1886 –1918

The launch of EHR occurred within a decade of the publication of William Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England (1874–8), in many ways Victorian constitutionalism’s high-water mark. According to Stubbs (here writing in a present historic tense that may come as a surprise to those believing such things to be modern barbarisms), Magna Carta was ‘the first great public act of the nation, after it has realised its own identity: the consummation of the work for which unconsciously kings, prelates, and lawyers have been labouring for a century’. As a result, ‘the whole of the constitutional history of England is little more than a commentary on Magna Carta’.¹ Stubbs’s pupils, most notably John Horace Round, found this too large a pill to swallow, even within a decade of its first concoction. As a result, Stubbs’s chief legacy lay not in the ‘Whig’ (in fact, part-‘Tory’) teleology of the Constitutional History but in what Stubbs himself might have considered his lesser works, his editions of chronicles and his Select Charters, intended from the outset as a student crib. So workaday was the Select Charters that, although it was first published in 1870, no copy of it earlier than the fourth edition of 1881 seems to survive in the Bodleian, and no copy earlier than 1884 in the British Library.² Yet, it was by this means that Stubbs helped to establish a close connection between the writing of history and the editing of medieval texts, with Magna Carta as the greatest medieval text of all. At Oxford, in part in order to assist with the teaching of Stubbs’s Charters, classes in palaeography were made available from 1889 onwards, followed in the 1890s by classes in diplomatic taught by Reginald Lane Poole, EHRʼs editor from 1895 to 1920.³ In Cambridge, although there was less formal teaching provision for medievalists, Maitland and others trailed in Magna Carta’s wake, publishing plea rolls, year books and other records of thirteenth-century law.

Magna Carta made occasional appearances in EHR from the very first year of the journal’s publication.⁴ But it was not until 1893 that the charter took centre stage. In the midst of preparing his Calendar of Documents in France illustrative of the History of Great Britain and Ireland (eventually published in 1899), J.H. Round had been trawling through transcripts from French archives, prepared for the Record Commissioners in the 1830s.⁵ There he came across a highly significant single sheet preserved in the French Archives nationales: a copy of Henry I’s coronation charter followed by clauses granted by a king who could clearly be identified as King John.

This ‘Unknown Charter’, as Round termed it, was undoubtedly an early draft of the negotiations brought to fulfilment at Runnymede.⁶ It remains not only the first but also perhaps the most significant Magna Carta discovery that EHR has put into circulation. Round was right to stress its importance. He was less accurate in identifying its whereabouts. This was a point eagerly seized upon by Hubert Hall, himself a recent victim of Roundian persecution and only too keen to correct his tormentor.⁷ In an EHR note published in 1894, Hall, supported by the Frenchman Charles Bémont, gave the correct modern archival reference for Round’s charter. In the process, they pointed out that, far from being ‘unknown’, it had been printed as long ago as 1863 in an official French edition.⁸ Unfortunately for Hall, having floored Round on archival call numbers, the temptation arose to humiliate him further over points of interpretation. This was unwise. It drew Hall into a spider’s web of conjecture. The ‘Unknown Charter’, Hall suggested, was not part of the negotiations over Magna Carta, as Round had supposed, but instead an archaic French forgery of what purported to be John’s coronation charter issued in 1199, made after 1215 and here preserved as justification for the French invasion of England in 1216.⁹ Subsequent scholarship, including notes published in the EHR in 1894 and 1905, consigned Hall and his theory to hapless obscurity.¹⁰ Meanwhile, it is tempting to detect here the first volley of grapeshot in what was to develop into that great return of broadsides from Round, targeted at Hall’s flagship, the Red Book of the Exchequer (1896).¹¹ It seems not previously to have been noticed that the first shots in this battle were fired, in public at least, not by Round but by Hall.

In 1894, Round published a second Magna Carta note, again as a result of his exploration of French sources. A typically pugnacious piece, steering close to pedantry, this was intended to correct a reference in Pierre Adolphe Chéruel’s Histoire de Rouen (1843–4). Here Chéruel had referred to a charter published in Nicolas Brussel’s Nouvel examen de l’usage général des fiefs (1727), purporting to be a version of Magna Carta granted not by King John or Henry III to the men of England, but by Henry II to Normandy. Brussel’s Norman Magna Carta, as Round revealed, was in fact nothing but a slightly modified version of Henry III’s Magna Carta of 1225, clearly misattributed to Henry II.¹² Here, matters rested. Round’s note is seldom, if ever, cited. But, in fact, the Norman Magna Carta misattributed to Henry II is a document of some importance. It comes from a family of manuscripts of the 1280s and 90s, prepared in the build-up to Louis X’s Charte aux normands of 1315: an attempt by the Normans to guarantee their own distinctive Norman legal customs in the face of Capetian demands for conformity and taxation. In pursuit of this, Norman lawyers were prepared not only to hunt out genuine evidence of the Norman past but also, where necessary, to improve or invent evidence attributed to Norman and Plantagenet kings. As in England after 1066, so in Normandy after 1204 there was a great search for ‘pre-Conquest’ sources, some of them authentic, many of them not. The intention was to demonstrate the antiquity of Norman law and Norman liberties, employing specifically ‘English’ or ‘Anglo-Norman’ evidence that the Capetian kings and their lawyers were powerless to challenge. Into this category fall not only the Norman Magna Carta but, I would argue, a large part of the so-called ‘Très Ancien Coutumier’, supposedly a pre-1204 Deuteronomy of Norman legal custom, in reality known from no copy before the late thirteenth-century. ¹³

Round was a product of Stubbs’s Oxford. By 1900, Oxford’s predominance in medieval constitutional history had been challenged, first by the Cambridge of Maitland (whose great History of English Law appeared in 1895), then by the Manchester school headed by another of Stubbs’s pupils, Thomas Tout.¹⁴ Tout’s colleague, James Tait, displayed many of the best (and some of the worst) characteristics of Manchester in an article of 1912, correcting both Maitland and McKechnie (the most comprehensive of Magna Carta’s recent commentators) in their translation of the word waynagium in Magna Carta clause 20. According to Tait, waynagium was neither the instruments of husbandry nor ‘waggonage’ but derived from the French gagnage, both ‘profit’ and the means of obtaining such profit including tillage and land under cultivation. In the process, Tait referred to a passage of Bracton, still worth noting today, confirming the theoretical rights of villeins to sue their lords should a lord bring about their economic ruin. Here, from only a couple of decades after 1215, we find the language of Magna Carta associated with the interests not just of barons but of the common people.¹⁵ Tait’s attempt to redefine the word contenementum in Magna Carta clause 20 met with less success. This was not, Tait argued, a synonym for tenementum or ‘landholding’, but derived from the French contenance, or ‘status/position’. A brief note by A.F. Pollard, the Tudor specialist, confirmed this, drawing attention to Sir Edward Coke’s translation of contenementum as ‘countenance’, here considered a synonym for ‘credit’ or ‘public estimation’.¹⁶ By contrast, the standard modern English version of Magna Carta, by J.C. Holt, translates waynagium as ‘wainage’, and contenementum as ‘livelihood’. In the process, Holt deftly sidesteps (or simply ignores) the nitpicking of Pollard and Tait.¹⁷ He also ignores a contemporary French translation of the 1215 Magna Carta that he himself had been the first to publish. Here waynagium appears as ‘gaagnage’ (à la Tait), but contenementum as ‘contenement’.¹⁸ All of this is technically significant. To the non-specialist, it perhaps explains why not every undergraduate took to medieval studies in the age of Stubbs and Tout.

As with Round’s ‘Unknown Charter’, so confusion surrounded the precise status of another newly discovered text, first signalled by H.J. Lawlor in 1907. In the Liber Niger of Christ Church, Dublin, Lawlor found a copy of the 1217 Magna Carta of Henry III. He supposed it to be a slightly later and properly dated version of the 1217 reissue of Magna Carta, previously known to the Statutes of the Realm only from an undated original.¹⁹ It has since been shown that the 1217 issue of Magna Carta circulated in at least two different versions, one deliberately undated, the other supplied with a date given by the hand of the chancellor, Richard Marsh, bishop of Durham, at St Paul’s, London, on 6 November 1217. The version preserved in the Black Book is, in any case, a conflation of the issues of 1217 and 1225.²⁰ What was most significant about Lawlor’s article was not so much the controversy over dating, but the proof that Magna Carta travelled to Ireland, certainly in its 1216 reissue and probably in the original issue of 1215.²¹ Ireland thereby became the first of the king’s overseas possessions to share in Magna Carta’s provisions.

Neither Ireland nor Lawlor’s discovery was alluded to in Reginald Lane Poole’s survey article of 1913, intended to establish the means by which Magna Carta and other charters of liberties, from Henry I to Edward I, were published and distributed.²² Poole argued that although Magna Carta had been granted to church and people, ‘its execution was entrusted to a commission of nine prelates and Master Pandulf’. As evidence here, he cited the exemplification of Magna Carta, issued in the name of the bishops, that was copied into the English Exchequer Red Book which had recently been edited by Hall. Poole misunderstood the purpose of these letters testimonial.²³ By drawing attention to the role played by the bishops in Magna Carta’s enforcement, he nonetheless advanced an important line of argument. This went largely ignored by commentators between 1913 and the revival of Poole’s theory by Ifor Rowlands, in improved form, as recently as 2009.²⁴ As noted by Rowlands, the thirteen exemplifications of Magna Carta released by the chancery in June/July 1215 exactly match the number of cathedral churches in England with a bishop in place. It was thus probably to the cathedrals and their bishops (including the examples still surviving at Lincoln and Salisbury), rather than to the sheriffs, that the charter was first sent.²⁵ This remains unproved, although reattribution within the past few months of one of the two 1215 Magna Cartas preserved in the British Library tends to confirm Rowlands’s theory and hence to vindicate Poole.²⁶

Equally definitively, in 1915, the American Albert Beebe White revealed that the name ‘Magna Carta’ was first applied to the great charter of liberties not, as had previously been supposed, in the 1230s or 40s, but as early as February 1218, shortly after the issue of the Forest Charter. In commanding publication of the Forest Charter, the royal chancery specifically contrasted it with the great (or ‘magna’) charter of liberties.²⁷ In 1218, as White demonstrated, the chancery remained uncertain as to whether to call the great charter ‘magna carta’ or ‘maior carta’ (‘the big’ or ‘the bigger’ charter). In a supplementary note published in 1917, White showed that such ambiguity continued to trouble the chancery as late as 1225, when the charter was reissued in what was to become its standard text.²⁸ White’s first note had appeared in the EHR’s issue for July 1915, as almost the only commemoration of Magna Carta in its 700th anniversary year. For the rest, celebrations long planned to mark Magna Carta 1915 melted away in the midst of war.²⁹ As we shall see, EHR was to allow the 750th anniversary, in 1965, to pass similarly uncommemorated.

Round’s rediscovery of the ‘Unknown Charter’ marked a turning-point in Magna Carta studies. Yet arguably even more significant were the articles that EHR published, from 1906 to 1909, by the most promising of Tout’s young apprentices, Frederick Maurice Powicke. The first of these concerned the relationship between two of the principal chronicles of the reign of King John.³⁰ The next two concerned the administration of Normandy, whose loss in 1204 was an essential step along the road to Magna Carta.³¹ The fourth was a classic detective story, suggesting not only that the disappearance in 1202 of Arthur of Brittany, the King’s nephew, was the mistake that cost John his continental lands, but that the disgrace at John’s court of the royal favourite William de Braose was a consequence of loose talk as to Arthur’s fate, begun by William’s wife.³² Founded upon a chain of conjectures almost worthy of Hubert Hall, this established the rich narrative tone that was to remain Powicke’s hallmark through to his death in 1963. Despite much subsequent work on the Braose family, Powicke’s conjectures remain in many ways the most plausible explanation for William de Braose’s spectacular fall.³³

At the time of his EHR debut, Powicke, born in 1879, had more than half a century of writing ahead of him. Not so Mary Bateson (1865–1906), destined to die of a brain haemorrhage aged only forty-one. A protegée of Maitland, Bateson used EHR in 1902 to publish a lengthy edition of a London law-book compiled in the years immediately before Magna Carta. This supplied significant proof of the spread of legal expertise within the city.³⁴ It was supplemented in 1913 by Felix Liebermann’s notice of an equally important legal manuscript, first discovered in Manchester by Tout, that was closely related to the collection that Bateson had published and once again threw light upon Londoners’ knowledge both of ancient charters and of English law.³⁵ As early as 1899, Adolphus Ballard had noted the significance of borough charters for the study of communal liberties and hence for political society under King John.³⁶

Just as important to the history of Magna Carta, J.H. Round’s 1904 article on ‘King John and Robert Fitzwalter’ still stands as a classic exercise in Roundian ‘prosopography’ (a word that Round himself would not have cared for). What Round proved here was that Robert fitz Walter and a significant number of his fellow rebels came from East Anglia rather than the north, being bound to one another by kinship with the Anglo-Norman family of the Clares.³⁷ Despite the discoveries of Round, and subsequently of J.C. Holt and others, there remains a great deal of work still to be done on the networks of rebellion in 1215. As a pointer to the sorts of evidence at our disposal, Round’s ‘Robert Fitzwalter’ remains of considerable significance.

Before leaving the earliest years of EHR, we must glance at the reviews. Stubbs’s Constitutional History appeared too early for notice, but H.W.C. Davis reviewed the first two volumes of the French translation of Stubbs, by Georges Lefebvre, published between 1907 and 1913 and amply supplied with notes by Charles Petit-Dutaillis.³⁸ These notes went on to form the basis of Petit-Dutaillis’ own Studies and Notes Supplementary to Stubbs’s Constitutional History, published in English translation by Manchester University Press between 1908 and 1929.³⁹ The reviews of the French edition of Lefebvre and Petit-Dutaillis reveal the extent to which Oxford, in the person of H.W.C. Davis, continued to grind away at the Stubbsian mill half a century after Stubbs’s Constitutional History. It was Davis who, in 1913, produced the latest, ninth, and definitive edition of Stubbs’s Select Charters—still a staple of the Oxford undergraduate syllabus into the 1960s. Thanks to Stubbs’s Charters, Magna Carta remained an Oxford ‘set text’ for J.E.A. Jolliffe, J.O. Prestwich, J.C. Holt, David Carpenter and (as perhaps the last of its acolytes, as recently as 1983) John Hudson.

In 1913, Elizabeth Levett had used a minor error in Stubbs’s Charters to assess the importance of King John’s summons, issued in November 1213, to four knights of every county to attend the king a week later at Oxford, to discuss the business of the realm. This was not (as Levett perhaps wished it to be) a direct ancestor of the later summonses to the parliamentary Commons. It was nonetheless of no small importance in the background to Magna Carta.⁴⁰ As late as 1968, a (Glaswegian) contributor to EHR could look forward to a time when ‘a revised edition of Select Charters will one day remove this little stumbling-block from the path of students’.⁴¹ This was perhaps naive in the year of les événements. Stubbs himself, meanwhile, had attracted a fulsome obituary notice from Maitland, published in 1901.⁴² Perhaps because his Charters were now so much part of the Oxford furniture, they themselves were never offered for scrutiny in EHR, although William McKechnie, the Glasgow lawyer and authority on Magna Carta, reviewed them in 1914 in EHRʼs sister journal in Scotland.⁴³

Tackling Kate Norgate’s biography of John Lackland in 1903, the great historian of the friars, A.G. Little, allowed that Norgate had satisfactorily demolished the king’s reputation for ‘cleverness’, recently emphasised by J.R. Green.⁴⁴ Norgate, he suggested, was fair on the king but less fair on the king’s baronial opponents, a criticism of writers on the reign that we shall find repeated more than once in what follows. Powicke’s The Loss of Normandy (1189–1204): Studies in the History of the Angevin Empire, first published in 1913, remains in use today, albeit cited from its second edition of 1961. The ideas that informed it had first been aired in EHR, in a linked pair of articles by Powicke published in 1906–7.⁴⁵ It was reviewed by Round, in general favourably, and with particular enthusiasm (from that great writer of appendices) for the ‘remarkable appendices which give a peculiar value to the book’. In passing, Round drew attention to the need for a full-scale study of the ‘Terrae Normannorum’ in England confiscated from Norman landholders after 1204.⁴⁶ A preliminary investigation towards such a study did at last appear in EHR, almost a century after Round’s remarks, published by Tony Moore in 2010.⁴⁷

Both of the principal secondary studies of Magna Carta published before the end of the First World War, McKechnie’s commentary and the volume of commemorative essays edited by H.E. Malden in 1917, attracted reviews. H.W.C. Davis was assigned to the first edition of McKechnie published in 1905, commending its thoroughness but noting its almost complete lack of originality and its tendency to privilege political philosophy over the specific details of history.⁴⁸ In reviewing Malden’s volume, James Tait stressed the failure of Paul Vinogradoff and Powicke to agree on the translation of the all-important word ‘vel’ in Magna Carta clause 39, in either a disjunctive or a conjunctive sense (‘or’ versus ‘and’). In other words, were all men, not just the ‘feudal’ barons (as the American legal historian G.B. Adams had suggested), to be allowed access to judgement by peers?⁴⁹ In his 1965 and 1992 translations, J.C. Holt continued to prefer a disjunctive word (‘or’), while allowing that ‘judgement by peers or by the law of the land were advanced as loose, but not exclusive, alternatives’.⁵⁰ What had in 1917 appeared a major problem had by 1992 resolved itself into a minor footnote, not least as a result of the waning of the ‘feudal constitution’ as an active concern in Magna Carta studies. Tait, meanwhile, was on the brink of another significant Magna Carta ‘discovery’: his re-evaluation of the so-called ‘Cheshire Magna Carta’, a document known only from later thirteenth-century copies but apparently issued in June or July 1215, promising on behalf of Earl Ranulf of Cheshire to uphold the liberties of the knights and barons of Cheshire at precisely the same time that, at Runnymede, John was confirming the liberties of England more generally.⁵¹

1918 –1950

In the years after 1918, although the journal recruited new writers who, in due course, were to make their mark on the study of Magna Carta—Helen Cam, Christopher Cheney, Vivian Galbraith, J.E.A. Jolliffe, H.G. Richardson—their offerings to EHR dealt only indirectly with the events of 1215. Thus Richardson’s 1933 article on the papal legate Guala and Cheney’s article two years later on ‘Legislation of the Medieval Church’ were of significance as pointers to future work, but as yet contributed only tangentially to the debate on Magna Carta.⁵² Both Cheney and Richardson were to publish seminal Magna Carta articles, but in other journals, most notably (in homage to Manchester, still at this time in contention for Oxford’s laurels) in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.⁵³ In 1938, David Knowles, living under monastic discipline though already in exile from Downside, contributed an important article setting out the circumstances in which King John had broken with the Church and plunged England into Interdict.⁵⁴ Helen Cam, reviewing Jolliffe’s Constitutional History in 1939, admitted that there was much good in Jolliffe’s account of Magna Carta, but at the same time (‘torn between admiration and exasperation’) criticised Jolliffe for his increasingly notorious inaccuracies of citation.⁵⁵ There are at least some today who would argue, contra Cam, that Jolliffe’s Constitutional History, like his later and greater Angevin Kingship (for which see below) is a book whose insights far outweigh its many faults. Cam’s first and pioneering attack on the whole concept of ‘feudalism’ was meanwhile published in 1940, not in EHR but in the journal of the Historical Association. There it rubbed shoulders with an early notice of Marc Bloch’s La Société Féodale, itself reviewed by Powicke in EHR, yet even by the time of its publication based upon an outmoded systematisation of ‘feudalism’ and ‘feudal’ law that henceforth was to face mounting challenge.⁵⁶

This was unfortunate. So too was the fact that (with the exception of a brief note by Ludwig Riess, first published in German in 1910 and republished in English form in 1926) the Franco-German contribution to the study of Magna Carta before 1914, so prominent in the work of Charles Bémont, Charles Petit-Dutaillis and Felix Liebermann, gave way to a more narrowly Anglocentric approach.⁵⁷ Here Powicke stood out as an exception. His contributions to EHR included a rich stream of book reviews, more than eighty of them, spanning his career from 1907 to 1963, ranging from the most arcane points of ninth-century diplomatic to the broadest of intellectual horizons.⁵⁸ Most of these were of books published in French or English, with a scattering of German books chiefly before 1914.⁵⁹ Powicke’s use of manuscripts and record sources was notoriously limited. It was rumoured that he would only visit the Public Record Office if a committee meeting dragged him there. In this respect he resembled, not Stubbs, but E.A. Freeman (who declared that ‘a manuscript becomes practically useful only when it is changed into the more everyday shape of a printed book’).⁶⁰ More plausibly, as Michael Clanchy has suggested, Powicke’s decision to distance himself from unpublished manuscripts was deliberate, intended to set his own methods apart from those of his Manchester masters, Tout and Tait.⁶¹ Certainly, Powicke, with his training in Manchester and Oxford, was well equipped, if not for manuscript work, then for the exploration of the Public Record Office’s calendars and printed editions.⁶²

The most important of his notices for our purposes were those that he contributed between 1924 and 1937 on the first seven volumes of the Curia Regis Rolls of the reign of King John. Here he assembled a feast of references and memoranda, still of great value.⁶³ It was Powicke, for example, who drew attention to John’s insistence on personally attending judicial duels, and to the nicknames attached by the king’s clerks to a particularly memorable attorney (referred to by the writers of the rolls as ‘Sighing and Weeping’ or ‘Grief and Sighing’).⁶⁴ It was Powicke who noted the transcripts of pleadings from the Hilary term of 27 Henry II preserved in the rolls for 1207: a lone survivor of records that must originally have extended back at least as far as the 1170s.⁶⁵ Elsewhere, there are glimpses of Powicke’s command of medieval legal process. Reviewing a recent study, in French, of the customs of the prévôté of Paris, in 1924, for example, we find him declaring that ‘the growth of English common law had little or no relation with the growth of borough customs; in spite of constant royal supervision, London had not much more effect upon it than Burford or Stockport had’.⁶⁶ The choice of examples here is revealing. As long ago as 1886, when Powicke was aged only seven, his father, a Nonconformist minister, had uprooted his young family from the ducal certainties of Alnwick to the working-class rough and tumble of Stockport.⁶⁷ Just as Powicke had detached himself from Tout, so here there was a determination to distance himself from the work of another of his Manchester masters, James Tait.⁶⁸

In 1928, reviewing the Festschrift for Henri Pirenne, we find Powicke commending a paper by Léon Leclère that ‘illustrates the extent of the reaction against recent views on Magna Carta’.⁶⁹ What Leclère had attacked here was the view propounded by Petit-Dutaillis, McKechnie and others, in deliberate reaction against Stubbs, that Magna Carta was essentially a ‘baronial’ settlement, dictated by the ‘selfish’ interests of a feudal aristocracy, divorced from the later tradition of liberal constitutionalism onto which it was only much later, and most uncomfortably, grafted. On the contrary, Leclère argued, Magna Carta had from its very origins been targeted at a community that extended far beyond the baronial elite.⁷⁰ Powicke likewise believed Magna Carta to be broadly based, for the benefit of all free men. This was a quality that he was inclined to attribute to the influence of Archbishop Stephen Langton. In this, Powicke followed a much older tradition, represented by the work of Langton’s Victorian biographers, including Mark Pattison, Walter Farquhar Hook, and C.E. Maurice (whose 1872 life of Stephen Langton appeared in a series devoted to ‘English Popular Leaders’).⁷¹ Stubbs himself had allowed that ‘it was probably by the bishops, Langton in particular ... that the rights of the freeholder were so carefully fenced round with provisions’.⁷²

Powicke himself, now involved in what was intended to be an international scholarly collaboration on Langton, remained prolific in articles as well as in reviews. In EHR, the most relevant and significant of his inter-war efforts was his edition in 1929 of the letters, issued at Dover in September 1215, by which the Pope’s commissioners published papal excommunication of the rebel barons and prepared the way to suspend Archbishop Langton from office. These letters, recently brought to light in the Canterbury cathedral archives, marked, in effect, the moment at which the entire programme of Magna Carta was repudiated by the king.⁷³ On a more technical note, in 1920, Powicke had defended McKechnie’s translation of abbrevientur in the 1215 Articles of the Barons, deploying his mastery of legal records to prove that it meant ‘shortened’, not ‘set down in writing’, in the process paying due homage to Maitland.⁷⁴ Powicke’s work on Stephen Langton, meanwhile, emerged as his Ford Lectures for 1927. These obtained a favourable but insipid review in EHR by the otherwise forgotten Charles George Crump.⁷⁵ They were followed both by a further update on recent Langton discoveries by Powicke and, more significantly, by Kathleen Major’s first venture into print, on the household and familiars of Langton, a prolegomenon to the great edition of Langton’s letters and charters that Major was to publish in 1950.⁷⁶ I have discussed Powicke’s Langton elsewhere.⁷⁷ For present purposes, its principal achievement lay in its willingness to invest the actors of 1215 with minds and ideas as well as grievances. This was a brave new departure in English constitutional studies. It was nonetheless achieved by means with which Stubbs himself would have been thoroughly familiar.

From this inter-war period, particular significance attached to an article published in EHR in 1924. Sir John Charles Fox’s study of the originals of the 1215 Magna Carta is a period piece, overshadowed after 1948 by a much more detailed survey by A.J. Collins, of the British Museum.⁷⁸ Fox (1855–1943) was a solicitor, a former Senior Master of the Chancery Division, and a dabbler in medieval studies. He had previously contributed articles to EHR seeking to identify Marie de France with Henry II’s half-sister, the abbess of Shaftesbury.⁷⁹ In dealing with the physicality of Magna Carta, he offered a welcome departure from the excessively constitutional-textual tradition in which Powicke and others had been raised. His article makes one remarkable claim. Three slits are pierced at the bottom of the original Magna Carta that is now BL MS Cotton Augustus ii.106. These had already attracted the attention of Richard Thomson in 1829, who suggested that they were made to carry the seals of three of the barons.⁸⁰ Reginald Lane Poole had concurred, in 1913 reporting them as ‘slits for three seals’.⁸¹ As a government solicitor in the age of Lloyd George, Fox was perhaps inclined to seek out more dramatic explanations for the abuse of state documents. He now suggested that the slits in the foot of Magna Carta were in reality ‘stabs with a knife or a dagger—the visible evidence of [King John’s] fury’.⁸² The truth is more mundane. As pointed out in 1948 by Collins, the three slits were in reality nothing more than traces left by Sir Robert Cotton’s bookbinder, from the time that Augustus ii.106 had been bound up with other charters into a guard book.⁸³

Collins’s article was published amid post-war austerity, but at a time when Magna Carta itself seemed more relevant than ever—not least as a totem of that democracy so recently triumphant over Fascism.⁸⁴ The war years saw little sustained work on the charter of 1215. The best efforts were those of V.H. Galbraith, whose Studies in the Public Records, delivered as the Ford Lectures for 1941, were not published until 1948, by which time Galbraith had succeeded Powicke as Regius at Oxford.⁸⁵ There were, nonetheless, stirrings of a new interest in the charter’s later role in law and constitutionalism. Much of this came from America, and in particular from the work of Faith Thompson, whose First Century of Magna Carta had been favourably reviewed, as long ago as 1925, by Powicke’s student, E.F. Jacob. Jacob pronounced the book ‘useful’, but questioned its author’s assumption that medieval lawyers were servants of the law rather than of the Crown. Drawing attention to the ‘strength of the household system’, Jacob suggested that, throughout the thirteenth century, the Crown managed to evade the charter through ‘procedure’ or ‘administrative technique’. The only remedy here, Jacob proposed, was for those opposed to the king to take control of Crown patronage and the appointment of the Crown’s servants—a method so drastic that it was never in practice enforced, even during the period of baronial rebellion after 1258.⁸⁶

An even more favourable judgement was pronounced by S.B. Chrimes, in 1950, on Faith Thompson’s Magna Carta: Its Role in the Making of the English Constitution, 1300–1629. Chrimes rightly considered this ‘a remarkable contribution’.⁸⁷ As a study of the charter’s reception it has never been surpassed, although Anne Pallister’s Magna Carta: The Heritage of Liberty extends the story that Thompson told from the 1640s, via Wilkes, Macaulay and the Chartists, into the latter half of the twentieth century.⁸⁸ A.E. Dick Howard had attempted something similar for North America.⁸⁹ Thompson, in turn, pointed the way to that rediscovery of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century obsession with an ‘Ancient Constitution’, itself an increasingly significant theme in the work of early modernists and intellectual historians, most notably J.G.A. Pocock, whose Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957) was favourably reviewed in EHR by D.C. Douglas.⁹⁰ For the most part, however, this was a debate conducted elsewhere.⁹¹

Instead, EHRʼs chief contribution during the war years was limited to narrative accounts of the reissue of Magna Carta in 1297, culminating in a long piece by Harry Rothwell, published as one of those multi-part articles with which the scholarly journals compensated for wartime shortage of copy.⁹² It was Rothwell, a decade later, who did his best to deter the young W.L. Warren from writing a biography of King John. ‘What’, Rothwell is reputed to have asked, ‘can you possibly say about King John that Sidney Painter has not said already?’⁹³ There was irony to this, since Painter’s biography of John, published in 1949, had met with a far from laudatory EHR review by Cheney.⁹⁴ Cheney, damning with faint praise, approved Painter’s ‘liveliness’. He found him, nonetheless, woefully deficient in point of detail. Painter’s attempt to recreate the psychology of king, barons and pope was unwelcome, as was his description in which everybody acted from entirely selfish motives, save only Langton ‘moving in another and rarefied atmosphere of ideal politics’. As a product of the Manchester school, Cheney was suspicious of any attempt to ascribe administrative changes (be it in seals, warranty or sheriffs) to personal as opposed to official motives. Yet by concluding that ‘Mr Painter is not sufficiently rigorous in his analysis of evidence and is too imaginative in his interpretation of it’, Cheney did a disservice to what remains, in many eyes, the best and certainly the most detailed modern biography of King John. It is perhaps not too fanciful to detect here an element of Old World resentment of the brash success of post-war America.⁹⁵

1950 –1965

Not even two world wars buried the desire to score points over Magna Carta’s terminology. Cheney’s review of Painter made one very interesting observation, inspired by Jolliffe, on the use of the single word ‘aids’ in clause 12 of Magna Carta, where the Articles of the Barons had referred to London’s payment both of ‘aids’ and of ‘tallages’. This, he suggested was a result of the Londoners’ insistence that they were bound to pay ‘aid’ but not ‘tallage’. As Cheney noticed, this suggested that the Londoners’ influence lay more heavily on the charter than on the Articles.⁹⁶ Cheney also commended Painter for dismissing the work of H.G. Richardson on the origins of the chancery rolls (which Richardson argued were first introduced as a means of calculating fees in chancery). Richardson’s theory, first propounded in his introduction to the Memoranda Roll 1 John, published as a wartime venture of the Pipe Roll Society, had already attracted the scorn of Austin Lane Poole.⁹⁷ It nonetheless introduces us to Richardson’s methods, and in particular to his determination to stir up the otherwise complacent pond of academe, lobbing grenades at the bottom feeders, and taking potshots at the less agile wildfowl.

Two such Richardsonian ventures occupied space in the EHR. The first was a debate between Richardson and Painter, argued out between 1946 and 1952 in a bad-tempered series of papers on King John’s (possibly no less bad-tempered) marriage.⁹⁸ In this, as is now acknowledged, Richardson knew that he was wrong, yet fought tooth and claw not to admit the fact.⁹⁹ There was also a vendetta pursued by Richardson against J.E.A. Jolliffe. Beginning with an article in Powicke’s Festschrift, published in 1948, Jolliffe had developed a theory of the significance of household government to the early Plantagenet kings, and in particular of the importance of the ‘camera regis’ attached to the itinerant court, increasingly presented as a rival to the sedentary Exchequer at Westminster.¹⁰⁰ In due course, this was to form a central plank of Jolliffe’s Angevin Kingship, published in 1955. Informed by Jolliffe’s own wartime experiences of working in Brazil under a military junta headed by the dictator Getúlio Vargas, this was a book that attempted to return to first principles. Not only did Jolliffe cut through a century or more of constitutional afflatus to search out the underlying characteristics of Plantagenet government (rule by the king’s fiat, by ‘vis et voluntas’, ‘ira et malevolentia’), but he did so by exploiting the riches of Pipe Rolls, Charter, Close and Patent Rolls, with hardly a glance at the secondary authorities. The government of Henry II and his sons, according to Jolliffe, was underpinned by no broad ideology. Rather, it represented ‘a sustained course of intrigue and violence which can by no stretch of argument be justified within any conventional limits of legitimate power’.¹⁰¹

The problem (as ever with Jolliffe) was that a crabbed and convoluted prose style (single sentences threaten to run on for entire pages) was matched to almost pathological inaccuracy in the citation and interpretation of sources. This was all the more unfortunate because Jolliffe’s theories on the royal chamber had recently attracted the disapproval of Richardson.¹⁰² Having butchered Jolliffe on the ‘camera regis’, Richardson went on to slay Angevin Kingship in an EHR notice whose ungenerosity is matched only by its lack of perception. Unable (or perhaps unwilling) to get the point of Jolliffe’s book, Richardson found only blemishes where others have since found a flawed masterpiece.¹⁰³

Much more perceptive was the reaction to Jolliffe by J.C. Holt, at this time making his first forays into the study of Magna Carta. Holt had been supervised by Vivian Galbraith, Powicke’s most influential Oxford disciple. As a senior scholar of Merton (1947–9), Holt had a college connection both to Powicke (fellow of Merton 1908–15, and viewed by Holt with that scepticism which youth is accustomed to extend to age) and subsequently to R.H.C. Davis (son of H.W.C., and fellow of Merton 1956–70). Jolliffe was still teaching when Holt was at Oxford, but as a fellow of Keble, Oxford’s ultima Thule. By the time that he came to publish his first Magna Carta article in 1955, devoted to ‘The Barons and the Great Charter’, Holt, on his own admission, had neither met Jolliffe nor read Angevin Kingship. Half a century later, he was nonetheless prepared to admit that he and Jolliffe had pioneered a new ‘method’: ‘[Jolliffe] lit upon government records as his chief source in describing the government’s ideology; his case was largely made up of bits and pieces selected from the rolls’.¹⁰⁴ Political thought was thus reconstructed not from theory but from the day-to-day echo of ideas reflected in events. In the process, again in Holt’s formulation, Magna Carta was to be rescued ‘from the hands of the lawyers where it had lain since the time of Blackstone and set … in a proper historical context, both English and European’.¹⁰⁵

There is an element of exaggeration here. Since the 1930s, both Cheney and Richardson had been using just such ‘bits and pieces’ to study the reign of King John. So had Sidney Painter. So, from an earlier generation, had Powicke and Kate Norgate. What was most novel in Jolliffe and Holt’s ‘method’ was a feature that neither they nor their earliest reviewers seem consciously to have acknowledged: their almost total abandonment of the sort of rich narrative that Powicke had pioneered, in favour of much more searching analysis. Jolliffe had direct experience of autocracy. Apart from Bradford Grammar School and wartime service in the Royal Artillery, Holt had not. Nonetheless, an early dose of Marxism enabled him to view individual baronial grievances as symptoms of wider ‘class’ sentiment. Long before Namier set to work, J.H. Round had taught medievalists the importance of genealogy and the accurate tracing of family descents. To this extent, Holt was more Roundian than Namierite. In ‘rescuing’ Magna Carta from the lawyers, he nonetheless employed methods that Namier himself would have approved.

Before this rescue could be effected, various of Holt’s ‘bits and pieces’ had first to be put in place. The pre-war edition of Curia Regis Rolls was continued by C.A.F. Meekings into the period of Magna Carta’s enforcement.¹⁰⁶ Just as significant, and already crucial to Jolliffe’s explorations, was the work of the Pipe Roll and Selden Societies, and the encouragement supplied by Doris, Lady Stenton, to the edition of plea rolls and Pipe Rolls from the reign of King John.¹⁰⁷ In particular, Stenton’s editions of Pleas Before the King or his Justices supplied the first in-depth analysis of the day-to-day administration (as opposed to the broader theory) of royal justice.¹⁰⁸ Stenton’s synthetic history of English law-making, meanwhile, did not appear until 1965 (and then as a collection of lectures first delivered in America). Based upon research stretching back into the 1920s, it viewed royal justice as an essentially benign affair, massively improved in efficiency by Henry II and his sons (‘genius was at work’). King John emerged from this as a more than competent ruler, directly involved in the work of his courts, fully committed to the customs and laws of England, and confronted with rebellion in 1215 only as a result of defeats overseas that were not his direct responsibility. This was to argue the case that English law was a function of an English exceptionalism stretching back beyond the Norman Conquest, with the Angevin kings as the law’s active and inventive stewards.¹⁰⁹

By contrast, with his Selden Society edition of Royal Writs, published in 1959, the Belgian historian Raoul van Caenegem had set out a very different trajectory for the law, allowing for only a muted Angevin ‘leap forwards’ and with English procedures, for all their antique peculiarity, joining a European-wide process of ‘judicialisation’ already chronicled in Van Caenegem’s work on Flanders and northern France.¹¹⁰ For Holt, a Yorkshireman with a particular concern for the barons of the north, it was also important that the edition of Early Yorkshire Charters, pioneered by William Farrer, was continued with ever more scholarly finesse throughout the 1950s by Sir Charles Clay.¹¹¹ Here Holt found the grist of family descents and feuds and law suits, stretching back into the twelfth century, with which to grind his mill. Here, also, it is worth noting that, for all his reaction against Powickian chiaroscuro, Holt, like Powicke, remained a master of printed rather than unpublished sources. In a career of more than fifty years, he edited only three fairly brief manuscript excerpts, none of which he himself claimed to have discovered.¹¹²

From 1955 onwards, Holt established himself as undisputed dominus rex of Magna Carta studies. His EHR articles on the ‘Barons’ (in 1955) and on ‘The Making of Magna Carta’ (in 1957) performed two quite distinct functions. The first offered a wide-ranging survey of political attitudes among King John’s contemporaries, informed by more manuscript references than were subsequently to become Holt’s norm, perhaps in deliberate alignment with Galbraith and those others inclined to regard Powicke as too detached from the PRO.¹¹³ The second was a forensic study of events at Runnymede in June 1215, dealing in particular with the relationship between the surviving ‘Articles of the Barons’ (an early draft of the terms agreed) and Magna Carta itself.¹¹⁴ Both of these efforts were masterly. Together they laid the foundations upon which Holt built two great, but very different, books. The first, The Northerners, was published in 1961—the same year, oddly enough, that witnessed the republication of Powicke’s Loss of Normandy, a still far from busted flush. The second, Magna Carta, was commissioned as part of the 750th-anniversary celebrations of Magna Carta, duly published in 1965. EHR, meanwhile, made only oblique reference to the charter’s anniversary. Its 1965 issue opened with an obituary notice for Powicke (perhaps appropriately, in the year of Holt’s Magna Carta).¹¹⁵ There was also a review of Richardson and Sayles’s Governance of Medieval England, a book published in 1963 and intended to pronounce sentence of death upon the tradition of Stubbs.¹¹⁶

Reviewing Holt’s Northerners in 1963, R.H.C. Davis declared it to be ‘full of good things [but] not easy reading’. Despite Holt’s concern for faction and class—in this instance for the faction of the ‘outs’, excluded from royal patronage—Davis noted Holt’s disdain for any grander theory, a tacit repudiation of the methods both of Marx and the Annales. Thus, Holt was sceptical of any theory that associated tensions between king and barons with the rise of a new thirteenth-century gentry. The gentry, he argued, were always rising: ‘It is their habit’. Davis suggested that the ‘outs’ of John’s reign were excluded not just on personal but geographical grounds; those from the north were simply too remote from a court that increasingly rewarded southerners or Frenchmen. Aliens, exiled from France after 1204, now ‘went to court (some of them had nowhere else to go) and waited there until they were rewarded’. This was a crude formulation. It nonetheless predicted various tendencies both in regional history and in the history of John’s ‘alien’ courtiers that were to emerge, in the wake of Holt, from the 1970s onwards.¹¹⁷

In the second part of Holt’s book, returning ‘from Namierization to a constitutional history of the sort that Stubbs would have understood’, Davis detected a tension between politics and personalities: did the barons fight for the charter or for themselves, from political conviction or from crude self-interest? Paying tribute to a master of the genre, Davis ended with a long quotation from Holt intended to demonstrate its author’s epigrammatic style:

John was not too cruel as a medieval king, but too supple, too clever. There was nothing in his character to cushion him from the logic of his actions, nothing to blur the hardening lines of political division, nothing around which a neutral body of opinion could form. Few men have ensured so effectively that those who were not for him would be against him.¹¹⁸

No one since has penned a more lucid or a more perceptive account of John.

Richard Southern’s review of Holt’s Magna Carta was superficially more admiring than Davis, yet intrinsically more critical.¹¹⁹ ‘Holt’s volume takes first place among recent studies of Magna Carta’, Southern declared, placing it in the apostolic succession that led from Blackstone via McKechnie. Yet Southern judged it to be an oddly imbalanced book. Being based so heavily on administrative sources, it threatened to impose a simplified royal pattern upon events, giving an appearance of consistency to the twists and turns of John’s policy that was denied to the barons. Holt had paid lip service to Powicke, but on the whole ignored the thought-worlds that Powicke had endeavoured to explore. By confining himself mainly to spheres, such as John’s submission to the Pope, ‘where all the initiative and advantage lay with the king’, Holt had once again unfairly weighted the scales against the barons. ‘The barons’ turn will come again’, Southern declared, when ‘attention is given to the developing ideas of community and corporation among the lawyers, theologians and masters of arts of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century’. Southern here anticipated the explosion set off in studies both of Magna Carta, and more widely of medieval political theory, by John Baldwin’s Masters, Princes and Merchants (a study of the mentalités of the Parisian masters published in 1970 and enthusiastically reviewed in EHR by Beryl Smalley, herself already queen dowager of this particular realm).¹²⁰ In the process, he tended to neglect Holt’s own contention, itself derived from Maitland, that political ideas can be recovered, not just from learned treatises, but from administrative routine.¹²¹

Meanwhile, Southern detected a further imbalance, between Holt’s concern for the background to Magna Carta and his relative lack of interest in the charter itself. So critical was Holt of the charter’s terms that, in Southern’s formulation, he emerged as a ‘King’s man’, ignoring the practical difficulties involved in devising a settlement ‘negotiated in a field by men in arms, with no handy edition of the Curia Regis Rolls to refer to’. Far from being sincere in his attempts to impose the charter, the king (as Blackstone long ago believed) was intent upon seeking its annulment by the Pope. Hence, Southern suggested, the insistence of the letters testimonial issued by the bishops that the king had granted his charter but that the barons had refused to issue the reciprocal undertakings demanded by the king. All of this, within a week of 15 June 1215, was to put on record a royalist version of events, targeted specifically at the Pope. This was reviewing at its very best, saluting a masterpiece yet pointing in directions that even the master would find perceptive.

Holt himself was never to surpass his efforts of the 1960s, at least not in direct application to Magna Carta. Second editions of both The Northerners and Magna Carta were published in the early 1990s. They showed, as Michael Prestwich noted in EHR, that ‘for the most part Holt has found in recent work confirmation, not revision, of his original views’. Far from accepting Southern’s criticisms, Holt had moved even further towards admiration of a king of ‘probing legal intelligence’. Robert fitz Walter’s adopted title as ‘Marshal of the Army of God and Holy Church’, described by Holt in 1965 as ‘imposing’, was by 1992 dismissed as ‘vainglorious and seditious’.¹²² In his very last review for EHR, published in 2003, Holt was still settling old scores. Southern had criticised him for ignoring the Parisian schools. Holt now criticised Natalie Fryde (with good humour and a particularly funny anecdote) for attempting to introduce the Paris schools into a debate over Magna Carta in which, according to Holt, neither theory nor the Policraticus had any real place. At the same time, not all was as it seemed. The Policraticus, Holt argued, would have meant nothing to the barons. But what of the thought-world of Gervase of Howbridge and the canons of St Paul’s, preaching apocalyptic sermons in the heart of King John’s capital city?¹²³ Here we find Holt espousing London radicalism (six centuries before Wilkes) at the expense of Southern, Smalley and their coterie of Left-bank intellectuals. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, Holt had himself been transformed from provincial outsider into establishment Grand Old Man. The young pretender had inherited Powicke’s crown. With it came no small claim to omniscience.

1965 –2015

Holt began his 2003 review, his parting shot in EHR, by declaring that ‘Magna Carta seems no longer to be an active field of study’. Few masters relish the attendance of inspectors in their classroom. In reality, of course, Holt, although undisputed captain of his team, never obtained freehold possession of the playing field. He continued to contribute to debate. In 1972, for example, we find him offering a generous and enthusiastic review of Ralph Turner’s first book, on the activities of The King and his Courts, a study that offered a wealth of new evidence on the enforcement of law in the immediate aftermath of 1215.¹²⁴ Much of Holt’s best work after 1965 lay at a tangent to Magna Carta, in his studies of Domesday and the politics of family and naming patterns, and in his classic account of ‘The Prehistory of Parliament’.¹²⁵ With direct relevance to the events at Runnymede, in 1974 Holt published an important Anglo-Norman translation of the 1215 charter, clearly the version of the text as it was publicised, in the vernacular in the Hampshire county court. The text certainly showed the difficulty that even contemporaries faced in translating some of the thornier of the charter’s Latin phrases. Holt supposed it to be unknown.¹²⁶ In fact, rather as with Round’s ‘Unknown’ charter, it had already attracted notice, brought to the attention of the young Thomas Stapleton, editor of the Norman Pipe Rolls, as long ago as 1833.¹²⁷

Scholars of an older generation continued to publish, most notably Christopher Cheney. In 1971, reviewing Christopher and Mary Cheney’s Letters of Pope Innocent III concerning England, Richard Southern declared it to be an ‘inflammatory’ book whose virtue derived from setting out so clearly so immense a quantity of detail (‘It might have come from Léopold Delisle’). Southern here drew attention to an important fact that should not be overlooked by future historians, henceforth dependent upon the Cheneys rather than the archives for their understanding of papal policy: that the loss of the papal registers for the period from February 1214 to June 1216 deprives us of knowledge of a crucial period in Anglo-papal diplomacy, only partially compensated by the scattered evidences surviving elsewhere.¹²⁸ Less informative, because more directly focused upon ecclesiastical politics, C.H. Lawrence’s review of Cheney’s Innocent III and England (1976) failed to spot the significance of a book that summarised a lifetime’s achievement and offered what remains by far the best synthetic treatment of King John’s relations with the Church.¹²⁹

As early as the 1950s, as we have seen, W.L. Warren had been warned against any attempt to supplant Painter as biographer of King John. Warren ignored this advice. His King John, published in 1961, the same year as Holt’s Northerners, was a fluent and still readable effort, judged by Doris Stenton to be careless in its interpretation of sources, to exaggerate the king’s adulteries and to underestimate ‘the catastrophe of King John’s excommunication and the heroic efforts made by the King ... to control local government and take justice to the shires’. Like Holt, her husband’s nominated successor as Professor in the University of Reading, Stenton had a more than sneaking admiration for a King who would certainly have made a stimulating head of department.¹³⁰ Other biographical studies of John have followed, most notably that by Ralph Turner published in 1994, together with an important collection of essays edited by Stephen Church to commemorate the 800th anniversary of John’s accession, in 1999.¹³¹

The impression that these studies convey is of a king too clever by half, never trusted by his barons, brought down by a combination of his Capetian rivals, economic pressure and his own unlovely personality. In all of this, there remains a teleological impulse to judge the beginnings by the end. The reign of King John is too often written backwards from 1215, with Magna Carta and civil war as the inevitable climax of a tale of woe. Holt drew attention to this tendency in his Historical Association pamphlet on King John, first published in 1963. Here he suggested that the most influential of the chroniclers, Roger of Wendover and the ‘Barnwell’ Chronicle, wrote with hindsight of a king who, in his earliest years, had inspired no particular hatred.¹³² This is not a view that has stood up to scrutiny. According to the latest thinking, although there is some evidence that the chroniclers (especially Ralph of Coggeshall) took a positive view of John in his first few years as king, their optimism swiftly evaporated.¹³³ Amongst modern accounts, even those, such as Daniel Power’s book on The Norman Frontier (2004), that treat only the earlier years of John’s reign have a tendency to focus on the king’s mistakes—not least his transformation of Normandy into a battle zone, leading in turn to the disaffection of the Norman aristocracy.¹³⁴ This was a point first sketched out by Holt in his British Academy Raleigh Lecture of 1975, deliberately framed as a revisiting of Powicke’s Loss of Normandy—of all Powicke’s works, the book that Holt most admired.¹³⁵ Here, it is intriguing to find Holt still in contention with the master, long after he had put on Powicke’s crown.

Having been ‘rescued’ from the lawyers by Holt, Magna Carta has seldom since been treated in jurisprudential isolation. Michael Clanchy’s article of 1964, for example, published a year before Holt’s great monograph, was only superficially a technical performance, and in reality a historian’s attempt to explain the effects of Magna Carta clause 34, previously supposed a mere administrative convenience but in fact eliminating an entire species of procedure by writ.¹³⁶ EHR has since extended notice to the work of Paul Brand, George Garnett, Richard Helmholz, John Hudson and Ralph Turner, all of whom have made valuable contributions to our understanding of the legal culture from which Magna Carta emerged.¹³⁷ Elsewhere, there has been a useful revisiting of the interplay between ‘common’, canon and Roman law systems, probing the connections between English and continental law and dispelling the older and cruder interpretation that at Runnymede only Stephen Langton possessed the vision that could transform baronial protests into a broader discussion of right.¹³⁸

Above all, there emerged a greater diversity in approaches to English law. As early as 1964, Richardson and Sayles had proclaimed the death of Stubbs’s Constitutional History, pilloried as ‘an inadequate and misleading book’. Yet apart from their name-calling and often infuriating topsy-turvydom (John’s excommunication by the pope as a positive step, the Interdict an irrelevance), it was difficult to see what Richardson and Sayles offered save a crib for clever examination candidates: a revisionism that would paint mauve what Stubbs had previously painted purple.¹³⁹ More significant was the continued dialogue between those arguing for exceptionalism as the defining characteristic of English law (Doris Stenton, Paul Brand, George Garnett, and above all, and despite his continental expertise, Patrick Wormald), and those drawn to broader continental perspectives (Van Caenegem, Walter Ullmann, Charles and Anne Duggan, and more recently Paul Hyams). If those in the first group were inclined to fetishise Magna Carta, then those in the second were at risk of smoothing it into insignificance.¹⁴⁰ Meanwhile, as John Hudson has pointed out, a common category error has tended to muddle concepts that would have been better kept distinct, leading to elision between the two distinct categories of (on the one hand) law, and (on the other) royal administration. Hudson seeks a via media of his own, arguing that, for reasons obscure but meriting speculation, Ius commune exerted only limited influence in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. In this respect, he suggests, the history of English law appears exceptional only if we mistakenly suppose that Ius commune was universally respected elsewhere in northern France or those other parts of Europe where, in reality, local tradition prevailed.¹⁴¹

Into this debate have been fed the ideas of S.F.C. Milsom, like those of Jolliffe often (though no doubt wrongly) approached via his commentators rather than along the thorny pathway of his own prose.¹⁴² To Milsom and his interpreters there remained a fundamental disjunction between the king as manipulator of the law and justice as a universal concept diffused throughout society. In its upper, more theoretical reaches, this offered an approach allied to that of Walter Ullmann, reading into English history a conflict between written or ‘national’ law and ‘feudal’ custom.¹⁴³ This in turn interlocked with Ernst Kantorowicz’s assertion that the Investiture Contest of the eleventh century had provoked a transformation of the image and ideology of kingship, from a ‘Christ-centered’ to a ‘Law-centered’ model.¹⁴⁴ At a more mundane level, Milsom’s high-flown rhetoric over seisin and tenure carried echoes of a pragmatic tradition, already apparent in the writing of F.M. Stenton and at its most functionalist in the work of C.A.F. Meekings.¹⁴⁵ In this interpretation, justice was the servant of the king, and the administration of the law to a large extent geared to the pursuit not just of jurisdiction but of revenue. In pursuit of revenue, the king necessarily sought to exclude his baronial competitors from the profits of justice. Here, in an unexpectedly Marxisant turn, the emergence of possessory assizes and the eyre, the improved efficiency of the king’s courts, the Angevin ‘leap forwards’, even Magna Carta itself, became parts of a wider mechanism driven by fiscal rather than intellectual imperatives. At its worst, as the congeries of abstraction and metaphor in the previous sentences should demonstrate, this was a debate conducted between legal specialists in their own peculiar dialect, divorced from the broader audience and plainer language of Stubbs or Maitland. At its best, it explained the legal context of Magna Carta, addressing the balance of power within society in ways that had not previously been attempted.

In the wider background here, and with the exception of John Baldwin’s re-evaluation of the scholastic contribution, the most heated topic for debate throughout the 1970s remained the supposed economic causes of the charter. This was a debate in part inspired by reactions to Marc Bloch and the rejection of systematised ‘Feudalism’ (with a Ganshofian capital letter): a debate in which Holt played a distinguished part, and whose purpose was at least in part to elide the distinction between ‘feudalism’ (derived from the knight’s fee and service, as described by J.H. Round and F.M. Stenton) and the supposed transformation of this ‘primitive’ system, at some point after the 1270s, into ‘Bastard Feudalism’ (as described by K.B. McFarlane, based upon money fees and written contracts).¹⁴⁶ More immediately, the spur came from the OPEC hike in oil prices and the great inflation of the mid-1970s. This in turn lent contemporary relevance to Paul Harvey’s attempt, broadcast in Past and Present in 1973, to suggest that the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries had themselves been a period of rapid and catastrophic monetary inflation. As a result, Harvey implied, not only did the king’s fixed income fail to keep pace with inflation, but the barons parted company from the knights and the greater aristocracy from the barons, as the ‘haves’ acquired more and the ‘have-nots’ declined into provincial stagnation.¹⁴⁷

The debate that this encouraged, both on John’s finances, and on the impact of economic change upon society more generally, had to some extent been predicted by Doris Stenton’s introductions to the annual volumes of the Pipe Roll Society, and by an article published in EHR in 1964. Here a Holt pupil, Brian E. Harris, demonstrated that an attempt, launched in 1204, to return the royal demesne from farming to direct accounting for profits had to be abandoned, in the process heightening tensions between the King and the county communities.¹⁴⁸ Highlights of the debate following Harvey’s revolution included David Carpenter’s 1976 article on ‘The Decline of the Curial Sheriff’, arguing that local government, under John a perquisite of great men, became under Henry III an increasingly irksome affair. The office of sheriff was shunned by the great but taken up by those less troubled by local protests, themselves the cause of tensions that, in the 1250s, exploded into renewed civil unrest.¹⁴⁹ Carpenter’s subsequent investigation of the effects of economic pressures upon the knightly classes of Oxfordshire, continued by Carpenter’s pupil Kathryn Faulkner, fed into an even wider debate over the fate of the thirteenth-century gentry, in many ways defying Holt’s declaration of 1961 that the gentry’s rise or fall added little to our understanding of Magna Carta or its background.¹⁵⁰ In the past thirty years, our image of the thirteenth-century gentry has been further enriched by the studies of Peter Coss and others, generally focusing upon the period after 1250 but transforming the relatively mono-dimensional world of knights and barons in which Holt had placed his characters into a far richer (and more richly conceptualised) interplay between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Here, and by contrast to Holt’s vision of society, the royal court was only one factor affecting (but not in general controlling) such diversity.¹⁵¹

More recently, this debate has been widened and extended a long way backwards from Coss’s starting-point, not least as a result of the work of David Crouch, exploring the paradigm shift that is supposed, as early as the 1170s or 80s, to have transformed the relatively homogeneous ‘baronage’ into a hierarchy ranked from a stagnating gentry via a middle rank of prosperous knights to a rising but much narrower elite of the nobility at society’s top end.¹⁵² At the same time, as Paul Hyams has argued, peasant society was transformed by legal procedures that drove a wedge between free and unfree tenures. The villein was now polarised from the freeman.¹⁵³ Peasant intervention played little direct role in 1215. By the 1260s, by contrast, and not least as a result of the freedoms that Magna Carta promised to extend from all lords to all subjects, the peasantry was threatening to become a political force, at least in times of wider crisis.¹⁵⁴ Richard Britnell, meanwhile, tackled the more technical aspects of King John’s grants of markets and fairs, themselves evidence not only of economic prosperity and the rise of towns, but also of the policing of chartered liberties.¹⁵⁵

In all of this there remains an invitation to do for provincial society of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries what Coss and Nigel Saul have done for the fourteenth, and many others for the fifteenth, century.¹⁵⁶ At a tangent to such considerations, Stephen Church challenged J.O. Prestwich (Holt’s former tutor) over the payments made to knights at John’s court. This was a debate fought out over the question of money fees versus awards of land—a spat over mess bills.¹⁵⁷ Even so, it was by no means divorced from wider questions to which Magna Carta has continued to contribute, concerning the drift from ‘memory to written record’ and from ‘tenure to contract’.¹⁵⁸ More immediately it had implications for the military resources at the disposal of king and barons in 1215, determining the political calculations that led to Runnymede.¹⁵⁹

Dealing with ideas as well as ideology, David Carpenter has returned in less econometric mode to dispute the public-spirited nature of Stephen Langton’s contribution to Magna Carta, arguing, against Powicke and John Baldwin, that Langton was a hypocrite who urged the king to extend special privileges to the Church while himself grabbing a large part of the Mandeville inheritance for his own archbishopric.¹⁶⁰ Baldwin’s own thoughts on Langton were set out in an article of 2008, itself informed by work conducted since the 1970s by Philippe Buc, David D’Avray and others.¹⁶¹ In England, this schools-based approach to kingship had already been anticipated by Beryl Smalley, not least in her work on the Becket dispute.¹⁶² Its effect was to reintroduce ideology to an arena from which ideas had previously been squeezed out by realpolitik. In place of Holt or Jolliffe’s Angevin kings, motivated by no higher ideals than ‘intrigue and violence’, historians were obliged to imagine both the king and his critics reacting to Biblical and classical models of good and bad kingship. In this interpretation Moses and St Paul, Cicero and Suetonius, played no small part in the image of King John fashioned by his contemporaries.¹⁶³

Meanwhile, Harvey’s basic assumptions about inflation and its effects had themselves come under attack from the economists. By the late 1990s the arguments here (as with so many arguments in economic history) had effectively trickled into stalemate.¹⁶⁴ This did not prevent first Holt, and subsequently Nick Barratt, from attempting to recalculate the revenues of King John, both from England and from Normandy, and on this basis to draw conclusions as to the underlying trajectory of John’s fortunes founded upon economic imperatives.¹⁶⁵ Tom Keefe has pointed the way to new approaches in the study of scutage and other feudal assessments under John.¹⁶⁶ More recently still, David Crook has suggested a particularly draconian exploitation by John of forest fines, only brought to an end in 1212 when the exposure of a plot against the king forced closure of the forest eyre.¹⁶⁷

As this suggests, the resifting of the archives continues. Documents are still being discovered that materially affect our understanding of Magna Carta. Two important new finds here were published in EHR by the Welsh historian J. Beverley Smith: letters that elucidate the background to Magna Carta clauses 56–8 (on Welsh hostages), and a much improved text of the Treaty of Lambeth (the instrument by which the civil war started by the barons and King John in 1215 was brought to an end two years later).¹⁶⁸ David Carpenter has revisited the records to correct Holt, both on the date of Magna Carta (still best assigned to 15 June 1215) and on the implications of the charter for barons and their subjects after 1225.¹⁶⁹ Ifor Rowlands, by reference to a letter surviving in Hereford Cathedral, has argued that Magna Carta had been broadcast to the counties not by the sheriffs (themselves implicated in its provisions) but by the relatively neutral bishops.¹⁷⁰ Stephen Church, reassessing a document long known from its survival in Worcester Cathedral, has thrown light on John’s final days using his last will and testament.¹⁷¹

In this same tradition, by revisiting the reports of a great oath of fealty to the king and his eldest son, said to have been enforced by King John at Marlborough in 1209, John Maddicott supplies yet further insight into John’s very particular combination of efficiency and paranoia.¹⁷² Maddicott’s most important work directly relating to Magna Carta has appeared in venues distinct from EHR, on the role of the county communities in defending the charter and seeking its extension far down the social scale, and on the connection between Magna Carta’s demand for consent for taxation and the emergence of Parliament.¹⁷³

After so long a survey, I am perhaps permitted to suggest avenues that still remain dark or inadequately explored. There has been much work on the king and his courtiers. There are excellent biographies of royalists such as William Marshal, and of at least some of John’s bishops.¹⁷⁴ There may even, one day, be a full-scale biographical treatment of Stephen Langton to replace that by Powicke.¹⁷⁵ The baronial side, by contrast, remains to a large extent mysterious. Beyond brief notices in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and a couple of specific monographs, there are no comprehensive studies of such families as the Clares, the Bigods or the Mandevilles drawing upon the full range of charter evidence and directly linked to the rebellion of 1215.¹⁷⁶ Below the level of the super-magnates, there is even less on the baronial leaders such as Robert fitz Walter, or the knights.¹⁷⁷ This despite the fact that there are county-by-county surveys of contrariants, and (as Holt noticed as long ago as 1955) not only the chancery rolls for those returning to fealty, but also a series of original letters repledging loyalty, still unpublished in The National Archives.¹⁷⁸

The lawyers and the legal historians, having acknowledged diversity, need now to celebrate rather than to repudiate it. Some makers of the law were very clever, others were not. Some perfected their skills in Bologna; others never travelled further south than Portsmouth or Shoreham. Some saw broad horizons, others saw only immediate need. Even among the intellectuals, Stephen Langton’s vision of justice was not that of Hubert Walter, nor King John’s that of Philip Augustus. For all that we know, Simon of Pattishall had a very different conception of the law from that held by James of Potterne (to name but two of the judicial experts cited by Doris Stenton in proof of King John’s position as chairman of a highly talented supreme court).¹⁷⁹ There will probably never be a Grand Unification Theory of law. But in the meantime, the Blackstonian Common Law, like Newtonian mechanics, has been shown to exhibit peculiarities undreamed of by its first investigators.

In the meantime, and despite lip service paid to the continental parallels to Magna Carta, there has been no proper comparative study of the charter’s European siblings, and no comparative study of English public finance, save for a brief preliminary effort published in 1967.¹⁸⁰ The workings of the English royal Exchequer are well known. Those of the chancery remain obscure—including, indeed, the processes and scribal professionalism that went into the making of Magna Carta itself.¹⁸¹ More generally, diplomatists and historians of finance need to assimilate the implications of recent work on accountability and the twelfth- or thirteenth-century understanding of office and res publica.¹⁸² A crudely personal or psychological reading of relations between governed and government, like Blackstonian legal theory or determinist materialism, is no longer fit for purpose.

In the not so distant future there will be a need to revisit Faith Thompson on the charter’s fate after 1300. In the process, the early modern reception of the charter will have to be viewed in the same broad European perspectives that are now expected for the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.¹⁸³ There are already efforts towards a new clause-by-clause commentary on the charter of 1215, but the charter of 1225, and its reception into English legal practice, remains ripe for reassessment.¹⁸⁴ So does the continental reception of Magna Carta and English law, not only in the thirteenth but in all succeeding centuries. So do the chronicles of Roger of Wendover, ‘Walter of Coventry’, Ralph of Coggeshall, Gervase of Canterbury and Roger of Howden, all of them essential to the story of King John and Magna Carta, all of them still read in editions by Stubbs and his contemporaries predating even the foundation of EHR. 2015 will supply new momentum for investigations here. As with the aftermath of 1915 or 1965, it may not be for a decade or more that the impact of these new approaches is more widely felt.

Far from being unstudied, as Holt claimed in 2003, Magna Carta remains very much a topic of debate. New discoveries, some of them truly remarkable, can be expected in 2015. Let us end, however, with the best of the modern successors to Stubbs, Powicke and Holt. Only last year, Peter Coss greeted John Hudson’s history of English law as a book fit to stand alongside that by Pollock and Maitland. Appropriately enough, Hudson’s book ends not with Magna Carta but with the charter’s legacy and specifically with the need, from Magna Carta’s first reissues, for procedural experiment to frustrate the ingenuity of the lawyers.¹⁸⁵ 2015 itself has already seen the publication of David Carpenter’s new study of Magna Carta, a monograph likely in time to rank alongside that by Holt. At the age of fifty, Holt’s book is itself about to be reissued in a third and updated edition.¹⁸⁶ As ever, taking the long view of historical debate tends to remind us both how far we have come in some respects, and how little in others. Magna Carta itself now celebrates its 800th anniversary. By comparison, EHR is a mere stripling of 130 years. I have no doubt, however, that it will be to EHR that future generations will continue to look for the publication of the most significant new discoveries concerning Magna Carta, as for much else that is newest and best in English historical scholarship.