barons were to rebel. Nearly all the towns and most of the churchmen were on their side; yet they were only able to raise a little army of 2,000 men. Luckily John again lost his head and agreed to all their demands. The Great Charter of 1215.The document which they presented to him at Runnymede, near Windsor, in June, 1215, and which he signed (or rather, sealed), was called ‘Magna Charta’—the ‘Great Charter of Liberties’.
John soon repented of signing it, sent for his hireling soldiers, sent to his Holy Father’ the Pope (who at once absolved him from his oath to observe the Charter, and hurled dreadful curses at the rebel barons), and scattered the little national army like chaff before him. In despair some of the barons took the foolish step of calling in Prince Louis of France and offering him the English crown. Death of John, 1216.But within fifteen months England was saved. John, having grossly overeaten himself one night at Newark Abbey, died suddenly in October, 1216.
Contents of the Great Charter.If you will consider the Great Charter for a few minutes you will see what a long road towards union and peace England had travelled since the last barons’ rebellion in 1174. In that year the fight had been one of barons against king and people; now it was one of barons and people against king. All classes of the nation suffered, and had called on the barons to lead them. They could not have done this if the barons had still held their lands in Normandy; and so it was the loss of those lands that finally made the barons Englishmen.
The nation had grown up; it had ‘come of age’. What it wanted was to make its king give security that he would not oppress it in future. So, by the Great Charter, it proposed to ‘tie his hands’ in several ways.
