This chapter focuses on Eadmer’s treatment of Edgar’s reign as the consummation of a golden age destroyed by the assassination of Edgar’s son and immediate successor, Edward the Martyr. It was Dunstan, at the coronation of Æthelred, who prophesied the disasters that would ensue. In telling this story, Eadmer was building on an analysis that can be traced back through his predecessor as cantor at Christ Church Canterbury, Osbern, to the lives of Dunstan written not long after Dunstan’s death by ‘B.’ and Adelard. Careful attention is paid to Eadmer’s use of his sources and to the ways in which earlier lives had been compiled. Shortly after Dunstan’s death, the saint had been seen as potentially a uniquely influential intercessor, who had the best hope of persuading God to alleviate the barbarian threat. Archbishop Ælfeah had promoted the cult, and Edward the Martyr’s. His own martyrdom meant that he would soon be twinned with his predecessor Dunstan. All three cults were then appropriated by King Cnut. Eadmer moved beyond Osbern in including the Norman Conquest amongst the acts of divine retribution prophesied by Dunstan, and attributed to the saint a soteriological significance in the hoped-for redemption of the English.

Magna Carta reflects two distinct conditioning circumstances. On the one hand it emerged from the increasing maturity of European political thought and practice, from the concept of rule according to law, from the demand for the preservation of the rights of subjects within a feudal and ecclesiastical hierarchy and from routine patterns of government which went with more disciplined and sophisticated forms of administration. On the other hand it was a product of a political crisis. It sprang directly from the flexibility and severity of Angevin methods of government under the ruthless and capable direction of King John, from the urgent requirements imposed by foreign wars for the defence and, after 1204, the recovery of Normandy, and from the final collapse of John's military and diplomatic schemes on the field of Bouvines in July 1214.

Thus the Charter was not simply a statement of administrative practices, or desired regulations or principles of law. These were no more than the terms of reference establishing broad limits within which the opposing parties made their demands, or compromised and hedged, or sought hidden advantages, or skilfully provided escape routes from the letter of the documents. The Charter and its associated documents are complex records which bear the imprint of nearly three years of political crisis and protracted, discontinuous negotiation. They cannot be properly understood apart from this crisis, for to separate them from the detail of politics is to risk anachronism and to hinder our understanding of the relative importance which men then attached to particular issues and demands. By 1215 negotiation had acquired a momentum of its own, and particular details had achieved a crucial significance out of all proportion to their ultimate effects, if any, on the course of English history. Thus the restoration of a castle, the claim to an inheritance, the dismissal of a royal official, and issues such as these, became nodal points, important both in themselves and as tests of the king's good faith, from which there grew suspicion, mistrust and civil war.

Resistance to the abuse of monarchical power in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was based on assumptions which permeated the society of western Europe. Magna Carta was more than a simple reaction against Angevin government, and more than a statement of the privileges which the Angevins had made available; it was also a statement of principles about the organization of a feudal state. As such it drew on a common body of experience and custom which, with local variants, was shared throughout western Europe and the Latin states in the east. Hence the Norman and Angevin kings had to contend with men who shared strong views on the constitution of society, on title to feudal property, on the right to judgement and on the proper conduct of lords and kings. The Angevins gave their men the grievances and the education in government which were woven into the tapestry of Magna Carta. But the warp and weft were derived from the structure of society itself.

This common experience was embodied in custumals and law-books, it was formulated in statutes, it was sharpened by the conflict between Church and State, it was laid down as assizes when new states were founded, and it was stated in charters of liberties when the interaction of royal policy and aristocratic interests exploded into political crises. Together these scattered and widely different sources reveal legal and political principles of remarkable permanence and pervasiveness. For example, the insistence on judgement by peers in cap. 39 of Magna Carta was simply an assertion of a generally recognized axiom. It received its first clear statement in the edict of the Emperor Conrad II of 1037 which laid down that military tenants were not to be deprived of their fiefs ‘except by the laws of our ancestors and the judgement of their peers’.

There are four surviving originals of the Great Charter, two at the British Library, one at Lincoln Cathedral and one at Salisbury Cathedral. These are conventionally designated Ci, Cii, L and S. Ci was badly damaged in the fire of the Cottonian library in 1731; an engraved copy of it was published by John Pine in 1733. The others are in good condition, although none now carry the king's seal. Yet another possible original, inspected and noted by Matthew Hale, was ‘sent to the abbey of Tewkesbury’. As far as is known, this no longer survives.

L, certainly, and S, probably, reside in the counties which obtained them in 1215; Ci possibly went to the Cinque Ports. Ci and Cii share a small number of amendments which are noted below in the text. These have been used to argue that they were drafted either (a) earlier or (b) later than L and S, but they may well have been nothing more serious than copyists' omissions. The debate is not of great moment. It derived essentially from the assumption that there was a single authoritative original which figured in the ceremonies at Runnymede and from which all other versions were copied. This assumption was first questioned among later authorities by Professor V. H. Galbraith, and has now been rejected. There is no sound reason for giving any one of the surviving texts priority over the others, nor is there any need to do so. With the possible exception of S, they are all exemplifications of equal weight and value.

S presents its own special problems. The other three are plainly in a Chancery hand; S not so – not, at least, until the scribe of S is discovered at work in other Chancery documents. His hand is too ‘bookish’. Yet this may not render S any the less authentic.

‘We have also granted to all the free men of our realm for ourselves and our heirs for ever (in perpetuum) all the liberties written below.’ Thus cap. 1 of Magna Carta. The words are repeated in cap. 63 in corroboration –‘the men in our realm shall have and hold all the aforesaid liberties … … for ever (in perpetuum), as is aforesaid’. The immediate precedent is contained in the Charter itself. Cap. 1 opens – ‘In the first place [we have] granted to God and by this our present charter have confirmed, for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English church shall be free … ’, and also – ‘we conceded and confirmed by our charter, freedom of elections … which we shall observe and wish our heirs to observe in good faith in perpetuity’. Here the Charter repeated John's grant of freedom of election to the church of 21 November 1214 – ‘libere sint in perpetuum elections’. So cap. 1 of the Charter elides very easily from the liberties of the church to the liberties of the realm. It is as if ecclesiastical liberties infected all the rest, the whole placed within the broader notion of free and perpetual alms, the community of freemen viewed as if it were as permanent and undying as the church itself with all its component institutions. If so, the infection was a strong one; all subsequent reissues of the Charter and the Charter of the Forest are grants made in perpetuity.

Similar language was used for individuals – in ordinary grants occasionally, in quitclaims more frequently, in warranty clauses commonly. That apart, the norm was a simple concession from the grantor and his heirs to the recipient and his heirs. Earlier in the Anglo-Norman world hereditary tenure by laymen and perpetual tenure by the church had grown up side by side, the one reinforcing the other in the act of benefaction; indeed the earliest grants to the reformed Norman church were expressed in the language of perpetual inheritance.

Magna Carta was not a simple statement of law. That part of it which was confirmed in 1217 and 1225 did in fact become law. But it was not an accurate statement of law as it had been before 1215. Its supporters claimed that it was. Indeed, their arguments had been concentrated on reviving the ‘good old laws7’ and confirming existing privileges and liberties. But theirs was only one side of the case. The other side was equally convinced. The papal agents who excommunicated the king's opponents in the autumn denounced them for introducing new laws and depriving the king of his customary rights. Maitland asserted that ‘the charter contains little that is absolutely new. It is restorative. John in these last years has been breaking the law; therefore the law must be defined and set in writing.’ McKechnie likewise frequently assumed that John had been breaking principles which Magna Carta largely confirmed. But this is to accept the opposition's case and to by-pass important problems. How far, for example, did Magna Carta state existing law? Where it did, had John been breaking it? Whether it was law or not, was John the only king to contravene its principles?

None of these questions permit simple answers applicable to every clause. For example, it was existing law to levy aids by consent as cap. 12 of the Charter confirmed, but there is no certain evidence that John or any other king had habitually levied aids in any other manner. In contrast, it seems to have been generally accepted that knightly tenants of escheats in the king's hands should pay reliefs at the rate of £5 per fee. John had sometimes broken this rule, and so occasionally had Henry II.

The letter printed below was issued by Thomas count of Perche on behalf of his knights of the castlery of Bellême. It specifies four occasions for the feudal aid: the count's first knighting, his first ransom, the knighting of his eldest son and the marriage of his eldest daughter. It is also of great interest in its language. The aids are described as tallia (tailles or tallages) levied both on knights and their men; and it provides a rare instance of the adverb feodaliter, here used synonymously with ‘lawfully’.

Thomas accompanied Prince Louis to England and was killed at the battle of Lincoln in 1217, the subject of a famous drawing by Matthew Paris.

Three lists of the Twenty-Five barons have been known since Blackstone's day: one in the Chronica Majora of Matthew Paris, one in his Liber Additamentorum, and one in a marginal annotation in a late thirteenthcentury collection of law tracts and statutes. The first two are identical and are based on the same source. The third is the best of the three. It has Rogerus de Mumbezon correctly where Matthew Paris erred into the form Rogerus de Munbrai.

The Twenty-Five were Richard, earl of Clare, William de Fors, count of Aumale, Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Gloucester, Saer de Quincy, earl of Winchester, Henry de Bohun, earl of Hereford, Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, William Marshal junior, Robert fitz Walter, Gilbert de Clare, Eustace de Vescy, Hugh Bigod, William de Mowbray, the Mayor of London, William de Lanvallei, Robert de Ros, John de Lacy, constable of Chester, Richard de Percy, John fitz Robert, William Malet, Geoffrey de Say, Roger de Montbegon, William of Huntingfield, Richard de Munfichet and William d'Aubigné of Belvoir.

A fourth list which was discovered by Cheney (1968) in a Reading Abbey MS in Lambeth Palace Library can now be added. This is printed below. Like the St Albans versions this list names Roger de Mowbray in error for Roger de Montbegon. It also names the earl of Arundel mistakenly for the count of Aumale.

The list is unique evidence in that it includes quotas of knights against all Twenty-Five except the Mayor of London. These are not feudal quotas, although in a few cases they approximate to them or to the number of knights enfeoffed. It is more likely that they are estimates of the numbers each could bring to bear, if necessary, to enforce the Charter; and it should be borne in mind that in 1215 many knights of uncertain feudal dependence or loyalty are likely to have attached themselves to particular baronial leaders.

The case for including the treaty concerning London in the final peace agreed at Runnymede on 19 June is simple and straightforward. It depends on three arguments fully developed above. These are:

1. a. the strong probability that the firm peace would necessarily include some agreement about London;

2. b. the clear reference in the treaty to the execution of certain provisions of the Charter;

3. c. the fact that royal letters of 23 July relating to the ‘peace agreement’ refer to the restoration of castles, which can only come, among surviving documents, from the London treaty.

4. To these Galbraith has added a fourth argument viz.

5. d. The improbability that King John would accept an agreement with someone entitled ‘Marshal of the Army of God and Holy Church’ once peace had been restored.

In 1944 Richardson argued that the treaty should be dated to the third week in July. The ground for this is that the treaty is entered on the dorse of the membrane of the Close roll which covered the period 11–19 July. Cheney also took this view, although more tentatively. This is discussed in appendix 10 below, pp. 409–10.

Cheney also felt that the memorandum attached to the list of the Twenty-Five in Lambeth MS 371 had some bearing on the matter. This includes the proviso that the ‘mayor will hand over the city of London to the barons if the king happens to decide to contravene his charter’. Cheney took this to be part of a sequence of arrangements concerning London, in which case, he considered, the memorandum must antedate the treaty, which must accordingly record a situation subsequent to Runnymede, rendering a date of the third week in July the most likely. But there are difficulties. The treaty is an official record: the list an informal memorandum. They are not on a par or of equal weight; and there is no compelling need to read them sequentially on the presumption that the state of London was determined exclusively by the one or the other.

The ‘unknown’ charter survives in the Archives Nationales in Paris where it is classified as J. 655 in the Archives du Royaume. It was printed by Teulet in his edition of the Layettes in 1863, but was not known to English historians until it was discovered by J. H. Round in 1893: hence its name. It has formed part of the French royal archives since the thirteenth century along with two copies of the Magna Carta of 1216.

The document consists of a copy of the charter of liberties of Henry I to which certain concessions by John have been added. The provenance of the document and the form ‘Edouardus’ suggest that it was the work of a Frenchman. When he produced it is uncertain, but, whatever the date, it is clear that he was copying for he made errors of repetition in transcribing which he subsequently corrected.Whether he was copying from a document which already associated Henry I's charter with additional concessions by John, or whether the copyist himself associated the two for the first time in this document cannot be determined. His errors were not limited to repetition. His text of Henry I's charter contains several omissions and variants. This must be kept in mind in evaluating the second part of the document.

Authenticity

The main objection to accepting this document as an authentic grant or even as a memorandum of an authentic grant lies in the archaism of the language used in listing John's concessions. The use of the third person and even more the first person singular were totally foreign to John's Chancery; nor do the words baiulare, decenter, pecudes occur frequently in formal documents of the Crown in the senses used here.

On the other hand the text of the Charter of Henry I is independent of but similar to those of the twelfth-century law-book Quadripartitus and the Red Book of the Exchequer.

This title seems to be derived from a combination of the head of the document ‘Ista sunt capitula quae Barones petunt … ’, and the later endorsement ‘Articuli magne carte libertatum sub sigillo regis Johannis’. It is not used by Spelman, who heads the document ‘capitula super quibus facta est Magna Charta Regis Johannis’ or by Blackstone, who refers to the ‘articles or heads of agreement’. Richard Thompson refers to the ‘Articles of Magna Carta’. ‘The Articles of the Barons’ appears as a title in Stubbs's Select Charters and has become customary since.

Two hypotheses have usually been advanced in explanation of the Articles; first, that they were presented by the barons on 15 June and conceded by the king forthwith, and secondly that they were not drawn up until the 15th itself in the first general discussions between the two parties at Runnymede. Neither hypothesis is satisfactory. The first is inconsistent with the wording of the heading and of caps. 48 and 49, where the king's consent to the baronial demands is clearly stated, and with the probability that the document was drafted by a Chancery clerk. The second encounters the obvious difficulty of time. On this matter there was some inconsistency in McKechnie's arguments, for while he maintained that the amendment of the Articles into the form of the Charter and the engrossment of the latter formed the principal business of 16, 17, and 18 June, he also considered that the Articles were produced in the course of one single day, 15 June. That the process of amendment took several days is highly probable, but if this was so it is unconvincing to argue that the preliminary agreement of the Articles could have been produced on the first day of the discussions, for it was in the Articles that most of the major problems were first settled.

A surprising number of the documents of 1215 survive in Anglo-Norman translations. These include the Charter itself, the writ of 27 June directed to the sheriffs and twelve elected knights of each county authorizing them to distrain on those who refused the oath to the Twenty-Five, and versions of the charters of liberties of Henry I, Stephen and Henry II. The first two are included in the cartulary of the leper Hospital of St. Giles at Pont- Audemer, Normandy (Rouen, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS y 200). The charters of liberties constitute Harleian MS 458 in the British Library.

The first two were published under the title of ‘A vernacular-French text of Magna Carta, 1215’. It is now clear that they are in fact in Anglo- Norman. The writ, unlike the enrolled version on the Patent roll, was addressed to the sheriff of Hampshire. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that this vernacular version of the charter was intended for proclamation in the county court of Hampshire in 1215. If so, it lies at or near the origin of the public proclamation of the charters and other documents in both French and English, which was certainly being practised by the 1250s. That leaves some obvious questions – were there other translations? Where and how were they made? To these the Harleian MS suggests some possible answers.

Harleian MS 458 is only a bifolium. Liebermann used it in his work on the text of the charter of Henry I, but he did not appreciate its importance and misdated the translations on the second folio. It has escaped attention since. It is written in a careful, indeed handsome, business hand, or probably more than one. These are not scrappy notes or hasty transcripts but texts clearly and spaciously arranged. Nothing is known of its history except that it passed through the hands of the antiquary Peter Le Neve in the late seventeenth, or early eighteenth, century. It may be significant that Le Neve did much work on the records in the Rolls Chapel.

Dr Antonia Gransden and Dr R. M. Thomson are more inclined than I am to accept the evidence of Roger of Wendover that a great baronial gathering occurred at Bury St Edmunds late in 1214 at which the barons swore on the high altar that they would fight, if necessary, in order to compel the king to confirm the charter of liberties of Henry I. We are all agreed that the difficulty arises from the abrupt termination of the Annales S. Edmundi in 1212; but it seems to me to carry speculation too far to suppose that the story of the meeting appeared in the lost continuation of the Annales or its source. Indeed Dr Thomson provides strong grounds for thinking that this was not the case, for the author of the later Cronica Buriensis used John of Wallingford, not the Bury annals, as the source for his account of the meeting. In Bury histories the story first appears in a condensed form in a chronicle of Bury composed by Bury monks at St Benet of Hulme in or after 1327.

The matter therefore depends on the evidence or lack of it, in the Electio Hugonis. Now the Electio mentions no such meeting, and, given its subjectmatter, it may reasonably be asked – why should it? Dr Gransden relies in some degree on this argument. However, both she and Dr Thomson go further by maintaining that the Electio does, in fact, contain veiled references to incipient rebellion which are consistent with Wendover's story.

Before examining these it is well to bear some dates in mind. First, John was at La Rochelle on 2 October and at Dartmouth on 15 October. He probably arrived in England about 7 October. Secondly, he visited Bury on 4 November, when he attempted to settle the disputed election. Thirdly, the most likely date for a baronial meeting would be 20 November, the feast of St Edmund, when there was a good excuse for an assembly at Bury; and indeed Wendover states that the barons gathered ‘as if for prayer’.

One of the most important features of Mr Richardson's original paper on ‘The Morrow of the Great Charter’ was the emphasis he gave to the assembly held at Oxford in the third week of July. ‘This July meeting’, he wrote, ‘for which the evidence is exceptionally abundant, has been ignored or implicitly denied by historians. But it is vitally important if the sequence of events is to be understood. The broad result of the meeting was to carry a stage further the Concordia of Runnymede.’

This view differs radically from the one advanced above. The main points of difference are as follows.

(1) Richardson equated the triplex forma pacis with Magna Carta and not, as has been argued above, with the papal forma of March. This meant that he could interpret the approval which the papal commissioners expressed for the forma in September as approval of Magna Carta, and this in turn supported his hypothesis that the agreement was still being amplified in July. On the correct dating of the triplex forma pacis see appendix 3, above, pp. 341–4.

(2) He made the avowed presumption that the administrative changes and other measures taken at or about this time were taken by conciliar decision. For this there is no direct evidence. He rightly drew attention to an entry on the K. R. Memoranda roll of 2 Henry III, which states that William fitz Roscelin held the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk as the deputy of the baronial sheriff, Roger de Cressy, until 1 August, when a council was held at Oxford, and then the king committed the counties to Hubert de Burgh. Letters patent notifying Hubert's appointment were in fact dated 24 July at Woodstock, the day after John left Oxford. Now this entry on the Memoranda roll obviously associates this particular administrative change with the Oxford council, but it gets the date of the council wrong, it does not state directly that Hubert's appointment was made at Oxford and it certainly does not permit us to assume that the change was made ‘by common agreement’ at the council.

The charter of 1215 was the work of King John's enemies. The re-issues of 1216 and 1217 were the work of his friends and supporters. The men who fought and won the war for John's son had also given him their advice at Runnymede and taken the oath of obedience to the Twenty-Five. They had fought not so much to destroy the Charter as to preserve Angevin control of the throne, to protect all the benefits they had received hitherto as friends and supporters of the king and to preserve their control of office and their influence in local politics. None of this precluded them from acknowledging that many of the demands of the original Charter were just and reasonable. Of those who had advised the king at Runnymede, only one, William Briwerre, opposed any of the later confirmations. In 1224 he advised the young Henry against confirmation on the grounds that the original grant had been exacted by force. Despite the fact that his objection was similar to Innocent III's, he was now firmly instructed by Stephen Langton to hold his tongue lest he endanger the peace of the realm. The rebellion of 1215 had failed but much of its programme succeeded.

The men chiefly responsible for this were the great loyalist barons of John's reign: William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, Ranulf, earl of Chester, William de Warenne, earl of Surrey, William, earl of Salisbury, backed by the old king's agents, foremost among whom was the Justiciar, Hubert de Burgh. They were reinforced by the curialist bishops and by the papal legate Guala. The charters of 1216 and 1217 were issued under the seals of the legate and of William Marshal, earl of Pembroke and rector regis et regni. This announced a change in papal policy, all the more effective because the pope was the young king's feudal lord as well as his spiritual guardian. The old figures in the dispute had departed. Innocent III was dead. Langton had been summoned to Rome. Pandulf had become bishop of Norwich.