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Reshaping narratives, repatriation and Richard III : 25 lessons we've learnt from history in the last 25 years
To celebrate a quarter-century of BBC History Magazine, we asked 25 expert contributors to nominate the most important historical discoveries and revelations since the publication launched in 2000
1. Women played major roles in the Viking Age Just 25 years ago, there seemed to be little new to say about the Vikings – and that was particularly the case for Viking women. The centuries-old consensus was that Viking wives and daughters stayed at home, passively watching as the Viking Age unfolded around them. New technologies have forced a rethink, though, completely revolutionising what we know about Viking women. The first significant discovery came from a systematic survey of a nationwide database of metal-detected female dress jewellery. This demonstrated for the first time that Scandinavian women migrated to England in substantial numbers. Next, isotope analysis of teeth from the graves of Viking women showed that they had formed a key part of the migration process elsewhere, too, moving across the Viking world alongside their families. The most dramatic and most debated discovery, however, came through analysis of ancient DNA. In Birka, Sweden, an individual buried in a high-status warrior grave turned out to be biologically female. This led to a worldwide discussion of the roles of Viking women: we now agree that, though many certainly did stay at home, some played active roles in trade, craft and manufacturing processes, and even held military positions. Cat Jarman is an archaeologist, author and TV presenter. Her books include The Bone Chests: Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons (William Collins, 2023) 2. Britain has been culturally diverse for far longer than most believed The murder of George Floyd by white police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 signalled a turning point in the way the histories of people of African descent were taught and perceived across Europe. From that moment, the British press and institutions felt that they had to engage better with narratives about minority ethnic communities. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-1292414316-CMYK-6ff23f7.jpg" width="1451" height="967" alt="A black and white photograph of a man sitting in a chair, leaning on one arm. He is wearing a suit." title="Walter Tull, an English footballer of Caribbean heritage, c1908–11 and (below) with the FA Amateur Cup-winning Clapton FC team of 1908–09. Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the British Army, he was killed in action in France in March 1918" /> A renewed interest in personal histories and trajectories of people of African descent in Britain showcased stories about their links to major events – from the celebrated story of the British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole during the Crimean War to the experiences of black British football player Walter Tull and other soldiers of Caribbean and African descent who fought for Britain during the world wars. We also saw a number of new black history courses launched in UK universities, and school classes featuring black, Asian and minority ethnic histories. Uncovering these multiple trajectories further highlights how culturally diverse Britain has been over many centuries, and why sharing stories about a common past can bring communities together. Olivette Otele is a distinguished research professor at SOAS University of London. Her books include African Europeans: An Untold History (Hurst, 2020) 3. The Tudors got Richard III wrong We learned many things from the discovery of Richard III’s skeleton beneath a Leicester car park 13 years ago. We learned about the king’s physique, his diet and the injuries he sustained while fighting for crown and country at Bosworth against a foreign-backed invader. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/BAL1066157-CMYK-2-7311920.jpg" width="2889" height="1925" alt="A painted portrait of Richard III. He is wearing a red top with a gold cape around his shoulders, with a black cap that includes a gold jewel on the front" title="Richard III, portrayed after 1510 – long after his death at Bosworth. “History can make no progress unless it’s ready to test and deconstruct generally held assumptions,” says Philippa Langley (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> But, for me, two lessons in particular stand out from the discovery. The first is that history can make no progress unless it’s ready to test and deconstruct generally held traditions and assumptions – even those held by historians and archaeologists. Those of us working on the Looking for Richard Project trusted only our own painstaking, personal research in primary sources. Second, we learned that Shakespeare’s hunchback and withered arm never existed. Analysis of Richard’s skeleton – which had lain underfoot and peacefully undisturbed for 500 years – revealed that his limbs were sound, and that his spine showed a scoliosis that was invisible to onlookers. Richard’s makeshift burial in the wake of his defeat at Bosworth, in a grave cut too short, was hugely revealing. It speaks across the centuries of a victor’s disrespect for a fallen king. Philippa Langley is a historian, author and producer. Her latest book is The Princes in the Tower: Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case (The History Press, 2023) Read more | The final mystery of Richard III: how 21st-century science cracked a 500-year-old cold case 4. Magna Carta was only part of a truly revolutionary settlement King John’s Magna Carta is perhaps the best-known document in world history, generally regarded as the first attempt to place kingship itself under the rule of law. Not surprisingly, it has been much studied. Yet a torrent of new evidence has been brought to light over the past 20 years, transforming understanding of both the document and its wider context. We now know of many more ‘original’ Magna Cartas (from its subsequent reissues) than were previously dreamed of. And incidental discoveries in archives from Paris to New England have reshaped our appreciation of what actually happened in 1215. A fortuitous discovery in Lambeth Palace Library, for example, reveals that the charter was part of a truly revolutionary settlement, with the barons briefly permitted dual control of local government in tandem with the king. We know, too, that John himself made no attempt to publish the charter. On the contrary, it was the bishops who ensured its distribution, preservation and even, in some cases, its physical copying. The archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, is unmasked not so much as an honest broker between king and barons but as an ideologically committed adherent of the anti-royal party. By such means can new evidence help us rewrite the past – even for the oldest and best-known stories. Nicholas Vincent is professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia. His books include John (Allen Lane, 2020) 5. We ignore the past at our peril Most compellingly, the past 25 years have reminded us that history matters. Every life-sapping conflict since the millennium – Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Ukraine, Gaza – has its roots deep in the past. Of course, the past does not determine the future, but the future is shaped by the past. Merely railing against adversaries or shouting ‘victory’ from the rooftops may make for good headlines but, in the absence of some understanding of ‘how we got from there to here’, such indulgence is vacuous grandstanding. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-2198688988-CMYK-2766b77.jpg" width="3500" height="2331" alt="A group of Sudanese women and children dressed in bright clothing sit on the ground together. They all look serious." title="Women and children displaced by the civil war in Sudan, February 2025. The roots of such conflicts lie deep in the past, says Jonathan Dimbleby (Image by Getty Images)" /> The past has never been ‘another country’. This is especially true of Europe, where the tectonic plates did not stop shifting with the end of the Second World War in 1945 or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The events of the past 25 years have demonstrated only too cruelly that our continent is inherently, and sometimes alarmingly, unstable. All leaders claim to act in what they believe to be the national interest. The. less they make ill-judged declaratory statements of intent and the more they demonstrate a realistic vision of the future, based on a clear awareness of the past, the better it will be for all of us. History is a great mentor. Jonathan Dimbleby is a historian, biographer and broadcaster. His latest book is Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War (Viking, 2024) 6. Hitler tapped into hard-wired emotions to stir up hatred For my new book, I found it tremendously helpful to talk to academic psychologists and neuroscientists about the insights we can gain, in general terms, from their disciplines. For instance, I learned how Hitler – without knowing the science behind his actions – tapped into a profound truth about the way the brain works. In stirring up hatred against Jews and Bolsheviks, Hitler targeted the amygdala – the part of the brain that immediately processes feelings of anxiety, fear and anger. These powerful emotions are produced almost instantly, because it’s the amygdala that helps us avoid sudden danger. It’s a survival mechanism that, as the neuroscientist Professor Robert Sapolsky explained to me, is “hard-wired into us… and we’ll never get rid of it”. Hitler capitalised on this neurobiological tendency, and in the process did his best to subdue the parts of the brain that offer a more logical analysis. Indeed, he seemed to confirm that he was well aware of the immense power of this approach when he remarked, during a private speech to the Hamburger Nationalklub in 1926, that “the only stable emotion is hate”. Laurence Rees is a historian, author and documentary film-maker. His new book is The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings From History (Viking, 2025) 7. Hunter-gatherers and farmers joined in wild rituals 12,000 years ago Around the turn of this millennium, in a remote south-eastern corner of Turkey, an astonishing discovery was being made – one that stretched the story of humanity back more than 12,000 years. Still today, only about 5 per cent of the archaeological site known as Karahantepe has been excavated – but even that tiny fraction is changing our understanding of the beginning of society as we know it. Emerging from the earth is a giant chamber with 11 huge stone phallus columns, overlooked by the face of a man with a splendid handlebar moustache and the body of a snake. The head of a big cat is visible in the centre, and carvings on 250 obelisks in the area could be mistaken for gargoyles on any medieval cathedral.We expect the female equivalent of the chamber to be unearthed soon. Karahantepe, it turns out, is just one site in a constellation of a hundred or so – the Taş Tepeler – which together are rewriting the story of human collaboration. The orthodoxy used to be that hunter-gatherers invented farming, then settled down, then manifested religion to establish common mores to live by. But the discoveries seem to show that hunter-gatherers and the very first farmers gathered together in huge, collective spaces for wild ritual parties to share know-how and ideas. This is one of the joys of history: it is constantly protean. Every year, new finds reveal earlier and earlier evidence of human achievement and sophistication. Bettany Hughes is a historian, author and broadcaster. Her latest book is The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (W&N, 2024) 8. Returning stolen artefacts to Africa is no longer a naive dream Some 25 years ago, when I was starting my career in museums, a sense of optimism and renewal imbued the sector – yet the restitution of stolen African objects did not seem a realistic possibility. Today, the culture has changed profoundly. My old employer, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, has returned its contested Benin plaques; the Dutch, Germans and French have either begun programmes of return or discussed the possibility. In Britain, the Horniman has returned ownership of its Benin plaques, and the V&A and the British Museum (both restricted by law from giving collections permanently) have entered into long-term loan agreements with the Asante royal family in Ghana. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-1432612271-CMYK-85c7997.jpg" width="2806" height="1869" alt="A collection of Benin Bronzes – objects stolen by British troops in 1897 – displayed in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC in 2022 before repatriation to Nigeria (Image by Getty Images)" title="A collection of Benin Bronzes – objects stolen by British troops in 1897 – displayed in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC in 2022 before repatriation to Nigeria" /> Conversations that were inconceivable a generation ago – about ethics, about custodianship, about narrative, about ghosts – have begun to happen. We have to find ways to tell complex stories of empire, enslavement and colonialism more effectively and inclusively. It’s important that museums can craft their curatorial narratives with moral confidence, and the resolution of such thorny, long-term issues is vital. There is still much to do. Our museums must go further in building partnerships and programmes with museums across the African continent. We need to learn from African expertise – and in turn we must share our resources and expertise to improve the telling of these rich and amazing histories everywhere. Gus Casely-Hayford is a curator, historian and broadcaster. His books include The Lost Kingdoms of Africa (Bantam, 2012) 9. Anne Boleyn was a proto-feminist heroine Anne Boleyn is unique among English queens, and her story is remarkable, but much of the modern fascination with that tale lies in perceptions of her fuelled by films and novels. She is now revered as a feminist heroine – a concept I would once have dismissed as anachronistic. When I said as much to the historian Sarah Gristwood, she replied: “Well, actually…” and very generously allowed me a preview of her research for her marvellous book Game of Queens (Oneworld, 2016), which inspired me to find out more. Feminism was unknown in Tudor England. But in early 16th-century Europe, where Anne spent her formative years, there was an intellectual debate that questioned traditional attitudes to women, and looked forward to an era – the ‘reign of virtue’ – in which they would enjoy more power and equality. In this age of female rulers, Anne had two shining examples to study: Margaret of Austria and Marguerite of Valois, both of whom she served or knew. We have to study her in this European context in order to understand the cultural influences to which she was exposed, giving her the confidence to pursue her brilliant career. Alison Weir is an author and historian. Her latest book is The Cardinal: The Secret Life of Thomas Wolsey (Headline, 2025) 10. Mary Seacole was a true heroine of the Crimean War One of the most significant changes over the past 25 years is the extent to which researching and writing black history has opened up. This is partly down to the dedication of historians determined to extend knowledge of the black experience by digging deeply and stubbornly into little-consulted sources. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/2PJ0WEX-CMYK-06a24e3.jpg" width="2422" height="1614" alt="British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, who cared for sick and wounded troops in Crimea. Digitisation of sources helped Helen Rappaport paint a more rounded portrait of her (Image by Alamy)" title="British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, who cared for sick and wounded troops in Crimea. Digitisation of sources helped Helen Rappaport paint a more rounded portrait of her (Image by Alamy)" /> In my own case, 20 years of concerted searching across digitised newspapers and in genealogical archives gave the lie to the till-then widely perpetuated view that Mary Seacole had been wildly overrated and undeserving of the ‘Greatest Black Briton’ sobriquet awarded her in 2004. For decades, detractors dismissed her as a colourful but largely irrelevant presence who had done little more than ‘sell tea and buns’ to the soldiers in Crimea. But my searches, enabled by digitisation of sources, brought me to a more complete view of a woman who deserves to be viewed as a heroine. She journeyed 1,600 miles to Crimea under her own steam and at her own expense to set up shop in the middle of a war zone – a lone black woman facing prejudice and risking her own safety to help the wounded, sick and dying. Delving into previously unseen sources over an extended period enabled me to challenge the conventional sanctification of ‘the black Florence Nightingale’ and present a fully rounded personality. Helen Rappaport is an author and historian. Her latest book is The Rebel Romanov (Simon & Schuster, 2025) 11. Public history can play a major role in understanding the past One great change over the last 25 years has been the huge growth in public history – not just as an academic discipline, though of course it rests on the work of professional historians, archivists and museum workers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-473083908-CMYK-5eef700.jpg" width="5184" height="3454" alt="A woman wearing plain clothing and with her hair in a bun sits at a spinning wheel" title="A re-enactor at a recreation of a medieval German monastery village. Such projects contribute to public – and academic – understanding of the past (Image by Getty Images)" /> Public history is the product of us all. It is about public interaction with the past, its interpretation and popularisation – changing our understanding not only of the past but also of our own times. It’s about the link between historians and the general public. Films, podcasts, radio, heritage societies, living archaeologists, local history and re-enactment groups – even readers of this magazine – are all part of it. Good popularisation is the necessary link between professionals and the population at large, without which history becomes a closed debate between historians. And in a democracy, that link is vital: it’s part of a healthy information ecosystem, our reality check in the face of the tide of fake history on social media. Perhaps not surprisingly, in Trump’s America the US National Council on Public History is becoming more important in keeping minds open. When I hear people argue that you can’t rewrite history – though that is our actual collective job as makers of history! – it makes me think that perhaps we should have one here, too. Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. Read his column from the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine here 12. Charles I wasn’t so very chaste Traditional accounts of Charles I, the so-called ‘martyr king’, have always presented him as a grave, austere and chaste figure – the very opposite of his indecorous, bawdy father, James VI & I, and his dissipated, promiscuous son, Charles II. Charles’s marriage to his wife, Henrietta Maria, was undoubtedly a happy one and, until the royal couple were torn apart during the Civil War, he does indeed appear to have remained true to her alone. However, in an article published in 2006, the historian Sarah Poynting revisited a series of encrypted letters written by Charles in late 1647 and 1648, while he was imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight after his defeat by the parliamentarians. Previous attempts to decipher these letters had not been entirely accurate, Poynting showed, and in fact one of them revealed that Charles had been attempting to inveigle the royalist agent Jane Whorwood into his bed. Using the frankest language, Charles went so far as to suggest to Jane that she should secretly conceal herself in the ‘stool-room’ adjoining his chamber while he was out on his daily walk so that, after his return, he could dally with her at length. It was a remarkable discovery – and one that suggested previous characterisations of the king as “blamelessly uxorious” may well have been a little wide of the mark. Mark Stoyle is professor of history at the University of Southampton. His latest book is A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 (Yale University Press, 2022) Read more | "Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad? 13. Mesolithic Europeans had dark skin and blue eyes One of the major scientific advances in archaeology over the past 25 years has been the ability to extract and analyse DNA from the remains of long-dead people from the distant past. Such ancient DNA can shed light on how people were related to one another, on a family or population scale, and provide insights into the migration and movement of people over time. It can also tell us what diseases they had and – perhaps most compelling – what they looked like. In 2018, researchers at the Natural History Museum revealed that one of the inhabitants of Mesolithic Britain, a man who lived around 10,000 years ago, had dark skin and blue eyes. This individual – known as ‘Cheddar Man’, because his remains were discovered in a cave in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset – is represented by one of the oldest complete skeletons ever identified in Britain. Earlier results from remains found from Spain, Luxembourg and Hungary confirm that most hunter-gatherers in Mesolithic Europe looked this way. The genes for lighter skin pigmentation arrived thousands of years later, in waves of migration from the east during the Neolithic and Bronze Age. In addition, natural selection over time favoured lighter tones that allow more Vitamin D synthesis in the skin, essential in northerly climes. Susan Greaney is a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Exeter 14. Premodern Japan was surprisingly progressive One of the most fascinating and dynamic periods of Japanese history was the Meiji Restoration, which began with the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868 and ended with the death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912. Japan opened up as never before to diplomatic and trading relationships with the west and, over little more than four decades, modernised its economy and society at an astonishing rate. By 1912, it had become one of the world’s great powers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-566421965-CMYK-53c95d9.jpg" width="2704" height="1802" alt="A print showing a large blue river with little boats on it. A large arched bridge crosses the river. In the background, a volcano can be seen" title="An 1856 print of rural Japan by Hiroshige. Under the Tokugawa shogunate that preceded the 1868 Meiji Restoration, Japan enjoyed an artistic and intellectual flourishing (Image by Getty Images)" /> For a long time, this explosion of activity was contrasted with the preceding 250 years of the Tokugawa shogunate. That system was regarded as feudal, backward and badly out of date, requiring rescue at the hands of modernising and westernising reformers. Much though this view of history suited western historians across the 20th century, and flattering as it was to western modernity, since 2000 historians have increasingly been exploring the myriad achievements of the shogunate. Across two and a half centuries of peace, Japanese commerce, intellectual life and the arts enjoyed extraordinary growth and creativity, from theatre through to a tourism industry and a publishing boom. Without the commercial and technical expertise, high literacy rates and great bustling cities that developed under the shogunate, the Meiji Restoration could not have happened in the way that it did. Christopher Harding is senior lecturer in Asian history at the University of Edinburgh and creator of the IlluminAsia newsletter and podcast (illuminasia.org). His latest book is The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East (Allen Lane, 2024) 15. Egypt’s great pyramids at Giza weren’t built by foreign slaves Dominating the Giza Plateau for almost five millennia, the great pyramids still capture imaginations around the world. For centuries, archaeologists and historians have tried to determine how these magnificent monuments, including the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World, were created – and now we know who built them. Contrary to popular depictions, construction wasn’t completed by foreign slaves but by Egyptian employees. Excavations of a workers’ village over the past couple of decades, and the discovery of builders’ tombs in 2009, have transformed the narrative. The village, dating from the Fourth Dynasty (starting c4,600 years ago), boasted bakeries, breweries, butchers and a hospital. In the burial sites, skeletons show signs of hard labour, as one might expect, but they’re also accompanied by jars of bread and beer, ready for the afterlife. There are female skeletons, too, confirming that women played roles in building the pyramids. Hieroglyphs suggest a system of skilled labourers and artisans, from “overseer of the side of the pyramid” to “inspector of the craftsmen”. It’s also clear that villagers from surrounding areas came here to work in construction, usually in three-month stints. Their graffiti indicates that each cadre might associate themselves with one particular pharaoh or pyramid: the “friends of Khufu”, for example, or “drunkards of Menkaure”. The inscriptions confirm that the pyramid builders were Egyptian. And the manner and location of the burials, in the shadow of the great pharaohs, puts the slave myth to bed. Islam Issa is professor of literature and history at Birmingham City University. His latest book is Alexandria: The City that Changed the World (Sceptre, 2023) 16. Personal links to empire can reshape old narratives Astonishingly, I completed my entire education without learning about the British empire. I don’t even have a recollection of hearing the world ‘empire’ mentioned at school – and I studied History A-level! I now know that my experience is not unique. In the past 10 years or so, though, I have gained a growing understanding of not only what happened and how it shaped Britain today, but also of my own personal connection to empire and its tumultuous end. I feel lucky to be making programmes and writing books at a time when there is a greater interest in knowing about Britain’s imperial past – not that it is without complications or controversies. And things continue changing: a new generation of historians is exploring archives and asking different questions. Teachers are choosing to explore empire in all its complexity, and conversations are being had between people in the diaspora and their family members about a time when they were subjects of empire. I am learning that, just because an area of history is overlooked or not spoken of, it doesn’t always have to be that way. Kavita Puri is a journalist and broadcaster for BBC Radio 4. Read her Hidden Histories column from the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine here 17. Stonehenge was built in an already sacred area The past two and a half decades have seen a transformation in our understanding of one of the most iconic ancient monuments in Britain and, indeed, the world: Stonehenge. Archaeological research has revealed that the 4,500-year-old prehistoric ‘temple’ stood at the heart of a sacred landscape infinitely richer than previously thought. Scores of ritual monuments have been discovered in a vast halo scattered across the countryside around the monument. Even more extraordinarily, tests have revealed that one of Stonehenge’s most important stones was transported all the way from what’s now northern Scotland – and that a large number of the smaller stones had probably originally formed part of another stone circle in south-west Wales before being brought here. And research shows that some of the Neolithic people buried at Stonehenge did not come from the area but from western Britain, possibly from modern-day Wales – significant, given the origins of many of its smaller stones. We now know, too, that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were active in the Stonehenge area some 5,000 years before the monument existed. This remarkable new information, together with earlier evidence that a series of Mesolithic wooden obelisks may have stood adjacent to the site of Stonehenge, suggests that the area had been sacred for millennia. David Keys is the archaeological correspondent for The Independent 18. The tide seems to have turned against the British empire By the year 2000, the British empire – formerly a global superpower – had been transformed into an organisation with entirely voluntary membership, the Commonwealth. At the time, academic assessment of this extraordinary transformation resulted in a number of books – including my own – which concluded that British imperialism had been overall, and in a remarkable variety of ways, both a blessing and a curse. In the 25 years since that relatively benign consensus, however, there has been a profound anti-imperial swing resulting in a wholesale condemnation of British imperial history – shifting the dial remarkably. It is, however, vital to understand that, even at its Victorian zenith, the empire faced trenchant criticism from within. Anti-imperial attitudes were commonplace on the left wing of the Liberal Party, the infant Labour Party and the generally hostile Irish Nationalist Party. Nonconformist churches – Methodists, Congregationalists and, above all, Quakers – voiced criticisms of imperial aims and methods. Internal opposition, from resentful Afrikaners, French Canadians and diverse displaced and conquered Indigenous peoples, also inevitably arose. To cope with such internal opposition, and to prolong its existence, the imperial system undertook much self-correction – a process that led to mass devolution, the end of empire and the birth of today’s Commonwealth. In short, we are now keenly aware that there is no neat and fireproof analysis of the nature, governance and purpose of the British empire. It was such a huge, complex and long-lived organisation that almost every criticism, as well as almost every justification, has some validity somewhere and at some time. Denis Judd is professor emeritus of imperial and Commonwealth history at London Metropolitan University, and author of Empire (IB Tauris revised paperback edition, 2012) 19. The world is in danger of reverting to its darkest days After the collapse of Soviet-style communism in Russia and eastern Europe in 1989–91, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called The End of History and the Last Man. In it, he predicted optimistically that the demise of the Soviet system meant that western liberalism would roll out across the world, and that the future belonged to progressive democracy, with no rivals to challenge it. In fact, since the first issue of BBC History Magazine was published in 2000, history has evolved along a drastically different path to the one that Fukuyama predicted. So far, the 21st century has belonged to resurgent strongmen. In country after country, authoritarian regimes led by dictatorial rulers have come to power – and stayed there, with scant regard for democracy. Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, Erdogan’s Turkey, Kim’s North Korea and Sisi’s Egypt are leading examples of a worldwide trend that shows no sign of ending. So what we have learned from history in this century is a rather troubling lesson. After the terrors of the 20th century, the world is not moving into broad, sunlit uplands but is in danger of reverting to the darkest days of the past. Nigel Jones is a historian, journalist and former reviews editor of BBC History Magazine. His latest book is Kitty’s Salon: Sex, Spying and Surveillance in the Third Reich (John Blake, 2023) 20. Technology enables deep-sea shipwreck discoveries – but we should beware hubris In recent years, sophisticated modern technologies have allowed humans to dive deeper, explore the seabed autonomously, and locate shipwrecks. Lost in 1915 in the Weddell Sea, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s polar vessel Endurance made headlines when its wreck was rediscovered in 2022. Recovering or even visiting the wreck, which lies at a depth of 3,000 metres, are major challenges. But submersible robots were able to photograph the Endurance from every angle, enabling scientists to create a digital model of the whole vessel as well as many artefacts preserved just as they were when the crew abandoned ship. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-1137373443cmyk-1b64874.jpg" width="5248" height="3496" alt="Ernest Shackleton’s polar vessel Endurance clamped in a fatal ice embrace in 1915. The discovery of its wreck on the Antarctic seabed in 2022 made headlines (Image by Getty Images)" title="Ernest Shackleton’s polar vessel Endurance clamped in a fatal ice embrace in 1915. The discovery of its wreck on the Antarctic seabed in 2022 made headlines (Image by Getty Images)" /> The wreck of the Gloucester, lost in 1682 after hitting a sandbank while transporting James, Duke of York and his court, was discovered in 2007. Future excavation of the site could provide an unprecedented opportunity to explore a Restoration royal court frozen in time. Just as the Mary Rose Museum has captured the public imagination, making Henry VIII’s warship part of British national conversations, telling the Gloucester’s stories could transform public understanding of a historical period that laid the constitutional foundations of modern Britain. In 2025, mid-point in the United Nations ‘Ocean Decade’, a key task is to meaningfully integrate Britain’s remarkable maritime cultural heritage into ocean governance to help create a sustainable blue economy. Nonetheless, humanity should remain humble in the face of the ocean’s uncontrollable forces. The implosion in 2023 of the submersible Titan on its expedition to the wreck of the Titanic – resulting in the death of all on board – is a cautionary tale. Some 3 million shipwrecks around the world prove that the sea – so elemental, so powerful – shouldn’t be disrespected. Claire Jowitt is professor of Renaissance studies at the University of East Anglia 21. We now know how many enslaved African people were trafficked across the Atlantic The transatlantic slave trade was one of the largest forced movements of people in world history – yet for decades it was difficult to quantify. Then, in the early 1990s, an international team came together to solve this problem. The result was the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which showed that 12.5 million people were transported. Of those, 10.7 million survived the journey and arrived in the Americas. Many people, particularly in the US and the UK, assumed that most enslaved people were trafficked to the United States. In fact, the database showed that fewer than 400,000 Africans were forcibly taken directly to mainland North America; about 4.8 million arrived in South America and 4.7 million in the Caribbean. First published as a CD-ROM in 1999, the database was greatly expanded in the early 2000s to include the Portuguese trade in the South Atlantic. Re-released as an open-access website in 2008, including details of an additional 7,000 journeys, it has been described as one of the greatest historical achievements of the 21st century. Though the database does not give us a rich picture of the experiences of enslaved peoples, it has been critical to understanding the scale of one of the world’s worst human-rights violations. Hannah Cusworth is a historian, curator and history education consultant Read more | The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation 22. Richard III was behind the disappearance of the princes in the Tower… probably It’s history’s most compelling missing persons case: what happened to Edward V and his younger brother, Richard, after they were placed in the Tower in 1483 on the orders of their uncle, who soon afterwards seized the throne as Richard III? The mystery has been the subject of intense debate ever since. Some three decades later, Thomas More had established the narrative that Richard had his nephews murdered with the help of his henchman, James Tyrell. There was no shortage of other suspects but, though every scrap of evidence has been pored over by generations of historians since, the trail was already cold. Recently, Tim Thornton, professor of history at the University of Huddersfield, took a novel approach. Rather than researching the events leading up to the princes’ disappearance, he traced the lives of those involved in the years that followed – and found links between Thomas More and the two men he claimed had carried out the murder for Tyrell. Then, last year, Thornton came across a book of wills in the National Archives that included one made in 1516 by a wealthy London widow, Margaret Capel, half sister-in-law of Sir James Tyrell. Among her chattels listed in the will was “the chain of Edward V” – the only one of the boys’ possessions referenced in sources after their disappearance. The fact that it turned up in the family of the prime suspect makes it close to a ‘smoking gun’. Tracy Borman is a historian, author and broadcaster. Her documentary The Princes in the Tower: A Damning Discovery is on My5 23. History can help veterans cope with PTSD A remarkable discovery made this century is that history can be hugely therapeutic for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It might seem deeply counterintuitive but when veterans undertake top-level archaeological research on battlefields, rather than re-igniting their traumas it often tends to work in positive ways for them psychologically, and can be a useful step on their road to recovery. The work done by the organisation Waterloo Uncovered, founded in 2015 by former Coldstream Guards captain (and PTSD sufferer) Mark Evans, has been instrumental in this regard. Its mental-health experts found that, after helping to discover facts that are useful to military historians – the musket-ball scatter-pattern outside the orchard at the Hougoumont farmhouse in a key sector of the Waterloo battlefield, for example – veterans often saw improvements in their mental conditions. There are various theories about the mechanisms of this effect. Perhaps such work reminds veterans that their predecessors two centuries ago encountered much the same kind of perils they did themselves in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Evans also noted that the project provided a safe and structured environment in which veterans with shared experiences could start to open up to one another about the challenges they faced. Whatever the reason, history is helping in a tangible way today. Andrew Roberts’ latest book, with General David Petraeus, is Conflict: The Evolution of War-fare from 1945 to Gaza (William Collins, 2024) 24. Technology has revolutionised how historians work and collaborate One of the great things about historical research is that it keeps on moving. When I was a young historian, looking back in time required me to handle complex written materials and work out how to supplement them with reference material culture, to archaeology or to finds such as coins and lead seals. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-3433569-CMYK-2f40b22.jpg" width="2726" height="1815" alt="A sketch shows a massive explosion with black smoke billowing into the air" title="The catastrophic 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, depicted in a contemporary lithograph. Technological advances enable historians to better understand the impacts of such events (Image by Getty Images)" /> The past quarter-century has revolutionised the tools available to historians. Huge advances in the sciences, combined with plunging costs, mean that we now have access to data sources that don’t just provide new insights into topics such as human migration or the spread and lethality of pandemic diseases, but also enable us to do so with increasing accuracy. These are tools we must learn to rely on. Many of these new materials are related to climate archives, enabling historians to reconstruct past periods of environmental change – or even, in some cases, to better understand the effects of single, one-off extreme events such as floods, storms or volcanic eruptions. That, in turn, has changed how historians work, not least in the ways we can collaborate more often and more meaningfully with colleagues across research groups. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a historian – to be part of the community of people interested in the past. Peter Frankopan is professor of global history at Oxford University. His latest book is The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (Bloomsbury, 2023) 25. Powerful female leaders weren’t the sex-crazed failures of (manmade) myth Our understanding of queenship has, thankfully, moved forward in the past 25 years – just as women’s history has also moved forward. Female rulers such as Cleopatra and Mary, Queen of Scots have all too frequently been cited as cautionary tales about what follows when you give women power: sex and death. But in recent years, revisionist historians such as Kara Cooney, Joyce Tyldesley and Joann Fletcher have written brilliant accounts of Cleopatra, challenging the perception of her as a sex-mad failure. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-544268988-CMYK-27bfceb.jpg" width="3025" height="2016" alt="A woman with red hair tied back into a bun, wearing a brocaded red dress with a high white collar, and a lot of jewellery" title="Mary, Queen of Scots, painted c1558–60. Historical female rulers must be seen in context, says Kate Williams (Image by Getty Images)" /> Mary, Queen of Scots was surrounded by men attempting to seize her power – and, when she had a son, she was set on a course that led to her being deposed in favour of him. Lord Bothwell made her go back to his castle, where he assaulted her in an attempt to force her to marry. Past historians framed her for setting up this event. Today, though, we understand that a woman who had been seized and sexually assaulted was expected to agree to marry the man who attacked her. In Mary’s case, all of the lords were in agreement with that course of action – so what choice did Mary have? As we are increasingly coming to understand, female rulers need to be seen in context. If they lost to the powerful men of the time or, indeed, the Roman empire, we need to grasp why that happened. Such insights can shape perceptions of the past – and a future with women in power. Kate Williams is professor of public engagement with history at the University of Reading. Her latest book is The Royal Palaces: Secrets and Scandals (Frances Lincoln, 2024) This article was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
When was the worst time to be alive? You'll be surprised at what our expert has to say
If there's one lesson we should take from history, it's that we're fortunate not to be living in the past, Professor David Carpenter tells Dr David Musgrove
Imagine you’re having a truly bad day. You’ve dropped your phone down the toilet, burnt your toast, endured a packed commute on a slow-running train, and got soaked in a rain shower. And that’s all before you get to work. If there’s one lesson from history that might get you through such woes, it’s the fact that however bleak things are for you now, chances are they would have been worse if you’d had the misfortune to be alive in the past. That’s the message I got from the great medieval historian Professor David Carpenter, as he compared England in the 13th century to today. Professor Carpenter knows that century intimately: he is a world authority on Magna Carta (and was in the news recently over the discovery that he and Professor Nicholas Vincent made of a medieval copy of Magna Carta in an American library) and the definitive biographer of King Henry III. Recently I was chatting to him about Magna Carta for a HistoryExtra podcast, and when I asked him, at the end of that conversation, if there was any learning from his deep and extensive study of the past that he carried with him in day-to-day life, this was his reply: “We ought to feel how profoundly lucky we are, in two key ways: the first is parliamentary democracy, in which we have evolved a system whereby political conflicts are conducted within a democratic framework. That contrasts hugely with the 13th century when we had two very, very violent civil wars from 1215–17 and 1263–67 in which property was ravaged, people were killed, Jews were massacred, and peasants starved to death. So I think that we should value our parliamentary democracy compared to, for example, the situation in the 13th century. “The other thing we should value is that, although I know there’s obviously a lot of poverty, we live in a society where no one starves to death. Whereas in the 13th century, in years of bad harvest, very considerable numbers of peasants, and to some extent townsmen too, quite literally, starved to death.” Back to the future Professor Carpenter here is comparing Britain today to the 13th century. Clearly, globally, there are wars going on where political conflict is definitely not being solved by democratic means, and the news shows us that people are suffering terribly from malnutrition and starvation in some parts of the world right now. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/David-Carpenter-by-Damian-McFadden-crop-5f59ee0.jpg" width="2328" height="1551" alt="A man with white hair and round black glasses, wearing a suit and a dark blue and red spotty tie" title="Professor David Carpenter is a world authority on Magna Carta and the definitive biographer of King Henry III (Image by Damien McFadden)" /> Nevertheless, I think Prof Carpenter’s view is broadly shared by most people who study the past seriously. Over the years, I’ve asked various historians when and where they’d like to go back to if they could hop in a time machine, and I think pretty much universally they make the point that they wouldn’t really want to live in the past, because broadly speaking it’s better now. They generally mention dentistry as something they definitely wouldn’t want to experience without anaesthesia. Reflecting on that, I was reminded of an article we ran in BBC History Magazine a few years back, which you can now read on the HistoryExtra website, by the historian Derek Wilson, who has sadly recently passed away. We invited him to come up with a list of the worst years to be alive in history. Wilson was not short of contenders, but 1349 was a fairly obvious pick. If the 13th century wasn’t a great time to be alive, the 14th century was rock bottom. The Black Death of 1348–50 wiped out up to 60 per cent of Europe’s population, according to some estimates. “It was not just a health crisis,” he explained. “The psychological impact was devastating. It bred fear, paranoia, and a deep distrust of the authorities who had no answers.” Norwich was one of the worst-hit cities in England, losing around 7,000 of its 12,000 residents. They are just numbers now at this remove, and hard to compute, but take a moment to just sit with that level of devastation in one single urban centre. Imagine what it was like to live there at the time, and hold that thought, because I’ll come back to it momentarily. Wilson’s other choices were similarly grim: AD 60 in Britain when Rome brutally stamped out rebellion; persecution and revolt in the Reformation in 1536; war and social breakdown in 1812; and economic depression and the looming threat of global conflict in 1937. None of those years would have been much fun, but I find it hard to look past 1349 for outright existential horror. Read more | Black Death facts: your guide to "the worst catastrophe in recorded history" Escape to the past Does it actually help to know that people in the past had it pretty bad? To an extent, but David Carpenter did point out that although he does take solace in the fact that Britain today isn’t wracked by political violence and extensive starvation as it was in the 13th century, we do still have to worry about nuclear war and climate change. I get the sense that to escape those troubling new concerns, Prof Carpenter is quite happy to retreat back into the very period of the past that he’s so happy not to live in, but purely from an academic perspective, rather than any desire to time travel. “I enjoy teaching medieval history so much,” he told me. “What I take away, I think, is how invigorating and eternally fascinating both teaching medieval history is, but also researching and writing about it. It’s kept me going all my life.” So history offers two exit routes from today’s troubles – to escape from it, and to escape back into it. I guess we are supremely privileged to have the opportunity to do both of those things now. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Julian-of-Norwich-illu-by-Rose-Wilkinson-7974a9f.jpg" width="1713" height="2362" alt="A nun reads from a scroll. In the background, a cross is hanging on the wall and two candles burn on a table" title="An illustration by Rose Wilkinson of the mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich, the 14th-century author of the remarkable Revelations of Divine Love" /> All shall be well Going back to the 14th century, and the horrors of the Black Death, I sometimes find myself recalling the words of the remarkable mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich. She lived in the second half of the century and bears a male name because we don't actually know what she was called. We do know that she spent years of her life walled up in a cell in St Julian’s Church in the East Anglian city, and that’s why she’s called Julian. As I’ve said, Norwich was hammered by the Black Death. Though Julian’s life took in that horrific plague, as well as social dislocation, and religious stress, she wrote a remarkable text called Revelations of Divine Love. The historian and TV presenter Professor Janina Ramirez is, I think it’s fair to say, a Julian enthusiast. This is a quote from an article that Professor Ramirez wrote for BBC History Magazine about her (available on the HistoryExtra site for members too): “Julian lived through a time when the church was divided, communities were imploding and death was indiscriminate. Yet in the midst of this chaos she wrote a calm, optimistic and loving book. In it she stresses that God sees no sin, he is both mother and father, and that love is the root of everything.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Janina-Ramirez-by-Fran-Monks-b4b32dc.jpg" width="728" height="485" alt="Professor Janina Ramirez is a historian, broadcaster and author of Julian of Norwich: A Very Brief History (SPCK Publishing, 2016) (Image by Fran Monks)" title="Professor Janina Ramirez is a historian, broadcaster and author of Julian of Norwich: A Very Brief History (SPCK Publishing, 2016)" /> Read more | Medieval influencers: 4 women who brought change to the Middle Ages Now, I’m not a religious sort, but nevertheless I do find something incredible in the fact that this woman was able to live the life she did, in a time of such general and deep horror, and still find a chink of light to cling onto. If I am having a bad day, I do occasionally reflect on Julian's famous mantra: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” In fact, I chanted it to myself recently when I wasn’t feeling in tip-top shape on a ridiculous ultra-marathon running race that I had willingly paid to enter. I don’t know whether Julian would have been impressed with my voluntary submission to suffering, or confused by my strange self-inflicted decision to run myself into the ground, but either way, her wise words helped me get to the finish line. “It is a message that transcends theology,” says Professor Ramirez. “It speaks to anyone who has experienced hardship and found a way to endure.” If someone who had seen the devastation of the Black Death could have that attitude and write something that still helps people today, I think that’s a lesson from history that we can probably all take something from. This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.
Henry III and the Magna Carta that mattered
King John’s sealing of a charter at Runnymede in 1215 is one of the most feted moments of the Middle Ages. Yet, writes David Carpenter, it was the charter issued by his son 10 years later that became fundamental to England’s history
February 2025 marks the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. But wait – surely we already commemorated that milestone in 2015? Certainly, on 15 June that year, the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the archbishop of Canterbury, prime minister David Cameron and assorted dignitaries gathered at Runnymede. At the meadow by the Thames between Windsor and Staines, they celebrated the charter King John had sealed there exactly 800 years earlier. That document, sealed under duress from rebel barons and famously subjecting the king to the law and promising justice to all, is widely lauded today as a milestone in the establishment of English law. Read more | What did Magna Carta mean to the English in 1215? Yet the fact is that, in the centuries after 1215, the term Magna Carta was hardly ever used for John’s document. Rather, that was the name given to the charter issued nearly a decade later by King John’s son, Henry III, at Westminster on 11 February 1225. Although Henry’s charter was based on his father’s, the earlier iteration was usually called simply the ‘Charter of Runnymede’. So when, in 1297 and 1300, Henry’s son Edward I confirmed Magna Carta, he meant the charter of 1225 – and the same was true of all later confirmations. Indeed, though most of its provisions have since been repealed, those chapters that remain on the statute book of the UK today are from the 1225 version. So how did the Charter of Runnymede in 1215 become Magna Carta in 1225? On the podcast | Are we celebrating the wrong Magna Carta? Abandoned promises At the end of 1215 any progression beyond the Charter of Runnymede would have seemed unlikely, for it appeared to be a failure without a future – quashed by the pope, at the king’s behest. It had also, in effect, been abandoned by the rebel barons. Having failed to hold the king to its terms, they had taken another route: they deposed John and offered the throne to Louis, eldest son of the king of France. Louis came to England in May 1216, on a wave of support – but said nothing about the charter. Under his benevolent rule, he doubtless assured his supporters, it would be quite unnecessary. It was John’s death during the night of 18/19 October 1216 that transformed the situation. The minority government of his nine-year old son, Henry III – led by regent William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, and the papal legate Guala Bicchieri – was in a desperate situation. Louis controlled much of England. The only way forward seemed to be to accept what John had rejected and Louis was ignoring. Read more | The real King Arthur and his Lancelot? Henry the Young King's remarkable friendship with William Marshal So on 12 November 1216, a new version of the charter was issued in Henry’s name. The most controversial and radical provisions of the Charter of Runnymede were omitted, but the great bulk remained in place. This concession had its effect. Though there were no immediate desertions from Louis’ side, at the decisive battle of Lincoln in May 1217 (when forces loyal to Henry III defeated an army supporting Louis), the rebel barons hardly fought very hard. None were killed; most simply surrendered. With a revised version of the charter accepted, they could believe their cause was won. The baronial victory was confirmed by the peace settlement at the end of the war. Louis abandoned his claim to the throne and returned to France. In return, the minority government restored the rebels to their lands and, in November 1217, issued a new and improved version of the charter, accompanied by an entirely new charter regulating the running of the royal forest. It was at this point that the term Magna Carta (‘Great Charter’) was first introduced, referring not to its grandeur but to its size, to distinguish that physically larger charter from the smaller Charter of the Forest. Those two charters would now always be linked together. With both in place, why might further changes be needed in 1225? Because the 1217 charters remained problematic. How could they be trusted when issued by a king only 10 years old and lacking his own seal? Instead they bore the seals of the legate and the regent. There was another problem. Might it not be claimed that the charters were invalid, having been extracted from the king by rebellion? At a council meeting in 1223, that point was made by one of John’s most rebarbative old minsters, William Brewer. Two years later, the chance arose to put these problems right, thanks to a crisis overseas. In 1224, Louis – now king of France – overran the county of Poitou. Far to the south, Gascony seemed likely to fall as well. A gigantic effort would be needed to save the English king’s one remaining continental possession – and for that, he needed money. Read more | 6 Magna Carta myths explained With no reserves of treasure, the government knew that those vital funds could come only from a tax levied on the whole kingdom. They knew, too, that such a tax could never be collected unless sanctioned by a great council – the kind of assembly soon to be called parliament. How to secure such consent? The answer was for the king to concede, in return for the tax, new versions of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest – versions that put right the deficiencies of their predecessors. Once again, the exigencies of the continental empire played a central part in the history of Magna Carta. The loss of Normandy and Anjou in 1204, and the heavy taxation designed to fund their recovery, had been a turning point on the road to the charter of 1215. Similarly, the loss of Poitou in 1224 led directly to the Magna Carta of 1225. However, while John failed to recover his continental possessions, the great tax of 1225 did save Gascony, which remained in English hands until 1453. Doing the deal Two men above all were responsible for negotiating the deal that led to the 1225 charters, though acting from very different motives. They were the justiciar Hubert de Burgh, head of government since the death of William Marshal in 1219, and the archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton. For cautious, pragmatic de Burgh, the charters were simply a practical necessity. For Langton, one of the great biblical scholars of the age, they responded to deeply held ideas about the need for rulers to be limited by the law. The texts of both charters, crafted by Langton and de Burgh, had new preambles and new conclusions designed to address the anxieties mentioned previously. In the preamble, the king (now aged 17) was said to act “of his spontaneous and good will” – a statement not found in the 1216 and 1217 charters, nor indeed in John’s Charter of Runnymede. At the end of the new charters now hung Henry’s own seal, introduced in 1218. It showed him on the front crowned and enthroned, and on the back mounted, armoured and brandishing his sword – images that encapsulated the majesty of kingship. Read more | Alternate history: what if Magna Carta hadn’t been written? The conclusion to these revised charters also rebutted the charge that they had been extracted from the king by force. Rather, they stated, in return for his concessions everyone in the kingdom had granted him a 15th part of their movable property – essentially, a 15th part, by value, of their agricultural produce and farm animals. Producing some £40,000, roughly three times the king’s current annual revenue, this was the tax that saved Gascony. The charge of coercion was thus laid to rest. Magna Carta and the Forest Charter were the result of a freely entered bargain between king and kingdom. The consensual nature of the new documents was further demonstrated by lists of those who had witnessed and, thus, affirmed the granting of the charters – unlike earlier iterations, which had no witness lists to speak of. All the good and great of the land witnessed the charters, whatever their stance in the civil war. The witness list was headed by Archbishop Langton, 11 bishops and 20 abbots. Then came Hubert de Burgh, followed by nine earls and 23 magnates. Sensing the significance and novelty of this certification, the copy of the charters made soon afterwards at Cerne Abbey in Dorset set out the witness list in beautifully elaborate fashion, and inscribed the place and date of issue in great capital letters. Inclusivity statement Langton, responding to ideas about how just rule should benefit the whole community, also did something to make Magna Carta more inclusive. The concessions in the charters of 1216 and 1217, like those in 1215, had been made only to people who were free – thus excluding the unfree peasantry who made up the largest part of the population. In 1225, this changed. The statement that the concessions had been made to the free remained, but it was qualified – indeed, contradicted – by the new preamble in which these concessions were granted to “everyone in the kingdom”. Likewise, in the conclusion, everyone was said to have agreed the tax in return for which the charters were granted. Langton moved decisively to bring in the church full-square behind the new charters. In 1215, he had felt unable to excommunicate those who contravened John’s charter, in part because it was clearly the product of rebellion. When the charters of 1216 and 1217 were issued, Langton was out of England; now, with the new versions clearly consensual, he and his fellow bishops sentenced to excommunication all who breached them. This set a precedent, and further sentences of excommunication were promulgated in 1237 and 1253, the latter with great publicity and with circulation of the texts. Churchmen could profit as much as laymen from many of Magna Carta’s provisions but, in particular, they treasured the very first chapter, which guaranteed the freedom of the church. How right Langton had been to add it into the charter at Runnymede. Strengthened in these ways, the 1225 texts became the final and definitive versions of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest – but they were not without flaw. Despite acting “of his spontaneous and good will”, Henry was not yet 21 when issuing the charters, and therefore underage; this defect had to be put right in a proclamation of 1237. More serious was the fact that the charters set out no constitutional means of enforcement. The 1215 document had given 25 barons the power to enforce its provisions, but the barons were omitted from the subsequent versions, with nothing put in their place. Though the sentences of excommunication elevated the status and publicised the texts of the 1225 charters, their practical effect is unclear. Not surprisingly, there were constant complaints that the charters were being broken. The complaints had an element of truth, but some key chapters of Magna Carta were obeyed. The inheritance tax demanded from earls and barons, which sometimes ran into hundreds and thousands of pounds before 1215, was set at just £100. For the most part, widows of barons and knights were not forced into remarriage. Justice was no longer openly sold. The Forest Charter saw substantial areas removed from the royal forest. In general, the rule of Henry III was far less abrasive and extortionate than his father’s. Read more | “He was not a great king but he was respected as a most Christian one”: David Carpenter on Henry III The texts of the charters also became widely known and, thus, sank deep roots into English society. Copies were made by religious houses, magnates, ministers, knights, freemen and lawyers. Of the various versions, that of 1225 was easily the most copied. When the 1217 charter featured, it was often amended in the light of the 1225 changes, thus including from the preamble the king acting of his “spontaneous and good will” and, from the conclusion, him making concessions in return for the tax. Those examining the texts – and marginal annotations bear witness to intensive study – could see that Magna Carta was far more than just a baronial document. Chapters such as those regulating the levying of fines and the running of local government benefited wide sections of society. The Great Charter would never have survived had that not been the case. What’s in a name? By the end of the 13th century, Magna Carta was firmly established at the heart of the English polity and was well set for its long later history. Yet, on that point, one question remains: how and when did the Charter of Runnymede take centre stage and become universally known as Magna Carta? In the early 17th century, when the lawyers Selden and Coke saw Magna Carta as a bulwark against Stuart tyranny, it was still the charter of 1225 to which they appealed; they hardly mentioned John at all. William Shakespeare himself, in his King John, made no reference to the charter. The change came in the next century, thanks to lawyer William Blackstone. His seminal work, The Great Charter, published in 1759, printed for the first time an authentic text of the 1225 Charter under the heading ‘Magna Carta Regis Johannis’. His introduction, too, referred continuously to the ‘Great Charter’ of King John. Blackstone, it seems, was unaware that the word Magna had originally referred simply to the physical size of the 1217 and 1225 charters compared with the Charter of the Forest; he understood it to mean ‘great’ in terms of status, and thus thought it very much applicable to the charter of 1215 – the parent, as he showed, of Henry III’s later Magna Carta. (Blackstone also printed authentic texts of the 1216, 1217 and 1225 charters.) Read more | Is 15 June 1215 the true date of Magna Carta? Two historians debate Blackstone’s terminology stuck. In Bishop Stubbs’ hugely influential Constitutional History of England, published in the 1870s, John’s charter is called “The Great Charter” or Magna Carta. Likewise, JC Holt’s classic book Magna Carta, first published in 1965, was essentially about the charter of 1215. In many respects, this seems absolutely right. Without John’s charter, as Blackstone showed, the Henrician versions would never have existed. And yet the charter of 1225, consensual in a way its predecessors were not, placed Magna Carta on new and firmer foundations. The charters of 1215 and 1225 should always march together. This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Do you know the correct date of Magna Carta? Here’s why you might be wrong
Could we have been commemorating the wrong date of Magna Carta all along? Speaking on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Professor David Carpenter shares another date as a contender for the anniversary, and how the story of the charter has been shaped by other forces…
It’s one of the most memorable dates in English history: 1215, the year of Magna Carta. In that year, under pressure from his rebellious barons, King John was forced to agree to their charter at a meeting by the River Thames at Runnymede. He reluctantly put his seal to Magna Carta on 15 June and then accepted the final version on 19 June. Read more | 6 facts about Magna Carta But according to Professor David Carpenter, one of the world’s leading authorities on Magna Carta, we might have been commemorating the wrong occasion all along. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Carpenter explains that at the time, people didn’t see King John’s 1215 charter as the Magna Carta at all. “For people in the 13th century and beyond, John's charter was not regarded as Magna Carta," said Carpenter. Instead, they saw it as "the Charter of Runnymede.” So if 1215 wasn’t the defining moment, what was? The answer, Carpenter argues, is 11 February 1225 – the date when John’s son, Henry III, issued the final, definitive Magna Carta. “And in that sense, therefore, the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta is 11 February 2025,” Carpenter explains. On the podcast | Are we celebrating the wrong Magna Carta? What was Magna Carta actually about? The 1215 charter, often hailed as a cornerstone of constitutional law, was essentially a peace treaty. It was a response to the significant grievances of England’s barons, who were furious at King John’s military failures, heavy taxation, and abuses of power. The charter established a crucial principle: the king was subject to the law. But unlike modern declarations of rights, Magna Carta wasn’t a sweeping statement of liberty. It was a highly practical document, laying out specific limits on royal power. It regulated taxation, feudal inheritance, and legal procedures, while also talking about more prosaic matters such as fish weirs. One of its most famous clauses, still quoted today, declared: "To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice." Yet for all its significance, the 1215 Magna Carta failed almost immediately. Why is 1225 important in Magna Carta’s story? King John had no intention of honouring Magna Carta, and within months, he persuaded Pope Innocent III to annul it. Civil war erupted, and in desperation, the rebel barons invited Prince Louis of France to take the English throne. Everything changed when John died in October 1216. His nine-year-old son, Henry III, inherited the throne, but his supporters needed to find a way to stabilise the kingdom. Their solution? Reissuing Magna Carta. Read more | Henry III and the Magna Carta that mattered “In November 1216, from Bristol, Henry issues a new version of the charter,” Carpenter explains. It was a politically strategic move that intended to win back support from barons who had sided with Louis. A further revision followed in 1217, alongside a new Charter of the Forest, which regulated royal forests – a major grievance for landowners. It was at this point that Magna Carta got its famous name. “We've got to remember that John's [1215] charter is the Charter of Runnymede,” says Carpenter. But after 1217, when the Charter of the Forest was introduced, royal clerks needed a way to distinguish between the two. “So they decide to give it the term ‘Magna Carta’. And all that means is Great Charter.” How was the 1225 Magna Carta different? The 1225 version of Magna Carta wasn’t just another reissue – it was qualitatively different from 1215. The key change was that it was no longer extracted from the king by force. Instead, Henry III freely granted it in exchange for taxation. “There was growing unease over the legitimacy of the earlier versions,” Carpenter explains. William Brewer, a former minister of King John, questioned their legality in 1223, arguing: “The charters of Henry III should not be obeyed. They have no validity because they've been extracted by force.” The 1225 version removed any doubt by explicitly stating that it was given in return for taxation. “And so no one anymore can say the king has been forced to do it. He's done it freely,” says Carpenter. This made 1225 the final and definitive version of Magna Carta. Crucially, the 1225 Magna Carta also excluded the most radical part of the 1215 charter – the security clause. The original 1215 charter had contained a revolutionary provision allowing 25 barons to enforce the agreement, even by seizing royal property. It was, in essence, a recipe for civil war. Because of these changes, “no later king really felt the need to issue another version,” Carpenter noted. Whenever later kings confirmed Magna Carta, they confirmed the 1225 version – not John's 1215 charter. “Even in the 17th century, when the great lawyer Edward Coke dusted down Magna Carta as a bastion against Stuart tyranny, what did he appeal to? It was still the 1225 charter,” says Carpenter. How did 1215 take over? So why does everyone focus on 1215 instead of 1225? The answer lies in the 18th century, with Sir William Blackstone, an influential English lawyer. Blackstone was the first person to print all the different versions of Magna Carta together, showing how they had evolved. His decision to label the 1215 document as the Magna Carta stuck. “He took an absolutely crucial decision,” Carpenter explained. “He called John's charter of 1215, not the Charter of Runnymede – he called it Magna Carta.” “Such is the authority of Blackstone that it stuck,” Carpenter said. “So both in popular culture and academic writing, Magna Carta becomes essentially the charter of King John in 1215.” However, in a twist of irony, the actual law still acknowledges the truth. “There are still chapters of Magna Carta on the Statute Book of the United Kingdom today,” Carpenter said. “And actually, on the Statute Book, it's still the 1225 charter of Henry III.” Recognising the importance of the 1225 Magna Carta doesn’t mean disregarding 1215 entirely; the original document set events in motion. But without the 1225 version, Magna Carta likely wouldn't have survived. “Without the 1225 charter, and without putting it on a consensual basis – so it's a freely entered into bargain between king and kingdom, supported by the church – I think without that too, the charter would not have survived," says Carpenter. Carpenter's view is that we ought to see the 1215 and 1225 charters together in tandem, but he also argues that 11 February 2025 is a good moment to reflect on the fact that the Magna Carta we think we know isn't quite the full story. Professor David Carpenter was speaking to David Musgrove on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation
How King John helped bring about a political miracle in medieval England
From the historic moment that 'bad' King John was made to put his seal to Magna Carta to parliament, taxation and the law courts, the 13th and 14th centuries heralded many changes in England. In fact, Caroline Burt and Richard Partington explore how these changes laid the foundations for the modern British state
Good. But could do better. That was the message that the English people conveyed to their all-conquering monarch at the height of the Hundred Years’ War. In 1358, England’s great warrior-king Edward III asked parliament if he should accept a peace treaty he’d negotiated with the French, following a series of dramatic military victories. Parliament emphatically advised the king to fight again. Too much blood had been shed and too much treasure expended. The French, MPs declared, were not offering enough. For Edward’s distant predecessor King John, such a scenario would have been unthinkable. Then, at the dawn of the 13th century, there was no notion of shared national enterprise around foreign policy. The English king’s lands in France were a matter for the king alone – not for the community of the realm expressing its will through parliament. The people, if they had been courageous enough to venture their opinions to John, would have been told – not so politely – to keep their noses out. It was also unimaginable during John’s reign that other matters that parliament routinely considered in Edward III’s day – issues such as how much tax people paid, and the way in which law and justice was dispensed to the masses – might be a matter of nationwide debate. English state transformed Yet the 150 or so years between John’s reign and Edward’s victories over the French witnessed the utter transformation of the English state. This extraordinary period saw the introduction of a system of national taxation by consent, and the advent of the forum that approved that tax: parliament. It saw the legal system grow exponentially and a network of royal officers being appointed across the land. It saw striking advances in military organisation, including the professionalisation of the army. And, of course, it saw the introduction of Magna Carta, which established the much-cherished principle that the king was subject to the same law as his subjects. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/07/2PNNK27-b49fb23-e1721910912835.jpg" width="620" height="414" alt="Edward III, shown in a 15th-century miniature, sought parliament’s agreement before striking a treaty with the French (Photo by incamerastock/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Edward III, shown in a 15th-century miniature, sought parliament’s agreement before striking a treaty with the French (Photo by incamerastock/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Today we think of the 13th and 14th centuries as a period of protracted warfare and plague. It was undoubtedly both those things. But it was also the period that laid the foundations for many elements of the English, and by extension British, state as we know it today. So why did this transformation happen? And who were the main drivers behind this change? When John became king in 1199, it is doubtful that he gave any thought to these grand questions of statehood. That’s partly because the concept of the state as we know it did not exist. But it’s mainly because John had far more urgent concerns occupying his in-tray. He had to fend off a rival claim to the throne of England from his nephew Arthur, and he had to get to grips with a major assault launched by his great French rival, King Philip II. English losses in France Philip was determined to assert himself, and that meant seizing lands held in France by John. Those English possessions stretched far across France, from Normandy in the north to Aquitaine in the south-west – a block much larger than the territory directly controlled by the French king. Unfortunately for John, Philip was not only hugely ambitious but also vastly capable, and in 1204 the French king seized the jewel in the English crown, Normandy, shortly followed by many of the other English territories in France. The key moment in this English debacle was the loss of Château Gaillard, Richard the Lionheart’s extraordinary defensive system on the cliffs of the Seine at Les Andelys. Richard had declared that the walls of this mighty castle could hold out against the French even had they been made of butter. John’s manifold deficiencies as both a king and a military commander proved his older brother decisively wrong. The loss of Normandy in 1204 was a shattering blow. But it was also a turning point in English history: for it prompted a chain reaction that would lead to Magna Carta. Determined to regain his territories, John returned to England to regroup. Over the following decade, he raised vastly more money in England than any of his predecessors, money he used to build continental alliances and fund a new military expedition to France. Read more | Was King John really that bad? Yes! Funds flowed into the royal coffers through fines levied by the king on members of the nobility. These were extorted with threats, violence and the sale of justice to the highest bidder – and triggered a wave of resentment across the realm. John is rightly seen as one of England’s cruellest kings. According to one chronicler, he violated the wives and daughters of his nobles; in the words of another, he roasted French prisoners of war on tripods and gridirons. The unfairness and brutality of all this was not lost on England’s barons, who, as the wealthiest subjects, bore the brunt of John’s impositions. King John and Magna Carta If the common law – which since 1166 had offered all men and women cheap access to royal justice – dictated that the barons could not abuse, bribe and extort their fellow countrymen without facing legal action, then why, they asked, should the king be allowed to do it? And so, when John’s ambitions to regain lost territory came crashing down with military defeat in 1214, his opponents in England lost no time in demanding change. In Magna Carta, literally the ‘Great Charter’, they attempted to put an end, one by one, to all the questionable practices of their king. While John fought the rebels with all his might, his death in 1216, and the accession of his son as Henry III during a civil war that showed little sign of leading to any lasting settlement, meant that no government could hope to move forward in peace without compromise. Read more | Alternate history: what if Magna Carta hadn’t been written? That compromise was the confirmation of Magna Carta. By placing kings under the same law as their subjects, Magna Carta made it impossible for future monarchs to raise money for war arbitrarily. Doing so would bring political crisis, as Henry III discovered when, in an echo of his father, he began to threaten the landed property of his barons. It soon became abundantly clear that if the king wanted to defend his lands, he would have to find a new way of raising the money he required – one that involved accessing his subjects’ wealth in a legitimate manner. It was this imperative that led to the introduction of a national system of taxation by consent – and, in the 1230s, the emergence of the body that would grant (or refuse) such consent: parliament. Birth of the English parliament Parliament took its name from the French Parlement, ‘the place of discussion’, and true to that name, it soon became an arena for national debate on all areas of public policy. It was initially the exclusive domain of the very rich and powerful. But, by the end of the 13th century, a wider cross-section of the population was contributing to that debate. In 1258, when political crisis erupted in the face of Henry III’s unpopular foreign and financial policies, demands were made that angry knights, as well as disaffected barons, should be represented. This broader social representation was extended again during the reign of Edward I. In the 14th century, parliament came to consist of Lords and Commons, just as it does today – the latter elected to represent all the localities in the country. Read more | “He was not a great king but he was respected as a most Christian one”: David Carpenter on Henry III Under Edward, a partnership was established with parliament that led to repeated grants of taxation to support the king in wars in Wales, Scotland and France. This practice – of the crown co-opting the resources of the realm to royal military imperatives – led to a developing sense that foreign policy was not merely dynastic but national, in the interests of the entire country. By the time Edward I’s grandson Edward III was striding across Europe with aplomb in the mid-14th century, his subjects in parliament were fully engaged in consultation with the king, his ministers and judges on all aspects of national government. National taxation, approved by parliament, produced predictable and reliable war finance that enabled England to professionalise its army under Edward I and particularly Edward III. This enabled England to punch well above its weight internationally until the mid-15th century, most especially in the first half of the Hundred Years’ War with France. The battle of Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356 respectively saw the English destroy the French field army and capture the French king, John II. At the naval battle of Sluys in 1340, thousands of French soldiers drowned, fleeing English men-at-arms and archers charging across their decks. This was the English realm in its military pomp, producing arguably the country’s most significant naval triumph until the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. “How do we know that French knights are braver than English knights?” asked a jester of his master, the French king Philip VI, in the aftermath of Sluys. When Philip failed to provide an answer, the jester gave the sardonic reply: “Because English knights are afraid to jump into the sea.” Read more | 9 things you didn’t know about the history of parliament England's legal system Government, too, was growing increasingly sophisticated. The common law was in such demand that the courts struggled to keep up with the volume of business. The people of England were clearly hungry for the impartial, enforceable and centrally recorded justice provided by this ever-growing national legal system. Kings added to the pressure themselves because they regularly commissioned nationwide enquiries into crime and corruption. Edward I created so much legislation during his 35-year-reign that he was later called the English Justinian, after the famous law-giving Roman emperor. Such extensive legislating required a new professional cadre of judges, attorneys and justices of the peace. Government co-opted so many of the king’s subjects into its work that it is estimated that, by the mid-14th century, some 40 per cent of male house-holders were involved in some way – as sheriffs, jurors, constables, military recruiters, purveyors of supplies and tax collectors. England was hardly alone in all of this. Rapidly evolving ideas about the authority of the king as lawgiver were mirrored across Europe. Monarchs from Louis IX of France to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II embarked upon vast legislative programmes. In Iberia, Alfonso X of Castile ordered the compilation of law codes into a document, La Siete Partidas, that remains celebrated today. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/07/GettyImages-1768235900-ccfea11-e1721910986494.jpg" width="620" height="414" alt="Charles III and Queen Camilla at the state opening of parliament, 2023. The seat of British democracy grew into a force to be reckoned with in the late Middle Ages (Photo by Arthur Edwards - WPA Pool/Getty Images)" title="Charles III and Queen Camilla at the state opening of parliament, 2023. The seat of British democracy grew into a force to be reckoned with in the late Middle Ages (Photo by Arthur Edwards - WPA Pool/Getty Images)" /> The 13th-century rediscovery in Europe of Aristotle’s work added another flavour to this. Influenced by the ancient Greek philosopher’s ideas, writers began to see government as a force for good, not simply a necessary evil. Kings and their subjects eagerly embraced these ideas, both to claim power and to demand accountability. Yet not all nations experienced this thirst for power and accountability in the same way. In England, the quest for the common good was put under intense pressure by conflict and mass death. War in France and across the British Isles drove political change – and brought with it significant disorder. In the early 14th century, during a break in hostilities, demobbed soldiers formed armed bands that marauded across England, leaving a trail of outrages in their wake. That prompted one of the biggest enquiries into crime that had yet taken place in England – the so-called ‘trailbaston’ commissions. Black Death and Peasants’ Revolt Pandemic also shattered society’s sense of security. The Black Death, which first hit England in 1348 and re-appeared in several waves, killed at least 40 per cent of the population, forcing government to intervene to regulate the labour market. The Statute of Labourers of 1351 sought to constrain wage growth and labour mobility, as workers exploited their scarcity to demand higher pay and move to better paid jobs. Those in the upper echelons of society were clearly disturbed by this new thirst for social mobility. We can see this in the Sumptuary Law of 1363, which stipulated that the lower orders should not dress in clothes above their station. Such enforced restraint was hugely controversial, and the combination of a surprisingly buoyant economy and fierce opposition meant that the laws were widely ignored. What no one could ignore, however, was the crisis that struck the economy in the early 1370s. The fall-out from the financial downturn – caused by a collapse in prices, for reasons historians do not fully understand – was long and ultimately bloody. In the immediate aftermath, peasants experienced a double whammy of the sudden enforcement of earlier labouring legislation and the imposition of the first poll tax. Anger and resentment simmered away until, in 1381, they exploded in the popular uprising known as the Peasants’ Revolt. It took the authorities just a few months to put down the revolt, but not before the rebels had chopped off the heads of two of the most powerful men in the land – the archbishop of Canterbury and the lord high treasurer – and reduced the Savoy Palace, John of Gaunt’s opulent residence on the Thames, to a smouldering ruin. At the height of the uprising, the king himself – Richard II – felt compelled to ride out to Smithfield to listen to the rebels’ demands. Read more | The Peasants’ Revolt: did Richard II side with the rebels? Richard II survived his encounter with the peasants but it was a mere stay of execution. Like John before him, Richard was a weak, negligent and ultimately tyrannical ruler. And like John, his reign ended in ignominy, deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in 1399. Yet there was a crucial difference – one that signals just how far the tectonic plates of the English state had shifted over the two centuries between the reigns of these hapless rulers. John’s downfall occurred in the midst of a chaotic war in which a tiny cadre of the most powerful men in the land sought to limit the power of the king on behalf of ‘the community of the realm’. When Bolingbroke ousted Richard II, he presented deposition articles for the approval of a packed parliament of Lords and Commons gathered from across the kingdom. Where John had failed his dynasty, Richard had failed the entire English nation. Caroline Burt and Richard Partington are medieval historians at the University of Cambridge, and the authors of Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State (Faber & Faber, 2024) This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Part five in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1200–1249. In 1215, when England's barons clipped the wings of a tyrannical king, they established principles that still influence British justice 800 years on
The year of Magna Carta, 1215, when an English ruler was first subjected to the law, has resonated down the ages as a landmark in Britain’s constitutional history. The Charter itself still lives. Its most fundamental chapters remain on the Statute Book of the UK as barriers to arbitrary rule. They condemn the denial, sale and delay of justice, and forbid imprisonment and dispossession save by lawful judgement of one’s peers (social equals), or the law of the land. The Charter was negotiated at Runnymede between 10 and 15 June 1215, with King John riding down each day from Windsor, and the barons encamped in their tents across the meadows beside the Thames. On 15 June, John, tricky to the end, refused more concessions and simply sealed the Charter – “take it or leave it” – thereby cleverly keeping the names of the 25 barons who were to enforce its terms out of the document, this because they had still to be chosen. John hoped the Charter would become no more than a toothless symbol of his generosity to the kingdom; the barons hoped that its terms would be rigorously enforced and indeed extended. The result was civil war. By September, John had got the pope to quash the Charter. That month, the opposition barons deposed John and offered the throne to Louis, eldest son of King Philip II of France. He came to England in May 1216 and by the time of John’s death in October controlled more than half the kingdom. In the north Alexander II of Scotland had gained Carlisle, and was making good his claims to Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland. In Wales, Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, ruler of Gwynedd, had swept through the south and taken the royal bases of Cardigan and Carmarthen. Yet John’s dynasty survived, and with it, paradoxically, the Charter. Its implantation into English political life was the work of the minority government of John’s son, Henry III, who was only nine on his accession. Magna Carta was also a British document. Both Alexander and Llywelyn had been with the rebels from the start, and both benefited from the Charter’s terms, terms which acknowledged “the law of Wales” and invoked for the Welsh, as for Alexander, the principle of judgement by peers. Ultimately, as Wales and Scotland became part of a United Kingdom, their peoples too were embraced by the Charter’s protections. The Charter, however, was no panacea. Since the clause setting up the 25 barons was left out from post-1215 versions of the document, it had no constitutional means of enforcement. It said nothing about how the king’s ministers were to be chosen, patronage distributed and policy decided, major holes which defined the political battleground of the later middle ages. Yet the Charter made a profound difference. It clamped down on various sources of revenue. Henceforth the “relief” or inheritance tax paid by an earl or baron was to be £100, not the thousands of pounds sometimes demanded by John. It facilitated the spread of the common law and made justice less open to bargaining or bribery. It gave the gentry concessions they could exploit to make the running of local government more acceptable. Above all it asserted a fundamental principle: the king was subject to the law, the law Magna Carta had made. As a result arbitrary rule became more difficult and resistance to it more legitimate. 1215 in context Scotland, England and Wales were very different societies, but each nation showed the influence of the Norman Conquest The island of 1215 was one of contrasts with profound differences in social structure between the uplands of Wales and Scotland and lowland England. Hence the way the English, living in nucleated villages, and eating bread, product of their great corn-growing fields, could stigmatise the Scots as bare-buttocked highlanders and ridicule the Welsh as dwellers in dispersed settlements, who consumed nothing but milk and meat. Yet, in many ways, the peoples of Britain were becoming more alike. The structure of dioceses and parishes, and the houses of Benedictine and Cistercian monks, had spread through the island. The Scottish nobility had been transformed in the 12th century by the kings’ establishment of Anglo-Norman aristrocrats, men of chivalric outlook. The castles, cavalry, armour, seals and documents of the Welsh rulers show how they had been influenced by their Anglo-Norman neighbours. Royal government in Scotland, however, was comparatively decentralised. Wales was divided between competing princes. Only in England was the power of the ruler so insistent and intrusive as to provoke demands for restraints. The grievances dealt with in Magna Carta had a long history. Many were the product of the way kings since the Norman Conquest had manipulated the judicial process and exploited the rights and revenues which came to them from the new tenurial structures introduced by the Norman Conquest. Already in 1100 Henry I’s Coronation Charter dealt (unavailingly) with the issues of relief, widows, and wardships of children later tackled in Magna Carta. This was why the 1100 Charter was brought out again by the opposition to King John. John’s Angevin predecessors were also to blame. His father, Henry II (r1154–89), had extended the royal forest, antagonising wide sections of society. John’s brother, Richard I, between 1194 and 1199, had placed novel financial burdens on the country.The need for money to preserve the continental empire against the power of the king of France was a constant problem facing these kings. Another was that the great landed base brought to monarchy by the Norman conquest had slowly been eroded as land was given away to reward followers. As a result, kings had to exploit other, more politically sensitive, sources of revenue. Of course, the Angevins gave as well as took; they had developed immensely popular legal procedures which lay at the heart of what was later called “the common law”. These were the assizes which the Charter sought to extend not restrict. But here too was a problem, for the new procedures turned on due process of law. No free man was to lose his possessions “unjustly and without judgement”. The year 1215 was the moment when society turned on the king and demanded that he obey his own rules. Early in his reign John suffered two blows, first a rapid inflation for which he was blameless, and then, in 1204, the loss of Normandy. Thereafter he spent “ten furious years” trying to raise the treasure to get Normandy back. The treasure went in an abortive military campaign in France of 1214. The grievances remained and produced Magna Carta. When the king became a sitting duck In 1214 John’s long planned campaign to recover his continental empire had ended in disaster with his allies decisively defeated at Bouvines. John returned to England a sitting duck, his treasure spent. Suspicious and untrustworthy, a womaniser and a murderer, he was loathed by many of his barons. His huge financial exactions over several years had antagonised the wider political community. By early 1215 a large group of barons, many from the North, where his rule had seemed particularly severe, were in league, and were demanding reform. They were abetted by Scotland’s King Alexander and Llywelyn of Wales. John played for time and summoned a council to meet at Oxford towards the end of April. Instead the barons met in arms at Stamford in Lincolnshire, from where on 5 May they renounced their allegiance to the king, the beginning of civil war. The war was transformed within a fortnight by the Londoners letting the baronial rebels into the city – its walls and wealth protected the baronial cause, and made any quick royalist victory impossible. Yet baronial victory too could not be quick. John retained his castles, many commanded by ruthless military experts. Shrewd use of patronage meant he also retained the loyalty of some of the greatest barons. So the result towards the end of May was a truce and the start of the negotiations which ended with the Charter at Runnymede. Read more: Is 15 June 1215 the true date of Magna Carta? Two historians debate The Charter was the product of the way John and his predecessors has ruled since the Norman Conquest. It also reflected the nature of early 13th-century English society, in part through its omissions. Take the place of women in the Charter. They certainly appeared, for important clauses secured for baronial widows their dowers and inheritances and protected them from forced re-marriage by the king. The clause reflected that baronial women did have property rights: they could inherit land; they received as dower a portion (usually a third) of their husbands’ lands on his death. The clause had a real effect and the 13th century was graced by large numbers of baronesses who spent years as widows controlling extensive lands. Yet the Charter did nothing to alter the inequalities between men and women. Women only inherited in default of brothers. They virtually never held office, and, for all their influence behind the scenes, played virtually no public part in politics. No women featured in the list of those who had counselled John to concede the Charter. The clauses in the Charter itself were designed not to liberate women, but to protect their male children from having their mothers’ property carried off by second husbands. Peasants oppressed – no change there then Even less privileged were the peasants. They made up perhaps 75 per cent of the population, half of them “villeins” which meant they were legally unfree. Peasants featured in the Charter – the stipulation that sheriffs should not force men and villages to work on bridges dealt specifically with their predicament. So did the clause which laid down that fines imposed on villeins were to be reasonable and assessed by men of their neighbourhood. To no one, John promised in one of the most famous clauses, would he sell, deny or delay justice. But there lay the rub, for it was the law itself which made half of the peasantry unfree, leaving them excluded from the king’s courts and at their lords’ mercy in anything concerning the terms on which they held their lands. The Charter did nothing to alter this. Indeed, the protection it did afford peasants was exclusively against the oppressions of royal agents. They were protected from the king so that they could be exploited all the better by their lords. Against its meagre concern for women and peasants, the Charter catered abundantly for the great players. It gave freedom to the Church (holding over a quarter of England’s land), and re-iterated John’s promise that bishops and abbots could be elected free from royal interference, thus dealing with a major grievance. The church was to play a key part in publicising John’s charter and in supporting the later versions of Henry III. London as we have seen, was the great baronial base. Its population early in the 13th century was perhaps as high as 40,000, making it Britain’s largest city. The Charter protected the privileges of all the kingdom’s cities and boroughs but London’s alone were mentioned by name, and it received an additional promise that it should be free from arbitrary taxation. Most striking of all was the Charter’s treatment of the knights. In the 1200s there were about 5,000 of them in England’s counties, the backbone of local government. One contemporary chronicler, Ralph of Coggeshall, averred that all the barons who remained loyal to John were deserted by their knights, an exaggeration but it shows the flow of the tide. The charter laid down that the king’s judges hearing assizes in the counties were to sit with four knights of each county, elected in the county court, a testimony both to the self-confidence of the knights and their determination to control the workings of justice in the localities. Another clause empowered 12 knights in each county, again elected in the county court, to investigate and abolish the evil practices of the king’s local officials. The zeal with which the knights went about their work was a major factor in John’s decision to abandon the Charter. Read more: Was King John murdered? Above all, the Charter met the grievances of the earls and barons. There were around a dozen earls in the early 13th century, and 100 to 200 barons. Tiny numbers, but they controlled a large part of the country’s wealth, and had mostly been in rebellion. Not surprisingly, they stamped their mark on the Charter’s early clauses, making it very much a baronial document. Thus chapter two, as we have seen, fixed the relief of earls and barons at £100. Chapter four protected baronial lands from exploitation by the king when they were in his hands during the minority of an heir. Chapter 14 vested the power to consent to taxation in the hands of a largely baronial assembly. Indeed, only the greater barons, lay and ecclesiastical, were to receive individual letters of summons to it. The implication was that the earls and barons, commanding the allegiances of their tenants, could answer for the realm. The Charter thus reflected the structures of power in English society. It was also the product of ideas. The king should govern lawfully for the good of his people. He should only punish individuals having obtained a judgement of their peers. A king who defied these principles could be regarded as a tyrant, and might be restrained or even deposed. By 1215 such concepts had a long pedigree and were commonplace amongst John’s opponents. They were sharpened and refined by the archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, an internationally famous academic, who played a key role in brokering the 1215 settlement, and in supporting the Charter thereafter. It was these ideas, enshrined in the Charter, which formed its essential legacy, a legacy first for England, and ultimately for the United Kingdom as a whole. History facts: 1200–1249 £130,000: John’s treasure in 1213 £202 a year: the average baronial income 1160–1220 £15-£20 a year: the 3xpected income of a knight 1216–72 1 penny: minimum daily wage for a labourer in the 13th century Key years: other important events in the first half of the 13th century 1204 – John loses Normandy. Normandy was finally conquered by Philip II of France (his successful siege of Chateau Gaillard marked the end of John’s rule). This was a pivotal event in European history – now the cross-channel Anglo-Norman state was over. King and barons, like everyone else, would be born and live only in England. They had far more time for the affairs of Britain. The English conquest of Wales in the 1280s and near conquest of Scotland around 1300 was the result. 1216– Llywelyn dominates Wales. Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, the ruler of Gwynedd, established his dominance over native Wales. His vision was of a principality in which he alone did homage to the king of England while the other native rulers did homage to him, in effect as prince of Wales. Two years later, in the Treaty of Worcester, Llywelyn’s territorial conquests and practical (if not theoretical) supremacy were recognised by the king of England. 1217 – The throne is secured for John’s son. Two victories, the first at Lincoln, the second at sea off Sandwich, secured the throne for John’s son, Henry III (below). Prince Louis, eldest son of Philip II of France, resigned his claims and returned to France. Had a French king ruled England, the political structure of Europe would have developed on incalculably different lines. 1221 – The friars move in. The first Dominicans arrived in England, soon followed by the Franciscans. By c 1300 there were more than 100 Dominican and Franciscan houses in Britain. With an emphasis on poverty, preaching and university study, they transformed the religious life of the island. A sermon by an educated preacher now became an everyday part of town life. 1225 – Magna Carta is re-issued. In 1216 and 1217 the minority government of Henry III had reversed John’s policies and issued new versions of Magna Carta. In 1225, yet another version was issued in return for a great tax which saved the dynasty’s continental possessions in Gascony. The 1225 version of the Charter became definitive, the one confirmed by subsequent kings, clauses of which are on the Statute Book today. 1236 – A strong queen emerges. Henry III married Eleanor of Provence, laying the foundations for a remarkable resurgence of queenly power. No queen consort had played a role in English political life since Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1160s. Eleanor of Provence, made of far sterner stuff than her indulgent husband, changed that. Supporting, and supported by, her relations from Savoy, whom Henry established in England, she was a central figure in the politics of the reign. 1237 – The Treaty of York. Alexander II of Scotland resigned claims to the northern counties of England which Scottish kings had pursued for 200 years. In return he gained substantial territory in Tynedale. He consolidated the Anglo-Scottish peace (it lasted from 1217 to 1296), and was free to concentrate on the conquest of Galloway, where he had taken armies in 1235 and 1236, thus extending the reach of the Scottish state. 1240 – The end of a great Welsh leader. This year marked the death of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, justly called in his own lifetime Llywelyn the Great. His death ushered in a period in which the king of England recovered his power in Wales. But Llywelyn’s vision of a Welsh principality under a single native ruler, the prince of Wales, was to be realised, if only for the ten years between 1267 and 1277, by his grandson. 1249 – Scotland loses King Alexander. King Alexander II of Scotland (who had come to the throne aged 16 in 1214) died on an expedition to wrest lordship of the isle of Man and the Hebrides from the king of Norway. The expedition summed up the way Alexander had re-orientated Scottish kingship. It would expand not south into England but north and west. The acquisition of Man and Hebrides was ultimately achieved by his son, Alexander III, securing Scotland’s western borders. Together they had constructed a state strong enough to resist English attempts at conquest. More turning points in British history Read next: 1295: Edward I consolidates English rule Go back: 1171: The English invasion of Ireland <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2006/04/TP-Images-with-overlay5-2981063.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Part six in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1200–1249" title="Part six in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1200–1249 (Photo by Getty Images)" /> This article was first published in the August 2006 issue of BBC History Magazine
Is 15 June 1215 the true date of Magna Carta? Two historians debate
In 1215, King John sealed Magna Carta, a document that safeguarded basic freedoms and placed limits on the power of the crown. The event was a turning point in British constitutional history, but are we marking its anniversary on the correct date? Professors David Carpenter and George Garnett debate...
The sealing of Magna Carta was a turning point in British constitutional history, but are we marking its anniversary on the correct date? Was it really sealed on 15 June 1215? Two historians debate... Yes, it is – Professor David Carpenter The date 15 June seems fixed by Magna Carta itself. King John ends the Charter by stating that it has been “given by our hand in the meadow which is called Runnymede between Windsor and Staines on the 15th day of June in the 17th year of our reign”. This conclusion appears in all four surviving originals of the 1215 Magna Carta, and in the letter issued by Archbishop Langton and his fellow bishops setting out and guaranteeing the final text. The “given by the hand” formula is standard in royal charters: it indicates the day and place on which the ‘giver’ – either the king or a chancery official – authorised the drawing up and sealing of the charter in question, perhaps indeed by handing the final draft to the clerk who was going to write it out. King John, therefore, authorised the writing out and sealing of Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215. 6 Magna Carta myths explained That all seems clear enough, yet distinguished historians have argued that the 15 June date is nothing more than “fictitious”. In their view, it took several more days for the details of the charter to be hammered out, and it was not till 19 June that John authorised its issue. If they are to be believed, we should not be celebrating the anniversary of Magna Carta on 15 June. The argument for a later date for Magna Carta was propounded by Sir James Holt in both the first and second editions (1965/1992) of his magisterial book Magna Carta. His opinions have not gone unchallenged. In a paper in 1996 and in my own book Magna Carta, recently published in the Penguin Classics series, I have sought to vindicate the 15 June date. The debate, however, continues. Why Magna Carta matters In their introduction to the third edition of Holt’s Magna Carta, which appears this year, George Garnett and John Hudson – two of Holt’s former pupils – have revived and reinforced his arguments. Garnett and Hudson are formidable historians. Their arguments are powerful, and need to be taken very seriously. Everyone, moreover, would agree that the evidence permits differences of view, and prevents absolute conclusions. If it is any comfort to those gathering this year at Runnymede, I still think the most likely scenario is that John did indeed authorise the writing out and sealing of Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215. But others may come to a different conclusion. What, then, are the arguments against the 15 June date? The most central is that it was not till 19 June that peace was actually made between John and his opponents. On this day, it’s said that John’s opponents reentered his allegiance. This, so the argument goes, is incompatible with the charter being agreed on the 15th, for, if it was, there is an inexplicable hiatus before the peace on the 19th. The two events must surely have been more or less simultaneous, since John would never have granted the charter to those still in rebellion against him. Magna Carta, therefore, cannot have been issued earlier than 19 June. How, then, to explain its 15 June date? Here it is worth saying that chancery practice was not set in stone. Indeed, it is possible that the date in the charter recorded not its authorization, but some other event. This is what Garnett and Hudson believe. Listen | Professor Nicholas Vincent discusses the life and reign of the infamous 13th-century monarch, whose reign saw military disasters abroad and the sealing of Magna Carta in 1215 Their reconstruction is as follows: On 10 June, King John renewed the truce covering the negotiations, until the morning of 15 June. This created a ‘deadline’ for the reaching of some sort of preliminary deal. The deal was indeed achieved, and can be seen in a “penultimate draft of the charter” (preserved in a later copy) dated to 15 June, and “given” by John not at Runnymede, but at Windsor. The charter was now in place, however much there was still disagreement over some details. It was this “penultimate draft” that gave its date to the charter, although negotiations continued until a final settlement was reached on the 19th. As evidence for their continuation, Garnett and Hudson cite a later copy of the charter, which bears the date 16 June and still has detailed differences from the final authorised version. Set out like this, the arguments against 15 June seem formidable, yet I believe they can all be countered. Take the truce being prolonged on 10 June until the morning of the 15th. This seems to fit as well, if not better, with the deadline being for the charter itself to be agreed, rather than simply some sort of preliminary deal. One also wonders why four days later, on the 19th, it was thought worth recalling, in the date of Magna Carta, what had happened on the 15th. After all, the 15th, in Garnett and Hudson’s own account, had been a day of failure; a day when it had not been possible to reach a final agreement. Debate continued over the size of the baronial inheritance tax, the scope of the chapter on fines, and the ban against John appealing to the pope. These were important and contentious issues. In Garnett and Hudson’s scenario it took another four days before agreement could be reached. It is hard to see why, when that at last happened on the 19th, the charter was given the date of “some sort of preliminary deal” four days earlier rather than the date of the final deal itself. It is also difficult to see how the “penultimate draft” (if indeed it was that) could have been taken as the authorisation of the final charter, thus providing another reason for preserving its date. There are significant differences between the two: on the final charter the baronial inheritance tax is raised from 100 marks to £100; the chapter on fines is widened in scope, and most importantly of all, the king is no longer banned from appealing to the pope. There is no problem about these details having been changed on the morning of the 15th, but once they were and the charter was agreed, John must then have authorised its issue in its final form. If that authorization took place later than 15 June, why does the charter not say so? It is not as though the dating clauses in royal charters were frozen and formulaic. The place and date changed constantly. Yet at Runnymede, if Garnett and Hudson are right, the document whose text was solemnly guaranteed by Langton and the bishops, was given the correct place for its authorisation (Runnymede) but was left with the wrong date – one four days too soon. As I have said, chancery practice varied, and such a contradiction is not impossible, but no strong grounds have been advanced for thinking it took place in this case. If, then, there remain reasons for accepting the 15 June date for Magna Carta, how does one explain the four-day delay before the peace? My explanation here is that, having accepted the charter on the 15th, the baronial leaders found it very difficult to bring the general body of barons and knights encamped at Runnymede in behind the settlement. Hence the hiatus. Garnett and Hudson discount this hypothesis. The leaders, they point out, were not isolated, and were well able to carry their followers with them. Yet this idea is at odds with the Crowland chronicler, who says that some of the Northerners, on the pretense they had not been at Runnymede, went home and resumed the war. Evidently they were dissatisfied with the deal struck. Indeed, so little was there coherence and consensus, that at the time John authorised Magna Carta, the barons had been unable to choose the 25 of their number who were to enforce it. As the charter makes clear, that choice was still in the future. In these circumstances, it is easy to believe that it was not till the 19thh, after indeed John had made further concessions, that peace could at last be proclaimed. Why then was John prepared to authorise and issue the charter before the peace? Surely he would never have granted liberties to those still in rebellion against him. But in authorising the charter on 15 June, he was doing no such thing. The nearest parallel is 1216 when his son, Henry III, issued his first version of Magna Carta, although half the kingdom was in rebellion against him. Neither king was making concessions to rebels. It was only when rebels returned to the king’s allegiance that they would enjoy the liberties granted in the charter. After the baronial negotiators at Runnymede had agreed the charter’s terms, John perhaps assumed that the peace would go through at once and without difficulty. But, deeply suspicious as he was, perhaps he also had doubts – hence the stipulation that it would only be “after the peace” that he would dismiss his mercenaries. John hoped and believed the charter would bring peace, but if it was rejected he would at least have split the baronial party, embellished his reputation as a benevolent king, and established the best possible position for continuing the war. A possible sequence of events on 15 June is thus as follows: early in the morning (sunrise was before 5am), John moved from his base at Windsor castle to Runnymede, three-and-a-half miles away. The negotiations were concluded and John authorised, or “gave by his hand”, the final charter. If this was before noon, there was just time for the clerks to write out the charter (it reportedly took about eight hours) before the end of the day, even if they were based at Windsor rather than at Runnymede. On the other hand, it is equally possible that finished charters did not appear until the 16th. That would certainly have been the case if the negotiations did not conclude until late on the day before. This brings us finally to the question of why there are copies (as opposed to originals) of the charter that bear the date 16 June. Many later copies were made of the 1215 charter – they are found in monastic registers, chronicles and legal collections. Some of these copies are of the final, authorised version, while others are variants containing what seem to be material from drafts. Both types can have as a date either 15 or 16 June. The explanation for 16 June is most probably that it was the date given to unofficial copies of the charter written up on that day. Occasionally even in official chancery practice, royal documents bore the date on which they were written, rather than the date on which they were authorised. That one copy with a 16 June date still has the baronial inheritance tax at 100 marks rather than £100 could indicate discontent with the settlement that had just been reached. On the other hand, it is just as likely that unofficial copies were made from draft material without any precise awareness of how it differed from the final, authorised version. Whatever the truth here, variant copies with the 16 June date provide a slender basis for thinking that formal negotiations were still ongoing. A great debt is owed to Garnett and Hudson for reviving and re-invigorating the debate over the date of Magna Carta. I hope many will be encouraged to test out the rival hypotheses. I cannot give any absolute assurance that the great and good are marking the anniversary of Magna Carta on the right day. On the balance of the evidence and argument, however, I believe that yes, they are! David Carpenter is a professor of medieval history at King's College London, and author of Magna Carta (Penguin Classics), which came out in paperback in January. To find out more, click here. View oEmbed on the source website No, it is not – Professor George Garnett As Jim Holt knew well from his experiences in the army during the Second World War, when you are under sustained attack it is very important to be in the right company. Redoubtable an historian though David Carpenter is, most especially of Magna Carta, it is difficult to conceive of a more formidable comrade-in-arms than Holt. In that, John Hudson [co-author of Magna Carta, 2015] and I take some comfort. When we were invited to produce a third edition of Holt’s classic work, we decided that we would make no changes to his text, other than to correct obvious mistakes. We would confine alterations, amplifications, disagreements, and new directions to an extensive editors’ introduction. There, we would be at liberty to differ from the text that he had last revised in 1992. Like Holt himself, we were much impressed with David Carpenter’s recent work on Magna Carta, which has, since we wrote the introduction, culminated in his massive yet immensely readable book. Unlike Holt, we were initially minded to agree with Carpenter about a central aspect of this work – his re-dating of the document itself. This might appear to be a matter of pedantic, scholarly detail; but it is not. On the question of the date depends an assessment of how negotiations proceeded in those 10 crucial days approaching midsummer 1215 – days for which the chronicle record is strikingly sketchy. Carpenter’s meticulously argued revision all seemed so beautifully simple: the date in the dating clause of the extant engrossments of 1215 was the date of the document, Monday 15 June 1215. When something seems simple and obvious once it has been explained, it is generally right. On this particular issue, we envisaged that we would be disagreeing with Holt in our introduction, rather than elaborating or supplementing him. But as all historians know well, there is all the difference in the world between finding something plausible on reading it, and formulating an argument on paper. There is no better (because no more painful) way of thinking something through. At this point I should come clean, and admit that the section of our introduction about dating was written by me (though – like this response – read, criticised, and approved by John Hudson), so I must take primary responsibility for it. And the more I agonised and reformulated, the more I thought that Holt was right after all. This is why. A charter was envisaged as the diplomatic form of the settlement in that much amended, apparently incomplete, but sealed (though undated) negotiating document now known as the ‘Articles of the Barons’. The articles takes the form of a petition, not a charter. Stephen Langton appears to have stuffed it into his pocket – or whatever passed for the archbishop of Canterbury’s pocket in the 13th century– as a souvenir after it had been superseded in the rush of events. For complicated reasons it is likely (though not certain) that this document was sealed on the king’s behalf on Wednesday 10 June, although it was quite unprecedented for petitions to the king to be sealed on the king’s behalf. The point was to prove that the king had accepted this statement of capitula (‘heads’, though now by scholarly convention ‘articles’) of agreement, as the basis for further negotiation. The document was the work of a single scribe – very probably a royal Chancery scribe – and it was evidently the product of a great deal of previous haggling. There are no scratchings out, but the scribe left space for insertions, and he evidently laid it out in such a way as to make it easy for readers to find particular chapters quickly. It was therefore a late draft, but designed to facilitate further work. For whatever reason, there was no time or inclination to draw up a fairer copy for sealing. Everyone was in far too much of a hurry. Now although it is not absolutely certain that 10 June was the date of the articles, it is certain that on that day the king prolonged a truce for his opponents until the morning of 15 June. Truces were usually measured in units of whole days. That this one was not suggests that on 10 June, as the articles was probably being sealed at Runnymede, it was anticipated that something dramatic would have happened (or not) by midday at the latest on 15 June. By inference, the purpose of the truce was to enable negotiations to proceed only up to that deadline, on the basis of the petition that the king had unprecedentedly allowed to be sealed. The reason why that particular deadline had been set so punctiliously is now irrecoverable. It may well have seemed sacrilegious to stipulate that a truce should expire on Trinity Sunday, but that would not explain why the truce should not be allowed to run for the whole of the following day. After all, the previous truce, issued on 8 June, had been set to expire at the end of 11 June. Its replacement’s expiry point on 15 June must have been agreed at Runnymede on 10 June. So must the fact that the articles twice mentioned that the envisaged agreement between the king and his opponents would be recorded in a charter. The text of that charter, we contend, was the draft copied into a late 13th-century statute book that VH Galbraith unearthed in California in 1967. It is demonstrably a draft from June 1215, because it contains several provisions that are intermediate between those in the articles and those in the surviving engrossments of Magna Carta of 1215. Moreover, the scribe’s minor errors reveal that he was copying unthinkingly, not confecting something new. Like those engrossments, its dating clause records that it was “given by [King John’s] own hand” on 15 June, but unlike them, at Windsor – presumably in the royal castle – rather than “on the meadow which is called Runnymede between Windsor and Staines”. We have suggested that this was the fruit of the negotiations covered by the truce issued on 10 June. These had, in various respects, moved on from the details hammered out in the articles, and the whole draft settlement had by now been recast in charter form, as the articles had ordained. If I am right, this draft was ready by the expiry of the truce on the morning of 15 June. Stephen Langton could slip the now superseded articles into his pocket. But if the date in a later copy is to be taken seriously, why discount the date given in all four surviving engrossments of 1215? One reason is a matter of practicality. Many of the details shared by all those extant engrossments represent further amendments to the draft text dated to Windsor on 15 June, and if I am right, probably in the morning. These details are likely to have been the subject of very intense negotiation in the following hours and days. We know that John was at Windsor Castle to celebrate Trinity Sunday on 14 June; that he commuted to Runnymede, three-and-a-half miles away, on 15 June, presumably after lunch, and that he returned to Windsor that evening. Would it have been possible during that very busy day to have negotiated on the basis of the draft text, and agreed substantial and detailed revisions to it, to be authorised in an amended text cleared for issue by the king on the meadow at Runnymede that very same afternoon? The most authoritative estimate of the time needed to copy out an engrossment of Magna Carta is eight hours, so it is inconceivable that any were ready for sealing that day on the meadow, even if we imagine that the Chancery clerks carted all their paraphernalia back and forth with them in the king’s train. Why ‘Bad King John’ was actually good The physical impossibility of producing engrossments in the time available does not in itself preclude the agreement that afternoon to amendments to the morning’s draft. Yet despite the propensity of negotiations to accelerate towards their conclusion, and the possibility of a sudden breakthrough, it seems highly unlikely that so much could have been settled in a few hours, given the eyeball-to-eyeball nature of the wrangling which had been going on for many days. Furthermore, another 13th-century copy of a putative draft, added to a contemporary legal collection, is dated 16 June; it shares one, and only one, of the intermediate variants of the Windsor draft. All the other variants of the previous day’s draft have been amended to the form found in the final engrossments. If the date may be trusted, and if the copy is reliable – palaeographers date the hand in which it is added to the collection early in the century, so it is a very early copy – this suggests that negotiation continued into 16 June, by which point some of the contentious provisional settlements of the previous day had been further amended. It is difficult to conceive of circumstances in which a version antecedent to the final one should have been produced on the day after the final one had been definitively settled. But before too much weight is placed on this evidence, it needs to be repeated that the date in this copy is written in larger letters than the rest of the clause, and appears to have been inserted by a different scribe. View Riddle on the source website The other reason for rejecting 15 June as the date on which the final text of Magna Carta was authorised is not a matter of textual detail: however far negotiations had got by that date, there was still no formal peace between the king and his opponents. They had renounced their bond of faith with John, and so were not his men. They were assembled in arms on the meadow. They would not become his men again until Friday 19 June, when the “firm peace” first predicted in a writ of 18 June (and therefore already pre-arranged by that date) was established by the renewal of homage. There is plenty of evidence that 19 June was the day on which homage was re-done, and therefore peace renewed. It remains, as Holt argued, inconceivable that John would have authorised the issue of the charter while his enemies were, formally speaking, still at war with him (though they would also have needed reassurance that once they had renewed their homage, John would not be able to renege on the agreed charter). The oath prescribed in cap 63 Magna Carta, to be taken by the barons as well as the king, secured the terms of the settlement. Cap 62, which provides a pardon for all beaches of peace committed between Easter 1215 and the “re-establishment of peace”, strongly implies that these oaths were sworn only after the renewal of homage. If all this is true, and the final text was authorised on 19 June, the question remains why it preserved the Windsor draft Charter’s date of 15 June, if not its place. The answer must be that the draft charter was accepted on 15 June as the basis for the settlement. This had not happened in Windsor Castle, where the draft was written up, but at Runnymede in the afternoon, where John had accepted the articles five days before. The articles had now been reformulated as a charter, as John’s opponents had long been demanding, but the fine-tuning that remained to be done took several further days, while other contentious matters not covered by the charter – castles, hostages, etc – were also being thrashed out. It is striking that most of the last-minute alterations incorporated in the charter shifted the terms in the king’s favour, so he evidently had skillful negotiators acting on his behalf. When these parallel negotiations had been completed, the final version of the charter was retrospectively dated from the point at which the draft had been accepted as the basis of the settlement in the requisite charter form. The Windsor draft thus played the part of a heavily revised articles, accepted by both sides as something approaching the final terms of the settlement. Unlike the articles, it was dated. By 15 June, negotiations had reached a stage that rendered unnecessary the renewal of the truce that had expired that morning. The retrospective dating of the final charter served to bridge the gap between the acceptance of the Windsor draft at Runnymede on the afternoon of 15 June and the final settlement – a gap during which the refinement of the terms continued. King John: the making of a medieval monster David Carpenter himself seems to accept something of the sort, when he writes that on 15 June “[t]he Charter was now in place, however much there was still disagreement over some details”. Adamant as he is that there was no “original”, it is difficult to conceive precisely what form of charter was, in his view, “now in place” on 15 June. Nevertheless, thanks to his unearthing of numerous later copies of the 1215 charter, it may well be possible to re-construct some of the details of these intense negotiations, if some of the variations can be interpreted as evidence of intermediate drafting. As Holt wrote in 1992, “[d]raft versions of the Charter constitute the most intriguing problem of all.” But there is no space to begin that exploration here. 10 medieval dates you need to know One of the lessons of this anniversary year is that key pieces of evidence can still come to light – a whole engrossment of the reissue of 1300 was found by Nicholas Vincent in Kent Record Office. It may well be that something else will, and that it will demonstrate either that David Carpenter is right, or that I am right, or that neither of us is right! What we should celebrate is the interest the anniversary has provoked in a type of medieval history that has been dismissed by some current historians as outdated, indeed obsolete – the sort of thing in which Victorians were interested, and which we sophisticated moderns should have moved beyond. What we have been reminded about is how central these matters were to the way in which people thought in 13th-century England. And the current disagreement between David Carpenter and myself demonstrates that many important questions remain to be settled; that there is still much work to be done. Attempting to settle them will reveal still more about medieval political thinking and practice. George Garnett is a professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford. He is the co-author (with John Hudson) of a revised edition of John Holt's classic study of Magna Carta This article was first published on HistoryExtra in June 2015
In the late 13th century, a rumour swept England that the reviled King John hadn't been killed by dysentery – as the historical record suggests – but an assassin's poison. Why did that alternative version of the king's death gain so much traction? And is it founded on truth?
In October 1216 the king of England, travelling across country with what remained of his followers, stopped for a night’s rest at the abbey of Swineshead, deep in the Lincolnshire Fens. It had been hard going and he’d lost half of his baggage train in the treacherous fenland. The abbey was thrown into disarray by his arrival. Its residents scrambled to find accommodation and food for the king and his men, painfully aware that King John brought civil war to their doorstep. At the same time as the king demanded hospitality, Louis of France – attempting to seize John’s kingdom at the head of a determined force of rebel English barons – was laying siege to Dover Castle. The French prince had already received the submission of London and Winchester, and besieged the castles at Windsor and Lincoln. John had not faced him in battle, retreating north in the hope of regrouping his forces. The abbot would hardly have wanted to host John, even in better times. The king had a reputation for unpredictable cruelty and malicious spite. It was widely rumoured that he had killed his nephew Arthur with his own hands – certainly the young prince, a rival claimant for the English throne, had died while in John’s keeping. The king had a nasty habit of demanding hostages from his own nobles as a guarantee of their loyalty. In 1208 one noblewoman, Matilda de Briouze, had refused to hand over her eldest son for fear that he would meet the same fate as Arthur. Within two years the family had been destroyed. Matilda’s husband was outlawed and forced into exile, where he died. John arrested and imprisoned Matilda and her son, and starved them to death. Read more: Was King John really that bad? Yes! Sitting at dinner in Swineshead Abbey, John asked a wary monk how much a loaf of bread cost. No more than a halfpenny, he was told, and the king smiled humourlessly. “What good value,” he murmured. “But if I live, in half a year’s time this same loaf will cost as much as 20 shillings. I swear it.” The monk was aghast. John’s remark made no sense – or if it did, it meant famine and starvation, the ruin of his people. He stared at the king, and thought he would rather die than witness John’s threat come to pass. The monk went to his abbot and was confessed of his sins. Then he went into the abbey garden and found a toad – the only source of poison he could think of. He pricked the toad with a brooch pin, and gathered the white fluid that oozed out of its skin into a cup. Then he filled the cup with strong ale and took it to the king, offering him the old English toast: “wassail!” Ever suspicious, John told the monk to drink first, and he did. Then John drank. Bufotoxin, the poison produced by toads, can stop the heart or set it racing. It causes nausea, vomiting, seizures, pain and hallucinations – and death. There is no known antidote. The monk left the king and went directly to the abbey infirmary. In great pain, John demanded to know where he was and received the news that the monk had died. The king panicked and demanded that they bind up his swollen stomach. Hours later, he too was dead. So goes the story of King John’s untimely death, as told in the Brut Chronicle of English history, written towards the end of the 13th century. As the pages of the Brut tell us, the king was remembered as a hated figure, a tyrant, the man who had been made to seal Magna Carta and then tried to annul it, denying the English their ancient rights of justice and the law. But John’s sudden demise marked a turning point – a dramatic change in the course of the civil war between the rebel barons and the king’s supporters. Men who had despaired of John were willing to back the cause of his son Henry, who was nine years old. And when Prince Louis’ forces were defeated at the battle of Lincoln in 1217, Louis was paid to renounce his claim and return to France. The rebels pledged allegiance to Henry III, and were forgiven. Magna Carta was reissued in the new king’s name and it became iconic in English politics, repeatedly reissued by Henry III and later kings, enforced by rebellious barons. It was a potent symbol of the limitations of royal power, the refusal of the English people ever to submit to tyranny. The act of a hero Without John’s death, everything might have been different. By killing his king, the anonymous monk released England from the clutches of a tyrant, and opened the way to a new settlement, a permanent shift in the balance of power between the king and his people. It was the act of a hero: bravely undertaken for the greater good. But John wasn’t murdered. It’s true that he visited Swineshead Abbey on his last journey. But he was sick, with dysentery, and struggled on as far as Newark, where he died on the night of 18/19 October, after making a will and nominating a council to support the claims of his son Henry. One historian writing at the time said that John had made himself ill with his “pernicious gluttony”. Others, writing in the following decade, declared that John’s death was the inevitable judgment of God on his sins. But they all agreed on one thing: King John died of dysentery in Newark. And yet when the vivid story of John’s murder at the hands of the Swineshead monk appeared in the chronicles, perhaps 50 years later, it was suddenly everywhere – in histories written in Latin, French and English; in popular stories, poems and songs. One learned Latin historian in the 14th century said that, while John had died at Newark, “popular rumour” believed otherwise, and then he told the whole tale in detail. Even the historian who knew it to be false couldn’t resist it – and many others simply presented it as fact. A sumptuously illustrated manuscript created towards the end of the 13th century, now in the British Library, depicts the kings of England from Edward the Confessor to Edward I. In its picture of John, the king stares suspiciously at the poisoned cup proffered by a nervous monk. John’s murder had become the defining event of his reign: the just punishment of a tyrant, and an act of national salvation, carried out by a patriotic subject. Righteous rebels? The success of this story is important, and revealing. That’s because it tells us just as much about the English people’s evolving attitudes towards their kings, as it does about the death of John. Kings were anointed with holy oil at their coronation. They were God’s representatives on Earth, placed in supreme authority to rule over their subjects. When John faced his baronial opponents he was supported by the pope, who excommunicated the rebels for resisting their rightful king. But the rebels did not believe that they were doing wrong. They had renounced their homage to John in response to his abuses – his arbitrary exactions and punishments, his manipulation of the laws to destroy those who opposed him, his refusal to accept the counsel and advice of his greatest magnates. They had offered their allegiance to Louis, an alternative claimant – a man of royal blood, married to a granddaughter of Henry II – because of their belief in the essential nature of kingship. The rebels could not envisage England without a king. But they demanded that their king uphold law and justice. The events of John’s reign were a beginning, the start of real resistance to abuses of kingship. There had been wars before, but they had always been openly self-interested, a matter of rival claimants’ attempts to seize power for themselves. Now, for the first time, the English went to war over an idea of what English government and kingship should be. As the 13th century wore on, this idea of kingship – authority by consent of the people, subject to the laws enshrined in Magna Carta – became embedded in English politics. Political awareness spread far beyond the royal court and the greatest nobility: people in every town, village and parish church heard Magna Carta proclaimed, and they expected the king to uphold it. Listen | Nicholas Vincent discusses the life and reign of the infamous 13th-century monarch Guttering flames In 1253 Henry III had been repeatedly denied grants of taxation by parliament, and he was forced to reassert his support of the charter. He and all the great men of the realm pronounced an oath that placed a sentence of excommunication on anyone who broke the terms of Magna Carta. Standing in a circle holding lit candles, they threw them to the ground, so that the flames guttered out and smoke rose from the floor, while bells were rung. “So let any who break this oath be extinguished and stink in hell,” they intoned. The king made his own promise: “So help me God, I will faithfully keep all these things inviolate, as I am a man, as I am a Christian, as I am a knight, and as I am a crowned and anointed king.” This pronouncement was read out in all the parish churches in England, so that everyone in the land could hear it. Yet no matter how earnest Henry’s promises and pronouncements, they weren’t enough to placate his persistently rebellious barons. And when opposition to his rule finally coalesced into the Barons’ Wars of the 1260s, ordinary people – far more politically active than they were at the beginning of the century – joined the cause. As the two sides squared up in an increasingly bitter conflict, the barons’ leader, Simon de Montfort, was heralded as a saviour of the English people. And when the barons defeated the king’s forces at the battle of Lewes in 1264, a long poem celebrated their victory, describing how they had “fought for England” against Henry’s tyranny and injustice. Martyrdom of a rebel But the rebels’ triumph was short-lived. The following year, at the battle of Evesham, the royalists exacted revenge, slaughtering Simon de Montfort and many of his supporters on the field. Such was the enmity between the combatants that Montfort’s body was mutilated and torn apart. The king’s forces then pursued and killed as many rebels as they could. One witness wrote of the slaughter of a group who had sought sanctuary in a church, remarking that the floor was so deep in blood it flowed down into the crypt. The horrors of 1265 lodged themselves in popular memory for a very long time. As late as the following century, poems and songs lamenting the loss of Simon de Montfort were copied into manuscripts. This had not just been a struggle between powerful noblemen. Village preachers had taken up the cause and farmers and tradesmen had joined in battle alongside their lords. A few days after Evesham, villagers of Peatling Magna, a small parish in Leicestershire, attacked the royalist baggage train, accusing the party of “treason and other heinous offences because they were against the welfare of the community of the realm and against the barons”. De Montfort was hailed as a martyr, a man who had died in a holy cause, fighting for the English people. His death was a shocking break with custom. Not since the battle of Hastings in 1066 had any great English nobleman been killed on the field of battle. Now, powerful men were putting themselves in mortal danger, dying for “the whole community of the realm”. It was the most potent of ideas, and it changed English history. So English politics looked very different by the time the story of John’s murder appeared in the chronicles, 60 or 70 years after his death. No longer the preserve of a tiny minority of the nobility, the institution of parliament was growing in power and reach, while public awareness of matters of governance, law and justice had penetrated to every town and village in the country, to every parish church, smithy, pub and market square. The tale of John’s poisoning must have come from those places, from ordinary people, in conversations long lost to us. It began as a rumour, was elaborated and circulated. It gained in details and in drama – and then, finally, it reached into the written record. It was a direct contradiction of known history, but was a tale too compelling to ignore, too convincing to dismiss. When Edward II was crowned in 1308, he was made to swear a new oath to his people: “To maintain and preserve the laws and rightful customs which the community of the realm shall have chosen.” Within two months, enraged with Edward’s promotion of his favourite, Piers Gaveston, the Earl of Lincoln led the barons of the realm in a statement of their position: “Honour and oath of allegiance are more in respect of the crown than in respect of the king’s person.” If the king should fail to honour the dignity of the crown, if he appears “not to be guided by reason”, then their duty is to the crown, not to the king. Two years later, the barons added that “unless the king granted their requests they would not have him for king”, for “with the breaker of faith, faith may be broken”. In 1327 Edward II was deposed by parliament, with the consent of “all the people”. The medal struck to mark his young son Edward III’s coronation bore a new legend: Populi dat iura voluntas: ‘The will of the people makes the law.’ The people of England had come to believe they had the right to judge their king – just as they had created, and believed, the story that one anonymous monk had judged and executed a king more than a century before. Laura Ashe specialises in the literature, history and culture of medieval England at the University of Oxford. Her books include Richard II: A Brittle Glory (Allen Lane, 2016) This article was first published in the July 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine
Sean McGlynn discusses nine places related to an often forgotten assault on England and its much-maligned monarch in 1216
When Richard the Lionheart was killed by a crossbow bolt in France in April 1199, a French chronicler, no friend of the English monarch, wrote: “God visited the kingdom of the French, for King Richard died.” Richard had been a feared and victorious enemy of France, and few believed that his younger brother and successor, John, would be a match for the formidable and experienced French king Philip II, known as Augustus. As an archbishop presciently despaired on hearing of Richard’s death: “What hope remains to us now? There is none, for, after him, I can see nobody to defend the kingdom. The French will overrun us, and there will be no one to resist them.” When John died in 1216, more than one-third of England, including the capital, was under French rule. King John’s reign started out promisingly enough, helped by the relatively peaceful state of his lands in England and France (known as the Angevin empire, these extensive territories bisected France from Normandy to the Pyrenees). John had quickly come to peace terms with Philip of France, for which one English chronicler approvingly named him ‘Softsword’. Before long it was to take on a wholly derogatory sense. Even when war did break out between England and France, John initially notched up a great triumph: in 1202 at Mirebeau he captured many of his leading enemies, the prize of which was his 15-year-old nephew, Arthur of Brittany, a claimant to the English throne and ally of King Philip. John wrote boastfully home that he “had got the lot”. But one of John’s many weaknesses was his inability to capitalise on his successes. In a forerunner of Richard III and the disappearance of the princes in the Tower, John was almost certainly responsible for the murder of Arthur. He also seriously mistreated his prisoners, thereby alienating powerful marcher lords in Normandy. When Philip launched an all-out invasion of Normandy and Anjou, John found fewer allies on the ground than he would have liked. He did little to rally his forces and instead ignominiously left Normandy to return to England. By spring 1204 the duchy was back in French hands; John never stepped foot in Normandy again. For the rest of his reign, John’s focus was on regaining the lands he had humiliatingly lost. This meant money – and lots of it. To fully exploit the resources of his land, John tightened up administrative processes and stamped the authority of his government on England. John’s presence in England was both a marker of his failure (the loss of his lands in France compelled him to be a stay-at-home king) and the cause of his problems in England. John’s onerous exactions caused huge dissent among his powerful subjects. The barons, no angels themselves, understandably resented the increasingly interfering and arbitrary nature of John’s rule. The king’s inability to handle powerful men tactfully; his notorious cruelty and lechery towards them and their families; his complete lack of trustworthiness; and, most damaging of all, the complete waste of the money painfully extracted for failed campaigns in France… all these negative aspects of his reign served only to alienate ever further those not immediately within John’s circle of beneficiaries. John’s continental allies possibly came close to achieving his long cherished plans at the battle of Bouvines in 1214. However the clash ended in victory for Philip of France, who went on to secure the Angevin territories of Brittany and Normandy. This reversal – and John’s own flight from the French in the west of France – led to open rebellion at home and the humiliation of Magna Carta in 1215. The charter was designed to reaffirm baronial liberties and, crucially, to limit the dictatorial inclinations of the monarchy. John quickly reneged on the settlement and civil war broke out once more. The barons who rebelled called in Prince Louis of France, Philip II’s heir, to be the new king of England. In May 1216, Louis arrived at the Isle of Thanet at the head of a large army that required perhaps as many as 700 ships to transport his campaign forces and equipment. He and his allies quickly took control of half of England, siting their headquarters in London. By the summer’s end, two-thirds of the baronage declared for Louis, and King Alexander of Scotland marched all the way down to Dover to pay homage to Louis as king of England. The situation was radically transformed by John’s death from dysentery on 19 October 1216. At a stroke, the focus of discontent for so many barons was removed and the English resistance became a concerted counter-attack. In 1217, Franco-baronial defeats at Lincoln and Sandwich sealed the occupiers’ fate. Louis came to terms at the treaty of Kingston in September and quit the country, leaving the throne of England to John’s young son, Henry III. 9 places linked to King John Magna Carta memorial, Runnymede Where one of Britain’s landmark moments is celebrated In May 1215 the baronial party broke their homage to John and civil war broke out. John reluctantly met the rebels in June 1215, at Runnymede, situated on the Thames – halfway between his royal castle at Windsor and the rebel camp at Staines. Here he was forced to concede to the rebels’ demands as set out in Magna Carta. This was a charter of liberties affirming the rights of his subjects (especially the most powerful ones) in a document considered central to British constitutional history. Although much of the charter is concerned with feudal and financial matters, perhaps most famously it addresses injustice: the monarch has to agree that “to no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay right or justice” and that those accused must be tried “by the lawful judgment of his peers”. The last clause was the most revolutionary: the king’s adherence to the charter was to be overseen by a council of 25 barons acting for “the community of the realm”. John never intended to honour the agreement and was soon back at war with the barons. In 1957 the American Bar Association erected at Runnymede the memorial that stands there today, bearing the inscription: “To commemorate Magna Carta, symbol of freedom under the law.” Rochester Castle Where a six-week siege saw the castle fall to King John Rochester Castle, a powerful and strategic fortress that lies on the road between London and Dover, was handed over to the rebels in October 1215 and garrisoned by 140 men under William d’Albini (also written as Daubeney). Two days afterwards they were under close siege by King John. It was an epic confrontation, with the rebels holding out for over six weeks against the massive weight of John’s national resources. A constant bombardment battered the walls but the defenders resisted bravely as they waited for reinforcements from London to lift the siege. The support never arrived and the defenders found themselves in such dire straits that the knights had to eat their war horses. When mines brought the stone curtain wall down, the garrison rushed to the inner defences of the keep. When another tunnel brought down the south-eastern tower the garrison had no choice but to surrender. John had to be talked out of hanging the defenders en masse. The English king wasn’t to hold sway over Rochester Castle for long, for his troops were ousted by Louis of France shortly after his invasion in May 1216. Visitors can see the replacement tower built shortly afterwards, its ‘newer’ rounded shape contrasting with the other three square towers. Tower of London Where Prince Louis made his base in the heart of the capital Started by another French invader 150 years previously, William the Conqueror’s castle was a fitting headquarters for Prince Louis of France. The capital fell easily into rebel hands in May 1215. This was such a blow to John that he felt compelled to agree Magna Carta a month later. The city remained in Franco-baronial hands for more than two years, all the time representing a major humiliation for John. Militarily, it could be argued that John should have marshalled his forces to retake the capital, for it was widely acknowledged that the French could not succeed without it. Instead, John went ravaging around the country, inflicting misery on his own people. Louis’ occupation of London was never seriously threatened until September 1217, by which time he “had little trust in the burghers of London” and thus “dared not leave the city”. One of the least-known events of this little-known invasion is Louis’ plan in September 1217 to launch a death-or-glory charge from the city into the ranks of the surrounding enemy. Only the start of 11th-hour peace talks prevented this from happening. Wolvesey Castle, Winchester Where Prince Louis captured one of his primary objectives Winchester marked the south-west frontline between royalist and French forces. It was a primary objective for Louis, who marched there in early June 1216; he was also hoping for a decisive encounter with John, but the English king withdrew, as was his custom, to safety at Corfe Castle in Dorset. Louis entered the city itself unopposed but had to launch siege operations against its two castles. The main castle was towards the west; a smaller one, Wolvesey, owned by Bishop Peter des Roches, lay in the east and was garrisoned by John’s illegitimate son, Oliver. Following a bombardment, both strongholds surrendered on 24 June. The loss of Winchester marked a low point for John as it coincided with a tide of high-level desertions to Louis. In March 1217 the French found themselves subjected to withering sieges; they sortied from the castle to burn and plunder the city but surrendered at the end of the month on favourable terms that granted them a safe conduct back to London. The ruins of Wolvesey Castle, also known as Old Bishop’s Palace, are still open to the public. The Wash, East Anglia Where King John’s treasure may, or may not, have sunk In the second week of October 1216, John was at King’s Lynn, one of the five most important ports in England. On 11 October, despite being ill with dysentery, he made for Lincolnshire across the Wash, a five-mile-wide estuary. At low tide this was a well-known short-cut, and it also enabled John to avoid the roads in the rebel-dominated Fenlands. Legend has it that John’s baggage train and treasure were swallowed up here, with one chronicler reporting that “the land opened up in the middle of the waves and caused whirlpools which sucked in everything, men as well as horses, so that no one escaped”. Like John, the chronicler was on uncertain ground, exaggerating events. While it is possible that there was some drama during the crossing, it was probably greatly elaborated as a cover for where the treasure really went: in the pockets of John’s entourage when he died a week later. Newark Castle Where King John died from dysentery After having over-indulged during a feast at King’s Lynn, John fell seriously ill with what appears to have been severe dysentery. In great agony, he was hauled on a litter to Newark Castle, where he was attended by the abbot of Croxton, a monk renowned for his medical knowledge. John made his last confession to the abbot and, during a violent storm, died around midnight of 18/19 October. Medieval chroniclers did not observe the maxim that one should not speak ill of the dead, with Matthew Paris writing: “With John’s foul deeds all England is stinking, as does hell, to which he is now sinking.” The best contemporary obituary for him was simply that “in his own end he was little mourned”. John’s heart was removed by the abbot and his embalmed body buried at Worcester Cathedral. John’s death removed Louis’ greatest asset and the royalists’ greatest liability. Dover Castle Where Louis’ plans to dominate England were dealt a fatal blow Dover and Windsor castles were the only two strongholds in the south-east to hold out against the French during the course of the occupation, providing islands of royalist resistance throughout the 18-month invasion. Dover Castle was besieged for nearly a year (from July 1216) – in what was to be the largest and most protracted encirclement of the invasion – with interludes arising from temporary truces. So powerful and strategically significant was this Channel fortress that it was called ‘the key to England’. Its importance is reflected in the huge resources that Louis invested in his attempts to wrest it from the royalists, applying his large stone-throwing machine ‘Evil Neighbour’ against the walls. The castle was defended by Hubert de Burgh, with his 140 knights and other soldiers. Dover’s determined resistance cost Louis serious loss of momentum and men, as many returned to the continent after they had served their time. Although bolstered by King Alexander II of Scotland’s homage to him at Dover in September 1216, Louis still could not make headway. French troops were also attacked from the outside, by a company of forest-dwelling bowmen under William of Kensham, who, it can be argued, is the original inspiration behind the popular Robin Hood legend. Louis’ failure to take Dover is considered one of the single most important factors in his ultimate failure to win England. A French siege tunnel can still be seen at the castle. Lincoln Castle Where a major land battle left the royalists in control Lincoln witnessed the great land battle of the invasion. Representing the northern front line, the city was taken soon after the French arrived, but the castle remained defiant under the redoubtable leadership of Nichola de Haye. On 20 May 1217, the main royalist force under the command of the regent William Marshal and Peter des Roches arrived at the city to raise the siege. A group of crossbowmen under the notorious mercenary captain Falkes de Bréauté secretly made their way into the castle through a postern gate. These laid down a surprise barrage of fire on the French and baronial soldiers while the main body of troops burst through a city gate, pushing Louis’ men back. The French commander, the 22-year-old Count de Perche, tried to rally his troops in the close in front of the cathedral’s west front. But when he was killed by a dagger through the eyehole of his visor, his troops fled. The greatest number of casualties was inflicted after the battle when the city was savagely sacked. Lincoln left the royalists in the ascendant, and many of Louis’ leading men and knights now prisoner. During the civil wars of the 17th century, the castle walls were lowered. The cathedral holds one of the surviving copies of Magna Carta. Sandwich port, Kent Where a great naval battle saw Louis seek peace After Lincoln, Louis’ hopes rested on reinforcements from France, provided by his wife, Blanche de Castile. Another large fleet was assembled to convey these troops over the Channel – more than sufficient for Louis to redress most of his recent losses. The fleet was under the naval command of Eustace the Monk, one of this period’s most colourful characters: a cross-dressing, farting, foul-mouthed pirate. On 24 August some 40 English ships met the French convoy of around 80 vessels off the coast of Sandwich. There followed arguably the most important naval battle in England’s history. The English ships manoeuvred downwind of the French, and cast lime dust into their eyes, blinding the enemy. They then rammed, boarded and sunk French vessels. The end came when Eustace’s flagship was captured and he was beheaded on deck. The French sailors were slaughtered; according to one chronicler they were “thrown into the sea as food for the fish”. After this massive defeat, Louis sought peace terms, and left England forever. Sean McGlynn is a lecturer in history for the Open University and the University of Plymouth at Strode College This article was first published in the May 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Textus Roffensis: a medieval manuscript to rival Magna Carta
The Textus Roffensis, produced at Rochester Cathedral in the 12th-century, is 100 years older than Magna Carta and contains the only copy of the oldest set of laws in English...
The Textus Roffensis, which was compiled by a single scribe at Rochester Cathedral in Kent in the 1120s, is seen by some as containing foundation documents of the English state. Safeguarded by the cathedral since its inception, the charter was digitised by the University of Manchester in 2014. Here, Dr Chris Monk highlights 10 things we ought to know about the remarkable ‘text of Rochester’. It contains the earliest example of written English in the form of the only surviving copy of the oldest known English law The law-code of King Æthelberht of Kent (560–616) represents the creation of the Old English alphabet, which combines Latin characters and letters based on ancient runes. Issued around the year 600, Æthelberht’s Code is the first of three Kentish laws unique to the Textus Roffensis – the others being Hlothere and Eadric’s Code (c679–85), and Wihtræd’s Code (695). It is the opening text of a ‘legal encyclopaedia’ of more than three dozen English laws (ranging from 600–1100) that constitute the bulk of the first part of the Textus Roffensis. Æthelberht’s Code offers us insight into the system of compensation that probably prevailed in Kent at the start of the 7th century. Its opening words, ‘Godes feoh & ciricean XII gylde’ set out the level of restitution to be made by one who stole from ‘God’s property and the Church’s’, namely ‘a twelve-fold compensation’. The law also includes an extensive list of payments to be made for acts of violence, including 50 shillings for gouging out an eye and six shillings for stabbing a man through his genitals. It contains a forged document written by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York (1002–23), purporting to be a settlement drawn up between King Alfred (r871–99), Edward the Elder (r899–924), and Guthrum, Viking king of East Anglia (d899/90) This decree, known as Peace of Edward and Guthrum, was fabricated as an addition to the genuine Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum [an agreement between Alfred the Great of Wessex and Guthrum, the Viking ruler of East Anglia, following Alfred's victory at Edington, which established a boundary between their kingdoms and regulated relations between the English and Danish subjects of the two kings in criminal matters]. Wulfstan’s rationale was likely the preservation of the security of the church – and his own bishopric – in the Danelaw, the area of England in which Danish law prevailed. The law focuses on issues that directly affected the church, including church sanctuary, payments of tithes, and sorcery. It contains a unique copy of William the Conqueror’s law of trial by combat, which was used to settle disputes between Englishmen and Frenchmen This law, written in English, introduced to the English the Norman idea of settling disputes by combat. Fascinatingly, if an accused Englishman refused to defend himself though either trial by combat or oath swearing, then he had the further option of ordeal by iron: carrying a piece of red-hot iron in order to ascertain innocence (if innocent, he would heal quickly from the burns). Should the Englishman be the accuser, but he dared not summon the Frenchman to combat, then the latter could defend himself by a comprehensive oath. It contains an excommunication curse with an obscenity “May he be cursed... in sh***ing”. This is how Laurence Sterne, in his 18th-century novel Tristram Shandy, translated maledictus cacando, the surprisingly irreverent words that form part of a malediction against criminals. Sterne also supplied ‘pi**ing’ for mingendo, though that is arguably a somewhat amplified rendering of the Latin. Known officially as Excommunicatio VIII, and thought to originate from either the 10th or 11th centuries, it is an appeal for supernatural intervention against one expelled from the church. The comprehensive malediction leaves us in no doubt of the excommunicate’s status, cursing all activities of his life, his death, and all body parts – from the hairs of his head right down to his toenails! It contains the oldest copy of Henry I’s Coronation Charter which, more than 100 years before Magna Carta, granted freedom to the English Church The charter, published on 5 August 1100, announces to the shires that Henry was king of “the realm of England”, and that he would restore to the people “the law of King Edward (the Confessor)” – a profoundly symbolic gesture towards his English subjects for whom he claimed to have great love. The opening grant of freedom to God’s Church, that Henry would neither sell nor “lease at farm” its lands, influenced the first grant of liberty coerced out of King John and written down in the Magna Carta 115 years later. It contains a fabricated foundational charter for Rochester Cathedral, created to defend the long-standing land rights of England’s second oldest cathedral A beautiful, historiated initial depicting Christ in front of Rochester Priory offering his blessing while also trampling a beast (signifying Satan) marks the opening of a cartulary, the second part of the Textus Roffensis. As the only major decoration in the manuscript, it visually reinforces the charter’s claim that King Æthelberht granted lands for the foundation of the Church of Saint Andrew at Rochester in 604. Though the charter is, to put it politely, retrospective, it nevertheless represents what was in essence factual, since the historian Bede states explicitly that Æthelberht did indeed grant land and privileges in establishing the church at Rochester. Though written largely in Latin, the land boundaries themselves are described in Old English. If truly representing Æthelberht’s original grant, these may be the oldest examples of English street names. It was dropped into the River Thames in the 18th century Though the facts are not completely clear, it appears that the Textus Roffensis was accidently submerged in either the Thames or the Medway while being transported to or from London, sometime between 1708 and 1718. The book shows signs of water damage on each of its folios. Despite this, the manuscript is in remarkably good condition. It may well be that its tight clasps and robust binding prevented more significant damage. It is similar in size to a hardback novel Measuring approximately 225mm by 155mm, the book’s importance is not reflected in its small size. It is clear that its vellum pages have been trimmed, though it is not possible to say exactly by how much. Most likely this took place when the decision was made, probably in the 14th century, to bind together what were originally two separate manuscripts: the ‘legal encyclopaedia’ and the cartulary. Though both parts are predominantly the work of the same scribe, we cannot be sure of the rationale behind forming a single volume. It contains a pseudo-Christian, magical charm for the recovery of stolen property Sandwiched between a law on betrothal and a law on bequeathing property is this rather odd formula for dealing with theft of livestock and household goods. The charm – a mix of Latin and English – invokes the Cross of Christ, Abraham and Job. Instructions for singing the charm, written in English, are also provided, and include directions to sing upon the bridle, or fetters, of a stolen horse; and, in the case of other livestock, to sing upon and thrice drip candle wax over the animal’s hoof-tracks. For the recovery of household goods, one had to sing to the four sides and the middle of the house. It contains a royal genealogy that traces the kings of Wessex back to the apocryphal fourth son of Noah There are four royal genealogies in the first part of the Textus Roffensis, two of which trace the purported ancestry of the West Saxon kings back to Woden and ‘the first man Adam’, and, in one of these, to ‘the Father, who is Christ’. Bizarrely, both of these also highlight a certain Scef (or Scyf), informing the reader that he was ‘born on the ark’ – according to one of them, to Noah himself! It would seem, then, that Anglo-Saxon genealogists were keen to create a foundation myth that demonstrated that the English people had a very special ancestry. Dr Chris Monk was a consultant for Rochester Cathedral’s ‘Hidden Treasures, Fresh Expression’ project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and various other organisations. He has lectured on medieval literature and art at the University of Manchester, and is now a freelance writer