4. The Church and Magna Carta in the thirteenth century
The period of fifty years between the first issue of Magna Carta in 1215 and the confirmation of its authoritative version (1225) at Simon de Montfort’s celebrated parliament of 1265 is heralded in Britain today as a critical stage in the emergence of the parliamentary state, when the limitation of royal power and the constriction of the king’s ability to raise money through his feudal rights encouraged the strengthening of representative assemblies. Churchmen played leading parts in this story, though this is something that has generally gone unrecognized, perhaps for two reasons. First, academic research has for the most part focused on the role of laymen – whether barons, knights or even peasants – in the politics of this era. Second, the public perception of the age’s central episodes, from the meeting on the meadow of Runnymede in 1215 to the Westminster parliament of 1265 oft-hailed as the ‘first house of commons’, views them as steps towards the modern system of democracy so cherished in the West, a polity seen today as antithetical to theocratic systems of government.1 Yet research over the past four decades, and discoveries made in the last couple of years, suggest that this image of thirteenth-century English politics needs to be recast.
That churchmen, especially England’s bishops, deserve a prominent place in the telling of this period’s history was suggested in 1970, when John Baldwin published Masters, Princes and Merchants. This pathfinding study demonstrated how theologians of the Paris schools in the late twelfth century were deeply interested in what we might call moral philosophy and political ethics.2 Using events described in the Bible, as well as scenarios from the world around them, the Paris scholars discussed the rights and wrongs of various difficult situations, in order to determine the morally justifiable course of action. Many of the matters discussed related to the highest echelons of society, considering how bishops, barons and knights should interact with their kings. For instance: if the king has ordered his executioner to execute a subject, but the executioner knows that the man is innocent, should he proceed to carry out the sentence? If a king has ordered a knight to go to war, but the knight knows that the war is not justified, should he obey the order? One of the important scholars of Paris, the Englishman Stephen Langton, insisted that a king’s decision to go against a subject or to prosecute a war must be approved by the judgement of a court.3 The word ‘court’ in this context had two overlapping meanings: those prelates and magnates around the king and who offered him counsel, and the panel comprising the same group empowered to pronounce judgement upon one of its members accused of a fault. Both counselling the king and pronouncing a tenant-in-chief guilty or innocent meant providing ‘judgement’ for a royal decision. A king was expected not to act without first securing such judgement, or at least not without good reason or habitually, and indeed this was a profound expectation of medieval lordship more broadly. From this perspective Langton’s assertion was not controversial, though it is important to note that he was coming at the problem from a theological perspective.
Baldwin’s work was extended by the research of Philippe Buc, who published L’ambiguïté du Livre in 1994.4 Here, Buc showed (among other things) that the Paris scholars held a deeply distrustful view of kingship as an institution. This was based upon the biblical origins of royal government, as identified by the Paris scholars: Cain’s building of the first city (Genesis IV: 17), the construction of the tower by Nimrod (Genesis X–XI) and the Israelites’ rejection of the rule of judges and demand for a king (I Kings VIII).5 The last of these was particularly significant. The Israelites, having rejected God’s direct rule, had demanded that God appoint a king to rule them. And so God sent his prophet, Samuel, with a warning about what the Israelites could expect from such a ruler:
This will be the right of the king, that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and put them in his chariots, and will make them his horsemen, and his running footmen to run before his chariots, And he will appoint of them to be his tribunes, and centurions, and to plough his fields, and to reap his corn, and to make him arms and chariots. Your daughters also he will take to make him ointments, and to be his cooks, and bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your best oliveyards, and give them to his servants. Moreover he will take the tenth of your corn, and of the revenues of your vineyards, to give his eunuchs and servants. Your servants also and handmaids, and your goodliest young men, and your asses he will take away, and put them to his work. Your flocks also he will tithe, and you shall be his servants. And you shall cry out in that day from the face of the king, whom you have chosen to yourselves. And the Lord will not hear you in that day, because you desired unto yourselves a king.6
This account invited two conclusions. First, God had never decreed kingship to be his chosen system of government. Kingship was conceived by humankind, in the course of rebellion against God. The Paris scholars connected this conclusion to the words of St. Paul, which foretold the end of days, when God would abolish the office of kingship: ‘Afterwards the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God and the Father, when he shall have brought to nought all principality, and power’.7 The second conclusion centred upon the ius regis, the ‘right of the king’ proclaimed by Samuel in his warning to the Israelites. Samuel was not setting out the rights to which a king was naturally entitled but, rather, describing kingship essentially as a series of crimes, an array of abuses that resulted from a weak and sinful mortal being placed in a position of authority over his fellows.8
The findings of Baldwin and Buc serve as important correctives to the entrenched conception of medieval political history, which held that politics was an essentially secular business. This view was epitomized by Sir James Holt, the pre-eminent Magna Carta scholar of his generation. In a chapter of his magnum opus Magna Carta (first published in 1965), ‘The quality of the Great Charter’, Holt argued strongly that Stephen Langton (appointed archbishop of Canterbury 1207, and present at the Runnymede negotiations in 1215) played no real part in the Charter’s creation, except as a mere negotiator. Holt’s argument was founded upon the assertion that Langton did not think it was the business of churchmen to intervene in ‘secular’ affairs. Although when Holt came to revise his Magna Carta for its second edition in 1992 it was now clear, as a result of Baldwin’s research, that Stephen Langton nourished a deep interest in politics, based on his theological view of the world and his responsibilities within it, Holt did not change his views.9 The prodigious influence that Holt’s work enjoyed in the field of Magna Carta scholarship for decades perhaps explains why the topic of political theology was not incorporated into mainstream Magna Carta scholarship for some time.
In recent years, there has been a resurgence in the debate about Langton’s role in the creation of the first issue of the Charter in 1215.10 Clearly, it was Langton who in 1215 brokered peace, bringing king and barons together at Runnymede. The chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall describes how, while King John and his men remained in their pavilions and the barons in their tents, the archbishop and his colleagues shuttled back and forth between them to negotiate a settlement.11 To describe their role here with such a meagre term as ‘go-between’ would be a failure to grasp its nature. Bringing together two sides so divided by ideals and by enmity, and keeping them together long enough to hammer out a peace treaty, required true grit. It also required a profound authority, drawn from the charisma of the episcopal office and from the trust of both king and barons. As to the question of whether Langton authored particular clauses of the Charter, this is, in most cases, contentious. In an article of 2008, John Baldwin argued that Langton’s commitment to the ‘judgement by court’ principle propelled him into rebellion between 1213 and 1215.12 The implication was that Langton’s agency was behind the Charter’s headline chapter (thirty-nine of the 1215 issue): ‘No free person is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any other way destroyed, nor will we go against him or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.’ This view has been rejected by David Carpenter (in an article of 2011), though Carpenter argued persuasively, based on a careful comparison of the 1215 Charter and the Articles of the Barons (a draft from which discussions at Runnymede proceeded), that Langton was responsible for inserting chapter one of the Charter, guaranteeing the freedom of the Church.13 As far as most chapters are concerned, however, attempting to find a single ‘author’ would be a futile task: the Charter was a product of committee discussions and negotiations.
It is now possible, however, to say much more about the role of Langton and his suffragans in securing the Charter’s issue in 1215, thanks to research conducted in the build-up to Magna Carta’s anniversary celebrations in 2015 by the Magna Carta Project.14 Extensive analysis of the documents issued by King John’s chancery, and of the charters issued by the households of the bishops, was conducted by David Carpenter, Nicholas Vincent and Teresa Webber. The scribal hands from hundreds of charters were compared to the hands that produced the four surviving engrossments of the 1215 Charter. It now seems clear that at least two of the four, those kept at the cathedrals of Salisbury and Lincoln, were not written by royal scribes (as one would expect royal charters to be). Instead, they were written by scribes of the bishops’ households. This research reveals, therefore, that the bishops provided their own scribes to help draw up engrossments of the Charter, in order to ensure that the contents of Magna Carta would be published above the wishes of a reluctant King John. Furthermore, the bishops were also the principal guardians of Magna Carta 1215, taking exemplars back to their cathedrals for safekeeping, from where they could be read or publicized.15 Thus, in a phrase recently coined, the Church was central to the production, preservation and proclamation of the first issue of Magna Carta.
As time wore on, the interest of the English bishops in Magna Carta only increased. This was first revealed in 1998, when David d’Avray published a seminal article on Langton’s political theology that engaged directly with the work of historians of English politics. D’Avray pointed to the central place of the bishops in the enforcement of Magna Carta in the thirteenth century. When a new version of the Charter was issued by Henry III’s minority government in 1216, the controversial ‘security for peace’, which empowered twenty-five barons to ‘distrain and afflict’ the king in order to compel him to keep the Charter’s terms, was removed, leaving Magna Carta with no means of enforcement.16 This changed in 1225 when Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, and his suffragans stepped in to pronounce a general sentence of excommunication against all who would violate Magna Carta or the Charter of the Forest. The archbishop’s actions were informed by his own biblical scholarship (found in his exegesis of Deuteronomy), which set out the need for kings to keep and abide by a written volume of the law and placed upon the shoulders of the clergy the responsibility for ensuring that this condition was met. Crucially, then, Langton had the opportunity as archbishop of Canterbury to put his thinking into practice. In acting thus, Langton set a precedent for his successors, encouraging a culture in which bishops were duty-bound to oversee royal government and to keep the king’s rule within the law.17 The confirmations of the 1225 Charter made throughout the course of Henry III’s reign, and during the reign of his son Edward I, were likewise buttressed by a sentence of excommunication pronounced by England’s bishops.
Descriptions of this sentence of excommunication (provided by the chronicler Matthew Paris) reveal the centrality of the bishops in the political culture of the Magna Carta era. In the course of a great assembly in 1237, the ritual was enacted in St. Katherine’s chapel of Westminster Abbey. There the king stood, surrounded by his barons and bishops, with the bishops holding lighted candles. The king held his right hand on the Gospels and clutched a candle in his left, and delivered his oath to the archbishop of Canterbury, binding himself to uphold the Charters. All then uttered ‘let it be done’ to consummate the sentence, and the bishops turned over their candles onto the floor to extinguish them. This filled the room with smoke and the stench of the smoking wicks, which irritated the eyes and nostrils of those present. Now the archbishop proclaimed: ‘thus may the condemned souls of those who violate the Charter be extinguished, and thus may they smoke and stink.’18 This was a vivid and dramatic ritual, intended to imprint the sentence upon the memory by awakening the senses of sight, hearing, and smell. It summoned its participants to fulfil the communal responsibility of upholding the Charters and warned them of the spiritual danger of breaking their terms.
The duty to enforce Magna Carta was one that the bishops took seriously. In 1234, when Henry III had for a time cast off the principles of Magna Carta, Stephen Langton’s pupil and successor as primate, Edmund of Abingdon, and his suffragans confronted the king in parliament with a catalogue of royal misdeeds and threatened to excommunicate him unless he mended his ways. It was a threat that the king took to heart, for he repented of his unjust actions and bent to Edmund’s counsel (discussed below). On another occasion, three years later, the king and a number of his barons sought absolution from the archbishop, in case they had fallen under the sentence.19
As the thirteenth century continued, the bishops made increasing efforts to publicize the sentence of excommunication to the wider kingdom. As recent work by Felicity Hill has argued, they were driven by their responsibility to ensure good government but also by their pastoral obligations: if anybody violated Magna Carta, their soul would be placed in jeopardy, meaning that the bishops were duty-bound to warn their flocks of the Charter’s terms, lest anybody fall under the sentence in ignorance.20 The consequence was that Magna Carta was brought to a broad public, to parish churches as well as shire courts, and thus to the unfree as to the free, to women as well as men. The bishops, then, were instrumental in the expansion of the political community in the thirteenth century.
English bishops were able to act in this way because they were peculiarly powerful in respect to their king, and uniquely qualified to confront illegal royal actions. When the king acted illegally, refusing to follow due process or to consult his magnates and prelates, and provoked his barons to rebellion, the bishops could intervene. They possessed the ritual power to chastise him, purge him of his faults, and recreate him anew as king.21 This can be seen in 1213: before Winchester Cathedral, the sin-ridden King John threw himself tearfully at the bishops’ feet, begging their forgiveness for the faults he had committed against Church and kingdom. The bishops lifted him from the ground and led him into the cathedral, where John swore to defend the Church and her clergy, to maintain the good laws of his kingdom and to provide justice: effectively a renewal of his coronation oath.22 The bishops’ authority can be seen again in 1234. Between 1232 and 1233, under the malign influence of certain royal ministers, Henry III gave orders per voluntatem regis (acting according to his will and without judgement). This was a violation of the tenets of his office, as laid out by custom and guaranteed by Magna Carta, and provoked certain of his barons to rebellion. In response, Edmund of Abingdon, Stephen Langton’s pupil and now archbishop of Canterbury, intervened. Edmund and his suffragans stood before the king and reproved Henry for the unjust treatment of his subjects, and warned him to desist or face the penalty of ecclesiastical censure. The king’s response was humble and penitent, and he went on to rectify the wrongs he had committed.23
The role of the bishops here was ultimately founded upon the example of the Old Testament prophets, who were held to be the forerunners of the Christian clergy. First, the bishops drew authority from their role as anointers of kings. The place of the bishops in royal inauguration rites was founded upon Old Testament descriptions of the anointing of the kings of Israel by prophets,24 and had been established since at least the mid tenth century in much of western Europe.25 In England, bishops had long been central to the coronation ritual: they administered the coronation oath, anointed the candidate, and delivered a sermon on his duties as ruler.26 In England, this crowning and anointing by prelates became essential to the monarch’s authority.27 This was not the case in many other European polities in the central middle ages, where kings were not generally anointed. The fact of the royal anointing was important to episcopal authority because, like baptism, it renewed the candidate and implied that those conferring the anointing had the right to correct him.28
Second, the bishops drew authority from the example of their Old Testament antecessors by looking to instances when God had sent his prophets to reprimand the wayward monarchs who oppressed the Israelites. The duty to reprimand erring kings in this manner had long been borne by English prelates: Björn Weiler has traced it through the centuries, from the Anglo-Saxon period up to the archiepiscopate of Stephen Langton (1207–26).29 The most famous example, of course, was Thomas Becket, whose conflict with Henry II led to Becket’s martyrdom at the hands of Henry’s men in 1170. English bishops of the thirteenth century could thus draw on the authority not only of the Old Testament prophets but also of their predecessors when they reprimanded kings, and especially from the sanctified example of Becket (he was canonized in 1173), whose memory became talismanic.30 Something changed in the thirteenth century, however: the manner of issue contested by the bishops. Where earlier prelates had chastised kings for their moral failings or defended the liberty of the Church, Langton and his successors chastised the king for offences against his people and defended the kingdom as a whole, in the interests of the broader community.31 It was Langton, with his scholarly interest in political ethics, who was responsible for extending this duty.
These pools of authority combined to qualify the English bishops for the oversight of royal power, a duty and a right amplified by Stephen Langton’s biblical scholarship, which argued that it was the responsibility of the priesthood to provide the king with written law. The strength of the episcopate in acting thus was enlivened by a forceful sense of corporate solidarity, developed through the thirteenth century as senior churchmen met frequently both in synods and regnal assemblies, where the king’s frequent demands for taxation encouraged the prelates to engage with royal policy and to act collectively in resisting it.32 This power of the English bishops to reform royal rule was unusual, in comparison with their colleagues in other European polities. For instance, the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula can be viewed as parallels to England, in that representative institutions similar to the English parliament emerged during the thirteenth century, wherein a penurious king was forced to bargain with his subjects. Yet, in the Iberian Peninsula, bishops had no power to oversee royal rule or correct the abuses of their kings, because they had no liturgical role in king-making, because they did not enjoy (or rather were not permitted to develop) the same sense of corporate solidarity, and because they were kept under the royal heel.33 What was peculiar about the English experience, then, was the prominent place of religious leaders in the development of the parliamentary institution.
The creation of Magna Carta and its entrenchment in political society were, therefore, intertwined with the strengthening of England’s episcopate. Research over the past few decades has shown that regnal politics in this period was inherently religious, and that it became more and not less so even as the bureaucracy of the English State (so often seen as antithetical to charismatic politics) expanded, and as the parliamentary State emerged. Indeed, central to the political culture that produced the parliamentary State was the wielding of spiritual power by certain of its agents, and the understanding that spiritual and charismatic authority was as important in constraining the operation of kingship as the ability of barons and knights to refuse grants of taxation. The two, indeed, went hand in hand, since grants of taxation (made by assemblies of prelates, magnates and knights) were made only on condition that the king uphold the Charters, requiring the political community to participate in sentences of excommunication and subjecting them to its spiritual penalties. Contrary to the myths that have come to surround Magna Carta over the centuries, this world was not democratic, but theocratic.
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1 For the 1265 parliament, see S. T. Ambler, ‘Magna Carta: its confirmation at Simon de Montfort’s parliament of 1265’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cxxx (2015), 801–30.
2 Masters, Princes and Merchants: the Social Views of Peter the Chanter and his Circle (2 vols., Princeton, N.J., 1970).
3 J. Baldwin, ‘Master Stephen Langton, future archbishop of Canterbury: the Paris schools and Magna Carta’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cxxiii (2008), 811–46, at pp. 815–20.
4 P. Buc, L’ambiguïté du Livre: prince, pouvoir, et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1994).
5 Buc, L’ambiguïté du Livre, pp. 237, 246–8.
6 I Samuel VIII: 11–18.
7 1 Corinthians XV: 24; Buc, L’ambiguïté du Livre, pp. 123–70.
8 Buc, L’ambiguïté du Livre, p. 248.
9 J. C. Holt, Magna Carta (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1992), pp. 281, 284–9.
10 For the part attributed to Langton in the making of Magna Carta during the ‘rediscovery’ of the archbishop from the 17th to the 19th centuries, see N. Vincent, ‘Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury’, in Etienne Langton, prédicateur, bibliste, théologien, ed. L.-J. Bataillon, N. Bériou, G. Dahan, R. Quinto (Turnhout, 2010), pp. 51–123, at pp. 51–5, and a summary of more recent debate at pp. 92–3, with Vincent’s contribution at pp. 93–7; for a bibliographic summary of recent debate, see D. A. Carpenter, ‘Archbishop Langton and Magna Carta: his contribution, his doubts and his hypocrisy’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cxxvi (2011), 1041–65, at p. 1041 n.1, with Carpenter’s contribution at pp. 1042–52.
11 Radulphi de Coggeshall Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. J. Stevenson (Rolls Ser., 1875), p. 172.
12 Baldwin, ‘Master Stephen Langton’, pp. 827–30. Baldwin’s Masters, Princes and Merchants portrays a more conservative thinker, but the Langton of Baldwin’s 2008 article is something of a radical.
13 Carpenter, ‘Archbishop Langton and Magna Carta’, in extenso.
14 The Project’s website can be found at <http://magnacartaresearch.org>.
15 N. Vincent and D. A. Carpenter, ‘Feature of the month: June 2015 – Who did (and did not) write Magna Carta’, The Magna Carta Project <http://magnacartaresearch.org/read/feature_of_the_month/Jun_2015_3> [accessed 11 Jan. 2016]; D. A. Carpenter, Magna Carta (2015), pp. 373–79.
16 For the ‘security of peace’, see ‘The 1215 Magna Carta: suffix A’, The Magna Carta Project, trans. H. Summerson et al. <http://magnacartaresearch.org/read/magna_carta_1215/Suffix_A> [accessed 11 Jan. 2016].
17 D. L. d’Avray, ‘“Magna Carta”: its background in Stephen Langton’s academic biblical exegesis and its episcopal reception’, Studi Medievali, 3rd ser., xxxvii (1998), 423–38.
18 According to Matthew Paris, Henry held a candle for the ceremony of 1237 but refused to do so in 1253, on the grounds that he was not a priest (Matthaei Parisiensis, Monachi Sancti Albani, Chronica Majora, ed. H. R. Luard (7 vols., Rolls Ser., 1872–83) [hereafter CM], iii. 382, and v. 360–61 (for events of 1237); v. 377 (for 1253)).
19 The Letters of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, trans. F. A. C. Mantello and J. Goering (Toronto, 2010), pp. 252–4.
20 F. Hill, ‘Magna Carta, canon law and pastoral care: excommunication and the Church’s publication of the charter’, Hist. Research, lxxxix (2016), 636–50.
21 S. T. Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community of England, 1213–1272 (Oxford, 2017), pp. 61–81.
22 Roger of Wendover, Chronica, sive Flores Historiarum, ed. H. O. Coxe (4 vols., 1842), iii. 260–61.
23 Wendover, iv. 294–7.
24 I Samuel X: 1; I Samuel XVI: 13; I Kings I: 39; I Kings XIX: 15–16; II Kings IX: 6; J. L. Nelson, ‘The lord’s anointed and the people’s choice: Carolingian royal ritual’, in her The Frankish World, 750–900 (1996), pp. 99–132, at p. 108.
25 J. L. Nelson, ‘Inauguration rituals’, in her Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (1986), pp. 283–307, at 287.
26 P. Stafford, ‘The laws of Cnut and the history of Anglo-Saxon royal promises’, Anglo-Saxon England, x (1982), 173–90, at pp. 185–6.
27 English rulers since the Conquest were not considered king until crowned and anointed in Westminster Abbey. This custom continued until 1272, when necessity dictated that custom be broken (M. Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (2008), pp. 103–4).
28 J. L. Nelson, ‘National synods, kingship as office, and royal anointing: an early medieval syndrome’, in Studies in Church History, vii, ed. G. J. Cuming and D. Baker (Cambridge, 1971), 41–59, at pp. 52–3; Nelson, ‘National synods’, pp. 54–5. For the longer background of admonitio, see M. Suchan, ‘Monition and advice as elements of politics’, in Patterns of Episcopal Power: Bishops in 10th and 11th Century Western Europe, ed. L. Körntgen and D. Waßenhoven (2011), pp. 39–50; Stafford, ‘Anglo-Saxon royal promises’, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 188.
29 B. K. Weiler, ‘Bishops and kings in England, c.1066–1215’, in Religion and Politics in the Middle Ages: Germany and England by Comparison, ed. L. Körntgen and D. Waßenhoven (Berlin, 2013), pp. 157–203.
30 Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, pp. 20–1, 64, 67–8, 96, 97–8, 117–18, 132–3.
31 Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, pp. 63–4.
32 Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, pp. 82–104.
33 Ambler, Bishops in the Political Community, pp. 54, 99–103, 206.