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- [00:00]
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Professor Nicholas Vincent
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- [00:35]
Emily Briffett
Magna Carta. It's one of history's most famous documents. But how did the Febrile World of 13th century politics lead to its creation? And what were its consequences? Over the next four Sundays on the History Extra Podcast, Emily Briffett is going to be joined by historian Professor Nicholas Vincent to explore just that. Kicking off with today's first episode.
- [00:58]
In the early 13th century, England was a kingdom under pressure, as the challenges posed by King John's reign had left the realm restless. But by 1215, such tensions had reached a boiling point. What began as isolated grumblings among nobles soon evolved into an organised challenge to royal authority and would ultimately lead to a charter that would leave an indelible mark on history for far beyond their own lifetimes. I'm Emily Briffet and I'm joined by historian Professor Nicholas Vincent in this first episode of our series on Magna Carta. We're setting the stage with John's disastrous reign, charting taxes, war failures, papal relations and baronial rebellion, all building up to the showdown at Runnymede in 1215. Welcome, Nick. It's a pleasure to have you on.
- [01:50]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
Lovely to be here.
- [01:51]
Emily Briffett
So, as I've said, today, we are going to be setting the scene for Magna Carta. If we take this point in history. Zoom right on 12:15 and this moment in Runnymede, John's poised to press his seal into the wax. How did we get to this point?
- [02:08]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
So there are a number of things in the background here. Immediately in the background, there's military failure. So John had just returned from a disastrous campaign in France, where he'd attempted to regain land that he'd lost a decade earlier. That had gone very badly. His army in the north of France was defeated and he himself had run away from the son of the king of France on the Loire, just outside Angers. So he's a defeated king, but he's also defeated Twice, because earlier on, 10 years before, he'd lost the territories of his father and his mother, mother's family. The whole of France, from Normandy down to the Loire, had been lost to the French, basically by the King's cowardice, he'd run away from battle. King John, soft sword, all of this idea. So we've got military campaigning in the background and then there's the personality of John himself that is generally regarded as toxic.
- [03:14]
Emily Briffett
And this is something that I'm sure, as we're going to talk in this episode, we're going to cover many times. I think John's very well known as a figure in history for his particular reign. Before we get to that point, could you set the scene for us? What was life like in the early 13th century?
- [03:30]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
Well, I think if you were a member of the elite, like the King or the great barons, this was a time of great opportunity. I think the 12th century in general had seen a vast expansion in European trade. People were getting richer and richer, particularly at the top end of society. And if you want modern comparisons, think of Russia after the fall of communism. Those who have control of resources suddenly have a great deal more. So for the elite, things are getting better and better, save, of course, for the King, because there's always the risk that these super barons, these great aristocrats, are actually now beginning to compete with the King at a certain level. Below that, things aren't really very happy. So we're still talking about a world in which 80% of the population at least live the lives of peasants. Many of them are unfree. They don't enjoy access to the law in the same way that free men and women do. And they're living at a level of subsistence where really year on year, you don't know whether it's going to be boom or bust, whether you're going to be able to store your crops for the following year, or whether you're going to die of starvation. So it's a society of enormous divisions, into which, of course, you've got to bring other factors like the Church. So the Church at this time is tremendously important. The Church is really the chief store of literacy within society. And the bishops are just as important as the barons. As leaders of political society at this time, it's also a society that's very, very closely linked to Europe. So we might think of merry old England, medieval England, but really the King himself is a Frenchman, John is a French speaking king, the aristocracy are French speaking, and the Church is run from Rome, from the papacy, from at this stage, a very powerful Italian Pope. So we're England in Europe, not just fortress England at this time.
- [05:37]
Emily Briffett
This gives us a really good glimpse into the world that Magna Carta takes place in what characterised the Plantagenet style of rulership and governance up to this point.
- [05:47]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
So the best summing up of this is in a few Latin words, vis et volontas, the King's wish and will. So the Plantagenets are notorious for getting their own way, extralegally, if necessary. You delay justice. Henry ii, John's father, had been instructed by his mother, always delay. If there's difficult business, put it on the back burner, because sooner or later you're going to be able to get an advantage here. So those two words, will and wishfulness, and then ira et malevalentia, the anger and malice of the King. The King's ability to turn even on his closest friends and destroy them. Because the King still controls the majority of the resources, he still has a material advantage over even the great aristocrats. And the King's personal wishes and of course, therefore, the King's personality are crucial here. This is the family that within living memory, had killed the Archbishop of Canterbury. This is the family John's father, Henry ii, who in many eyes had actually commanded the death of his own Archbishop. This is a family that had warred within itself. It's a very, very dysfunctional family in many ways. And all sorts of accusations of sexual impropriety, of incest, of murder, of intrigue circle around this family. They're known as the Devil's brood. The great Saint Bernard of Clairvaux asked in the 1150s, what about this Plantagenet dynasty that's rising in the west, said, from the devil they came and to the Devil they will surely go.
- [07:39]
Emily Briffett
I think if you're looking for an introduction into the Plantagenet dynasty, that is the definitive introduction. What a family we've spoken about. John. John is notorious in history as Bad King John. Was John really all that bad?
- [07:56]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
About 25 years ago, we organised a conference attempting to rehabilitate John and to show that actually he was a great administrator, that he'd been maligned, that in fact the problems were systemic, not personal. And the conclusion of that conference was that he was actually far, far nastier than anyone had previously noticed. I won't repeat the words that are used of him, but that he was absolute, absolutely a rotter. This is a man you could not trust. He'd betrayed his father, he betrayed both his wives, he betrayed his closest friends. He turned on a tiny point against those that he regarded as his closest friends, or certainly who thought that they were the friends of the king. He was a man who couldn't be trusted. And then you get to the particular crimes of which he was accused. So he came to the throne in 1199, having earlier on in the 1190s when his brother, the great hero Richard I, was a crusader, having rebelled against his brother, stabbed his brother in the back whilst Richard was in captivity in Germany, did a deal John with the King of France, the arch enemy of the kings of England, to divide up the lands of Richard the Lionheart. Of course, that all unfolded because John, as it were, again ran away when Richard returned to England. But then when Richard died, John seized the throne. He wasn't necessarily the rightful claimant to the throne. It was debatable. John was the late king's younger brother. But John had an elder brother, Geoffrey Plantagenet, Duke of Brittany, who himself had left a son, Arthur of Brittany. It's a wonderful name. Arthur evokes all of that heroic legend of King Arthur of antiquity, Arthur of the Bretons. The trouble there was that Arthur was still only a boy. John was of mature age, in his by this stage, early 30s. So John seized the throne and there were those who thought that actually it was probably better to have an adult king than a boy. Arthur himself, and those around him didn't see it like that. The King of France backed Arthur. Arthur then rebelled against John in 1202, was rapidly taken prisoner folly outside Mirabeau, where Arthur was swooped upon by the King of England and the King of England's army. And then we just don't know what happened to him. He disappeared completely. Some say that he was murdered by John in person. Terrible descriptions of John murdering him on board a boat on the River Seine by the French chroniclers. Some say that he was murdered at John's command by one of John's henchmen. Some say he died attempting to escape escape from imprisonment at Rouen. Some say that he just died in prison. But whatever, Arthur disappeared. Now, the Plantagenets before had fallen out with one another. They'd locked one another up. John's mother had been locked up for a large part of the second half of the reign of her husband, Henry ii. But to kill your own nephew is to go a bit beyond. So John, from a very early date, was taxed with these, this reputation for disloyal, for mistrust and now for murder, murder of his own nephew.
- [11:28]
Emily Briffett
So we can't say that this. He's just a Product of lineage and of circumstance. It's him as a person as well.
- [11:35]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
I think the personality of John is crucial to understanding what goes wrong during the reign, that it isn't just systemic, though some of it is systemic. Some of it has to do with economy, some of it has to do with geopolitics and so on. But add into that the factor of John himself. Had Richard lived, had the French invaded Normandy, as they did in 1203, 1204, where John just ran away, well, what would Richard have done? He would have been there wading through the ditches outside the city of Rouen, defending Rouen against the French, whereas John was on board ship, hightailing it off to England, unable to actually do anything to stem the flow of rebellion. And even at the time, those at the time said, you know, where was John when all this was going on? Well, some said, oh, well, he was enjoying pleasures of the marital bed. He'd recently married an heiress from southern France. She was supposed to be about 12 years old, but if you calculate it, she could have been as young as eight. And he immediately consummated the marriage, which was even at that time regarded as almost criminal. Some said he was enjoying the pleasures of the marital bed. Others said that he was skulking through the back lanes of Normandy, that, you know, where was the king? Well, he's actually hiding from his own supporters because he didn't trust anybody. People who are themselves not to be trusted often find it very difficult to put trust in anybody else.
- [13:06]
Emily Briffett
It's all about personality as well. You've mentioned some of the military, I dare say, challenges in his reign. What about some of the economic, political ones?
- [13:17]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
There are a number of things here. So one is basic economics. This is a period of inflation and it's a period during which the King relied on fixed income from rents. Basically, the counties of England are rented out to the sheriffs at a fixed. It's called the farm, the farm of the counties. Now, the actual relative value of that fixed rent was falling. You can imagine it today. You get a fixed rent, but inflation eats into that, so that what was worth £100 in the 1190s is now worth a great deal less. You've got the rise of the great oligarchs around the King as well. And you've got the fact that the kings of France, even regardless of what they're doing with the Plantagenets, are expanding their territory and getting far, far richer in the 1190s. So they Hoover up large parts of northern France at this time, not previously. Owned by the Plantagenets. But the kings of France are becoming a more formidable enemy. So we've got the economics of the situation and then you've got the systemic problems of trying to organize a realm in England whilst at the same time governing the whole of western France, from the Channel ports all the way down to the Pyrenees. Now, that was a logistical nightmare. Even in the reign of John's father, Henry ii, there'd been constant rebellions within that territory. And systemically also bear in mind that warfare there had been going on for a very long time and that the local aristocracy in Normandy and throughout France were probably fed up with all of this and they have to make a choice. Are they going to go on, as it were, defending this war like land, forever and ever, or are they going to throw in their chips and join with the King of France, where there will be some sort of status quo thereafter with a French ruler? So, systemically, there are all sorts of problems here.
- [15:15]
Emily Briffett
I was going to ask you, why did so many powerful men decide they'd have enough? But I think that might be. Given what you said, that might be the wrong question to ask. So it's more, at what point did they decide they had enough?
- [15:27]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think the financial pressures here really build up in the 1190s, partly, of course, because of Richard's captivity coming back from Crusade. First of all, he has to finance the crusade in the east, which is enormously expensive. He taxes England in a way that it simply hasn't been taxed before. And then when he was taken captive in Germany, he was ransomed for an enormous sum of money, a sum of money so great that it paid for the German conquest of Sicily. So we're talking £100,000 plus. So not only is there enormous pressure on the aristocracy, on the barons, to pay these taxes, the barons and the bishops, the Church's taxed too. But you've also got the fact that the people who've been living here on what is a permanent frontier have just had enough. And if you look at the end of wars, that's often how they end. People just get fed up, they've just exhausted. They've had enough of this. They want a settlement and really at any price. So when John tried to defend the Angevin lands, this is a family from Angers, they're called the Plantagenets, but they're also the Androvins. When he tried to defend these lands after 1199, after he came to the throne, very quickly, the Norman aristocracy begin peeling away in favor of the kings of France.
- [16:49]
Emily Briffett
So how does this take us up to 1215 in the early 13th century? How is this building up to the moment? We've spoken about the moment at Runnymede in 1215.
- [16:59]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
So I think two things there. First of all, there's the fact that John was a failure militarily. He'd failed in the 1190s against Richard. He failed again to defend Normandy in 1203. 1204, Norman falls to the French, as does the whole of the Angevin land, all the way down to the Loire. So he lost the majority of the lands that mattered in France. And in the eyes of his contemporaries, that showed that he'd been abandoned by God. Those who have God on their side are going to win their wars. Those who in some way have offended God are going to lose them. So we've got that systemic problem, and then we've got the fact that having lost those lands in northern France, where can the king find refuge? He goes to England. Now, the kings of England for the previous 150 years had ruled both in England and in France. They'd been absent in France for large parts of their reign. But John is now on the doorstep of his barons, eyeing up their cash boxes and eyeing up their wives and daughters in a way that previous kings really, because of their absence in France, hadn't posed quite that problem. He also has a frenetic itinerary. He travels the realm day by day. He's in the saddle from one castle to another castle, visiting parts of England that previous kings of England simply had never visited. And then, of course, you've got the fact that for the barons in England, many of whom had residual interests in France, this is the Anglo Norman aristocracy that, since the conquest of England in the 1060s, has had lands both in England and in France, although to some extent that had already begun to break down. They themselves have lost a great deal of their own resources. I think that the circumstances there, even 10 years before Runnymede, 10 years before Magna Carta, the circumstances there are already building towards what is not going to be a very good climax to this renown.
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- [21:34]
Emily Briffett
So when do we first see the first inklings of rebellion, discontent?
- [21:41]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
Some years before 1215. So previous Plantagenet kings, Henry II, Richard, there had been considerable rebellion against them. But we begin to see a movement five years, three years before Runnymede, in which the barons and the church begin to come together with almost a program to impose upon the king. There are rumors as early as 1210, 1211 of attempts to depose the king. There's a threat in 1212, that the barons will actually rise up against the king, betray him to the Welsh, leave him to die at the hands of the Welsh rebels and themselves set up a new king in England. We're even told the name of that new king. It's to be a man called Simon de Montfort, who's a great hero of the crusade against heresy in southern France. Well, there are stories that the Batt baron's plot to bring Simon de Montfort into England. Simon de Montfort has resentments of his own against King John having been locked out of his inheritance in the Earldom of Leicester, that Simon de Montfort will be made king. There are rumors of conspiracies with the French and The French from 1210 onwards plan to invade England. Those plans don't necessarily get anywhere very quickly, but they're always in the back of the mind of the King. But behind all of that, I think, is this new coalition that's being forged between the barons and the bishops and that is greatly increased also as a result of that failed rebellion in 1212, where various of the rebel barons then go into self exile from England and join in Paris with the leaders of the Church who themselves in many cases are in exile in France. So we've got, as it were, almost a court in exile of bishops and barons all talking to one another about what they might be able to do about this entirely toxic king.
- [23:47]
Emily Briffett
What grounds do they have for this? I think for us this might seem a little unprecedented. Was it quite so unprecedented at the time?
- [23:54]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
To depose a king is virtually impossible within the law. But all of these people look back at history and they see that bad kings lose their thrones. They also define a certain type of bad king as a tyrant. As early as the 1150s, a writer around the Plantagenet court, a man named John of Salisbury, wrote a treatise on politics called the Polycraticus, in which he declares that it is not only right but a duty to slay a tyrant. Now, what actually happens to the slayer in the mind of John of Salisbury is another matter. Probably they're a criminal, but it's God's purpose. You can see this throughout the Old Testament history of the kings of Judah, the kings of Israel. It's God's purpose that tyrants should be removed from their throne. Saul is a tyrant and therefore we get the rise of King David. In the Old Testament, tyrants come and go. So we begin to get this rhetoric in which John himself is presented as a tyrant. And although the hand that slays him is probably the Hand of a criminal to get rid of him does seem increasingly possible.
- [25:12]
Emily Briffett
So John's got to deal with this situation. What's his initial responses to these first inklings of rebellion?
- [25:19]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
Back to the Plantagenet response to everything, ire and malevolence. He turns against anyone he thinks is not to be trusted. But the trouble is that, that, that really covers pretty much all the bases. The only people that he actually trusts or appears to trust with any degree of long term future are those Frenchmen who've gone into exile with him in England after 1204. People like the Bishop of Winchester, a man named Peter des Roches, who is a Frenchman. People like Girard Dathay and his various kinsmen from around the Plantagenet heartlands on the Loire. They've forfeited everything in France to join the King and they're promoted to positions of very great power, both in the English localities and at court. So John doesn't trust anybody and he turns against those he thinks are against him. So for instance, he turns against the greatest knight of the age, a man named William Marshal, who's accused of plotting with various of the King's enemies in Ireland. He turns against his greatest crony, a man named William de Braose. William de Bros was probably there when Arthur had been taken prisoner in 1202. It's been suggested that the reason the king turned against William de Braos was that William de Braose's wife began to blab about what had happened to Arthur. Whatever the circumstances, William, who'd been promoted to enormous lands in England, in Wales and in Ireland, was suddenly disgraced, confronted with demands for huge amounts of money. Money. And then when William himself went into exile in France, where he died, John pursued him through Ireland, so that William sought refuge in France, captured William's wife and eldest son, imprisoned them and we're told, starve them to death. So that when they were discovered, the mother was sitting with her son, the younger William de Breuz, on her knee and had begun to eat her own son in an act of cannibalism imposed by King John. John, we're told, left them in this dungeon with nothing but a small flitch of bacon. There's a very specific detail that the chroniclers report there. So that the mother ended up cannibalizing her own son. Now, whether that's actually what happened, who knows? But the fact that those sorts of rumors were circulating gives you some idea of the popularity, shall we say, of King John.
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Emily Briffett
It's a really dark turn in the story. He seems to be losing friends, potential allies left, right and centre. Did he in any way try and shore up any supports?
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Professor Nicholas Vincent
I don't think that he did, except by buying in a lot of foreign mercenaries and assuming that everything will be all right. I mean, this is a family that's succeeded by violence, by threat, by murder. So I think he just thinks he's carrying on the same family traditions. I mean, many of the things that John did weren't really that much worse than what Henry II had done. John didn't kill his Archbishop of Canterbury. That's really going it a bit. But somehow Henry ii, probably because of his personality, because of the impression he made on his contemporaries, Henry II got away with murder and adultery and all sorts of terrible things in circumstances in which John just didn't. There was something wrong about John in the eyes of his contemporaries, where Henry II people might fear him or respect him. With John, they seemed to have felt contempt and increasingly hatred.
- [29:05]
Emily Briffett
If we were to look more widely, do we see the broader European climate affecting or influencing the situation in England at all?
- [29:13]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
Well, then I think we go back to the Church, because John's reputation was again fundamentally damaged. By falling out with the Church, Henry II had murdered his archbishop. With Canterbury, John tried to engineer the election of a friend of his as Archbishop of Canterbury, failed, and the Pope then imposed an archbishop, a man named Stephen Langton, who John wouldn't take. And the outcome there was a period of interdict where the Church was basically sent on strike by the Pope. The services of the Church, the Mass, the celebration of Mass, the celebration of the sacraments, all of those things that would assure you a route to the afterlife, all of that suspended. The King himself was threatened with excommunication. The court was excommunicated. Most of the bishops went into exile. This is a period of a very, very powerful Italian pope named Innocent iii. It's a period where there was a crusade against heresy in southern France. A crusade against heresy, where King John in England is seen as an ally of the principal leader of the heresy, his own brother in law, the Count of Toulouse. So John's seen as being, as it were, on the side of the heretics against the Church. And there are rumors during this period, while the Church is on, that the King himself intends to convert to Islam. It's nonsense. I'm sure it's nonsense. But the King did enter into an alliance with the ruler of Morocco, who is also the ruler of large parts of southern Spain, as part of this policy to recruit allies for his allies in southern France with His ambition to recover his lands further north in France, using this southern alliance as a major lever to in his relations with the King of France. So, yes, there is a European dimension here. And again, the King isn't shown up in a very good light because he's seen, as it were, as the ally of heretics, terrible in the eyes of the Church and even worse of pagans, of these Saracens in North Africa and Spain.
- [31:25]
Emily Briffett
It would be fair to say things are not going well for John.
- [31:28]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
All in all, things don't look too good at this stage.
- [31:30]
Emily Briffett
No, not at all. How then did you, this handful of rebellions, grumblings, uprisings, whatever we'd like to call them, morph into a more organized resistance to John?
- [31:43]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
Well, there we go to that campaign in 1214 where the king stakes everything. All this money he's raised from the Church, the Church's gone into exile. The King confiscates the wealth of the Church, he's already milked the wealth of his barons on a regular basis through taxation. He stakes all of that on a campaign of reconquest in France, and it proved a failure. So in July 1214, the northern part of John's army, John wasn't with it, but the northern part of his army, commanded by his cousin half brother, was defeated in battle at Bouvines, just outside Lille. That's as important in the history of France as the Battle of Hastings is in the history of England. England, it's the great moment of the takeoff of Capetian French royal power. And John, who runs away from the son of the King of France outside angers and then skulks back into England in the autumn of 1214, was now bankrupt, and also bankrupt in terms of reputation for having lost this war. And it's from that point onwards that things really begin to heat up considerably. So we have an alliance between the barons and the bishops and we begin to get the first rumblings of a real campaign of reform imposed upon the King. Meetings between the barons and the bishops. The bishops, by this stage, have been reintroduced to England. John had taken the cross, had taken vows as a crusader, really as a political exercise, a propagandist exercise, to buy back the favor of the Church. So in doing that, the bishops themselves had been allowed back into England. England, but they in many cases now make common cause with the barons. And then we get the increasing tensions with the merchant class. This war with France really isn't very good for trade, and John's relations with the city of London were not good. So that in May 1215, London itself is betrayed to the barons who've risen in arms against the King at Northampton, a sector of the London oligarchy. Throw in their lot with the barons, open the gates of London so that the capital city and even the King's treasury are now at the disposal of his enemies. The King retired to Windsor and it's at that point that we begin to get the negotiations that go on between the King and the barons. In May and June 1215.
- [34:17]
Emily Briffett
Would you mind introducing us to the barons? So often we hear of them as the barons who are the leading figures.
- [34:23]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
In theory, it's the Earl of Hertford, a man named Richard de Clare. So he's, as it were, the most powerful. He's the one who looks best on paper. And many of these barons are closely related to the Clares. We're talking about 150 years of very close intermarriage between various of these elite families. And the Clares seem to be, as it were, at the heart of all of this. They're very much in east of England phenomenon. Clare itself in Suffolk is their caput, the chief castle that they have. But beyond that, I think the real leader here is a man named Robert Fitzwalter. And Robert Fitzwalter is related to the Clares, but is an Essex baron who in 1212 had been implicated in the conspiracy to murder King John, to betray him to the Welsh, and had sought exile in France. There he'd met up with Stephen Langton and the leaders of the Church, who were themselves in exile. Robert Fitzwalter was very closely related to a large number of these other barons and he went into exile also with a Northern baron named Eustace Staveski, who was Lord of Alnwick. And they too are in negotiation with the church from 1212 onwards. And there we get the introduction of this idea of a northern conspiracy. The chroniclers begin to refer to the dissident baronets as the Northerners. It's perhaps the first political party that's given a name in English history, the Northerners. Years ago, Jim Holt wrote a wonderful book called the Northerners, about the coalition against King John amongst the barons. It's a great read. Even now. The reality is, although they may call themselves the Northerners, the real center of their authority lies in, in the east of England, the Northern Midlands, the counties of East Anglia, Essex in particular, all the way down to London. But these are real people and it's remarkable, actually, that their identities are so little known to the public today. I think in most cases, unless you happen to come from somewhere in Essex closely associated with Robert Fitzwalter, or unless you've seen the Russell Crowe film of Robin Hood, where Robert Fitzwalter does have a walk on appearance, though in a completely ahistorical, mythologized way. That name isn't really generally known, but he's probably the linchpin behind that baronial coalition.
- [36:54]
Emily Briffett
This is fascinating. I've not heard the names before. I've heard the story. I'm familiar with some of the major facts and dates, but I have not been introduced to the barons. One thing, while we're here with the barons at this time, obviously we're going to. In our next episode, we're going to be delving more into the documents sealed in 1215. But what were the barons demands at this time in the negotiations?
- [37:17]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
Well, we've got an extraordinary document called the Articles of the Barons, which the king put his seal to at the beginning of June 1215. We've also got a thing. It's one of those unknown knowns in a Rumsfeldian sense, but there's a thing called the unknown charter that turned up in the 19th century in the French royal archives, which looks like an early draft of the terms that were negotiated at Runnymede. So we know that there were negotiations going on and really that there was already a program, that Russell Crowe film absurdly shows the terms of Magna Carta being produced from behind an altar where they've been stored for years and years and years. That's a lot of nonsense. But the. The reality is that there was a program already being formed here and there were certain specific points that the barons wanted to get across. So the king's mistreatment of taxation, the king's mishandling of his rights over widows and orphans, the king's exploitation of certain feudal privileges. I use that word feudal with inverted commas around it, but certain privileges that the crown had over the great barons. All of this was obviously a topic for consideration. The king's charging of taxation for his wars. How and when was he entitled to charge tax? Would that be negotiated with the barons or would it be imposed by fiat by the king? All of this was clearly a topic for discussion. The king's patronage powers. What about these Frenchmen around the king, the French cronies of King John? Well, already their position was the topic of discussion and was already beginning to be formulated as a specific demand to be made against the king. And then, Emily, there's one other thing here. There were presidents. So when Henry I had come to the throne. 100 years earlier, in 1100, he had issued a coronation charter promising certain things. He'd go back to the good laws that had existed before the reign of his father. He'd go back to the good laws of Eber the Confessor. He wouldn't exploit widows and orphans in the way that his brother William Rufus had done. He would make only limited demands upon those who pay tax. Well, all that document itself was available to the bishops and barons in 1214, 1215, and does seem in many ways to have been used as a blueprint for what was being demanded of King John.
- [40:01]
Emily Briffett
And I'm sure there'll be more to come on that in the next episode as we delve really into the clauses. While we're at the negotiating stage. Who is actually at the negotiating table? Who's the pivotal powerbreaker?
- [40:13]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
Well, it's often said the Archbishop of Canterbury, and it's often been queried whether he acted as an honest broker between the King and the barons, or whether his sympathies really lie with the barons. And I'm inclined really to see him very much in that baronial party. Stephen Langton, great commentator on the Bible, but absolutely imbued with this sense of justice, with this sense of also the opposition to tyranny that you can see in the Old Testament, had spent the last 30 years as a master at the schools of Paris, teaching about good and bad kings and really teaching that the kings of England were no good. So there's Stephen Langton, and then you've got the very position of Runnymede. Runnymede was chosen as a site of negotiation because it lies partway between the King at Windsor and the barons in London. And it lies on a river. So it's a liminal space. It's neither one thing nor t'. Other. It lies on the frontier between four dioceses and four English counties. So there are four bishops who could, in theory, say that they had an interest in Runnymede. And there are four counties, I won't bother naming them, but they meet more or less at that spot. So that itself is chosen as a place that is neither in the power of the King nor in the power of the band. And then there are other go betweens here. The most prominent of them, of course, are the military orders, the Templars and the Hospitallers. Now, traditionally, they'd been involved in diplomacy in the Holy Land. They were accustomed to negotiating between both rival Christian powers and between the Christians and Islam in that part of the world. And they're there at Runnymede, and they clearly played a major role as go betweens, as neutral go betweens, between king and barons.
- [42:11]
Emily Briffett
So here we are, we've reached Runnymede. In that pivotal moment in 1215, was a Magna Carta style showdown inevitable, do you think?
- [42:20]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
Well, I suppose not. If the barons hadn't taken London, I don't think that the king would have been forced into negotiations in quite the way that he was, had the king retained possession of his own treasure or his ability to tax. Probably not. So in a sense, it's the loss of London in May 1215 that was the absolute crucial turning point here. Up to that point, the King clearly thought he could wing his way through this, that through a bit of dastardly false diplomacy and false promises and wriggling out of things, he would get away with it. But the loss of London, I think really does turn the tables against the king and make it absolutely essential that he negotiate a peace.
- [43:07]
Emily Briffett
That was Professor Nicholas Vincent, professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia. He was speaking to me. Emily Brifford. Fancy going beyond the podcast? If you're curious to learn more about the Magna Carta and the world in which it originated, I've put together some essential reading, listening, listening and viewing from the History Extra archive to help deepen your understanding. You can find a link to that in the description of this episode.
- [43:41]
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- [44:09]
Professor Nicholas Vincent
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- [44:10]
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