Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John With an Historical Introduction by McKechnie William Sharp
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page
Ebook has 2262 lines and 232868 words, and 46 pages
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION.
PAGE
MAGNA CARTA: TEXT, TRANSLATION, COMMENTARY.
PREAMBLE.
No Relief after Wardship, 239
Wardship: The Definition of Waste; The 241 Punishment of Wasteful Guardians; Provision against Recurrence,
The Marriage of Wards, 250
Marriage of Widows, 260
Procedure for Enforcing Payment of Debts, 261
Widows and Children of Debtors to be Protected against 273 Creditors,
Liberties and Free Customs of London, 284
No one to perform greater service for a tenement than is 306 due,
Procedure at Petty Assizes, 331
Amercement of Earls and Barons, 346
Amercement of the Clergy, 349
Farms of Counties and Hundreds, 372
Intestate Succession, 382
Castle-Guard, 390
Purveyance of Horses and Carts, 392
Purveyance of Timber, 393
Obstructions to be removed from Rivers, 402
Standards of Weights and Measures, 414
Prerogative Wardship, 427
Justice not to be Sold, Refused, or Delayed, 459
Tenants of Escheated Baronies, 478
Justices, Castellans, Sheriffs, and Bailiffs to be 502 law-abiding men,
Wardship over Vacant Abbeys, 505
Forests and River-banks encroached upon by John, 507
Procedure for abolishing Evil Customs of Forests and 511 elsewhere,
Hostages and Charters to be restored, 514
List of those excluded from offices of trust in future, 518
Expulsion of Foreign Mercenaries, 522
Procedure for redressing wrongful Disseisins, 523
A Crusader's Respite allowed to John, 525
Right of Appeal by Women, 527
Remission of Unjust Fines and Amercements, 530
Redress for Welshmen wrongfully disseised by John, 533
Welsh Hostages and Charters to be restored, 536
Justice to be done to Alexander, King of Scots; 537 Relations of England and Scotland,
Extension of Provisions of Charter to Tenants of Mesne 543 Lords,
Prelates to issue Letters Testimonial, 562
INDEX TO STATUTES, 597
GENERAL INDEX 599
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION.
The Great Charter is too often treated as the outcome of purely accidental causes. Students of its origin are sometimes content to explain it as a mere tangible product of the successful resistance called forth by the tyrannies of King John. That monarch's personal misdeeds, it is maintained, goaded into determined action a fierce unflinching opposition which never rested until it had achieved success; and the outcome of this success was the winning of the Great Charter of Liberties. The moving causes of events of such tremendous moment are thus sought in the characteristics and vices of one man. If John had never lived and sinned, so it would appear, the foundations of English freedom would never have been laid.
Such shallow views of history unnecessarily belittle the magnitude and inevitable nature of the sequence of causes and effects upon which great issues really depend. The compelling logic of events forces a way for its own fulfilment, independent of the caprices, aims and ambitions of individual men. The incidents of John's career are the occasions, not the causes, of the great national movement which laid the foundations of English liberties. The origin of Magna Carta lies too deep to be determined by any purely contingent or accidental phenomena. It is as unwise as it is unnecessary to suppose that the course of constitutional development in England was suddenly and violently wrested into a completely new channel, merely because of the incapacity or misdeeds of the temporary occupant of the throne. The source of the discontent fanned to flame by John's oppressions must be sought in earlier reigns. The genesis of the Charter cannot be understood apart from its historical antecedents, and these are inextricably bound up with the whole story how England grew to be a nation.
In expounding the origin of the Charter, it is necessary briefly to narrate how the scattered Anglo-Saxon and Danish tribes and territories, originally unconnected, were gradually welded together and grew into England; how this fusion was made permanent by the growth of a strong form of centralized monarchical government which crushed out all attempts at local independence, and threatened to become the most absolute despotism in Europe; and how, finally, the Crown, because of the very plenitude of its power, challenged opposition and called into play forces which set limits to royal prerogatives and royal aggressions, and at the same time laid the foundations of the reign of law. A short survey of the early history of England forms a necessary preliminary to a right understanding of Magna Carta. Such a survey makes prominent two leading movements, one of which succeeds the other; namely, the establishment of a strong monarchy able to bring order out of anarchy, and the subsequent establishment of safeguards to prevent this source of order degenerating into an unrestrained tyranny, and so crushing out not merely anarchy but legitimate freedom as well. The later movement, in favour of liberty and the Great Charter, was the natural complement, and, in part, the consequence of the earlier movement in the direction of a strong government able to enforce peace. In historical sequence, order precedes freedom.
On the whole, the miseries of the long centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule were mainly the outcome of the Crown's weakness; while, at the Norman Conquest, England escaped from the mild sceptre of inefficiency, only to fall under the cruel sceptre of selfish strength. Yet the able kings of the new dynasty, powerful as they were, had to struggle in order to maintain their supremacy; for, although the conquered English races were incapable of concerted resistance against their Norman masters, the unruly alien barons fought vigorously to shake off the royal control.
During a century of Norman rule, constant warfare was waged between two great principles--the monarchic standing on the whole for order, seeking to crush anarchy, and the oligarchic or baronial, standing on the whole for liberty, protesting against the tyranny of autocratic power. Sometimes one of these was in the ascendant; sometimes the other. The history of medieval England is the swing of the pendulum between these two extremes.
The student of history will do well to concentrate his attention at first on the main problem, while viewing the subsidiary ones in their relations to the central current.
The attention of the most casual student is arrested by the consideration of the difficulties which surrounded the English nation in its early struggles for bare existence. The great problem was, first, how to get itself into being, and thereafter how to guard against the forces of disintegration, which strove without rest to tear it to pieces again. The dawn of English history shows the beginning of that long slow process of consolidation in which unconscious reason played a deeper part than human will, whereby many discordant tribes and races, many independent provinces, were crushed together into something bearing a rude likeness to a united nation. Many forces converged in achieving this result. The coercion of strong tribes over their weaker neighbours, the pressure of outside foes, the growth of a body of law, and of public opinion, the influence of religion in the direction of peace, all helped to weld a chaos of incongruous and warring elements together.
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page