The Runnymede Story
Magna Carta. By J. C. Holt. (C.U.P., 60s.) 'GIVEN under our hand in the meadow which is called Runnymede between Windsor and Staines on the fifteenth day of June in the seventeenth year of our reign.' These are the concluding words of King John's Great Charter; four originals, two in the British Museum, one each at Lincoln and Salisbury, survive to assure us that the date is authentic and precisely correct. Or so one would think. ,But what happened in the meadow called Runnymede on June 15, 750 years ago? King John did not sign the charter. He did not even set his seal to it, as some, wiser than their fellows, have supposed. What he did, but not on the fifteenth, was to authorise his chancery officials to draw out fair copies of it and one in particular, the spigurnel, to attach the great seal to each of these. The four originals are survivors from a great multitude, which took many days to engross, seal and issue. He would be a bold man who pretended to know the precise day on which any surviving original was written. But we can be quite sure that none of them was written on the fifteenth of June. The king finally agreed to authorise the charter in the meadow called Runnymede on the nineteenth of June, after five days of " hard bargaining, themselves the con- clusion of several weeks of rebellion and negotia- tion. What, then, happened on the fifteenth? We do not know. There has indeed been much dis- pUte. But the most probable answer is that the last round of negotiations opened with the king per- mitting his seal to be attached to a rough draft of the charter called 'The Articles of the Barons,' which seems to have been intended as a guaran- tee to the barons' supporters that a charter of 'liberties' or privileges would emerge in the end. The date of the charter is only one of many mysteries, great and small, which surround it; and it is appropriate that Magna Carta should celebrate its first three-quarters of a millennium by receiving a precise, detailed and penetrating study by one of the foremost scholars in the field. Professor Holt's book is primarily addressed to scholars. There are notable passages of general interest in it, and it will (or should) assuredly form the foundation of the popular accounts which appear between now and AD 2015. But the charter contains sixty-three clauses cover- ing a multitude of topics; and its expositor has to give precise treatment to such notable mysteries as relief and wardships, unjust disseisin and the writ Praecipe. Professor Holt never shirks the particulars, and yet he has succeeded in making the larger issues clearer than they were before. He shows how the charter was one of a number which came from reactions by the landed classes, growing in wealth, sophistication and social com- plexity, in almost every part of Europe, against the arbitrary nature of royal government in the twelfth century. It was produced immediately by
the failure of King John's foreign campaigns and by baronial, revolt. It Was the condition of • peace, but its terms were never fulfilled and peace was broken within a few months: 'In 1215 Magna Carta was a failure.' Yet the principle that major issues of law can be fixed by agree- nient between king and people, that law is and should be known, had been stated: and though many petty interests were represented on both sides in the meadow called Runnymede, Profes- sor Holt is very firm that the barons at large were perfectly capable of the wide view of legal issues represented by the charter.
. One can accept this while still wondering why more is not made of the desperate need for rebels to have and to hold all the allies they could get —the Church, the Scots, the Welsh, the mer- chants, the men of London, all free men. Each of these groups had its benefit from the charter, and this was surely a major reason for the breadth of the charter's scope. Many historians have gone further and seen the barons as men of narrow vision and selfish interests, and have fol- lowed the St. Albans chronicler of the day in finding a dens ex machina in Archbishop Stephen Langton. While Professor Holt pays homage to Langton's services as a scrupulous and skilful mediator, he puts him firmly in his place. The author of the Golden Sequence was not, it seems, in any useful sense the author of Magna Carta. And it was this wider appreciation of the issues involved which made it possible for a revised and chastened charter, when the king was dead, to be a reconciling 'instrument among the barons who eventually agreed to make the throne safe for the boy King Henry III. From then on it rapidly became a shibboleth.
Early in this century the American scholar, G. B. Adams, issued a very notable book on Magna Carta (now unjustly neglected) called The Origin of the English Constitution. Profes- sor Holt puts it differently. 'Later generations were rarely in any doubt that authority should be subject to law which the community itself defined. Magna Carta could not ensure that this would always be so, but it endured as an example. It set no mean standard.' If there were such a thing as the English Constitution, we should not be so very far wrong to find its origin in the negotia- tions of those June days in the meadow between Windsor and Staines called Runnymede.
CHRISTOPHER BROOKE
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