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1. Archbishop Langton and Magna Carta: his contribution, his doubts and his hypocrisy

Occasionally, the Fine Rolls help provide radical new insights into long-debated historical questions. Here, David Carpenter weaves previously unnoticed entries into an analysis which both sheds new light on Archbishop Stephen Langton’s contribution to the creation of Magna Carta, and raises the question as to whether his actions, in one area, contravened the principles of the Charter and the canons of his own academic thought.

1.1. Preface: Archbishop Langton in the fine rolls search facility

⁋1This ‘Fine of the Month’ on Archbishop Langton and Magna Carta has its origins in two entries on the fine rolls, one from 1228 and the other from 1242, both virtually unknown before the work of the Henry III Fine Rolls Project. ¹ It was these which started me thinking about the hypocrisy of Langton, or what might be alleged to be his hypocrisy, in relation to Magna Carta. Initially, I had thought in terms of a relatively short ‘Fine of the Month’ devoted simply to this question, but the subject is so closely linked to the debate about Langton’s responsibility for Magna Carta as a whole, that I have been led to have a fresh look at that topic too. This appears as the first part of what follows, while the question of Langton’s ‘hypocrisy’ appears as the second.

⁋2In researching this topic, I have made extensive use of the search facility to the fine rolls. This is one of the Project’s achievements, and it will be expanded to cover the years 1234–42 this month. It may be helpful to say something about how I used the facility here. ² The first thing I did was simply to key into the search ‘Stephen Langton archbishop of Canterbury’ and this immediately called up all 34 references to Langton in the fine rolls of Henry III, which I then proceeded to print out. ³ The whole process took a few minutes. Contrast that with the great labour which is necessary to extract equivalent material from the other chancery rolls of the period, these being available in the form of printed books. With the latter, one has to write down from the indexes the hundreds of page references to Langton, and then look them up one by one. When one has found the relevant entry on the page, one has then, if it is germane to one’s quest, to copy it out or summarize it. The whole process takes days.

⁋3In working from the index of a printed book, it is often impossible to find the references related to a particular year or group of years. The fine rolls search facility, by contrast, precisely allows a search to be targeted in this way, which is very helpful if, for example, one is interested in Langton’s last years (the subject of an article by F.A. Cazel.) ⁴ In the fine rolls search, it is also possible to cross a person with a place or a subject (and of course places and subjects can be searched in their own right.) In the story of Langton’s ‘hypocrisy’, particular importance attaches to his relations with the Essex manors of Debden and Walden (now Saffron Walden). If, then, Langton is crossed with Debden and Walden, the one relevant entry (a highly significant one) comes up. ⁵ Likewise, suppose one is interested in how far Langton participated in the surge of markets founded during the minority of Henry III, then one can combine Langton with the subject ‘markets’ (either inputted in free text or from the search thesaurus which contains all people, places and subjects in the index, thereby saving fruitless searches on those individuals not featuring in the rolls), and the search produces two entries, both from August 1220, which show him setting up markets at his manors of Uckfield in Sussex and Reculver in Kent. ⁶

⁋4The entries in the fine rolls for Archbishop Langton cover the period from 1218 to 1229, the year after his death. The fine rolls search facility, however, now embraces the whole period from 1216 to 1242, and I have used it extensively in this Fine of the Month, to research the fortunes of the earls of Essex in the period, a search which has turned up fascinating material about William de Mandeville, his sister Matilda who became countess of Essex on his death, and her son and successor, Humphrey de Bohun, who combined the Mandeville earldom of Essex with the Bohun earldom of Hereford.

⁋5The fine rolls website has one further facility, which I have used in this research, namely the digitised images of the original rolls. If one wants, as I have wanted, to quote from an entry verbatim, rather than from the summary in the English calendar (full though that is), then one can click in a second from the calendar to the membrane on which the entry occurs, after which it is an easy business to find it. In Michael Wood’s splendid TV history of Kibworth in Leicestershire, one often saw him examining with his magnifying glass some document in a record office or in the archives of Merton College Oxford. The images of the fine rolls, with their zoom facility, enable everyone to do the same in his or her own home, zooming in to the fabric of the parchment to view each individual pen stroke with clarity.

⁋6None of what has been said above is to meant to diminish the value of the printed book. Quite the reverse. After all, the fine rolls themselves, in parallel with web publication, are being printed in book form by Boydell. ⁷ The book constitutes an alternative record, and is sometimes more convenient to use than the online version. We are lucky in the case of the fine rolls to have both.

1.2. Archbishop Langton and Magna Carta: his contribution and doubts

⁋1The question of Archbishop Stephen Langton’s contribution to Magna Carta has long intrigued and divided historians. ⁸ At one extreme they have ascribed to Langton all that was best in the Charter: the way it asserts the fundamental principle that the ruler is subject to the law, and the way too it reaches out to a wide constituency and is not just a selfish baronial document. At the other extreme, led by J.C. Holt, they have argued that Langton contributed little to the Charter’s fundamentals (or what are usually seen as its fundamentals), and played the role essentially of a moderator and intermediary rather than an originator. ⁹ These divergent views reflect contemporary testimony. In the (often challenged) account of the St. Albans abbey chronicler, Roger of Wendover, Langton seems very much the fons et origo of Magna Carta, whereas in Ralph of Coggeshall and the Barnwell chronicle, he is both far less prominent and essentially a peacemaker between the sides. ¹⁰ The purpose of this paper is to advance some new arguments and produce some new evidence, arguments which cast fresh light on Langton’s role in shaping Magna Carta, and reveal for the first time his doubts about its validity; and evidence which, on the face of it, lays him open to the charge of double standards, even of hypocrisy, if his conduct is judged against the principles of the Charter and the canons of his own academic thought.

⁋2All historians would agree that Langton’s thought, as displayed in his sermons and biblical exegesis, chimed well with many aspects of the Charter. In his lectures in Paris on the book of Deuteronomy, he had criticised ‘the avarice...of modern kings, who collect treasure not in order that they may sustain necessity but to satiate their cupidity’, and, of course, many clauses of the Charter could be seen as restraining avarice of just that kind. ¹¹ Langton also commended Deuteronomy’s injunction that kings should set down for themselves a summary of the law and read it assiduously, getting an exemplar from the priests, all of which might seem both to foreshadow the law as set down in Magna Carta, and indeed Langton’s role in begetting it. ¹² Langton also wrestled with the question of obedience and here ‘the absence of the judicial process became his principle justification for political resistance.’ ¹³ Kings, therefore, should act against individuals only after due legal process, which was precisely the principle evoked in chapter 39 of the Charter: ‘no free man shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land.’ And then there was Langton’s view of the church as the congregation of the clergy and people from whom temporal authority derived, and in whose interests kings should rule. Might not this have a connection with ‘the baronial notion of the community of the realm’, and the way ‘the commune of all the land’ was expected to support Magna Carta and by implication benefit from it? ¹⁴

⁋3Langton’s thought, therefore, sat well with the Charter, but that does not mean he played a leading part in shaping the baronial demands. The first point here, often made, is that it hardly needed Langton’s intervention to introduce the principles of the Charter, or indeed the idea of a charter itself, into political discourse. They were already common place. Henry I, Henry II and John, at the start of their reigns, had all issued charters promising to abolish evil customs. John proclaimed his desire to provide for ‘the liberty and safety’ of clergy and people, and extirpate evil customs which had arisen from bad counsel, arbitrary action and ‘cupidity’ (no Langtonian lecture necessary about that). John thus hoped to promote ‘the honour of God and Holy Church’ (words which re-appeared in Magna Carta) and ‘the peace and tranquillity of clergy and people.’ In a sense, all that happened in 1215 was that John was made to fill out the details, not surprisingly since, in the view of his enemies, he had greatly increased the evil customs. The 1199 proclamation also paralleled Langton’s thought about the origins of temporal authority, stating that John had come to the throne through ‘hereditary right, divine mercy and the unanimous consent and favour of clergy and people’. ¹⁵ Later, in 1205, John anticipated the ‘commune of all the land’, formed to support Magna Carta, when he set up in each county ‘the commune of all the county’ to defend the realm from invasion. In both cases, the ‘commune’ was formed by oaths taken by everyone. ¹⁶ As for the principle of due legal process, that was as old as it was widely known. In 1101 ‘judgement by peers’ had featured in Henry I’s agreement with the count of Flanders. ¹⁷ In 1189–90, it featured again in Earl Roger Bigod’s agreement with Richard I: he was not be deprived of his land ‘unless by judgement of the court of the lord king made by his peers’. ¹⁸ Similarly, in Henry II’s assize of novel disseisin, the question the jury had to answer was whether the plaintiff had been disseised of his free tenement ‘unjustly and without judgement’. Since knights and freemen brought this legal action in large numbers, and also staffed the juries which gave the verdicts, the principle of ‘judgement’ was as familiar throughout the counties of England as it was to Langton’s audiences in the Paris schools, and was far more part of lived experience. Of course, there was a world of difference between the idea of ‘judgement’ as espoused by a baron and espoused by Langton. For the former it just seemed a good and obvious thing. For the latter it was part of complex and biblically referenced discussion about obedience. But the end result, belief in the principle, was the same.

⁋4Nor did it need Langton to force concerns about the wider community into the Charter against the opposition of ‘selfish’ barons. As Holt pointed out, and as much of his work demonstrated, the barons did not rule England in lordly isolation, commanding a loyal body of tenants who did just as they were told. ¹⁹ Instead, they had to reach out to the knights and freemen, taking positive measures to win their support. If they failed to do so, they could be absolutely sure that John would be grabbing for the same constituency. The Charter, therefore, in harnessing the energies and meeting the concerns of knights and those below them, was reflecting the balance of power in English society.The use of sub-headings and marginal annotations in the fine rolls also enables us to see how the personal preference of one scribe could influence the decision of others.

⁋5There is one further argument against Langton’s role in shaping the Charter, one which, while it covers familiar ground, has never, I think, been made with much point and force. It is this. The Articles of the Barons, as is well known, are a fairly full draft of the document which was to become Magna Carta. Probably they were agreed between the king and the barons as a basis for the final negotiations on 10 June, while the Charter itself was promulgated on the fifteenth. ²⁰ Now, the Articles contain everything in the Charter which has been most associated with Langton, yet there is compelling evidence that he had nothing to do with them. Indeed, they had clearly been drawn up without consulting him. There are two reasons for thinking this. The first is that the Articles completely lack the clause on the liberties of the Church, which five days later was to appear right at the start of Magna Carta: strange if Langton had been involved with the document. The second is that, in several places, the Articles demanded of Langton a role which he refused or hesitated to perform, with the result that, in the Charter, the relevant clauses had to be excised or watered down. ²¹ Individually some of these changes might be explained away, but taken together, they argue strongly against Langton’s involvement with the Articles, especially as one of the demands was completely impossible for him to meet. The first of these changes involved chapter 25 of the Articles, where Langton and the bishops were to sit in judgement on the disseisins committed by Henry II and Richard I, if it was decided that John was to enjoy the stay in legal actions to which a crusader was entitled. In chapter 52 of the Charter, by contrast, John was indeed to have the crusader’s respite but any reference to judgements by Langton and the bishops disappears. ²² Likewise, chapter 37 of the Articles laid down that all fines and amercements imposed unjustly and against the law of the land, were to be either pardoned or judged by the twenty-five barons of the Charter’s security clause ‘one with the archbishop and others whom he wishes to call with him’. In Magna Carta chapter 55, Langton was only to be there ‘if he can be present’; if he could not be, judgement was to proceed without him. ²³ The ‘judgement’ of Langton ‘and of others who he will wish to call with him’ was also dropped when it came to deciding about the return of hostages and liberties to the king of the Scots. Instead the matter was to be judged by the king of the Scot’s peers in John’s court. ²⁴ Finally, and most significantly, at the end of the Articles, John was to give the barons security, through charters of Langton, the bishops, and Pandulf, the papal envoy, that he would seek nothing from the pope by which the concessions might be revoked. Langton’s eyes must have popped out of his head when he read this one, for there was no way he could agree to setting up a ring fence between John and the pope. ²⁵ And sure enough, the Charter itself reduced the clause to the innocuous stipulation that Langton, Pandulf and the bishops were to issue letters patent testifying to the Charter’s concessions and security clause. ²⁶

⁋6Of course, it remains possible that Langton, while not involved with the Articles of the Barons, had contributed to the evolution of baronial demands at some earlier stage, and precisely this has been argued by John Baldwin in an important article, published in the 2008 English Historical Review. ²⁷ Baldwin first sets out Langton’s political ideas, along the lines outlined above, and then looks more closely at his career in England after John’s submission to the pope in 1213. Here all historians would agree that Langton was concerned with the good government of the realm, and was probably associated with an oath to that effect which John took on his absolution. ²⁸ Baldwin goes further than this in two key areas, one familiar, the other novel. First, Baldwin takes more seriously than do many historians Roger of Wendover’s story that it was Langton who revealed to the barons the Coronation Charter of Henry I, this at a council held at St. Paul’s in August 1213. ²⁹ Langton certainly possessed a copy of the Coronation Charter in his Canterbury archives, ³⁰ and may have commended it in baronial circles, but, given there were other copies around, he was hardly needed to introduce it into the debate. Certainly neither Ralph of Coggeshall nor the Barnwell annalist thought he had done so, for both bring the Charter into their narrative without mentioning him. ³¹ Wendover’s story, moreover, as he himself says, is merely, ‘ut fama refert’, ‘as rumour says’, and when Wendover of all historians says that, alarm bells should be ringing. His uncertainty contrasts sharply with the precise date and place he gives for the meeting, 25 August at St. Paul’s, and with the precision of the surrounding narrative, which, although in its final form dating from at least 1225, must be based on a much earlier text. Equally in contrast is the direct speech put into Langton’s mouth, which is clearly made up, as one suspects is Langton’s statement that he would give ‘most faithful aid’ to the barons, who had just sworn to fight for the liberties in the Coronation Charter to the death. ³² Nothing else in the contemporary evidence suggests that Langton took open sides in this way. Wendover clearly knew that the Coronation Charter came on the scene sometime between 1213 and 1215. He himself possessed a copy of the text which he transcribes, a copy which, it may be noted, derived not from Langton but simply from the original sent to his home county of Hertfordshire. Quite probably, he did not know when the Charter first emerged and made an arbitrary decision to pin it on Langton and the council of 1213. One needs to remember that this is the historian who, in copying out the 1215 Charter, conflated it with the later versions of Henry III, and also ascribed to John, rather than to Henry, the Charter of the Forest. ³³

⁋7The entry of the 1100 Charter into the debate was manifestly important because, unlike the charters of John and Henry II, it contained a detailed list of concessions and thus set a pattern for Magna Carta, but there was still a long way to go from the former, which runs to a little over two printed pages, to the latter, which runs to around eleven. ³⁴ It is here that Baldwin’s second (and novel) line of argument comes in, because he associates Langton with a document which reveals the development of baronial demands, a document, known to historians as ‘the Unknown Charter. ³⁵ The only known copy of the ‘Unknown Charter’ survives in the Archives Nationales in Paris where it appears on a single sheet membrane following a copy of the Coronation Charter of Henry I. The first clause of the Unknown Charter demanded that John would not ‘take a man without judgement, nor receive anything for justice or do injustice’, thus anticipating chapters 39 and 40 of the eventual Charter. ‘That the Unknown Charter’, Baldwin comments, ‘bears Stephen Langton’s signature’, in thus forbidding action without judgement, ‘exemplifies the influence of his Paris teaching on the reforms that resulted in Magna Carta’. Indeed, Baldwin suggests that Simon Langton, as chancellor of his brother in 1213–1214, ‘would have been responsible for drafting the copies [of the Henry I Charter and the Unknown Charter] that were ultimately brought to France’, Simon, that is, taking them with him when he was expelled from England in 1217, following the defeat of Louis of France for whom he had equally acted as chancellor. ³⁶

⁋8This is certainly an ingenious hypothesis, but also one hard to sustain. Whatever the route of the two Charters into the French royal archive, it is difficult to believe that Langton and his circle had responsibility for the one, any more than they discovered the other. Langton, in his dealings with John, may well have stressed the necessity of ‘judgement’, especially when trying to restrain him from taking punitive measures against the Northerners, but, as we have said, he was hardly alone in doing that. ³⁷ Much more important, there are clear indications that Langton had nothing to do with the Unknown Charter, for it makes not a single reference to the church and churchmen. Indeed, it conspicuously omits such references in places where Magna Carta and the 1217 Charter of the Forest include them. Thus chapter 5 of the Unknown Charter laid down that if one of John’s barons or men died intestate, then his family could distribute his money for the good of his soul. The corresponding chapter in Magna Carta added that this was to take place ‘under the supervision of the church’. ³⁸ Likewise, in the Unknown Charter, it was ‘knights’ who were to enjoy privileges within the king’s forests. A clause in the Forest Charter, by contrast, was to benefit ‘archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, knights, free tenants’. ³⁹ Baldwin’s hypothesis would thus seem to require that Langton introduced the principle of ‘judgement’ into the Unknown Charter, an untutored baronage having not thought of it before, and then took absolutely no interest in the rest of the document, even where it concerned the church and churchmen. This does not seem a very likely scenario. ⁴⁰

⁋9Langton, therefore, on the evidence so far adduced, approved the principle of the Charter, but did little to shape baronial demands. This does not mean that he had no input into Magna Carta. Quite the reverse. His input, however, was very different from that usually imagined. Langton did not introduce the idea of judgement and force the barons to reach out to the knights and freemen. No, what he introduced was the clause dealing with sectional interests of the church. The Articles of the Barons of 10 June totally lacked such a clause, as we have seen. By 15 June in the Charter, it features as chapter 1. ⁴¹

⁋10‘In the first place, in primis, [We] have granted to God and by this our present Charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished and its liberties unimpaired: and we wish it thus observed, which is evident from the fact that of our own free and spontaneous will, before the discord between us and our barons began, we conceded and confirmed, by our charter, freedom of elections, which is reputed of the greatest necessity and importance to the English church, and obtained confirmation of this from the lord pope Innocent III, which we will observe and wish our heirs to observe in good faith in perpetuity.’

⁋11This was Langton’s great work. We are so used to the clause being there, that we just take its inclusion for granted. Historians thus usually ascribe it to Langton but in perfunctory fashion, before moving on to other more exciting things, as though the inclusion of the church was as routine as it was insignificant. It was neither. In the next great political crisis to shake England, in 1258, churchmen conspicuously failed to put the church into ‘the baronial plan of reform’. ⁴² Instead they held their own councils and drew up their own schedules of grievances. The same nearly happened in 1215. It was, after all, only at a very late stage, between 10 and 15 June, that the church arrived on the scene, for the clause was absent from both the Articles of the Barons and the Unknown Charter, as we have seen. Until Runnymede, the church had pursued its own agenda and secured its own concessions, the most striking being John’s charter of November 1214 conceding free elections to which Magna Carta referred. In January 1215, John issued the Charter again and this time sent it to the pope for confirmation. ⁴³ Langton, therefore, was perfectly capable, quite properly, of going it alone when it came to the interests of the church. ⁴⁴ Indeed, had it not been for the secular revolt in 1215 he would have done so, leaving John’s charter on freedom of elections as the only achievement of the period.

⁋12In the end, if at a late stage, this was not the route Langton followed. Instead, he made the crucial decision to put the church into the charter. He did so, however, in a new and remarkable way, which served almost to decouple church and realm. The preamble to the Charter stated conventionally enough that John had acted ‘for the honour of God, and the exaltation of Holy church and the reform of our realm’, ⁴⁵ but when it came to chapter 1, the phraseology suggested that the church and realm were very separate. The concessions for the church were thus given not to the realm but, as the clause stated, to God. ⁴⁶ Then the Charter started all over again and announced

⁋13‘We have also granted to all the free man of our realm for ourselves and our heirs for ever, all the liberties written below, to be had and held by them and their heirs from us and our heirs.’ ⁴⁷

⁋14The division made here between concessions made to God and concessions made to the men of the realm had no precedent. The Coronation Charters of Henry I and John, and John’s charter over freedom of elections, had announced their benefits without naming any specific recipients. ⁴⁸ John’s Charter making England a papal fief had granted the kingdom to God and the papacy, but here, of course, there was no question of any parallel concession to the realm. ⁴⁹ The division in 1215 also ran clean contrary to the model provided by the Coronation Charter of Henry II where the concessions were made to ‘God, holy church and all my earls and barons and all my men’, which meant there was no separation, as there was in 1215, between church and realm or realm and God. ⁵⁰

⁋15Despite this deliberate decoupling, Magna Carta in 1215 nonetheless put the church into the Charter, and this in a fashion both emphatic and novel. The Charter of Henry I had also begun (‘in primis’) by setting the church free, but there was no attempt to confer on the ecclesiastical concessions an eternal status by giving them to God, indeed, as we have said, the concessions, ecclesiastical and secular, in the 1100 Charter, were not, in so many words, given to anyone at all. ⁵¹ In the charter of Henry II, God, the church and the barons were all linked together as beneficiaries, instead of church and God forming their own unique union. ⁵² The chapter in Magna Carta, moreover, embraced not the issue of episcopal and abbatial vacancies, as did the Charter of 1100, but Langton’s great victory over freedom of elections – ‘of the greatest necessity and importance to the English church’ – which John confirmed, and cited as testimony to his good faith. ⁵³ Thus the concerns of the church, which in 1214 had been dealt with in its own charter, were now, all be it in semi-detached fashion, brought within a charter which dealt also with the concerns of the realm.

⁋16Why then did Langton act in this way, having nothing to do with the Articles of the Barons, and introducing the church into the Charter at the last minute, and in a way both so detached yet so emphatic? And why too, in sharp contrast to the Charter of 1225, was the 1215 Charter not supported by sentences of excommunication? The answer to all these questions lies in one overarching fact, never, I think, before appreciated, namely that Langton had grave doubts about the political morality of the rebellion which produced Magna Carta, and thus doubts too about the validity of the Charter itself. This is made virtually explicit in the first clause on the church where John states that his desire to set the church free

⁋17‘is evident from the fact that of our own free and spontaneous will, before the discord between us and our barons began, we conceded and confirmed, by our charter, freedom of elections’.

⁋18There was thus a clear qualitative difference between the liberties conferred on the church and those conferred on the rest of the realm. John had granted the former spontaneously before ‘the discord between us and our barons’. The inevitable implication was that the latter, coming after the discord, had not been freely given, indeed had been forced from him. These doubts over the rebellion fit with Langton’s biblical exegesis, for while he thought disobedience to an unjust command might be legitimate on an ad hoc basis, he never sanctioned outright rebellion. At the very most he averred that if the king wished to kill someone unjustly and without judgement, then, if the people knew it, they were bound to liberate the prisoner, an injunction which could hardly stretch to justifying the rebellion of 1215, especially when John was now a faithful son of the church. In other comments, given the Pauline stress on obedience to secular powers, Langton was almost hilariously cautious. Thus a soldier was bound to answer the summons to an unjust war, but then should either retire or remain without taking up arms. ⁵⁴ Given his views, Langton was thus quite unable to side openly with the rebellion, however much he wished to avoid excommunicating the insurgents and sympathised with their aims. In the Charter itself, Langton appears amongst the loyalist councillors, none of whom had rebelled, and on whose advice John said he had acted. ⁵⁵ Once, therefore, the rebels had openly defied King John, as they did on 5 May, Langton hesitated to mix himself up in their demands. Hence he had nothing to do with the Articles of the Barons.

⁋19When it came to the Charter, Langton must have wondered whether he should continue in the same vein and exclude the church from it altogether. He knew there might be challenges to the validity of a document which John had been ‘forced to accept by violence and fear’, as Innocent III put it later when quashing it. ⁵⁶ Yet, on the other hand, Langton was desperate to do the best he could for the church, and here practical considerations, precedent and ideology urged him to engage with the Charter. It might succeed and become fundamental to English law and government. There was also the model of the Coronation Charter of 1100 with its first clause on the church, and there was his view of clergy and people together forming the congregation of the faithful from whom secular authority derived, which argued that both should feature in the same charter. Langton, therefore, would not act like the bishops in 1258, who withdrew from the parliament which saw the coercion of the king, and never afterwards introduced the church into the reforms. ⁵⁷ His problem was how to include the church in as powerful and privileged a way as possible, while at the same time distancing it from the other concessions. The answer was the masterly formula which we have seen. The freedom of the church was stated explicitly to have had nothing to do with the ‘discord’ between the king and the barons, and was given to God, which ipso facto separated it from the dubious concessions given to everyone else.

⁋20It was not till 1225 that Langton was able to free the Charter from the taint of its violent origins. He had played no part in the versions of the Charter issued by Henry III’s minority government in 1216 and 1217 since he was out of the country. Had he been present, he would surely have protested about the decision of the legate, Guala, in 1216 to omit John’s promise on free elections from the chapter on the church – in the circumstances of the time, Guala doubtless felt, freedom to elect might just mean freedom to elect opponents of the king. ⁵⁸ By contrast, Langton played a major part in shaping the 1225 Charter, the final and definitive version. In the first place, the 1225 Charter made clear that it was not the product of coercion, removing, therefore, Langton’s doubts about the 1215 Charter, and by extension its successors, doubts which had been cunningly exploited only two years before by John’s old minister William Brewer, who told Langton that that Charter had no validity since it had been extorted by force. ⁵⁹ The 1225 Charter exploded such claims for, as the last clause stated, it had been conceded in return for a grant of taxation, taxation Langton himself justified (in a letter to the bishop of Salisbury) on the grounds of the king’s ‘necessity’, exactly in line with his biblical exegesis. ⁶⁰ With the taint of coercion now removed, it became possible for churchmen, as they had not in 1215, to stand behind the Charter with solemn sentences of excommunication against those who contravened its terms. The Charter also had a new preamble in which the king said he had granted ‘the below written liberties’ to ‘archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, and all of our kingdom’. At last churchmen and laymen, separated in 1215, were brought together as beneficiaries of the Charter. ⁶¹ Langton, of course, remained keen to privilege the church, and its freedom was still given to God, while the other liberties were granted ‘to all free men’, but this now took place under the wing of the Charter’s liberties being granted to everyone. Langton, indeed, had hoped in 1225 to bring the church even more fully within the Charter, hoped, that is, to include once again John’s promise over free elections. Here he had failed, remarking bitterly to the bishop of Salisbury that he had consented to the taxation of 1225 ‘although through that there was little or no benefit to us, or to bishops and abbots in terms of new liberties’. ⁶² The papal confirmation of John’s charter, which Langton secured in January 1228, near the end of his life, tried to make up for the lack. ⁶³ But Langton would have preferred to have had the promise, as in 1215, embraced within Magna Carta itself. That is a testimony to his regard for the Great Charter.

⁋21David d’Avray has written that Langton’s role in the minority of Henry III ‘seems to have started a tradition of the use of Magna Carta by English bishops as a symbol of limited monarchy (not merely of the freedom of the church.)’ ⁶⁴ 1225 was important to that, for at last ecclesiastics were able to regard the Charter as a whole as a freely given grant, not one extorted by force. Yet Langton’s initial decision to put the church into the 1215 Charter was immensely important too, for it gave the church a stake in the Charter right from the start, and thus helped secure its future. One can see that stake in the account of Magna Carta in Langton’s ‘home’ chronicle of Christ Church Canterbury which went into detail about the first clause on the church, and hardly said anything about what followed. ⁶⁵ By contrast, the lay author of ‘The History of the Dukes of Normandy’ set out some of the secular concessions (not altogether accurately) and ignored the church altogether. ⁶⁶ With a clear stake in its success, the bishops thus played a vital role in distributing and preserving the 1215 Charter. ⁶⁷ Thereafter, the fact that the liberty of the church was protected remained central to the Charter’s ecclesiastical support. Thus when Master Thomas de Cantilupe, future bishop of Hereford and saint, drew up a critique of Henry III’s rule in 1264, he began with the way the king had contravened the clause in Magna Carta giving freedom to the church, both by exploiting ecclesiastical vacancies and by impeding free elections. ⁶⁸ We can, therefore, turn David d’Avray’s aphorism round, and say that Langton’s actions meant that English ecclesiastics regarded the Charter ‘as a symbol of the liberty of the Church (not merely of limited monarchy)’. In truth, like Langton, they believed in both together, hence the Charter’s survival.

1.3. Archbishop Langton: hypocrite?

⁋1Nothing that has been said so far challenges the usual view of Langton as a man of clear conscience and high principle. Where then the accusation of double standards, even of hypocrisy? The starting point here is one of King John’s most notorious acts, namely his extraction from Geoffrey de Mandeville, in January 1214, of a promise to pay 20,000 marks (£13,333) for having Isabella countess of Gloucester as his wife. ⁶⁹ Isabella had been John’s first wife, and, since the annulment of their marriage in 1200, her estates had been in royal hands. Now Geoffrey was to have them, a rich prize worth perhaps 800 marks a year, and including the county of Glamorgan. ⁷⁰ Had payment of the 20,000 mark fine been staged over many years, the sum would have been reasonable enough. In fact, it was utterly unreasonable, since Geoffrey was to pay it within ten months, which was quite impossible. Yet Geoffrey was made to issue a charter stating that John could take possession of all his lands if he failed to keep the terms. John certainly intended to make a lot of money from Geoffrey. He also intended to have him completely in his power. There was one other feature of the agreement which made it even more noxious. There was no get out clause in the event of Isabella’s death. If she produced a child by Geoffrey, her death, in purely material terms did not matter to him, for he could, under the law of England, retain her lands for his own lifetime, after which the child, if it survived, would inherit them. But Isabella was now in deep middle age and could never be fruitful. On her death, her lands would pass to her heirs who were the Clare earls of Hertford. Geoffrey’s possession, therefore, could be snuffed out at any moment, yet he would still be left paying the 20,000 marks. ⁷¹

⁋2Why then did Geoffrey agree to this terrible bargain? The answer is that he was forced to by an even more appalling prospect, namely the loss of virtually all his lands. For at this very moment, doubtless with John’s encouragement, Geoffrey de Say was reviving his claim to the whole of the Mandeville inheritance. Doubtless, John made it very clear to Geoffrey de Mandeville that if he did not agree to marry Isabella and pay 20,000 marks, the case would make rapid progress; if he did agree, it would run into the sand. And sure enough, soon after John’s departure for France in 1214, the Say case was dismissed, although the prospect of it being revived was kept very much alive. ⁷²

⁋3The unpleasant consequences of all this, as far as Geoffrey de Mandeville was concerned, are described in the well informed annals of Dunstable priory. Geoffrey, we are told, married Isabella

⁋4‘although unwillingly. For which marriage he gave security to the king for paying 10,000 marks and more, which he was never able to pay, and for the payment of which his woods were destroyed and his manors pawned.’ ⁷³

⁋5A later account in the pipe rolls, credited Geoffrey, before the outbreak of the civil war in 1215, with making no less than ten payments totalling some £3582 or 5373 marks, and doubtless much of this was harried from him. ⁷⁴

⁋6John, of course, was well aware that the great Mandeville debt might prove toxic, for it was bound to be challenged if political circumstances changed. So he tried to do what many then and now try to do with a toxic debt, namely pass it on to someone else. And the someone else whom John fixed on, with a devilish cunning worthy of Mefistofele, was none other than his archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton! At some time before Magna Carta in 1215 John offered Langton a full half of the debt – 10,000 marks or £6666 – ‘in part payment of the losses of clerks in the time of the Interdict’. ⁷⁵

⁋7What was Langton to do? Did he agonize over the proffered deal, as he agonized over so many questions in the mazy world of his academic thought, coming up with all kinds of distinctions and refinements? On the one hand, there was the overwhelming need to compensate the church for John’s depredations during the Interdict. To secure that compensation had been one of Langton’s central pre-occupations since his return to England in 1213, and without an agreement, the Interdict could not be lifted. Did Langton also feel that the misdemeanours of the Mandevilles took the edge off the extortion from which he was about to profit? Geoffrey fitzPeter, father of Geoffrey de Mandeville, after all, had acquired the Mandeville inheritance through questionable means, hence the claim of the Says. He had also been an oppressor of Walden abbey, and John’s justiciar in the time of the Interdict. ⁷⁶ The Mandevilles, therefore, might themselves be thought to owe compensation to the church. ⁷⁷ Yet, on the other hand, the Mandeville debt clearly arose from one of those fines made ‘unjustly and against the law of the land’, with which Magna Carta later sought to deal. By the same token, it surely qualified as an egregious example of ‘the tyrannical exactions’ of ‘modern kings’, which Langton stigmatised in his commentary on Deuteronomy. Although, moreover, as Nicholas Vincent has pointed out to me, Langton, in one area of his academic discourse, justified the spending of bad money in a good cause, the discussion told more in favour of refusing than accepting the Mandeville debt. In his consideration of whether prostitutes might give alms from earnings ‘unjustly acquired through mortal sin’, Langton argued that they could, but he added that such alms were to be given privately to the bishop so as to avoid scandal, and there was nothing private about John’s gift to his archbishop. More important, the underlying assumption behind accepting alms from prostitutes was that ‘they were not held to do restitution for their ill-gotten gains in an open court of law (ius fori)’, as Baldwin puts it, which was precisely, as we will see, what John was held to do in 1215 in respect of the Mandeville debt. ⁷⁸ The injustices suffered by the Mandevilles over the fine, as well as the injustices they had committed (if such they were), were surely matters, crying out for the ‘judgement’ to which Langton was so attached. Should he not then have concluded, that the church must be compensated, yes, but not from the proceeds of an act which ought to be subject to judicial redress?

⁋8Whether Langton paused and puzzled over accepting the debt, we will never know. What is certain is that when the bait was flicked towards him, he eventually rose, like a great salmon from the water, and swallowed it. ⁷⁹ How John must have laughed, if he ever did laugh. He had got rid of a bad debt, compensated the church, and compromised the archbishop all in one go. The cynicism with which John doubtless regarded pietistic and prating churchman like Langton had proved amply justified. They were no better than anyone else.

⁋9If Langton was troubled over the Mandeville debt, he soon had the opportunity to put things right, for as the crisis developed in 1215, Geoffrey pushed his grievance onto the political agenda and demanded redress. On 10 May 1215 John, struggling to contain the rebellion, agreed that Geoffrey could have the ‘judgement of our court concerning the debt which is exacted from him from the fine he made with us to have Isabella countess of Gloucester as his wife’. ⁸⁰ A month later the Articles of the Barons, with Geoffrey now a leader of the revolt, dealt exactly with his case in laying down that

⁋10‘fines made for dowers, marriages and inheritances...unjustly and against the law of the land, are to be wholly pardoned, or they shall go to the judgement of the twenty-five barons, or to the judgement of the greater part of them, one with the archbishop and others whom he will wish to call with him.’ ⁸¹

⁋11The chapter made clear that members of the twenty-five could not sit in judgement on their own cases, although I doubt if that would have excluded Langton from sitting on the Mandeville debt, especially if he intended altruistically to quash it. Certainly, he was now well placed to help right the injustice, after which he could have sought his own compensation from another source. Yet it was this very clause, as we have seen, that Langton distanced himself from in the negotiations after 10 June, so that in Magna Carta, he was to be associated with the work of the twenty-five only ‘if he can be present’. Of course, that could just have been because Langton might be otherwise engaged, and, in another way, he did indirectly help the twenty-five since he agreed to hold the Tower of London until their work was completed; only then would John recover the fortress and London itself. ⁸² Even here, however, there was a curious sub-text for Geoffrey de Mandeville was seeking from the twenty-five not merely the abrogation of his debt but also the vindication of inherited claims to the Tower. ⁸³ Did Langton indicate he would facilitate the second claim, if Geoffrey backpedalled on the first? Perish the thought.

⁋12Probably we will never know Langton’s attitude and actions at this time with regard to the Mandeville debt. The drift into civil war, and Langton’s suspension and departure for the papal court in any case soon ended his direct involvement in the matter, on which there is no evidence the twenty-five ever gave a verdict. What, however, we do know, is that Langton remained very keen to hold on to the debt and exploit it. This takes us on to the events after 1215.

⁋13Geoffrey de Mandeville was killed in a tournament in 1216, leaving as his heir his brother, William, who was also in rebellion. On the restoration of peace next year, the minority government of Henry III allowed William to enter the Mandeville inheritance and soon recognised him as earl of Essex. It also saddled him (no account as yet being taken of any payments and assignments) with the whole of Geoffrey’s 20,000 marks debt for the hand of Isabella of Gloucester. Taken narrowly, this was perfectly legal for Geoffrey’s original fine had not merely offered no let out in the event of Isabella’s death. It had also offered none to his heirs in the event of Geoffrey’s. The debt, however, had become all the more extraordinary, for William found himself liable for a vast sum from which he had received absolutely no benefit. He had no connection with the Gloucester estates which were now controlled first by Isabella as a widow, then by her next husband, Hubert de Burgh, and finally, on Isabella’s death in October 1217, by her heir Gilbert de Clare earl of Hertford.

⁋14This did not bother Langton. Sometime after his return to England in May 1218, he reached an agreement with William de Mandeville under which the latter was to liquidate the 10,000 marks debt at the rate of 150 marks a year. To be sure about this, the money was to be drawn annually from the revenues of two Mandeville manors in Essex, Debden and Walden (now Saffron Walden), the procedure being that four knights were to receive the revenues and give the 150 marks to Langton and any surplus to William. ⁸⁴ Just why Langton fastened on these two adjoining manors, we do not know, but perhaps it was due to the proximity of Walden abbey, which already held part of Walden from the Mandevilles, and doubtless might help Langton exercise effective control over the rest. The actual text of the agreement does not survive (or I have not found it), but the arrangement continued after Langton’s death, and by 1235 the debt had been reduced by 2840 marks to 7160 marks. ⁸⁵ If the agreement had run from 1218 itself, then that would account for 2550 marks of the 2840 marks, suggesting that Langton had already exacted around 300 marks (or £200) from the hapless Geoffrey before the war. Of course, this paled before the £3582 John had exacted in the same period, and Langton might claim that he had set up orderly and reasonable procedures for repayment, though by the same token these meant the Mandevilles would be deprived of the bulk of the revenues from two of their most valuable manors for over fifty years. William de Mandeville had the more reason to feel aggrieved given that he had begun restoring relations with Walden abbey, returning property taken by his father and making a generous grant of tithes from his newly cleared land. ⁸⁶ William, however, was in no position to resist for, if the agreement was made around 1218, he was at that very time facing a renewed attempt by the Says to recover the Mandeville inheritance. He could do with Langton’s support. ⁸⁷

⁋15In all this, Langton was far more successful in exploiting the debt than was the king’s government, which in fact did not extract it from William at all. It was not till 1226, that he came before the Exchequer to account, and then the payments made by Geoffrey before the war and the assignment to Langton were allowed him, all of which brought the debt down to £3084. It was then rolled up into other debts he owed, the grand sum, after further payments and allowances had been credited, being £3788. This William was to pay off at £100 a year, which meant, taking it as a proportion of the whole, that the Gloucester debt was to be reduced by £69 a year as opposed to Langton’s £100. ⁸⁸ In practice, William made no payments before his death in January 1227. ⁸⁹

⁋16On William’s death his heir was his sister Matilda, widow of the earl of Hereford, who was now due to become countess of Essex in her own right. She had, however, made an imprudent second marriage to the Wiltshire knight, Roger of Dauntsey, and difficulties were made over her entering the Mandeville inheritance. To overcome them, she enlisted the help of William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, the king’s brother in law, promising him, if successful, her Warwickshire manor of Compton. She also made promises to the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh. ⁹⁰ Langton, meanwhile, uncertain of the outcome, made quite sure his money from Debden and Walden, was secure, as hitherto unknown material from the fine rolls shows. On 28 January 1227, three weeks after William’s death, he secured a writ from the king, recorded on the fine rolls, which gave him actual possession of Debden and Walden, although he was to account for any surplus above his annual £100 at the Exchequer. ⁹¹ The grant was made during the king’s pleasure and did not mention Matilda’s claims, so it looks as though Langton was making a bid for possession of the manors in case these did not succeed. In the event, however, Matilda, having purchased powerful backers, was successful and, in October 1227, as the fine rolls again show, she gained possession of the Mandeville inheritance. ⁹² At this point, the arrangement with regard to Debden and Walden reverted to what it had been under William de Mandeville, with the four knights giving Langton his £100 and any surplus going to Matilda and her husband. ⁹³

⁋17Langton himself died next year in July 1228, and for a while the Mandeville payments continued to his executors, before reverting to his successors as archbishop. ⁹⁴ Then, in 1235, Matilda de Mandeville, now separated from her second husband, reached a more comprehensive settlement. In a move foreshadowed by Langton’s possession of the manors in 1227, she granted Debden and Walden to Edmund [of Abingdon] archbishop of Canterbury in return for 180 marks (£120) a year being deducted from the debt, now put at 7160 marks. Edmund then granted the manors to Walden abbey in return for it paying him and his successors the equivalent amount. ⁹⁵ Once the debt was liquidated (which would have been in 1275) the manors were to return to the Mandeville heirs. At last Walden abbey, which presumably could still make a profit on the deal, was revenged on Matilda’s father, Geoffrey fitzPeter. ⁹⁶

⁋18Meanwhile, King Henry and his government were doing little to match the church’s acquisitiveness. Initially, as the fine rolls show, Matilda and her husband, far more vulnerable than William de Mandeville, had been told to pay the debt off at £200 a year, as opposed to William’s £100 (which in any case he had never met), but, perhaps through the intervention of William Marshal, this was quickly reduced to £100 a year, £40 10s. 10d. annually being set against the payment due to Matilda for the earldom of Essex. Thus she only had to come up with an annual £59 9s. 2d. in actual cash. ⁹⁷ Matilda died in 1236 and was followed by her son, Humphrey de Bohun, who thus added the earldom of Essex to his Bohun earldom of Hereford. He cannot have welcomed inheriting the Mandeville debts as well, but, again as the fine rolls show, his payments were reduced first to £50 a year, and then, during the Poitevin expedition of 1242, to £40 10s. 10d. so that they could be set against the sum to which he was entitled as earl of Essex. ⁹⁸ Since Henry III made this concession for himself and his heirs, Humphrey had no need ever again to make actual payments to the king. He may well have reflected that the church, thanks to Langton’s initiative, was being far more extortionate, and was depriving him of two of his best manors worth well over £120 a year.

⁋19Perhaps diplomatically, many of the documents of the 1220 and 1230s never referred to how the Mandeville debt to Langton had arisen. But the Mandevilles and their Bohun successors did not forget, which is a measure of their bitterness. It was thus almost apologetically that Henry III, when in 1242 he finally agreed to set the debt off against the payments due for the earldom of Essex, referred (in the writ on the fine rolls) to

⁋20‘the remainder of all the debt which he [Humphrey de Bohun] owes us of the 20,000 marks through which Geoffrey de Mandeville, once earl of Essex, his uncle, made fine with the lord King John, our father, to have Isabella, once countess of Gloucester, as his wife’. ⁹⁹

⁋21Almost certainly this passage reflects the terms in which Humphrey de Bohun spoke to Henry about the debt, if with expletives deleted.

⁋22Langton had accepted the revenues from Debden and Walden as compensation for the losses of the church, and he may well have used them directly for that purpose. ¹⁰⁰ Yet even here there was another side, for his stake in the manors also came to fit in well with his private interests. Having established himself in Essex, he busied himself setting up his kinsmen as landholders in the surrounding area, a point I owe to Tony Moore. In 1223, partly through marriage and partly through purchase, he acquired two thirds of the Essex barony of Aveley for his nephew Stephen Langton. ¹⁰¹ Two years later, he married his brother, Walter, to the heiress of the Anstey barony, whose castle at Anstey was less than ten miles from Debden and Walden. ¹⁰² One wonders indeed, whether, Langton also used the revenues from the two manors to finance his programme of acquisitions. There were mixed views within the contemporary church as to whether bishops and abbots could use their revenues to advance lay relatives, but many did, and no doubt Langton could have found something in his biblical exegesis to justify the practice. ¹⁰³

⁋23At the end of this long and murky story, opinions may differ as to the morality of Langton’s conduct. One can see his point of view. The church needed compensation. The Mandevilles hardly came with clean hands. Yet one may also think that his actions contravened the principles of the Charter and are not easily squared, to put it mildly, with the canons of his academic thought. He is indeed open to the charge of double standards, even of hypocrisy. That conclusion has wider implications which cannot be pursued here. To what extent did other scholar bishops leave their principles in the schoolroom when their own interests, or the interests of the church were at stake? Did Grosseteste set a higher standard? Would he have accepted the Mandeville deal? ¹⁰⁴ Whatever the answers here, one thing is certain. However compromised, Langton remains a key figure in the history of Magna Carta. In 1215, despite his doubts about its validity, he put the church indelibly into the Charter, and thus ensured that ecclesiastics were involved from the start in its proclamation and preservation. Then, in 1225, he freed the Charter from its tainted origins in an act of coercion, and thus enabled churchmen to support it as a whole, without qualification and constraint. Stephen Langton was central to the form and survival of the Charter. We are all in his debt.

1.4. C 60/39B, Fine Roll 26 Henry III (20 May 1242–27 October 1242), membrane 2.

1.4.1. 557

⁋1 17 June. Saintes. For H. earl of Essex and Hereford. To the barons of the Exchequer. The king, for himself and his heirs, has granted to H. de Bohun, earl of Essex and Hereford, that he may henceforth render £40 10s. at the Exchequer for the remainder of the whole debt he owes him of the 20000 m. by which Geoffrey de Mandeville, formerly earl of Essex, his uncle, made fine with King J., the king’s father, for having Isabella, formerly countess of Gloucester, to wife, and for all other debts which the same earl owes the king at the Exchequer, for which he previously made fine with the king to render £50 at the aforesaid Exchequer, ¹⁰⁵ and that the king and his heirs, by the hand of the sheriff of Essex who will be, will take those £40 10s. that the same earl was accustomed to take each year from the county of Essex in the name of earl, and the king and his heirs ¹⁰⁶ will retain them in their hand in part payment of the aforesaid debt and will cause this to be allowed to him and his heirs each year until the king will be satisfied for all of the aforesaid debts. ¹⁰⁷ In the meantime, the king or his heirs ¹⁰⁸ will not distrain the same earl or his heirs by their lands, chattels or tenements for the aforesaid debts, or cause them to be distrained. Once the aforesaid £40 10s. have been in the king’s hand for such time that the aforesaid earl and his heirs will be quit from the aforesaid debts, they are to revert quit to the same earl and his heirs freely and without impediment, so that the king and his heirs ¹⁰⁹ will have no right in the same £40 10s. and thereafter will not claim, or be able to claim, anything which would prevent the earl and his heirs taking the aforesaid rent as fully and freely as the same earl was accustomed to take it from the aforesaid county before this concession. ¹¹⁰ Order to cause this to be done and enrolled thus.