King John

The incidents of John’s career are the occasions, not the causes, of the movement that laid the foundations of English liberties.

A new definition of the frontier between the spiritual and temporal powers was the outcome of John’s need of allies on the eve of Magna Carta.

This attempt to explain, point by point, the sixty–three chapters of Magna Carta, embracing, as these do, every topic—legal, political, economic and social—in which John and his barons felt a vital interest, has involved an analysis in some detail of the whole public and private Edition:

Besides, if his laws were to be authoritative with the jury, why should John indignantly refuse, as at first he did, to grant the charter, (and finally grant it only when brought to the last extremity,) on the ground that it deprived him of all power, and left him only the name of a king?

The king also, by the charter, so far absolved all the people of the kingdom from their allegiance to him, as to authorize and require them to swear to obey the twenty-five barons, in case they should make war upon the king for infringement of the charter.

The barons of England, sustained by the common people, having their king in their power, compelled him, as the price of his throne, to pledge himself that he would punish no freeman for a violation of any of his laws, unless with the consent of the peers—that is, the equals—of the accused.

Occasione rerum Africanarum in ulteriora primum Oceani inquirere coeperunt regnante Iohanne Lusitani, anno salutis millesimo quadringentesimo septuagesimo septimo.

It was during the reign of King John, in the year of our Lord 1477, at the time of the wars in Africa, that the Portuguese began to push their discoveries first into the more distant parts of the Ocean.

Sir Thomas Hardy’s ‘Itinerary of King John’ gives the places at which that King is found to have stayed during every month of every year from 1200 to 1216, the regnant year then beginning on Ascension Day.

The first employment of the missi was much older than the reign of King John on the Continent, and considerably older in England.

When John reigned, the delegation of the royal authority to itinerant servants of the King for some purposes had long been known;

Of our own kings, King John was the first who always called himself King of England.

The Magna Carta, greatest of all historical characters wrung from the various kings of England from Henry I downward, was granted by King John at the pressing instance of the Barons and Commons of England toward the end of his ill-judged and unfortunate reign.

Hampden’s counsel have spent all their powder in citing a multitude of records, beginning with one in King John’s time, and so downwards, to prove that the King’s ministers have paid, that the barons have been by writs commanded sometimes to pay, sometimes to make allowances, out of the King’s moneys or dues,—in cases of foreign auxiliary, and voluntary wars:

an assize in the King’s Bench, or an appeal of death in the Common Pleas, are coram non judice, though the writ be His Majesty’s command;