in the Magna Carta. William Marshal’s reputation for unshakeable loyalty was complemented by his extensive experience as a warrior and a military commander. 

Ellen: One of William Marshal’s first acts as regent was to reissue Magna Carta in the name of the young king. This was an abridged version of the Runnymede “Magna Carts.”  It explicitly omitted what it called “chapters that were weighty and doubtful” concerning baronial consultation on assessments of scutages and aids, that is the clause later interpreted as no taxation without representation, debts owed to Jews, freedom to leave and enter England, and the king’s rights over the forests. But the point was clear: Essentially, it contained the clauses that Marshal and the royalist regarded as reasonable. The crucial thing is that Magna Carta was now being offered freely as a gesture of peace.

Richard: The death of John and the reissue of Magna Carta took some of the wind out of the baronial rebellion. A number of rebel barons switched their allegiance from the French Prince Louis to the Plantagenet king. But a substantial number remained in Louis’ camp, and what had begun as a baronial civil war was now more of a foreign invasion. Militarily, the Franco-baronial party had control over London and the southeast, except for key royalist castles such as Dover. The royalists had control over the West, and the Midlands were still up for grabs. The decisive military event occurred at Lincoln.  Louis had divided his forces. He himself took command of the siege of Dover, the capture of which was necessary for commanding the mouth of the Thames, while Thomas, count of Perche, was sent to take the strategically located town of Lincoln. The Count apparently entered the city without opposition from the townspeople. The warden of the castle of Lincoln, a noblewoman in her late 60s, Nicola de le Haye, was quite another matter. She refused to surrender the keep, but she also knew that it was only a matter of time before it fell. She sent word to William Marshal of her situation, and he responded by assembling a relief force consisting of about 400 knights, 300 mercenary crossbowmen, and an uncertain number of mounted and foot sergeants, avoided the main roads to Lincoln to avoid detection. When a French reconnaissance force reported the approach of a relief army, it was uncertain about its strength. The Count of Perche decided to continue the siege while guarding the gates.  The military action that followed was truly odd in that it involved the Royalist forces breaking into the town in order to lift the siege of the castle within the town.

The battle oration that William Marshal gives to his troops in “The History of William Marshal” is an interesting mix of calls to patriotism, self-interest, glory, and, not least, crusade.

“you who keep faith with the King.

16140  In God’s name hear me now,

for your attention to what I say is most necessary.

Now that we, in order to defend our name,

for ourselves and for the sake of our loved ones,

16144  our wives and our children,

and to defend our land

and win for ourselves the highest honour,

and to safeguard the peace of Holy Church

16148  which our enemies have broken and infringed,

and to gain redemption

and pardon for all our sins,

now that we, for all that, have taken on the burden of armed combat,

16152  let us make sure there is no coward amongst us!

if we do not now take revenge

16164  on those who have come from France

to take for themselves the lands of our men,

thinking to inherit the same.

They seek our total destruction;

16168  so, in God’s name, let us play for the highest stakes,

for, if victory is ours,

we must truly bear in mind

that honour will accrue to us,

16172  and that that heritage will be defended,

for us and our descendants,

which they shamefully wish

to deprive us of; we will truly hold on to that,

16176  since it is God’s wish that we defend ourselves.

William Marshal’s speech is fascinating both for what it says and what it omits. Marshal appeals both to his troop’s religious sentiments and to what may be called English patriotism. He proclaims the defense of England to be a sacred duty. Those who fight the French invaders who have broken the peace of Holy Church will “gain redemption and pardon” for all their sins. This is the language of crusade. What Marshal does not say is that they will be fighting not only foreign invaders but also their own compatriots. Indeed, one of the reasons that the royalist victory at Lincoln was so decisive is the number of baronial leaders who were taken prisoner, including Robert fitzWalter; Saer de Quincy, earl of Winchester; Gilbert de Clare; and Henry de Bohun. Nor does Marshal speak about the townsmen of Lincoln who welcomed the enemy into their city, although their supposed treason became the excuse for a savage pillaging of the town, so severe that the battle was remembered sarcastically as the Battle of Lincoln Fair. Looting and pillaging were a standard aspect of medieval warfare, including crusades.

          The shadow of the crusade hangs over Lincoln in a different and more ironic way. If John had not given the English kingdom to Pope Innocent III to be held as a papal fief, it is likely that Prince Louis’ invasion would have been a crusade. As it is, Louis subsequently led northern French troops in the Albigensian crusade against the Cathar heretics and their supporters in southern France. And three of the baronial leaders captured at Lincoln--Robert fitz Walter, Saer de Quincy, and Henry de Bohun--subsequently joined the Fifth Crusade to Egypt. 

Whether or not Marshal’s speech had anything to do with it, the Royalists won a decisive victory at Lincoln, destroying half of the Franco-baronial forces.  That was followed by an equally decisive naval victory at Sandwich. These two battles brought the First Barons War to an end. In the Peace of Lambeth on 20 September 1217, Prince Louis agreed to leave England, never to attack it again, and to renounce any claim he had to its throne. The Royalists, for their part, agreed to grant amnesty to the rebels, and, in a sign of good faith, William Marshal once again reissued Magna Carta in the name of King Henry III, but with his own and Cardinal Guala’s seals. 

The First Barons War began and ended with Magna Carta.