My purpose in writing this Protest & Progress blog post, is to explore for myself the history of English Protest Movements. What effect they had, and the changes they may ( or may not ) have instigated. Today, it begins where else but with Magna Carta.
Imagine, you are the younger less handsome, less charismatic brother of the heroic crusader King Richard. You were his Regent. You kept the country running whilst Richard was off committing atrocities (with Papal sanction) in the Holy Land, chivalrously slaughtering Saracens. You can understand why John might have had a chip on his shoulder.
Once he became King, did he feel unfairly maligned, undervalued, not respected or revered in quite the way his absentee brother had been? Richard was undoubtedly a hard act to follow. But, I mean, what had Richard actually done for his adopted country, except neglect it? John, however, did appear to be cruel and brutal, with a perverse ability to make any bad situation worse, so his subjects actively feared and loathed him. The issues that really pissed off his barons, however, were very common ones in the history of English protest - war and taxation.
Plantagenet Kings like Richard and John were not English, they were French. Who ruled at their peak half of France. For them England was an occupied territory, one that increasingly took time and energy away from their home country. Hence John found the need to fight wars in France to retain control of his home feifdom. But with each ensuing battle he was defeated in, he lost control of larger swathes of his territory. Wars were expensive to perpetrate, and royal coffers were emptying fast. So John had to raise finances through imposing taxation on the citizens of England.
He was not the first king to find himself in this predicament. But in his case,John was losing a war quite shamefully, and would be further humiliated by having to pay his enemies compensation for it. Turning around and asking the citizens of England e.g his own barons, to stump up the cost. Well, this went down like a lead balloon. Had he won, perhaps they might have begrudgingly paid up. But there is nothing like abject failure in a war to foment dissent. The barons having had enough, rose up on mass and captured large areas of southern England, including London. King John was dragooned into signing the Magna Carta on the island of Runnymede. He may have been thinking of this purely as a tactical capitulation, to prevent the wider spread of civil unrest.
This was one hundred and forty nine years after the Norman Conquest. These plucky barons were two generations distant from being French migrants. So don't imagine they were Anglo Saxon Englishmen fighting for their ancestral rights. What they called 'their land' was stolen property, given to their families by William the Conqueror. But England was cash and land rich, that's why the Normans wanted it in the first place.
Charters similar to The Magna Carta were being signed all the time, in order to try establish in law firm legal precedence. The complete lack of a strong legislative making Parliament, made that virtually impossible in 13th century England. But let's be clear here, this charter was concocted entirely for the barons benefit and vested interests. Only by implication does this charter apply to every person in England. As it turned out. King John and the barons both reneged on it pretty quickly and conflict between the King and the barons erupted.
After John's death in 1216, Henry 3rd kept reissuing Magna Carta, using it to try and placate the baronial turbulence he'd inherited in 1216, 1217 and 1225. Under pressure he began to bequeath more power to Parliament. And his son Edward 1st reissued the charter again in 1297, but this time making sure it became Parliamentary statute law, with the intention of it forming the basic foundation for future national law. This was the point at which The Magna Carta began vaguely to resemble the proto-democratic document later generations would laud so highly.
As a piece of law making Magna Carta had a pretty shambolic progress towards enforcement. Only through historical retrospect, roughly from the 16th century onwards, through English Civil War Parliaments, to the Victorians desire to re-write English history with more noble people and principles actively present, has this document gained the significant reputation it now has.
Magna Carta demonstrates the morally compromised approach to law making in English history. Never start from establishing first principles, but give far too much consideration to the short term pressures and vested interests of an era, so end up doing only what could pragmatically be got away with?
However, given time, what this Protest established ( eventually) was the following, and because we once had an Empire these became established more widely in what were our former colonies.
No citizen is above the law, regardless of status.
Everyone has the right to a fair trial
No citizen should be arbitrarily stripped of their rights, without legal process.
No citizen should be taxed without prior Parliamentary agreement.
Judicial process should be impartial and not subject to bribery or corruption
Any citizen can own and inherit property and not have it unjustly seized by another,
Religious institutions and practices should be free from royal or political interference.
To create the conditions for any change you first have to recognise the collective power that you possess. With Magna Carta the barons certainly grasped that. Over a hundred years later the peasantry of England were to learn what collective power they might have. And in the process encountered the duplicitous nature of the royal house of Plantagenet.
Next Episode - 1381 - The Peasants Revolt
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