Runnymede 1215: Magna Carta and the First Barons' War
On 15 June 1215 King John rode out from Windsor to a watermeadow on the south bank of the Thames called Runnymede. Across from him stood the rebel barons, who had ridden out from London, the city they now held, to negotiate. Mediating between the two sides was Stephen Langton, the archbishop John had spent six years refusing to admit. The document John sealed there — later called Magna Carta — was a peace treaty between a desperate king and a faction of his barons. It was annulled within ten weeks. Within twelve weeks the kingdom was at civil war.
The Motives at Runnymede
The two sides came to Runnymede with very different aims. John wanted to buy time. With London lost on 17 May, the Exchequer paralysed and the rebel army growing, he could not raise mercenaries on credit. Stephen Langton’s mediation offered the king a route out: he would agree to the rebels’ charter, recover their oaths of homage and use the breathing space to appeal to Pope Innocent III for the charter’s annulment. John never intended to abide by Magna Carta as a permanent settlement.
The rebel barons wanted protection. The Northerners wanted the customary law of Henry I, not the arbitrary rule of John, to govern feudal incidents and military service. Robert FitzWalter and his allies wanted personal redress for years of royal extortion and humiliation. Some, especially the Londoners and the moderate barons led by William of Albini, wanted a constitutional principle: that the king of England was beneath the law and could be held to a written agreement. None of them wanted to depose John outright in June 1215. They wanted a treaty that would force him to govern by counsel and custom.
Magna Carta was sealed at Runnymede on 15 June 1215 with Stephen Langton as mediator. John sealed it to recover the rebels’ homage and gain time to appeal to Innocent III for annulment. The barons sealed it as a peace treaty to bind the king to customary law and customary feudal incidents.
The Main Provisions of Magna Carta
The 1215 charter contained sixty-three clauses, most addressing specific baronial grievances of the previous decade. Six broad areas dominate.
Feudal incidents. Reliefs were fixed at £100 for an earl or baron, ending the punitive sums John had charged. Wardships could no longer be auctioned to the highest bidder; the lands of an underage heir were to be managed without ‘destruction or waste’. Heiresses could not be forced to marry against their will. Clause 61 set up an enforcement committee of twenty-five barons with the right to seize royal castles and lands if the king broke his word.
Taxation. No general aid or scutage could be levied without the ‘common counsel of the realm’, except in three customary cases — the ransom of the king, the knighting of his eldest son, and the marriage of his eldest daughter once. This clause aimed at the eleven scutages of John’s reign.
Justice. Common pleas were to be heard at a fixed place rather than following the king’s travelling court. Earls and barons were to be judged by their peers. Most famously, clauses 39 and 40 declared that no ‘free man’ could be imprisoned, dispossessed or outlawed except ‘by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land’, and that ‘to no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice’. These were the clauses later generations of lawyers would use to claim a right to due process.
The Church. Clause 1 confirmed the freedom of the English Church to elect its own bishops — the issue at the heart of the Interdict. Stephen Langton had personally pressed for this clause.
Royal forests, weights and measures. The forest law was to be reviewed; standard measures of wine, ale and corn were to be enforced; restrictions on fish-weirs in the Thames and Medway were imposed. Petty grievances, but the kind of detail that mattered to landed gentry and town merchants.
Treatment of foreign mercenaries. Clauses 50 and 51 ordered the dismissal of named foreign captains — including Falkes de Bréauté and Engelard de Cigogné — and the removal of their relatives from royal office. The barons knew exactly who they wanted out of England.
It is tempting to read Magna Carta back through later constitutional history. It was not, in 1215, a charter of human rights or a foundation of democracy. The protections it granted applied to ‘free men’ — perhaps a fifth of the population at most. The villeins, the urban poor, women in their own right, and the Anglo-Jewish community received almost nothing. The charter’s language about ‘peers’ and ‘the common counsel of the realm’ meant the great barons, not the people. The British Library is blunt about this: in 1215 the document was a ‘baronial peace treaty’, not a constitutional landmark. Its later reputation grew when seventeenth-century lawyers like Sir Edward Coke used clauses 39 and 40 to argue against royal absolutism in the Stuart age, and when the American revolutionaries cited it in turn. The principle that the king is under the law, however limited in 1215, was the seed from which that later tree grew.
Annulment and the Outbreak of War
Within hours of leaving Runnymede John was writing to Rome. He told Pope Innocent III that the charter had been ‘extorted by force’, was contrary to his royal dignity, and was — under the 1213 settlement — an interference with a papal fief. On 24 August 1215 Innocent issued a papal bull declaring Magna Carta ‘null and void of all validity for ever’ and excommunicating the rebel barons. The 1213 reconciliation now paid its dividend. Stephen Langton, who had mediated at Runnymede, was suspended from his archbishopric for refusing to publish the bull.
By September the kingdom was effectively at war. The rebel barons, joined by the Londoners, declared John deposed and offered the throne of England to Prince Louis of France, son and heir of Philip II. They had run out of moderate options: Innocent III was now their enemy, and only a credible alternative ruler with continental resources could match John’s mercenary armies.
The Siege and Taking of Rochester
The first decisive military action of the war was the siege of Rochester Castle. In October 1215 the rebel garrison under William of Albini occupied the great Norman keep that controlled the road from London to the Channel ports. John brought up siege engines, hired sappers and laid siege from 11 October. After six weeks of bombardment John’s miners undermined the south-east tower; the foundation was collapsed by burning forty fat pigs in the mine to set the timbers alight. The tower fell, the garrison surrendered on 30 November, and Rochester — the strongest castle south of London — was back in royal hands.
The siege was both a military success and a political catastrophe. John ordered the whole garrison hanged, against the chivalric custom of his age. His captain Savari de Mauléon talked him out of it: one crossbowman was hanged and the rest were imprisoned. The king then announced his intention to march north and devastate the rebel heartlands. The chronicler at the abbey of St Albans wrote that the king had ‘hurried like a tempest’ through the kingdom, burning houses and crops. Whatever leverage the rebels had lost at Rochester was matched by the political gift John handed them: he made himself impossible to negotiate with.
Pope Innocent III annulled Magna Carta on 24 August 1215, less than ten weeks after the sealing. Rebel-held Rochester Castle fell to John’s siege on 30 November 1215. By the spring of 1216 the rebels had offered the throne to Prince Louis of France, who landed at Thanet in May.
The Invasion of Prince Louis
Prince Louis landed at Thanet on the Kent coast on 21 May 1216 with a substantial French force and an English claim of doubtful legality (his wife was a granddaughter of Henry II). London opened its gates within days. By midsummer Louis controlled the south-east, the rebels held the Midlands, and John’s authority extended only to the south-west, the Welsh march and a network of loyal castles. The French prince was acclaimed in St Paul’s and treated as king of England by half the kingdom.
John spent the summer of 1216 on a frantic campaign to relieve loyalist garrisons and disrupt rebel supply lines. The king never recovered his strategic initiative. In October he marched north into Lincolnshire, lost much of his baggage train — including, according to legend, the crown jewels — in the tidal estuary of the Wash, fell ill of dysentery, and died at Newark Castle on 18 or 19 October 1216. The First Barons’ War was not yet won by either side. The man who had provoked it was gone; the boy who would inherit it was nine years old.