CSET Practice Test History Subtest I

The Magna Carta The Magna Carta has long been considered
by the English-speaking peoples as the earliest of the
great constitutional documents which give the history of
England so unique a character; it has even been spoken of
by some great authorities as the "foundation of our
liberties". That the charter enjoyed an exaggerated
reputation in the days of Coke and of Blackstone, no one
will now deny, and a more accurate knowledge of the
meaning of its different provisions has shown that a
number of them used to be interpreted quite erroneously.
When allowance, however, has been made for the mistakes
due to several centuries of indiscriminating admiration,
the charter remains an astonishingly complete record of
the limitations placed on the Crown at the beginning of
the thirteenth century, and an impressive illustration of
what is perhaps national capacity for putting resistance
to arbitrary government on a legal basis. The memories of
feudal excess during the reign of Stephen were strong
enough and universal enough to give Henry II twenty years
of internal peace for the establishment of his masterful
administration, and, even when the barons tried to "wrest
the club from Hercules" in 1173-74, they trusted largely
to the odium which the king had incurred from the murder
of St. Thomas. The revolt failed and the Angevin system
was stronger than ever, so strong indeed that it was able
to maintain its existence, and even to develop its
operations, during the absence of Richard I. The heavy
taxation of his reign and the constant encroachments of
royal justice roused a feeling among the barons, which
showed itself in a demand for their "rights" put forward
at John's accession. It is indeed obvious that, quite
apart from acts of individual injustice, the royal
administration was attacking in every direction the
traditional rights of the barons and not theirs only. St.
Thomas had saved the independence of the Church, and it
now remained for the other sections of the community to
assert themselves. Historians have probably been over
tender to the Angevins, for to them feudalism is the
enemy; and the increase of the royal power, to be checked
later on by a parliamentary system, is the clear line of
constitutional development.; but, however satisfactory we
may think the ultimate result, there was the immediate
danger of a rule which was arbitrary and might be
tyrannical. The king had acquired a power which he might
abuse, and the acts of the reign of John are sufficiently
on record to show how much a bad king could do before he
became intolerable. Those who drew up the Great Charter
never pretended to be formulating a syllabus of
fundamental principles, nor was it a code any more than it
was a declaration of rights. It was a rehearsal of
traditional principles and practices which had been
violated by John, and the universality of its scope is a
measure of the king's misgovernment. During the early part
of John's reign the loss of the greater part of his French
possessions discredited him, and led to constant demands
for money. Scutage, which had originally been an
alternative for military service, occasionally permitted,
became practically a new annual tax, while fines were
exacted from individuals on many pretexts and by arbitrary
means. Any sign of resistance was followed by a demand for
a son as a hostage, an intensely irritating practice which
continued throughout the reign. The quarrel with Innocent
III and the interdict (1206-13) followed hard on the
foreign collapse, and during that period John's hand lay
so heavily on the churchmen that the lay barons had a
temporary respite from taxation, though not from ill
government. When peace was finally made with the Pope, the
king seems to have thought that the Church would now
support him against the mutinous barons of the North; but
he counted without the new archbishop. Langton showed from
the first that he intended to enforce the clause in John's
submission to the pope, which promised a general reform of
abuses, and his support provided the cause with the
statesmanlike leadership it had hitherto lacked. The
discontented barons met at St. Alban's and St.Paul's in
1213, and Langton produced the Charter of Henry I to act
as a model for their demands. Civil war was deferred by
John's absence abroad, but the defeat of Bouvines sent him
back still more discredited, and war practically broke out
early in 1215. Special charters granted to the Church and
to London failed to divide his enemies, and John had to
meet the "Army of god and Holy Church" on the field of
Runnymede between Staines and Windsor. He gave way on
nearly every point, and peace was concluded probably on 19
June. The charter which was then sealed was really a
treaty of peace, though in form it was a grant of
liberties. The clauses or chapters of the Magna Carta are
not arranged on any logical plan, and a number of systems
of classification have been suggested, but without
attempting to summarize a document so complex, it may be
sufficient here to point out the general character of the
liberties which it guaranteed. In the opening clause the
"freedom" of the Church was secured, and that vague phrase
was defined at least in one direction by a special mention
of canonical election to bishoprics. Of the remaining
sixty clauses the largest class is that dealing directly
with the abuses from which the baronage had suffered,
fixing the amount of reliefs, protecting heirs and widows
from the Crown and from Jewish creditors, preserving the
feudal courts from the invasions of royal justice, and
securing the rights of baronial founders over monasteries.
The clauses enforcing legal reforms were of more general
interest, for Henry II's "possessory assizes" were popular
among all classes, and all suffered from arbitrary
amercements and from insufficiently controlled officials.
These assizes were to be held four times a year, and
amercements were to be assessed by the oath of honest men
of the neighborhood. John had allowed the royal officials
a very great and very unpopular latitude, and many clauses
of the charter were directed to the control of the
sheriffs, constables of royal castles, and especially of
the numerous forest officials. The commercial classes were
not altogether neglected. London and the other boroughs
were to have their ancient liberties, and an effort was
made to secure uniformity of weights and measures. The
clause, however, which protected foreign merchants, was
more to the advantage of the consumer than to that of the
English competitor. There is little in the charter which
can be called a statement of constitutional principle; two
articles have, however, been treated, not without reason,
as such by succeeding generations. Chapter xii, which
declares that no extraordinary scutage or aid shall be
imposed except by common counsel of the kingdom, may be
taken as an assertion of the principle "no taxation
without consent". How the counsel of the kingdom was to be
taken is explained in chapter xiv which describes the
composition of the Great Council. Chapter xxxix prescribes
that "no freeman shall be arrested or detained in prison
or deprived of his freehold . . .or in any way molested. .
.unless by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law
of the land". The chief object of this clause was to
prevent execution before trial, and so far as is certainly
the assertion of a far-reaching constitutional principle,
but the last two phrases have been the subject of much
wild interpretation. "Judgment by his peers" was taken to
mean "trial by jury", and "the law of the land" to mean
"by due process of law"; as a matter of fact both taken
together expressed the preference of the barons for the
older tradition and feudal forms of trial rather than by
judgment of the court of royal nominees instituted by
Henry II and abused by john. The principle asserted by
this clause was, therefore, of great constitutional
importance, and had a long future before it, but the
actual remedy proposed was reactionary. The final chapter
was in a sense the most important of all for the moment,
for it was an effort to secure the execution of the
charter by establishing a baronial committee of twenty-
five with the admitted right to make war on the king,
should they consider that he had violated any of the
liberties that he had guaranteed. Two chief criticisms
have been brought against the Magna Carta, that of being
behind the times, reactionary, and that of being concerned
almost entirely with the "selfish" interests of the
baronage. Reactionary the charter certainly was; in many
respects it was a protest against the system established
by Henry II, and, even when it adopted some of the results
of his reign such as the possessory assizes and the
distinction between greater and lesser barons, it
neglected the latest constitutional developments. It said
nothing on taxation of personalty or of the spirituality
of the clergy; It gave no hint of the introduction of the
principle of representation into the Great Council: yet
the early stages of all these financial and constitutional
measures can be found in the reign of John. Bishop Stubbs
expressed in a pregnant phrase this characteristic of the
charter when he called it "the translation into the
language of the thirteenth century of the ideas of the
eleventh, through the forms of the twelfth". It is a
reproach, however, which it bears in good company, for all
the Constitutional documents of English history are in a
sense reactionary; they are in the main statements of
principles or rights acquired in the past but recently
violated. The charge of "baronial selfishness" is a more
serious matter, for one of the merits claimed for the
charter, even by its more sober admirers, is that of being
a national document. It must be admitted that many of the
clauses are directed solely to the grievances of the
barons; that some of the measures enforced, such as the
revival of the baronial courts, would be injurious to the
national interests; that, even when the rights of freemen
were protected, little security if any was given to the
numerous villein class. Nor are these criticisms
disallowed by chapter lx, which declares in general terms
that liberties granted by the king to his men shall in
turn be granted by them to their vassals. Such a statement
is so general that it need not mean much. It is more
important to notice that all the numerous clauses directed
to the controlling of the royal officials would benefit
directly or indirectly all classes, that after all what
the country had been suffering from was royal and not
baronial tyranny, and that it was the barons and the
clergy who had been, for the most part, the immediate
victims. Finally the word "selfish" must be used
cautiously in an age when, by universal consent, each
class had its own liberties, and might quite legitimately
contend for them. Though in form a free grant of
liberties, the charter had really been won from John at
sword's point. It could not in any sense be looked upon as
an act of legislation. He had accepted the terms demanded
by the barons, but he would do so only so long as he was
compelled to. He had already taken measures to acquire
both juridical and physical weapons against his enemies by
appealing to his suzerain, the pope, and sending abroad
for mercenary troops. By a Bull dated 24 August at Anagni,
Innocent III revoked the charter and later on
excommunicated the rebellious barons. The motive of
Innocent's actions are not far to seek. To begin with, he
was probably misled as to the facts, and trusted too much
to the king's account of what had happened. He was
naturally inclined to protect the interests of a professed
crusader and a vassal, and he took up the position that
the barons could not be judges in their own cause, but
should have referred the matter to him, the king's
suzerain, for arbitration. But, more than this, he
maintained quite correctly that the king had made the
concessions under compulsion, and that the barons were in
open rebellion against the Crown. It is indeed manifest
that the charter could not have been a final settlement;
it was accepted as such by neither extreme party, and even
before the gathering at Runnymede had separated, the
archbishop had grown suspicious of the executive committee
of twenty-five. War over the French king's son, and,
during the sixteen troubled months that intervened between
the signing of the charter and the end of the reign, John
had on the whole the advantage. Shortly after the
accession of the young Henry III, the charter was reissued
by the regent, William Marshall. This charter of 1216
differed in a good many respects from that accepted by
john at Runnymede. To begin with, the clauses dealing with
the royal forests were formed into a separate charter, the
Charter of the Forests; the other clauses were
considerably modified, points were more accurately
defined, matters of a temporary nature, including
naturally the old executive clause, were left out, but the
chief change was to restore to the Crown a number of
powers which had been abandoned during the previous year.
Amongst these the most important was the right of
taxation, chapters xii and xiv being omitted. On the other
hand, there is this all-important difference that the new
charter was a genuine grant by the Crown. It may be called
a piece of honest legislation; and to this charter the
papal legate gave the fullest consent. A few further
changes were introduced in 1217, and for a third time the
Magna Carta was reissued in 1225. The form it then
received was final, and the charters which the Crown was
so repeatedly asked to confirm for many years to come,
meant the Charter of Liberties of 1225 and the Forest
Charter. In time the Charters became almost symbolical;
the precise meaning of many of the clauses was forgotten,
and much more was read into some of them than their
authors had ever intended to imply. They came to
represent, like the "Laws of Good King Edward" in an
earlier age, the ancient liberties of Englishmen, and in
Stuart days when men looked behind the Tudor absolutism to
a time of greater independence, lawyers like E. Coke
continued the process of idealization which had been begun
even in the thirteenth century. This symbolical use of the
Great Charter has played a great part in English
constitutional history, but it would have been impossible,
had not the original document in its original sense been a
thorough, an intelligent, and in the main a moderate
expression of the determination of Englishmen to be ruled
by law and tradition and not by arbitrary will. The most
convenient text of the Great charter is that printed in
Bemont's Chartes des Libertés anglaises" (Paris, 1892),
but, it will also be found in Stubb's "Select Charters"
and similar compilations. W.S. McKechnie ("Magna Carta",
Glasgow, 1905) has published a very thorough commentary,
clause by clause, together with an historical introduction
and a discussion of the criticisms brought against the
Charter. His book also contains a bibliography.

Source: The New Advent