I’m standing in the car park of the Runnymede-on-Thames Hotel and Spa. To my left, kitchen staff in starched white jackets and chequered trousers are bustling about dumping what I guess are bags of waste food in the rubbish bins. It’s a noisy spot because a few yards to my right is Junction 13 of the M25 London orbital motorway where it links with the Egham bypass. And from somewhere behind me I can make out the whining drone of a train on the London to Reading line. We’re also only 2 miles south-west of the world’s third busiest airport, Heathrow. I can see an American Airlines jet climbing high above the hotel roof.
You may wonder why – having come to Runnymede, where King John met the barons – we haven’t gone straight to the official Magna Carta memorial, which stands a mile and a quarter to the west of here. The reason is that I’m searching for the exact location where the Great Charter was born.
Yes, it was at Runnymede, but Runnymede isn’t a specific spot. It covers an area of several square miles along the River Thames halfway between Windsor and Staines, plenty of room in fact for the site of the birth of Magna Carta to be the subject of as many errors and falsifications as anything else associated with the Great Charter.
There’s a persistent myth, given worldwide credence by Jerome K. Jerome in his 1889 best-selling novel Three Men in a Boat, that the great event happened on an island in the Thames, across from the meadow at Runnymede. Jerome treats us first to rousing images of ‘slippery’ King John and his ‘French’ mercenaries facing the ‘grim ranks of the barons’ men’ before they all step ashore ‘on the bank of the little island that from this day will bear the name of Magna Carta Island … a great shout cleaves the air and the great cornerstone in England’s temple of liberty has, now we know, been firmly laid.’ There’s even a stone in the grounds of a cottage on the island that marks the spot where the Great Charter was ‘signed’. Three Men in a Boat is one of the funniest books ever written. But, historically speaking, it’s rubbish – charming and humorous rubbish, but rubbish nonetheless. Even so is still popularly believed today. Just to be clear: nothing – not the thinnest sliver of evidence – supports the idea that John and the barons assembled on any island.
And prepare to be shocked. There are doubts too about the positioning of the official memorial itself. According to the Ordnance Survey map for south-west London, it’s in a field towards the bottom of a gentle slope. And that’s the problem. It’s shown on the side of a hill, not a steep hill, but a hill nevertheless, running parallel with the river. It’s called Cooper’s Hill. However, that doesn’t fit with contemporary accounts. Magna Carta itself ends with the words, ‘Given in the meadow that is called Runnymede between Windsor and Staines, 15 June’. The name ‘Runnymede’ is Anglo-Saxon, and doesn’t mean, as we might imagine, ‘runny’, i.e. a ‘wet’, meadow, but derives from the word ‘runieg’ meaning meeting-place. Since as far back as at least the ninth century, the meadow at Runnymede had been somewhere where kings gathered to consult their vassals, and where enemies could meet to negotiate in safety. Security was guaranteed because it was bounded by the River Thames to the north, by a stream to the west, and by marshy ground to the east and the south. It was almost an island, not a real island, but more like a reverse oasis, of dryness surrounded by water. It was accessible only by the causeway road from Windsor in one direction and from Staines in the other. This was important because King John and the barons had a deep distrust for each other. And the last place either would have chosen for their meeting was one where attack was possible from nearby high ground. Finding the exact spot today that fits that definition is no easy task. Over a period of 800 years, marshland has been drained so houses and roads could be built, and small streams can disappear at the same time. But what doesn’t tend to rise up out of the earth unexpectedly over just a few centuries is a 3-mile-long hill. In 1215, it would have been exactly where it is now. So the conclusion seems clear: Magna Carta cannot have been born where the official memorial is shown on the map, on the side of Cooper’s Hill; nor can the big event even have taken place in front of the memorial where the stretch of meadow is exposed to attack from that hill.
So, where did it take place?
What we’re looking for is a section of flat land alongside the Thames, which is not overlooked by sloping ground to the south. And the OS map shows that the only place that meets that specification is right here, where they’ve built the Runnymede-on-Thames Hotel and Spa. In fact, given that the two opposing camps would have occupied several hundred square yards of meadow, the betting must be that much of the site where the Great Charter was born lies somewhere under the hundred thousand tons of concrete and tarmac that make up the several roundabouts, bridges, underpasses and slip roads by the M25 motorway nearby to my right.
Truth can be ugly.
‘Runnymede’ denotes a large area of meadowland halfway between Windsor and Staines. John would have wanted to be well away from Cooper’s Hill from where he would be vulnerable to attack.
I have to concede though that a pretty field and, according to the map, a bosky hillside makes a more romantic spot for an altar to freedom and justice than does a deafening, polluting stretch of brutal urban desert. So next stop, the official memorial. To find it, I have to travel west along the A308 towards Windsor, along what would have been the old causeway road in the thirteenth century. The map indicates a turn-off to the left. Sure enough, there’s a small silver plaque on a pole which – beneath the oak twig insignia of the National Trust – announces in inch-and-a-half high lettering:
Runnymede
the
birthplace
of modern
democracy
At the entrance to a little car park, two slightly larger plaques warn:
Gates close 7 pm
and urge:
Please take your litter home
The immediate attraction here is a single-storey brick building with a plastic banner fixed to its wall announcing ‘Magna Carta Tea Room. Tea-Coffee-Breakfast-Lunches-Cream Teas. Open All Year.’
Inside, it’s a pleasant enough little provider of refreshments, whose homely, old-fashioned atmosphere is reinforced by a visitors’ book on the counter next to a help-yourself basket of crisp packets and a topless tea-pot with knives and forks poking out of it. Recent entries include one from a Mr and Mrs Clerides of Tasmania, Australia (‘Great!’), another from a Bill and Sarah of Nebraska (‘Fantastic. Very welcoming.’), and one by somebody illegible from Egham, 2 miles up the road (‘Must get recipe for carrot cake.’)
This morning there are few customers: two matronly women comparing gardening tips, a family whose kids are competing to see who can make most noise with a drinking straw, and a chap with a coffee reading the Daily Mail. Apart from beverages and sandwiches, the Magna Carta Tea Room also sells souvenirs, notably Magna Carta Tea Room Biscuits and Magna Carta Tea Room Jam. But just when I’m thinking the place only promotes itself, I spot a black cardboard tube with the words ‘Magna Carta 1215’ in gold letters on it. I ask a young waitress with an unsteady bouffant hairdo what it is.
‘Just a bit of paper, I think,’ she replies. Oh how the mighty are fallen.
I shell out £4.99, and discover I’m now the owner of a facsimile of the Great Charter of Liberties, in the original Latin, complete with a facsimile royal seal on the bottom, plus – in full colour – the coats of arms of the more prominent barons around the outer margin. And on a separate sheet, an English translation.
Leaving behind the Magna Carta Tea Room and what it might say about the place of the Great Charter in twenty-first-century Britain, I strike out across the meadow in search of the official memorial. This unprepossessing riverside field has had a surprisingly spicy and at times dramatic history. For 150 years up to the late nineteenth century it was a racecourse, which for some reason was a particular favourite with pickpockets. They used to come out here by the trainload from London to practise their profession. Then, during the Second World War, a US Airforce B-17 bomber crash landed on this bit of grass, just missing the river. Luckily, the whole crew managed to scramble out unhurt. There’s no relic of these dramas here now.
I guess I’m on the right track for the memorial because a little fingerpost by the car park had pointed this way. But there’s nothing in sight to aim for. The only clue is a trail of muddy grass, trampled down alongside the hedge. Apart from a mum, dad and two kids playing football over to the left, there’s no one to ask.
There are in fact three monuments at Runnymede. There’s the Air Forces memorial to those killed in the Second World War, sited on the far side of Cooper’s Hill. There’s a memorial to US President John. F. Kennedy which is hidden away in the woods to my right. Then, a few hundred yards further along, over a field gate, the Magna Carta memorial eventually comes into view. A broad stone slab pathway diminishes up the hill to what from this distance looks like a small stone bandstand or the kind of domed war memorial found in many English towns. It stands about 15 feet high. It has eight simple columns supporting the roof, and in the middle is a bolt of granite 5 feet tall. There’s a five-pointed star and a short inscription in blue letters on the side that faces down over the meadow towards the river.
This monument is a striking lesson in the significance of Magna Carta today.
Take the wording of the inscription. It says:
To commemorate
Magna Carta
symbol of freedom
under law
It does not say ‘Magna Carta, the earliest constitution’, or ‘Magna Carta, which gave us freedom and justice’, nor even does it echo the National Trust sign we saw when we turned off the main road, and claim ‘Magna Carta, mother of modern democracy’.
The key word is ‘symbol’. So, to those who composed these words, Magna Carta has the same function as a national flag, which after all is no more than a piece of cloth, which we make to represent loyalty to country. So it seems the folk who erected this memorial didn’t regard the Great Charter as a statute or a constitution. The monument’s founders – unlike Ernest Normand and the Historian William Stubbs – weren’t going to get involved in any myth-making.
So, who were they, the ones who decided to put up this colonnaded monument with its nine words written large? They were people who were careful not to put anything in writing that could be thrown back at them later as a lie or an error. They were lawyers. Nine thousand of them in fact, who all made a donation to pay for the memorial. But they were not judges from the Old Bailey, nor QCs from Middle Temple, nor solicitors from small country towns across Great Britain. They were Americans. Every last one of those 9,000 lawyers who wanted to be associated with the place where was born the earliest symbol of freedom under law was a member of the American Bar Association. And until they decided to erect this memorial in 1957, there was nothing here to mark the place.
But what does this mean? That the Brits don’t love freedom under the law? Surely not. Maybe we’re just a modest nation, happy to be admired by others, but don’t wish to blow our own trumpet. The story on the other side of the Atlantic, however, is clearly very different. On the pavement around the edge of the columned dome are more inscriptions, announcing that representatives of the American Bar Association ‘returned to this place to renew its pledge of adherence to the principles of Magna Carta.’ One of these slabs is dated 1971, another 1985, and a third says 2000. Maybe Americans are keener on symbols than we are? After all, many if not most homes in the USA have the national flag flying in their front yards, whereas you could travel hundreds of miles in the UK before you spied a Union Jack fluttering over the daffodils and roses. That doesn’t mean we’re an unpatriotic nation. We just do things differently. Or maybe the idea that freedom and law have ancient roots is somehow something that the modern American state needs more than Britain does. We shall be crossing the Atlantic later to investigate.
A wax impression of King John’s seal, similar to the ones which would have been appended to each of the copies of Magna Carta. It is around 6 inches in diameter and we can make out the faint image of the king on horseback.
Before leaving, a few yards from the monument at the foot of a small oak tree I spot a black polished marble plaque set in the earth. Its inscription reads:
Quercus robur
Planted by
P. V. Narasimha Rao
Prime Minister of the Republic Of India
As a tribute to the historic Magna Carta, a source of inspiration throughout the World and as an affirmation of the values of Freedom, Democracy and the Rule of Law which the people of India cherish and have enshrined in their constitution.
March 16th 1994.
And all we Brits can manage to do is to bury the true birthplace of Magna Carta under an eight-lane highway, and to open a tea room.
I cringe back through the gate to the water meadow and the ghosts of John and the barons.
The events that brought King John to travel down that causeway from Windsor and meet his enemies face to face at Runnymede moved quickly following the defeat at Bouvines. The crisis, which had come to a head with the northern barons’ repeated refusal to supply the king with military aid, hit rock bottom with the utter failure of his overseas venture. In the words of the historian Geoffrey Hindley, it ‘shattered … his credibility at home’.
One of the most remarkable things about Magna Carta is that we have so little information about what exactly happened between Bouvines and Runnymede. The chroniclers’ accounts are patchy. The facts we can piece together are as follows.
A group of barons from the east of the country began discussing whether John’s demands for scutage could be curbed by getting him to agree to the ancient customs of England. They talked a lot about the good laws of Edward the Confessor. The dissidents were wrestling with the age-old problem: what can be done – short of rebellion – to curb the unacceptable actions of a king?
Over the next few months, the two sides circled each other like wild beasts, sizing up the other’s strengths and weaknesses. At Christmas 1214, the dissident barons demanded that John confirm the laws of King Edward the Confessor and a charter of Henry I, neither of which, as it happened, had anything to say about scutage. John played for time and said he would look into the idea. In the following weeks, a more general campaign was launched among the country’s magnates for some sort of new charter which would define and limit the king’s authority. But the extreme opponents of the king wanted a more violent solution. They began to organise themselves for rebellion.
At this point, John pulled off a coup. He took a vow to go to the Holy Land on crusade. This brought Pope Innocent III, who had become John’s enthusiastic supporter following the king’s submission to the papal legate Pandulf at Temple Ewell, right into the middle of the conflict between John and his mightiest subjects. The Pope ordered the barons to renounce any idea of armed resistance, to show John the respect due to a monarch, and, what’s more, to pay him the outstanding scutage still due from the Bouvines campaign.
The dissidents ignored the papal instruction, and on 3 May 1215 they formally renounced their allegiance to the king. In other words, they were resorting to the old-fashioned feudal solution to the question of what to do about an unsatisfactory monarch. They were now in open revolt. John proposed that his disagreement with the magnates be settled by arbitration, to be carried out by men appointed by the Pope. For obvious reasons, the barons refused. Within a week, hostilities broke out across the south Midlands and on the Welsh borders. Then came the turning point. London fell to the barons. In the words of the historian J.C. Holt: ‘If Bouvines brought on a political crisis … the baronial seizure of London led directly to Runnymede.’
John needed to do a deal to buy time. It was now that he moved his base to Windsor a handful of miles north of Runnymede. The rebel leaders installed themselves at Staines to the south of the meadow, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, began to shuttle between them in an attempt to broker an agreement.
On 10 June, King John and his entourage rode down the causeway from Windsor and set up the royal camp on the meadow here at Runnymede. We can picture the scene, smoke swirling up from cooking fires, horses in corrals, carts heavily laden with food, furniture and whatever else the royal party needed, and probably fairly simple shelters. It’s unlikely there was the sort of red-and-gold high-canopied throne or the grand pavilion envisaged by Ernest Normand in the painting of his that we saw in London’s Royal Exchange. The barons moved on to the meadow slightly later, via the same causeway, from the opposite direction. They were in position by 15 June.
It might be imagined that the Great Charter must have been provoked by some desperately brutal act on the part of King John, some spectacularly cruel, exploitative or aggressive deed that prompted the barons of England to say, in effect, ‘Enough is enough. This is the last straw.’ According to the – admittedly thin – information we have, that was not the case. There was almost certainly a major row about the barons’ failure to support the king during the Bouvines campaign. But the antecedents of Magna Carta lay as much in the lives and attitudes of individual barons as in any great events of state.
So let’s take a closer look at the powerful men who assembled in the meadow here at Runnymede in mid June 1215. Who were they? And what were their motives?
For a start, the barons were not – as the myth makers would have us believe – a single-minded force made up of the aristocratic magnates of England united against the king. The true story is much more complex than that. It’s a tale of personal, and sometimes sordid, hatreds on both sides.
England in 1215 was home to approximately 170 earls and other lords of high rank. Of those, fewer than forty had declared themselves in rebellion against the king. Most of these had a personal grudge against him. For instance, William Mowbray felt he had been tricked when John had made him promise to pay for royal justice, then delivered a verdict against him. Mowbray, who was said to be as small as a dwarf, made up for his lack of stature with frequent outpourings of vitriolic anger, directed against the king.
But the undoubted leaders of the rebellion against John were Robert Fitzwalter, lord of Dunmow in Essex, and Eustace de Vesci, lord of Alnwick Castle in Northumberland. At first, they tried to rally support for a rebellion by putting out stories that John was a sexual predator who had targeted the wives and daughters of England’s most exalted noblemen. Now, such tales were not entirely improbable given what we know of John, but Fitzwalter and de Vesci’s accusations were confused and without any evidence to back them up. It seems the two would-be chief rebels were no intellectual giants. In the words of one historian, it’s ‘hard to believe they were anything more than baronial rough-necks’.
Fitzwalter, in any other walk of life than the powerful lord of vast tracts of south-eastern England, would have been dismissed as a blustering, malevolent clown. Some years before the meeting at Runnymede, during one of the many conflicts with the French crown, he had surrendered without a fight to King Philip Augustus. The French king said afterwards that men such as Fitzwalter were ‘like torches, to be used then thrown in the cesspool’.
The most telling episode began a few years later. One night the royal court arrived at Marlborough. Fitzwalter and his family were part of the retinue. His son-in-law decided the lodgings allotted to him were beneath his rank, got into an unseemly brawl with a young servant, drew his sword and killed the lad. John was outraged and threatened to hang the man for murder.
Fitzwalter went berserk and shouted at the king, ‘You would hang my son-in-law? By God’s body you will not! You will see 200 laced helms in your land before you hang him!’ By ‘laced helms’ he meant the crested helmets worn in battle by members of the nobility. In other words, he was threatening John with an uprising by 200 of his fellow barons. It’s unlikely the king would have gone through with his threat to hang a member of the baronial class, but he did summon the man to trial. Fitzwalter turned up in court with 500 knights. There was a further face-off with John before Fitzwalter fled across the Channel with the yobbish son-in-law and the rest of his family.
Lovers of irony will appreciate the idea that a man who seeks to pervert the established judicial process with the threat of extreme violence should appear in Normand’s painting at the Royal Exchange as the ramrod-backed, look-’em-in-the-eye champion of justice.
Another popular notion we need to abandon is that ranged against the forty rebel barons on the riverside grass here at Runnymede was a royal party made up of just a few servants and loyal courtiers. In fact, there were almost as many barons supporting the king that day as there were against him. They were men who had stayed loyal to John throughout the tense time leading up to Runnymede. What’s more, the foremost among them were more powerful, more influential and a good deal wiser than the Fitzwalters of this world.
In the lead on the king’s side at Runnymede was William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke. Marshall – as much as was possible in the late twelfth century – was a self-made man. From being a comparative nobody he’d risen to the very top of the baronial ladder, controlling territories along the Welsh border as well vast tracts of Ireland. His birth in a noble family had been only a limited career launch pad, because as a younger son he had started out with no land and no money. He was virtually a servant, though his biographer does tell us that as a boy, sixty years before Magna Carta, he once played conkers with King Stephen. He grew up to be one of the country’s leading exponents of an entirely different sort of game. The tournament.
The word ‘tournament’ today may conjure images of picturesque ceremonial jousting with knights, in a spirit of good-humoured sportsmanship, trying to knock each other off their steeds with blunted lances. A sort of twelfth-century rugby match with horses and metal protective clothing. In fact, the tournament in William Marshall’s day had more in common with Roman gladiatorial contests than with the rough-and-tumble of young men who shake hands with each other when the final whistle blows. The only difference between a tournament and a real battle was that the tournament was put on for entertainment. It was sometimes even fought out between mini-armies over several square miles. The losing participants could expect to face death, maiming (which, given the state of twelfth-century medical science, often amounted to the same thing) or utter humiliation. The winners were allowed to seize the valuable armour and horses of the vanquished and, what’s more, to hold them hostage until their family paid out crippling ransoms.
William Marshall turned out to be rather good at it. He claimed on his deathbed that he had beaten 500 knights on the tournament field. He was also the only man ever to have unhorsed Richard the Lionheart. This was during a real battle, in the days when the young Richard was in open rebellion against his father Henry II. Chivalrously – and sensibly – William didn’t take the future monarch’s life, but just killed his horse instead. William had already been rewarded for his prowess with the gift of various lands and titles, but the big leap forward in his career came in 1189 at the age of 43, when Richard, by now on the throne, gave him the hand in marriage of the 17-year-old heiress Isabel de Clare, who brought him her father’s vast estates.
Relations between King John and William Marshall were tetchy to say the least. At first John gave him more land and titles. But then, in 1204, following a mix-up in a diplomatic mission that Marshal undertook to Paris, John accused him of treason and called on his fellow barons to stand in judgement on him. William turned to them and said: ‘Let this be a warning to you. What the king is planning to do to me, he will do to every one of you when he gets the upper hand.’ John had to back down, and he nurtured resentment against Marshall for years afterwards.
So it may seem paradoxical to us that this is the man who was at the king’s right hand, leading the loyalist barons here on the meadow at Runnymede in 1215. The reason is simple. For Marshall, pillar of chivalry and defender of feudal custom, an oath of allegiance to the monarch trumped any personal grievance. The formal principle of loyalty came first.
Both Robert Fitzwalter on one side and William Marshall on the other were extreme examples of how the barons reacted during the years of tension that led to Magna Carta. Forced to choose between the vengeful thuggery of one and the unswerving my-king-right-or-wrong principles of the other, many barons simply stayed clear. And they weren’t a small group of floating voters either. In fact, this group of waverers consisted of many more powerful men than those in the other two opposing groups put together. In total, more than a hundred great families, around 50 per cent of England’s great barons, held back when the rebels first came out into the open.
And here’s another irony. Those who were really responsible for the birth of Magna Carta were not the rebel barons. Nor even the sage William Marshall and the loyalist magnates. The fact that there is a Great Charter at all is mainly due to the members of this third, neutralist middle party who had dithered and dathered, and most of whom weren’t even present here at Runnymede on the great day in June 1215. What happened was that John, on the one side, and the militant rebel barons on the other, both had to back off from their more extreme positions, because both lots were concerned that they might otherwise offend the powerful group of neutrals and drive them into the opposing camp.
Magna Carta was not a revolutionary document born of a nationwide uprising against a tyrant. Its terms were more of a common sense, middle-of-the-road compromise.
It’s time to look at those terms, and at the document itself. Or I should say ‘documents.’ There were at least thirteen and possibly more of them issued from the royal scriveners at Runnymede, of which four have survived. Two of those ended up in the British Library in London’s Euston Road, and that’s our next stop.