Magna Carta: A Very Short Introduction by Nicholas Vincent

Author:Nicholas Vincent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2012-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

3. The Articles of the Barons

Was it Langton, with his biblical expertise, who first suggested the number twenty-five to the barons of King John? Perhaps not. The idea of a committee of twenty-five already occurs in 1200, when it is reported as the number of men sworn to take counsel with the mayor for the government of the city of London. It was more likely the rebel Londoners, rather than the archbishop of Canterbury, who first proposed the idea for inclusion in Magna Carta. Whoever it was proposed it, the baronial committee of twenty-five was nonetheless the measure above all others that marked a new departure from previous dealings between king and barons. This in itself reflects not just the sophistication of the political and legal negotiations that led to Magna Carta, but the much more visceral terror felt by those taking up arms against the king.

After his inconclusive discussions in January 1215, and his vows as a Crusader in March, John entered negotiations with what he assumed was very much the winning hand. Although civil war was now inevitable, it was a war, in the words of the greatest of its modern historians J. C. Holt, ‘which only the King could win’. Even with twenty-five barons against him, some of them, as with Richard de Clare, earl of Hertford, claiming to command personal retinues of up to 140 knights, the king still possessed vastly superior resources, a majority of English castles now under garrison, a contingent of household knights larger than that of any baron, and the ability not only to call upon the moral assistance of the pope but to summon to his aid mercenaries from Flanders, southern France, or Ireland. Yet what is most remarkable about the drift to civil war in 1215 is its slow pace. The last great rebellion against an English king, in 1173–4, had come like a bolt out of the blue, so swiftly that no-one could explain it save as an act of divine retribution for the murder of Thomas Becket. The precedent set by the war of the 1170s was no doubt in the minds of the barons forty years later. Some indeed had been children in 1173. Although the greatest baronial uprising yet staged, the 1173 rebellion had proved a disaster for its leaders. Its outcome had been a Plantagenet administration far more ruthless than anything seen before. Baronial castles had fallen by the dozen. Earls had been imprisoned, heiresses seized. To step back into the past and once again to take up arms against the king was to risk repeating precisely the mistakes of the 1170s. Hence no doubt the decision of the conspirators of 1212 to be done with such worries and merely to kill the king. Hence the fact that, three years later, the barons of 1215 moved so slowly. King John had an evil reputation. His reign had been scarred by hostage-taking, allegations of rape, and the murder of prisoners. He seemed to operate outside the norms of chivalric behaviour.

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