How The English Nobles Came to Expect Freedom

A speculation

This article is subtitled a speculation although it is not a speculation about what happened. I hope my facts are straight. My sources are primarily from the Orderic Vitalis and the Laud Chronicle (from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles). But it is speculative in the sense of speculating upon why the English nobles and clergy demanded John to grant them certain rights that became the Magna Carta.

There are enough biographies and accounts of William the conqueror.  I want to concentrate on the development of the somewhat unique English development of freedom of the English barons.  It was not that no sub-lords or brothers or sons had ever rebelled.  In fact, William himself faced all three, both before, during, and after his conquest of England.  But these were always attempts to supplant the king or authority, or to establish a vassalship of one lord to another.  What led to the signing of the Magna Carta was a desire of suppressing the authority of the king and forcing him to grant a certain degree of equity to the barons and to limit allegiance to the king to respect a certain degree of equality to the barons.  While this was not at first to be a democracy for all, it was the beginnings of a democracy for the powerful to grant them both participation within the government and a justice apart from kingly whim.

I wrote about the great anarchy,and the fact that whenever any one side in the conflict appeared to be gaining the upper hand in battle, barons would switch allegiances and prolong the conflict.  It appears the goal was actually to have no particular supreme king.  Of course they also realized there was some need for some unifying authority without which there would also be a continuous struggle for some lord to become supreme.  The ingenuousness of Henry FitzEmpress was to recognize this and a promise to grant such a balance to the barons if they would select him as the arbiter of authority.  In many ways Henry seems to have more directly inherited his great-grandfather’s talent to accomplish this than did the intervening two generations.

Even though the Anglo-Saxons had more or less coalesced under the kingship of Alfred, and after his wins against the Viking encroachment, gave him a thirst for conquest that violated his treaty with the Vikings, Alfred never attempted to centralize the government away from local control of the chiefdoms of the multitude of shires.  The Danes were more or less under the central control of their homeland, but the threats of rebellions against the Daneland prevented them from successfully consolidating all of England to become subject to that central authority,

William’s achievement was to actually not interfere with the locally organized structures of government and to simultaneously centralize them.  Henry II would finally make both the consolidation of authority under his central authority and a set of particular common laws and let the individual landowners, barons, etc have great authority over their own territories to insure their loyalty.  Henry II could be just as violent and reactive to what he might consider to disloyalty to his authority.  And while the well documented case of Thomas a Becket was not the only example of how ruthless Henry could be, the intense contemporary documentation shows that Henry spent a great deal of effort to persuade Beckett to his position.  It was not just, you don’t agree with me, bye bye Beckett, it was a process of attempted persuasion.  Unfortunately for Beckett, Henry’s attempt at persuasion led Beckett to become increasingly obstinate and the original dispute that might have been worked out became a demand for Henry to completely submit to his (Beckett’s position).  This same pattern would develop again a few centuries down the road with the increasing obstinance that led to the widening between both Charles I and the Parliamentarians.  Rather than working towards a compromise, both sides moved further away to a more absolutist position.

When William conquered England he promised, at his coronation, to leave the existing Lords or the divisions of power in place.  In this case, I actually think William might have done so.  But after being crowned king, William returned to Normandy and that led to some of the Saxons attempting a revolt, William rushed back and suppressed these revolts but by 1072 seemed to have a secure hold on England.  In the meantime almost all of the Saxon leaders were replaced by Normans William thought loyal and he began the building of defensive fortresses and castles to prevent attacking the leaders he had installed directly (or made it more difficult to do so.) William also faced contention with much of the clergy, so he replaced many of them with Normans as well, and he moved the church seats closer to cities to be under more direct control.  

But no sooner had this been accomplished than some of his own barons began a revolt against him and once again he had to return to put down the “revolt of the earls.”  The Orderic Vitalis leaves the exact cause of this revolt unclear, but it might have been because of disputes with the overseers he had left behind because it appears to have begun at the wedding of Ralph de Gael when a conflagration occurred.  De Gael was marrying a relative of Roger de Breteuil, and both had lesser powers than many of the Earls William had installed.  Whether it was because other Earls feared they might gain a stronger force in unity or whether the marriage was being sanctioned as a plan to do so, however it is left unclear by the contemporary accounts.  Anyway the other loyalists isolated their territories and those that joined them.  It might well be that the marriage was a plan for rebellion because the Danes had been asked to intervene by Ralph,and their arrival on the northern shores seems to have occurred rather quickly for the time, so Ralph might have requested aid even prior to the attempted rebellion.  At any rate, by the time the Danes arrived, loyalists to William had the situation pretty much under control, but the Danes’ arrival forced William back to England to push the Danes back.  

And if any one is interested in the internal instability of being a king, the life of William the Conqueror is a microcosm of the history of the internal family struggles of kingdoms and have been repeated continuously in the west since the first Pharaohs and can be seen in the familiar dynastic struggles in China.  

But what we are attempting to illustrate here, this governmental independence  predates the Magna Carta, and even predates the Normans, all the way back to at least the Saxons who first settled into independent fiefdoms without little unity between them until the need to stave off the Vikings and Danes.

But it might have even predated the Saxons.  There might have been the concept of liberty or individualistic freedom of communities for decentralized authority over them, and the expression of common justice that goes back much further into the English psyche, and maybe that is why England was destined to lead the world in beginning, in what has come to be known as modern democracy.  Perhaps the residents of the Isles were themselves responsible for passing the concept of liberty upwards to the multiple generations of conquerors.  Certainly it appears the organization of England into shires, counties, hundreds, and wapentakes that William did not (could not?) replace remained intact.  And the complexities of the governance, the use of legal writs and the multi-layered society that favored, shall we say, a small degree of equality of law for even the peasants that William inherited and left intact appeared nowhere in mainland Europe at the time of William.  But they didn’t exist when the Saxons conquered England in Saxony, or when the Danes first invaded prior to the Saxons, as far as I am aware, in the Northlands from whence they came.

Was  this system perhaps, a priori to the conquests or was it a consequence of so many conquests and cultures blending together that there was a greater need for certain liberties to be extended to the conquered in order to rule the conquered?  Certainly England was never conquered as an extension of an empire that imposed its own governance on the conquered (although that was the Roman intent), Britain remained stubbornly uninfluenced by the Roman attempts at organizing them into their Roman systems of structure. But the waves of conquerors mostly came (between the Romans and William) mostly to settle rather than necessarily add territory to kingdoms.  Of course they did add territory, but like the English that came to the New World, the prime reason for the settlers was homesteads for themselves rather than the expansion of any imperial dreams.  It may not have been the idea of the homeland authorities but it does seem to be the prime reason for those who participated in the settling.  The Romans never adequately (from the Emperors’ perspective) completely incorporated the English people into their Empire.  William more or less did, but within a few generations the Normon Earls he had given dominions to felt more English than Norman.  Richard II did maintain his holdings on the continent, but his chief title was King of England.  

Is it possible that this influence of individual rights predated all of the conquests that were imposed upon them and that they imposed their nativist demand for liberty  into the consciousness of the continued waves of immigration?  Is that possible?