1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (31 page)

There is no doubt, however, that the great building project itself was masterminded by someone else, by one of the most radical and gifted clerics of the age: Elias of Dereham. In 1220 he had only just returned to England from the exile imposed on him as punishment for the active and inspirational part he had played in the opposition to John. During the interdict Elias, from Dereham in Norfolk, had been on the staff of the exiled archbishop of Canterbury and had been sent on missions to England in the hope of ending the quarrel. By 1215 Elias had clearly sized John up. In June he was at Runnymede in his role as Stephen Langton’s steward. In the days and weeks that followed the sealing of Magna Carta, he played a prominent role in the distribution of the charter and its accompanying documents. On 24 June he received four copies of the charter, and twelve copies of the royal letters announcing the peace. On 22 July he was entrusted with another six copies of the charter. It seems that some people, among them Elias, were so suspicious of the king’s intentions that they were not prepared to leave to the royal chancery and its messengers the business of informing the country of the precise terms that had been agreed. They took upon themselves the responsibility for seeing that the job was done. Later that year when Pope Innocent declared Magna Carta null and void and when Stephen Langton went to Rome to appeal against his suspension from office by papal commissioners, his steward took the far more drastic step of actively promoting war as one of the keenest supporters of Louis of France. When Innocent III excommunicated the leading rebels, Elias defied him, preaching at St Paul’s Cross in London that the excommunications were invalid because the pope had not been accurately informed of the true facts.

Just how important Elias and three other like-minded clerics had been to Louis’s cause became clear in 1217. In that year, when Louis saw that he would have to concede defeat, one of his main concerns in negotiating a settlement was to ensure that his supporters would not be victimised. Those representing Henry III in these talks, and the papal legate Guala was prominent among them, were willing to promise Louis that laymen who had supported him would not be, but they drew the line at clerics. In June 1217 peace negotiations broke down over this issue. But by September Louis had decided he could protect them no longer. One of the conditions of the peace was that Elias should go into exile. During the interdict he had gone into exile for the sake of his allegiance to the papacy; now he suffered the same fate as a consequence of his public opposition to papal policy.

Elias was a man of uncompromising principle and ready to put his mouth where his mind was. But his opponents evidently admired rather than hated him for that. When William Marshal died in 1219 he had appointed Elias as one of the executors of his will. Bishop Richard Poore was praised for resisting Louis and the French ‘who tried to seize the kingdom’, but diocesan records make plain that the bishop had great confidence in the Salisbury canon who had been one of the French prince’s leading advocates. In 1237 Elias was even named as an executor of the bishop’s will. Indeed, an astonishing number of prelates asked Elias to act as executor.

As the archbishop of Canterbury’s steward Elias had been responsible for the maintenance of the archiepiscopal castles and palaces, and for new building works. On 7 July 1220 Becket’s body was moved into a magnificent new shrine at the east end of Canterbury Cathedral. According to Matthew Paris: ‘among those present were Masters Walter of Colchester, sacristan of St Albans, and Elias of Dereham, the incomparable craftsmen (
artifices
) by whose advice and skill everything necessary for the making and erection of the shrine, and for the ceremony, had been impeccably prepared.’ There is no doubt that Walter of Colchester was a painter and a sculptor. Was Elias also an artist? Matthew Paris’s words suggest that he was, at the very least, a man of considerable taste with a flair for supervising the creation of great works of art. Henry III evidently thought so too, for in the 1230s Elias often worked for the king, on new windows in the hall of Winchester Castle, on Clarendon Palace on a hill overlooking Salisbury, and on a tomb for his sister Joan, queen of Scotland. This was the man who was a canon of Salisbury until his death in 1245. In Salisbury tradition as recorded by John Leland in the sixteenth century he was ‘the rector of the new fabric of the church of Salisbury from its foundation for twenty-five years’. The cathedral was not consecrated until 1258, but the coherence and restrained elegance of the design leaves no one in any doubt that the whole had been conceived as a unit, although the astonishing spire, which is now the cathedral’s landmark, would not be started until half a century later.

A large site of eighty-three acres had been set aside for the great new cathedral close. Elias’s own house, Leadenhall – named for its fine roof of shining lead – was one of the first of the canons’ houses to be built, and was acclaimed at the time as a model of its kind. More than twice as much ground had been allocated for the new town. Tax returns in 1377 show that at that date it was the most successful of all the new towns founded during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Laid out, like many of them, on a regular grid plan, it combined roads and waterways in a way that commanded the admiration of visitors over four hundred years later.

It was almost certainly the radicalism of his commitment to Magna Carta in 1215 and 1216 that prevented Elias of Dereham being promoted to high office within the English Church. However, in partnership with Richard Poore, Elias’s vision for a new church and a new town at Salisbury stands for the rebuilding of a new England after the trauma of civil war and rebellion.

The men in our realm shall have and hold all the aforesaid liberties, rights and concessions well and peacefully, freely and quietly, fully and completely for them and their heirs of us and our heirs in all things and places for ever
.

Magna Carta, Clause 63

W
hen the rebels offered the throne of England to Prince Louis, they were reverting to the old style of rebellion. Once again barons were taking up arms on behalf of a rival king, as barons had in the past. By offering the crown to Louis they were publicly acknowledging that the new style had failed. Magna Carta had been intended as a peace treaty, a formula to bring to an end the conflict between king and barons. In fact civil war had quickly broken out again. Denounced by the pope, rejected by the king, discarded by the rebels, by the end of 1215 Magna Carta was surely dead.

Yet it survived. In 1770 William Pitt the Elder called it ‘the Bible of the English Constitution’. It remained on the Statute Book until the Law Reform Act of 1863. In 1956 the English judge, Lord Denning, described it as ‘the greatest constitutional document of all times – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot’. A Welsh historian, Natalie Fryde, explaining the importance of Magna Carta to German students, has recently described it as ‘one of the holiest cows in English history’. But it was not just in England that it came to enjoy the status of a fundamental law. Taken to the American colonies, it influenced both the Constitution of the United States and the laws of individual states.

How was it that a failed peace treaty survived to become ‘the corner-stone of liberty in the English-speaking world’? A failure when used by rebels as a weapon against the Crown, it succeeded when it was taken over by royalists and turned against the rebels. But the decision to reissue Magna Carta so soon after King John’s death was more than just clever civil war propaganda. Minor changes in the text of some of its clauses demonstrate that the detail of the document was being studied carefully and thoughtfully. For example, the charter of 1215 conceded that an heir who had been in the wardship of the Crown should not have to pay a relief when he came of age and entered into his inheritance. The charter of 1216 made the same concession and went on to fix the age at which an heir entered his majority, ‘namely when he is twenty-one years old’. Magna Carta was evidently thought of as a serious and valuable statement of the law of the land, worth modifying, worth keeping up to date, not just a political manifesto to be jettisoned as soon as the emergency was over.

After Louis had given up his fight for the English throne and had gone back to France, in the autumn of 1217, Magna Carta was reissued again, and with further modifications. These included the issue of a supplementary charter dealing with forest law. Since the Forest Charter was a much shorter document, the main charter became known as the ‘big charter’ – Magna Carta. In 1225 the charter was reissued yet again, this time in return for a grant of taxation to the king. The text of the 1225 version is particularly important because it is this version, and not the Runnymede charter, that entered the statute books and so became the Magna Carta of subsequent history and myth. Like the charter of 1215, these reissues were translated into French and English and read out at meetings of the shire courts throughout the realm. All this meant that Magna Carta was a highly publicised concept.

In 1265 when the government of England was in the hands of Simon de Montfort it was decreed that the charter should be proclaimed twice a year so that in future no one could claim to be ignorant of it. One demand commonly made was for copies of Magna Carta to be nailed to church doors. It rapidly became widely known as a ‘Good Thing’, a touchstone of good government. From now on whenever a king was thought to be governing badly, to be infringing men’s liberties, the cry went up for confirmation of the charter. Edward I was forced to confirm the charter in 1297. When lawyers compiled their books of statutes it was always Magna Carta, the text of 1225 as confirmed in 1297, that had pride of place. It came to be thought of as the first statute of the realm.

Believing Magna Carta to be a ‘Good Thing’, men assumed that it contained what they wanted it to contain. In this way it took on a mythical life of its own. King John’s promise in Clause 39 not to take any action against the free man, ‘except by the lawful judgement of his peers’ came to be interpreted as a guarantee of trial by jury. In fact, in June 1215 ‘the lawful judgement of peers’ meant that people should be tried in courts composed of their social equals. It was only after Innocent III, coincidentally later in the same year, banned priests from participating in trials by ordeal that the verdict-giving jury gradually came to be employed in criminal trials. But the myth that the right to trial by jury goes back to Magna Carta is one that remains widely believed in today. It was this myth that led Tony Hancock, playing Henry Fonda’s role in Twelve Angry Men, to turn to his fellow jurors with the plea: ‘Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?’

A myth that was once widely believed by lawyers is that Magna Carta embodied the ancient laws of Anglo-Saxon England, subverted by the ‘Norman Yoke’ after 1066, but then recovered and set out for all time in the charter. This myth mattered greatly in the run-up to the English civil war of the seventeenth century. In opposition to the Stuart monarchy, which was making increasing use of its prerogative powers, the lawyers and gentry in the House of Commons emphasised the notion of the subordination of the Crown to the common law of England. For many lawyers of the time, in particular Sir Edward Coke, Magna Carta was ‘the fountain of all the fundamental laws of the realm . . . a confirmation or restitution of the common law’. From 1610 onwards Coke cited the charter again and again, in and out of the House of Commons, always claiming that it limited the king’s power to alter ancient customs. When Charles I was informed that Coke was working on a book on Magna Carta, he ordered its suppression. But after Coke’s death, the Long Parliament ordered the publication of his confiscated papers and in consequence his commentary on Magna Carta was published as part of the revolution of 1642.

The radical Levellers appealed to Magna Carta to justify their resistance not only to Charles I but also to the Long Parliament which they felt had betrayed the cause, and then, in turn, to Oliver Cromwell. Once in power, even Cromwell was inclined to override the provisions of Magna Carta. On one occasion when the judges complained, he reminded them who had appointed them and told them that ‘their Magna F–– should not control his actions’. (Lord Chief Justice Keeling may have been remembering Cromwell’s words when, in 1667, he referred dismissively to ‘Magna Farta’.)

Against these seventeenth-century tyrants the Leveller John Lilburne proudly proclaimed his rights as a free-born Englishman:

In a pamphlet composed after he had been arrested in 1648, Lilburne wrote that the arresting officer ‘stabbed Magna Carta . . . to the very heart and soul’. Other Levellers succeeded in turning the political debate into a piece of street theatre. The pamphleteer Richard Overton described how, after his arrest, he was dragged to Newgate gaol by his head and shoulders ‘as if I had been a dead dog’, yet all the while managing to hold on to his copy of Coke on Magna Carta.

All this seventeenth-century fuss meant that Magna Carta was headline news at the time that the American colonies were being settled. ‘Nor shall any persons be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law’: the resounding phrases of the Fifth Amendment are an echo of Magna Carta Clause 39. In America as in England Magna Carta became a potent symbol of men’s struggle for freedom and human rights. Thus a tablet commemorating Magna Carta was set up at Runnymede by the American Bar Association, and an adjacent site was chosen as a memorial to John F. Kennedy. Fortunately these memorials were not placed on what has become known as Magna Carta Island since the notion that Magna Carta was sealed on an island at Runnymede is just another myth, in this case spun out of the name Runnymede, which means ‘the meadow in council island’.