Read Online The Great Turning Points of British History by Michael Wood - Free Book Online

father’s death in 1189, Richard I decided that it was time to make peace with King William of Scotland. In December he restored both castles and Scottish independence in return for a hefty sum. In the words of the earliest Scottish historian, John of Fordun, Richard was ‘that noble king so friendly to the Scots’. When Richard was later held prisoner in Germany, King William even contributed to his ransom.
    1199 A reforming chancellor? John was crowned king of England on 27 May, and on the same day Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury, formerly Richard I’s most trusted minister, was appointed chancellor. As a result of his work as director of the royal secretariat, the first year of the new king’s reign saw an explosive proliferation of government records. This was to persuade many twentieth-century historians that John must have been an unusually business-like king.

1215
Magna Carta is forced on John
DAVID CARPENTER
    The year of Magna Carta, 1215, when an English ruler was first subjected to the law, has resonated down the ages as a landmark in Britain’s constitutional history. Indeed, in
BBC History Magazine
’s 2006 poll, its anniversary was voted the most suitable date on which the nation should celebrate Britishness. The charter itself still lives. Its most fundamental chapters remain on the statute book of the UK as barriers to arbitrary rule. They condemn the denial, sale and delay of justice, and forbid imprisonment and dispossession save by lawful judgement of one’s peers (social equals), or the law of the land.
    The charter was negotiated at Runnymede between 10 and 15 June 1215, with King John riding down each day from Windsor, and the barons encamped in their tents across the meadows beside the Thames. On 15 June, John, tricky to the end, refused more concessions and simply sealed the charter – ‘take it or leave it’ – thereby cleverly keeping the names of the twenty-five barons who were to enforce its terms out of the document, this because they had still to be chosen. John hoped the charter would become no more than a toothless symbol of his generosity to the kingdom; the barons hoped that its terms would be rigorously enforced and indeed extended. The result was civil war.
    By September, John had got the pope to quash the charter. That month, the opposition barons deposed John and offered the throne to Louis, eldest son of King Philip II of France. He came to England in May 1216 and by the time of John’s death in October controlled more than half the kingdom. In the north Alexander II of Scotland had gained Carlisle, and was making good his claims to Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland. In Wales, Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, ruler of Gwynedd, had swept through the south and taken the royal bases of Cardigan and Carmarthen.
    Yet John’s dynasty survived, and with it, paradoxically, the charter. Its implantation into English political life was the work of the minority government of John’s son, Henry III, who was only 9 on his accession. Magna Carta was also a British document. Both Alexander and Llywelyn had been with the rebels from the start, and both benefited from the charter’s terms, terms that acknowledged ‘the law of Wales’ and invoked for the Welsh, as for Alexander, the principle of judgement by peers. Ultimately, as Wales and Scotland became part of a United Kingdom, their peoples too were embraced by the charter’s protections. The charter, however, was no panacea. Since the clause setting up the twenty-five barons was left out from post-1215 versions of the document, it had no constitutional means of enforcement. It also said nothing about how the king’s ministers were to be chosen, patronage distributed and policy decided, major holes that defined the political battleground of the later middle ages.
    The charter made a profound difference. It clamped down on various sources of revenue. Henceforth the ‘relief’ or inheritance tax paid by an earl or baron was to