Thank M, for a good reading tip.
As i read the very interesting piece from Linebaugh however, I found a
sort of yearning for a past utopia.
His critique of Robertson he cites early on, discredits Robertson -
apparently upon the lack of evidence that King John was literate. [Since
when did stop the ruling class puts its imprint on anything?]
Since I am not an expert on middle age law, I found myself retreating to
my usual Guide to English History as a first resort: the much
under-known & largely ignored "Peoples History of England", by
A.L.Morton; First 1938 most recently 1974 Lawrence & Wishart. I still
think that sometimes less is more. Not that the thrust of Linebuagh's
article extolling the Commons and the commoner should be forgot. This
was also the message of others in the past such as JL & Barbara Hammond
amongst many others. We will not even discuss Marx's excoriation of
those like the Duchess of Argylle.
Anyway, that old hack Stalinist -pickaxe wielding nutcase Morton has
this to say - & I think is more historically relevant in the big
picture:
" “In the last resort the barons retained the right of rebellion. This
was always a desperate expedient, and in England, where the power of the
Crown was greatest and that of the barons least, it was almost hopeless.
Even the strongest combination of barons had failed to defeat the Crown
when, as in 1095 and in 1106, it had the support of other classes and
sections of the population.
John, ablest and most unscrupulous of the Angevin kings, did make the
attempt to pass beyond the powers which the Crown could claim without a
violation of the feudal contract. He levied excessive fines and aids in
ways and on occasions not authorised by custom; he confiscated the
estates of his vassals without a judgement in court; he arbitrarily
called up cases from the baronial courts to his own royal courts. In'
short, he showed no respect for law or custom. His administrative
machinery directly threatened baronial rights, and indeed the rights of
all free men, of all, that is, who were concerned with keeping in
effective working order the feudal state, one of whose main objects, it
must never be forgotten, was to keep in their place the mass of serfs
and cottagers. Nor were his innovations confined to the barons. The
Church was similarly treated, and the towns, which during the two
previous generations had been growing increasingly con-scious of their
corporate rights, were made to pay all kinds of new taxes and dues.
Ile result was the complete isolation of the Crown from those sections
that had previously been its strongest supporters. John was peculiarly
unfortunate in that his attack on the Church was made when it was at one
of its periods of exceptional strength under a superb political
tactician, Pope Innocent III.
Even so, it is possible that he might have been success-ful but for the
failure of his foreign policy. A dispute over the succession with his
nephew Arthur led him into a long war with France. One by one he lost
the provinces his father had held, including the dukedom of Normandy.
The loss of Normandy meant for many of the English barons the loss of
huge ancestral estates. In their eyes John had failed in his first duty,
that of guarding the fiefs of his vassals.
At the same time the loss of their foreign possessions made them more
anxious to preserve those still held in England.
At this moment, having lost the support of the barons, John became
involved in a direct dispute with Innocent III over the filling of the
vacant Archbishopric of Canter-bury. Ignoring the King's nominee, and
contrary to the well-established custom, Innocent consecrated Stephen
Langton, and to enforce the appointment placed England under an
interdict. He followed this by declaring John excommunicated and
deposed, and persuaded the kings of France and Scotland to make war on
him. John organ-ised a counter alliance which included Flanders and the
Emperor. His forces were crushed at the Battle of Bou-vines in 1214 and
the English barons refused to fight. Even a last minute submission to
Innocent failed to win back the support of the Church in England, and
Langton con-tinued to act as the brain of the baronial revolt.
John stood alone. It was not even possible for him to call out the fyrd,
which in the past had been the trump card of the Crown in its struggles
with the nobility. This fact in itself indicates that the movement
against John was to some extent of a popular character. Unwillingly be
submitted, and at Runnymede on June 15th, 1215, he accepted the
programme of demands embodied by the barons in Magna Carta.
Magna Carta has been rightly regarded as a turning point in English
history, but almost always for wrong reasons. It was not a
'constitutional' document. It did not embody the principle of no
taxation without representa-tion. It did not guarantee parliamentary
government, since Parliament did not then exist. It did not establish
the right to trial by jury, since, in fact, the jury was a piece of
royal machinery to which the barons had the strongest objections.
What it did do was to set out in detail the ways in which John had gone
beyond his rights as a feudal over-lord and to demand that his unlawful
practices should stop. It marked the alliance between the barons and the
citizens of London by insisting on the freedom of mer-chants from
arbitrary taxation. In other ways, as in its attempts to curtail the
power of the royal courts, the Charter was reactionary. And, while its
most famous clause declared that "No freeman shall be taken or
im-prisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we
go upon him or send upon him except by the lawful judgement of his peers
and the law of the land," the second word excluded from any possible
benefit the overwhelming mass of the people who were still in
villeinage. Later, as villeinage declined, this clause took a new
meaning and importance.
More important than all the specific points of grievance was the clause
setting up a permanent committee of twenty-four barons to see that
John's promises were kept. This was a real attempt to create machinery
that would make it unnecessary to resort to an open revolt that could
only succeed under such unique circumstances as those of 1215, or, at
the worst, to ensure that a revolt would begin in a way as favourable as
possible for the barons. This particular device did not work very well,
but it did. open a new avenue along which the barons could conduct a
political struggle as a class rather than as individuals. It also
prepared the way for the entry of new classes on to the political field.
It led to the development of Parlia-ment as the instrument through which
first the nobles and afterwards the bourgeoisie defended their
interests.
Ile moment the barons dispersed, John denounced the Charter and gathered
an army. The barons replied by declaring him deposed and offering the
crown to Louis, son of the King of France. A civil war followed which
was interrupted by the death of John in October IV& His son Henry was
only nine, and the supporters of Louis quickly deserted to the young
prince. He was crowned, and government was carried on in his name by a
group of barons led by William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke,
and Hubert de Burgh. During this long minority the principles of the
Charter came to be accepted as the basis of the law. In the following
centuries Magna Carta was solemnly reaffirmed by every king from Henry
III to Henry VI.
Its subsequent history is curious and, falls into three chapters. As
feudalism declined it ceased to have any clear practical application and
passed out of memory. The Tudor bourgeoisie were too closely allied to
the monarchy to wish to place any check upon it, while the power of the
nobles was broken in the Wars of the Roses. Shakespeare, writing his
play King John, never mentions Magna Carta and quite possibly had never
heard of it.
When the bourgeoisie entered their revolutionary period under the
Stuarts the Charter was rediscovered, and, being framed in technical
feudal language, was completely misinterpreted and used as a basis for
the claims of Par-liament. This view of the Charter as the cornerstone
of democratic rights persisted through the greater part of the
Nineteenth Century. It is only within the last fifty or sixty years that
historians have examined it critically as a feudal document and
discovered its real meaning and importance.
Just because it marks the highest point of feudal devel-opment and
expressed most precisely the nature of feudal class relations, Magna
Carta marks also the passing of society beyond those relations. It is
both a culmination and a point of departure. In securing the Charter the
barons won their greatest victory but only at the price of acting in a
way which was not strictly feudal, of forming new kinds of combinations
both among themselves and with other classes.”
Pages 83-87.
