The History of England From the Norman Conquest to the Death of John War And Finance byAdams, George Burton
Richard was indeed in prison in Germany. To avoid passing through
Toulouse on account of the hostility of the count he had sailed up the
Adriatic, hoping possibly to strike across into the northern parts of
Aquitaine, and there had been shipwrecked. In trying to make his way in
disguise through the dominions of the Duke of Austria he had been
recognized and arrested, for Leopold of Austria had more than one ground
of hatred of Richard, notably because his claim to something like an
equal sovereignty had been so rudely and contemptuously disallowed in the
famous incident of the tearing down of his banner from the walls of Acre.
But a greater sovereign than Leopold had reason to complain of the
conduct of Richard and something to gain from his imprisonment, and the
duke was obliged to surrender his prisoner to the emperor, Henry VI.
When the news of this reached England, it seemed to John that his
opportunity might at last be come, and he crossed over at once to the
continent. Finding the barons of Normandy unwilling to receive him in the
place of Richard, he passed on to Philip, did him homage for the French
fiefs, and even for England it was reported, took oath to marry Adela,
and ceded to him the Norman Vexin. In return Philip promised him a part
of Flanders and his best help to get possession of England and his
brother's other lands. Roger of Howden, who records this bargain,
distinguishes between rumour and what he thought was true, and it may be
taken as a fair example of what it was believed John would agree to in
order to dispossess his imprisoned brother. He then returned to England
with a force of mercenaries, seized the castles of Wallingford and
Windsor, prepared to receive a fleet which Philip was to send to his aid,
and giving out that the king was dead, he demanded the kingdom of the
justices and the fealty of the barons. But nobody believed him; the
justices immediately took measures to resist him and to defend the
kingdom against the threatened invasion, and civil war began anew. Just
then Hubert Walter, Bishop of Salisbury, arrived from Germany, bringing a
letter from Richard himself. It was certain that the king was not dead,
but the news did not promise an immediate release. The emperor demanded a
great ransom and a crowd of hostages of the barons. The justices must at
once set about raising the sum, and a truce was made with John until
autumn.
The terms of his release which Richard had stated in his letter did not
prove to be the final ones. Henry VI was evidently determined to make all
that he could out of his opportunity, and it was not till after the middle
of the year 1193 that a definite agreement was at last made. The ransom
was fixed at 150,000 marks, of which 100,000 were to be on hand in London
before the king should go free. It was on the news of this arrangement
that Philip sent his famous message to John, "Take care of yourself: the
devil is loosed." In John's opinion the best way to take care of himself
was to go to Philip's court, and this he did on receiving the warning,
either because he was afraid of the view Richard might take of his conduct
on his return, or because he suspected that Philip would throw him over
when he came to make a settlement with Richard. There were, however, still
two obstacles in the way of Richard's return: the money for the ransom
must be raised, and the emperor must be persuaded to keep his bargain.
Philip, representing John as well, was bidding against the terms to which
Richard had agreed. They offered the emperor 80,000 marks, to keep him
until the Michaelmas of 1194; or £1000 a month for each month that he was
detained; or 150,000 marks, if he would hold him in prison for a year, or
give him up to them. Earlier still Philip had tried to persuade Henry to
surrender Richard to him, but such a disposition of the case did not suit
the emperor's plans, and now he made Philip's offers known to Richard. If
he had been inclined to listen, as perhaps he was, the German princes,
their natural feeling and interest quickened somewhat by promises of money
from Richard, would have insisted on the keeping of the treaty. On
February 4, 1194, Richard was finally set free, having done homage to the
emperor for the kingdom of England and having apparently issued letters
patent to record the relationship,57 a step towards the realization of
the wide-reaching plans of Henry VI for the reconstruction of the Roman
Empire, and so very likely as important to him as the ransom in money.
The raising of this money in England and the other lands of the king was
not an easy task, not merely because the sum itself was enormous for the
time, but also because so great an amount exceeded the experience, or
even the practical arithmetic of the day, and could hardly be accurately
planned for in advance. It was, however, vigorously taken in hand by
Eleanor and the justices, assisted by Hubert Walter, who had now become
Archbishop of Canterbury by Richard's direction and who was soon made
justiciar, and the burden seems to have been very patiently borne. The
method of the Saladin tithe was that first employed for the general
taxation by which it was proposed to raise a large part of the sum. All
classes, clerical and feudal, burgess and peasant, were compelled to
contribute according to their revenues, the rule being one-fourth of the
income for the year, and the same proportion of the movable property; all
privileges and immunities of clergy and churches as well as of laymen
were suspended; the Cistercians even who had a standing immunity from all
exactions gave up their whole year's shearing of wool, and so did the
order of Sempringham; the plate and, jewels of the churches and
monasteries, held to be properly used for the redemption of captives,
were surrendered or redeemed in money under a pledge of their restoration
by the king. The amount at first brought in proved insufficient, and the
officers who collected it were suspected of peculation, possibly with
justice, but possibly also because the original calculation had been
inaccurate, so that a second and a third levy were found necessary. It
was near the end of the year 1193 before the sum raised was accepted by
the representatives of the emperor as sufficient for the preliminary
payment which would secure the king's release.
Richard, set free on February 4, did not feel it necessary to be in
haste, and he only reached London on March 6. There he found things in as
unsettled a state as they had been since the beginning of his
imprisonment. He had made through Longchamp a most liberal treaty with
Philip to keep him quiet during his imprisonment; he had also induced
John by a promise of increasing his original grants to return to his
allegiance to himself: but neither of these agreements had proved binding
on the other parties. John had made a later treaty with Philip,
purchasing his support with promises of still more extensive cessions of
the land he coveted, and under this treaty the king of France had taken
possession of parts of Normandy, while the justiciar of England, learning
of John's action, had obtained a degree of forfeiture against him from a
council of the barons and had begun the siege of his castles. This war on
John was approved by Richard, who himself pushed it to a speedy and
successful end. Then on March 30 the king met a great council of the
realm at Nottingham. His mother was present, and the justiciar, and
Longchamp, who was still chancellor, though he had not been allowed to
return to England to remain until now. By this council John was summoned
to appear for trial within forty days on pain of the loss of all his
possessions and of all that he might expect, including the crown.
Richard's chief need would still be money both for the war in France and
for further payments on his ransom; and he now imposed a new tax of two
shillings on the carucate of land and called out one-third of the feudal
force for service abroad. Many resumptions of his former grants were also
made, and some of them were sold again to the highest bidders. Two weeks
later the king was re-crowned at Winchester, apparently with something
less of formal ceremony than in his original coronation, but with much
more than in the annual crown-wearings of the Norman kings, a practice
which had now been dropped for almost forty years. Whether quite a
coronation in strict form or not, the ceremony was evidently regarded as
of equivalent effect both by the chroniclers of the time and officially,
and it probably was intended to make good any diminution of sovereignty
that might be thought to be involved in his doing homage to the emperor
for the kingdom.
Immediately after this the king made ready to cross to France, where his
interests were then in the greatest danger, but he was detained by
contrary winds till near the middle of May. In the almost exactly five
years remaining of his life Richard never returned to England. He
belonged by nature to France, and England must have seemed a very foreign
land to him; but in passing judgment on him we must not overlook the fact
that England was secure and needed the presence of the king but little,
while many dangers threatened, or would seem to Richard to threaten, his
continental possessions. Even a Henry I would probably have spent those
five years abroad. Richard found the king of France pushing a new attack
on Normandy to occupy the lands which John had ceded him, but the French
forces withdrew without waiting to try the issue of a battle. Richard had
hardly landed before another enemy was overcome, by his own prudence
also, and another example given of the goodness of Richard's heart toward
his enemies and of his willingness to trust their professions. He had
said that his brother would never oppose force with force, and now John
was ready to abandon the conflict before it had begun. He came to
Richard, encouraged by generous words of his which were repeated to him,
and threw himself at his feet; he was at once pardoned and treated as if
he had never sinned, except that the military advantages he had had in
England through holding the king's castles were not given back to him.
Along all the border the mere presence of Richard seemed to check
Philip's advance and to bring to a better mind his own barons who had
been disposed to aid the enemy. About the middle of June almost all the
details of a truce were agreed upon by both sides, but the plan at last
failed, because Richard would not agree that the barons who had been on
the opposing sides in Poitou should be made to cease all hostilities
against each other, for this would be contrary, he said, to the ancient
custom of the land. The war went on a few weeks longer with no decisive
results. Philip destroyed Evreux, but fell back from Freteval so hastily,
to avoid an encounter with Richard, that he lost his baggage, including
his official records, and barely escaped capture himself. On November 1 a
truce for one year was finally made, much to the advantage Philip, but
securing to the king of England the time he needed for preparation.
When Richard crossed to Normandy not to return, he left England in the
hands of his new justiciar, Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, and
soon to be appointed legate of the pope, at once the head of Church and
State. No better man could have been found to stand in the place of the
king. Nephew of the wife of Glanvill, the great judge of Henry II's time,
spending much of his youth in the household of his uncle and some little
time also in the service of the king, he was by training and by personal
experience fitted to carry on the administration of England along the
lines laid down in the previous reign and even to carry forward law and
institutions in harmony with their beginnings and with the spirit of that
great period. Indeed the first itinerant justices' commission in definite
form that has come down to us dates but a few weeks after the king's
departure, and is of especial interest as showing a decided progress
since the more vague provisions of the Assize of Clarendon. A possible
source of danger to a successful ministry lay in the quarrelsome and
self-assertive Archbishop of York, the king's brother Geoffrey; but soon
after Richard's departure Hubert deprived him of power by a sharp stroke
and a skilful use of the administrative weapons with which he was
familiar. On complaint of Geoffrey's canons against him he sent a
commission of judges to York to examine the case, who ordered Geoffrey's
servants to be imprisoned on a charge of robbery, and on the archbishop's
refusal to appear before them to answer for himself they decreed the
confiscation of his estates. Geoffrey never recovered his position in
Richard's time.
The year 1195 in England and abroad passed by with few events of
permanent interest. Archbishop Hubert was occupied chiefly with
ecclesiastical matters and with the troubles of Geoffrey of York, and
conditions in the north were further changed by the closing of the long
and stormy career of the bishop, of Durham, Hugh of Puiset. In France the
truce was broken by Philip in June, and the war lingered until December
with some futile efforts at peace, but with no striking military
operations on either side. Early in December the two kings agreed on the
conditions of a treaty, which was signed on January 15, 1196. The terms
were still unfavourable to Richard; for Philip at last had Gisors and the
Norman Vexin ceded to him by competent authority and a part of his other
conquests and the overlordship of Angoulème, while Richard on his side
was allowed to retain only what he had taken in Berri.
As this treaty transferred to France the old frontier defences of
Normandy and opened the way down the Seine to a hostile attack upon
Rouen, the question of the building of new fortifications became an
important one to both the kings. The treaty contained a provision that
Andely should not be fortified. This was a most important strategic
position on the river, fitted by nature for a great fortress and
completely covering the capital of Normandy. At a point where the Seine
bends sharply and a small stream cuts through the line of limestone
cliffs on its right bank to join it, a promontory of rock three hundred
feet above the water holds the angle, cut off from the land behind it
except for a narrow isthmus, and so furnished the feudal castle-builder
with all the conditions which he required. The land itself belonged to
the Archbishop of Rouen, but Richard, to whom the building of a fortress
at the place was a vital necessity, did not concern himself seriously
with that point, and began the works which he had planned soon after the
signing of the treaty in which he had promised not to do so. The
archbishop who was still Walter of Coutances, Richard's faithful minister
of earlier days, protested without avail and finally retired to Rome,
laying the duchy under an interdict. Richard was no more to be stopped in
this case by an interdict than by his own promises, and went steadily on
with his work, though in the end he bought off the archbishop's
opposition by a transfer to him in exchange of other lands worth
intrinsically much more than the barren crag that he had seized. The
building occupied something more than a year, and when it was completed,
the castle was one of the strongest in the west. Richard had made use in
its fortification of the lessons which he learned in the Holy Land, where
the art of defence had been most carefully studied under compulsion; and
the three wards of the castle, its thick walls and strong towers, and the
defences crossing the river and in the town of New Andely at its foot,
seemed to make it impregnable. Richard took great pride in his creation.
He called it his fair child, and named it Chateau-Gaillard or "saucy
castle."
Philip had not allowed all this to go on without considering the treaty
violated, but the war of 1196 is of the same wearisome kind as that of
the previous year. The year brought with it some trouble in Britanny
arising from a demand of Richard's for the wardship of his nephew Arthur,
and resulting in the barons of Britanny sending the young prince to the
court of Philip. In England the rising of a demagogue in London to
protest against the oppression of the poor is of some interest. The
king's financial demands had never ceased; they could not cease, in fact,
and though England was prosperous from the long intervals of peace she
had enjoyed and bore the burden on the whole with great patience, it was
none the less heavily felt. In London there was a feeling not merely that
the taxes were heavy, but that they were unfairly assessed and collected,
so that they rested in undue proportion on the poorer classes. Of this
feeling William Fitz Osbert, called "William with the Beard," made
himself the spokesman. He opposed the measures of the ruling class,
stirred up opposition with fiery speeches, crossed over to the king, and,
basing on the king's interest in the subject a boast of his support,
threatened more serious trouble. Then the justiciar interfered by force,
dragged him out of sanctuary, and had him executed. The incident had a
permanent influence in the fact that Hubert Walter, who was already
growing unpopular, found his support from the clergy weakened because of
his violation of the right of sanctuary. He was also aggrieved because
Richard sent over from the continent the Abbot of Caen, experienced in
Norman finance, to investigate his declining revenues and to hold a
special inquisition of the sheriffs. The inquisition was not held because
of the death of the abbot, but later in the year Hubert offered to
resign, but finally decided to go on in office for a time longer.
The year 1197 promised great things for Richard in his war with the king
of France, but yielded little. He succeeded in forming a coalition among
the chief barons of the north, which recalls the diplomatic successes of
his ancestor, Henry I. The young Count Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault
had grievances of his own against Philip which he was anxious to avenge.
Count Philip, who had exercised so strong an influence over King Philip
at the time of his accession, had died early in the crusade, and the
Count of Hainault on succeeding him had been compelled to give up to
France a large strip of territory adjoining Philip's earlier annexation,
and on his death Count Baldwin had had to pay a heavy relief. The
coalition was joined by the Counts of Boulogne and Blois, and Britanny
was practically under the control of Richard. Philip, however, escaped
the danger that threatened him by some exercise of his varied talents of
which we do not know the exact details. Led on in pursuit of the Count of
Flanders until he was almost cut off from return, he purchased his
retreat by a general promise to restore the count all his rights and to
meet Richard in a conference on the terms of peace. On Richard's side the
single advantage gained during the campaign was the capture of the cousin
of the French king, Philip of Dreux, the warlike Bishop of Beauvais,
whose raids along the border and whose efforts at the court of Henry VI
of Germany against his release from imprisonment had so enraged Richard
that he refused upon any terms or under any pressure to set him free as
long as he lived. The interview between the kings took place on September
17, when a truce for something more than a year was agreed upon to allow
time for arranging the terms of a permanent peace.
The year closed in England with an incident of great interest, but one
which has sometimes been made to bear an exaggerated importance. At a
council of the kingdom held at Oxford on December 7, the justiciar
presented a demand of the king that the baronage should unite to send him
at their expense three hundred knights for a year's service with him
abroad. Evidently it was hoped that the clergy would set a good example.
The archbishop himself expressed his willingness to comply, and was
followed by the Bishop of London to the same effect. Then Bishop Hugh of
Lincoln, being called upon for his answer, to the great indignation of
the justiciar, flatly refused on the ground that his church was not
liable for service abroad. The Bishop of Salisbury, next called upon,
made the same refusal; and the justiciar seeing that the plan was likely
to fail dissolved the council in anger. One is tempted to believe that
some essential point is omitted from the accounts we have of this
incident, or that some serious mistake has been made in them, either in
the speech of Bishop Hugh given us in his biography or in the terms of
Richard's demand recorded in two slightly different forms. Hubert must
have believed that the baronage in general were going to follow the
example given them by the two bishops and refuse the required service, or
he would not have dissolved the council and reported to the king that his
plan had failed. But to refuse this service on the ground that it could
not be required except in England was to go against the unbroken practice
of more than a hundred years. Nor was there anything contrary to
precedent in the demand for three hundred knights to serve a year. The
union of the military tenants to equip a smaller force than the whole
service due to the lord, but for a longer time than the period of
required feudal service, was not uncommon. The demand implied a feudal
force due to the king from England of less than three thousand knights,
and this was well within his actual rights, though if we accept the very
doubtful statement of one of our authorities that their expenses were to
be reckoned at the rate of three shillings per day, the total cost would
exceed that of any ordinary scutage.
Richard clearly believed, as did his justiciar, that he was making no
illegal demand, for he ordered the confiscation of the baronies of the
two bishops, and Herbert of Salisbury was obliged to pay a fine. It was
only a personal journey to Normandy and the great reputation for sanctity
of the future St. Hugh of Lincoln that relieved him from the same
punishment. The importance of the right of consent to taxation in the
growth of the constitution has led many writers to attach a significance
to this incident which hardly belongs to it. Whatever were the grounds of
his action, the Bishop of Lincoln could have been acting on no general
constitutional principle. He must have been insisting on personal rights
secured to him by the feudal law. If his action contributed largely, as
it doubtless did, to that change of earlier conditions which led to the
beginning of the constitution, it was less because he tried to revive a
principle of general application, which as a matter of fact had never
existed, than because he established a precedent of careful scrutiny of
the king's rights and of successful resistance to a demand possibly of
doubtful propriety. It is as a sign of the times, as the mark of an
approaching revolution, that the incident has its real interest.
About the time that Richard sent over to England his demand for three
hundred knights news must have reached him of an event which would seem
to open the way to a great change in continental affairs. The
far-reaching plans of the emperor, Henry VI, had been brought to an end
by his death in Sicily on September 28, 1197, in the prime of his life.
His son, the future brilliant Emperor Frederick II, was still an infant,
and there was a prospect that the hold of the Hohenstaufen on the empire
might be shaken off. About Christmas time an embassy reached Richard from
the princes of Germany, summoning him on the fealty he owed the empire to
attend a meeting at Cologne on February 22 to elect an emperor. This he
could not do, but a formal embassy added the weight of his influence to
the strong Guelfic party; and his favourite nephew, who had been brought
up at his court, was elected emperor as Otto IV. The Hohenstaufen party
naturally did not accept the election, and Philip of Suabia, the brother
of Henry VI, was put up as an opposition emperor, but for the moment the
Guelfs were the stronger, and they enjoyed the support of the young and
vigorous pope, Innocent III, who had just ascended the papal throne, so
that even Philip II's support of his namesake of Suabia was of little
avail.
From the change Richard gained in reality nothing. It was still an age
when the parties to international alliances sought only ends to be gained
within their own territories, or what they believed should be rightfully
their territories, and the objects of modern diplomacy were not yet
regarded. The truce of the preceding September, which was to last through
the whole of the year 1198, was as little respected as the others had
been. As soon as it was convenient, the war was reopened, the baronial
alliance against the king of France still standing, and Baldwin of
Flanders joining in the attack. At the end of September Richard totally
defeated the French, and drove their army in wild flight through the town
of Gisors, precipitating Philip himself into the river Epte by the
breaking down of the bridge under the weight of the fugitives, and
capturing a long list of prisoners of distinction, three of them, a
Montmorency among them, overthrown by Richard's own lance, as he boasted
in a letter to the Bishop of Durham. Other minor successes followed, and
Philip found himself reduced to straits in which he felt obliged to ask
the intervention of the pope in favour of peace. Innocent III, anxious
for a new crusade and determined to make his influence felt in every
question of the day, was ready to interfere on his own account; and his
legate, Cardinal Peter, brought about an interview between the two kings
on January 13, 1199, when a truce for five years was verbally agreed
upon, though the terms of a permanent treaty were not yet settled.
In the meantime financial difficulties were pressing heavily upon the
king of England. Scutages for the war in Normandy had been taken in 1196
and 1197. In the next year a still more important measure of taxation
was adopted, which was evidently intended to bring in larger sums to the
treasury than an ordinary scutage. This is the tax known as the Great
Carucage of 1198. The actual revenue that the king derived from it is a
matter of some doubt, but the machinery of its assessment is described
in detail by a contemporary and is of special interest.58 The unit of
the new assessment was to be the carucate, or ploughland, instead of
the hide, and consequently a new survey of the land was necessary to
take the place of the old Domesday record. To obtain this, practically
the same machinery was employed as in the earlier case, but to the
commissioners sent into each county by the central government two local
knights, chosen from the county, were added to form the body before whom
the jurors testified as to the ownership and value of the lands in their
neighbourhoods. Thanks to the rapid judicial advance and administrative
reforms of the past generation, the jury was now a familiar institution
everywhere and was used for many purposes. Its employment in this case
to fix the value of real property for taxation, and of personal property
as in the Saladin tithe of 1188, though but a revival of its earlier use
by William I, marks the beginning of a continuous employment of jurors
in taxation in the next period which led to constitutional results--the
birth of the representative system, and we may almost say to the origin
of Parliament in the proper meaning of the term--results of even greater
value in the growth of our civil liberty than any which came from it in
the sphere of judicial institutions important as these were.
Now in the spring of 1199 a story reached Richard of the finding of a
wonderful treasure on the land of the lord of Chalus, one of his under
vassals in the Limousin. We are told that it was the images of an
emperor, his wife, sons, and daughters, made of gold and seated round a
table also of gold. If the story were true, here was relief from his
difficulties, and Richard laid claim to the treasure as lord paramount of
the land. This claim was of course disputed, and with his mercenaries the
king laid siege to the castle of Chalus. It was a little castle and
poorly defended, but it resisted the attack for three days, and on the
third Richard, who carelessly approached the wall, was shot by a crossbow
bolt in the left shoulder near the neck. The wound was deep and was made
worse by the surgeon in cutting out the head of the arrow. Shortly
gangrene appeared, and the king knew that he must die. In the time that
was left him he calmly disposed of all his affairs. He sent for his
mother who was not far away, and she was with him when he died. He
divided his personal property among his friends and in charity, declared
John to be his heir, and made the barons who were present swear fealty to
him. He ordered the man who had shot him to be pardoned and given a sum
of money; then he confessed and received the last offices of the Church,
and died on April 6, 1199, in the forty-second year of his age.
The twelfth century was drawing to its end when Richard died, but the
close of the century was then as always in history a purely artificial
dividing line. The real historical epoch closed, a new age began with the
granting of the Great Charter. The date may serve, however, as a point
from which to review briefly one of the growing interests of England that
belongs properly within the field of its political history--its organized
municipal life. The twelfth century shows a slow, but on the whole a
constant, increase in the number, size, and influence of organized towns
in England, and of the commerce, domestic and foreign, on which their
prosperity rested. Even in the long disorder of Stephen's reign the
interruption of this growth seems to have been felt rather in particular
places than in the kingdom as a whole, and there was no serious set-back
of national prosperity that resulted from it. Not with the rapidity of
modern times, but fairly steadily through the century, new articles
appear in commerce; manufactures rise to importance, like that of cloth;
wealth and population accumulate in the towns, and they exert an
unceasing pressure on the king, or on the lords in whose domain they are,
for grants of privileges.
Such grants from the king become noticeably frequent in the reign of
Richard and are even more so under John. The financial necessities of
both kings and their recklessness, at least that of Richard, in the
choice of means to raise money, made it easy for the boroughs to purchase
the rights or exemptions they desired. The charters all follow a certain
general type, but there was no fixed measure of privilege granted by
them. Each town bargained for what it could get from a list of possible
privileges of some length. The freedom of the borough; the right of the
citizens to have a gild merchant; exemption from tolls, specified or
general, within a certain district or throughout all England or also
throughout the continental Angevin dominions; exemption from the courts
of shire and hundred, or from the jurisdiction of all courts outside the
borough, except in pleas of the crown, or even without this exception;
the right to farm the revenues of the borough, paying a fixed "firma," or
rent, to the king, and with this often the right of the citizens to elect
their own reeve or even sheriff to exempt them from the interference of
the king's sheriff of the county. This list is not a complete one of the
various rights and privileges granted by the charters, but only of the
more important ones.
To confer these all upon a town was to give it the fullest right obtained
by English towns and to put it practically in the position which London
had reached in the charter of Henry I's later years. London, if we may
trust our scanty evidence, advanced at one time during this period to a
position reached by no other English city, to the position of the French
commune.59 Undoubtedly the word "commune," like other technical words,
was sometimes used at the time loosely and vaguely, but in its strict and
legal sense it meant a town raised to the position of a feudal vassal and
given all the rights as well as duties of a feudal lord, a seigneurie
collective populaire, as a French scholar has called it.60 Thus
regarded, the town had a fulness of local independence to be obtained
in no other way. To such a position no English city but London attained,
and it may be thought that the evidence in London's case is not full
enough to warrant us in believing that it reached the exact legal status
of a commune.
We find it related as an incident of the struggle between John and
Longchamp in 1191, when Longchamp was deposed, that John and the barons
conceded the commune of London and took oath to it, and about the same
time we have proof that the city had its mayor. Documentary evidence has
also been discovered of the existence at the same date of the governing
body known on the continent as the échevins. But while the mayor and the
échevins are closely associated with the commune, their presence is not
conclusive evidence of the existence of a real commune, nor is the use of
the word itself, though the occurrence of the two together makes it more
probable. Early in 1215, when John was seeking allies everywhere against
the confederated barons, he granted a new charter to London, which
recognized the right of the citizens to elect their own mayor and required
him to swear fealty to the king. If we could be sure that this oath was
sworn for the city, it would be conclusive evidence, since the oath of the
mayor to the lord of whom the commune as a corporate person "held" was a
distinguishing mark of this relationship. The probability that such was
the case is confirmed by the fact that a few weeks later, in the famous
twelfth clause of the Great Charter, we find London put distinctly in the
position of a king's vassal. This evidence is strengthened by a comparison
with the corresponding clause of the Articles of the Barons, a kind of
preliminary draft of the Great Charter, and much less carefully drawn,
where there is added to London a general class of towns whose legal right
to the privilege granted it would not have been possible to defend.61
That London maintained its position among the king's vassals in the
legally accurate Great Charter is almost certain proof that it had some
right to be classed with them. But even if London was for a time a
commune, strictly speaking, it did not maintain the right in the next
reign, and that form of municipal organization plays no part in English
history.62 It is under the form of chartered towns, not communes, that
the importance of the boroughs in English commercial and public life
continued to increase in the thirteenth as it had in the twelfth century.
Footnotes
[57] Ralph de Diceto, ii, 113.
[58] Roger of Howden, iv. 46.
[59] Round, The Commune of London.
[60] Luchaire, Communes Françaises, 97.
[61] Articles of the Barons, c. 32; Stubbs, Select Charters, 393.
[62] See London and the Commune in Engl. Hist. Rev., Oct. 1904.
