The Provisions Overturned

The Provisions of Oxford, a result of the barons demanding reforms from King Henry III during the Mad Parliament in exchange for raising money for him, were overturned a few years later.

Henry's need for money came from trying to finance a war against the Hohenstaufens for the Kingdom of Sicily. Henry wanted it for his younger son Edmund. Pope Innocent IV wanted Henry to "buy" it to avoid giving the Hohenstaufens a foothold in Italy (the Kingdom of Sicily included the Regno, that held much of southern Italy, right on the papacy's threshold).

Although Henry had sworn on the Gospel to accept the Provisions, a papal bull in 1261 absolved Henry of the need to follow them. The barons called their own parliament to re-assert control over government, but Henry was not about to back down, and he still had several powerful earls and barons on his side. Simon de Montfort, one of the chief instigators of rebellion (even though he was married to Henry's sister), saw they were outmatched and fled to France.

The First Barons' War that ended with Magna Carta also set up a method by which the King of France would mediate disputes between King John and the barons (illustration). This was tried with King Louis and Henry versus the barons, but there was little agreement on each side.

Henry's need for financial support disappeared when he gave up trying to gain Sicily for Edmund, and therefore his reason for agreeing to the barons' demands disappeared. Then, in 1262, one of his strongest supporters, Richard de Clare, 6th Earl of Gloucester, died. Richard's son and successor, Gilbert de Clare, brought the resources of Gloucester to the side of the rebels.

Henry's re-assertion of his ultimate authority continued to anger the barons and earls, and in April 1263 several of them invited Simon de M Montfort back to England to join them in opposition. Simon gathered all the barons opposed to the king at Oxford. Before the end of 1263 both sides had raised large armies. Simon de Montfort's army marched on London where they found local support. Henry and his queen were trapped in the Tower of London, but before long were taken prisoner and de Montfort took control of England.

Not everyone approved of this usurpation, or of de Montfort himself. We'll look at what happened next tomorrow.

The Provisions of Westminster

The Provisions of Oxford, reorganizing the government of England with a series of checks and balances that removed power from King Henry III and distributed it among a large council of barons and others, were replaced a year later by the Provisions of Westminster of 1259.

This document restated the Provisions of Oxford, but added additional changes to taxation and inheritance policies, and included a section on mortmain.

The term "mortmain" comes from Latin mortua manus ("dead hand"), and refers to the permanent ownership of property by a legal entity, such as a church owning property from which it gains revenue through rent. Because the church entity was not a living person, the land could be said to be held not by a living person but in a "dead hand." (We think that is the explanation of the term, but no one knows for certain.)

Land held by an individual could be passed on to another when the individual died. If the individual had no heirs, the Crown took possession and chose to whom it should go. Mortmain meant that a legal entity could posses land eternally. Since a diocese or parish did not die, land possessed by such an entity stayed in Church hands in perpetuity.

The Provisions of Westminster put limits on mortmain, requiring approval from secular authorities (king and council) for the Church to hold land in perpetuity. (More limits were created in later administrations, such as by Henry's son Edward I).

There was more to the Provisions than mortmain, of course. Some additional parts claim that an accusation of murder could not be brought when a death was caused by accident. Also, a person could not be fined for making an honest mistake ("I didn't know I was trespassing" for instance).

A few years after this, however, the Provisions of Oxford and their successor, the Provisions of Westminster, were overturned completely. This would set up the Second Barons' War. I'll tell you how they were overturned next time.

(By the way, you can read Modern English translations of the Provisions of Oxford and Westminster here.)

The Mad Parliament

King Henry III had spent lavishly on many things, including trying to fund a war to gain the Kingdom of Sicily for his younger son Edmund. He was confronted by a number of barons who would only agree to raise money for him if he would commit to some reforms.

He called Parliament to gather at Westminster Hall (the illustration shows the room wherein they would have gathered) on 9 April 1258 to raise money. Three days later, Simon de Montfort and others refused the king's request to provide funds. They were given three days to reconsider, and so three days later several earls and barons and knights returned to Westminster, fully armed, to repeat their refusal and told the king he would get his money if he would submit to their policy demands.

Henry had little choice but to agree, and so he swore on the Gospel that he would go along with their demands and a commission was formed, 12 chosen by Henry and 12 chosen by the opposition, to meet at Oxford in June and discuss future policy. The result was the Provisions of Oxford.

The provisions re-organized government and could be called the first constitution. (The Magna Carta was not a reorganization of how government worked; it was a list of policies.) Under the Provisions, Parliament met regularly thrice each year, not just when the king wanted it. A council of 15 was created to manage appointments of ministers instead of having the king pick all his people. Parliament would oversee the council's actions.

Besides 15 members, the council would also include the justiciar, the chancellor, and the treasurer, and others. It was unlikely that the 15 would all be able to hang about the king all the time, so usually a few were around and would decide if any matter was important enough to summon the others. The chancellor, keeper of the king's seal, was forced to agree that he would not use the seal to approve an important grant unless a majority of the 15 greed. These checks and balances were unusual in a monarchy.

In an unusual move, the provisions were copied and sent to all the sheriffs of all the counties in three languages: Latin, French, and (Middle) English. The use of English was a signal of the barons' objection to all the French influences and advisors of the king.

The Provisons of Oxford were only supposed to be in effect for 12 years until a more permanent and more wide-spread set of changes could be devised. They lasted for one year. I'll explain tomorrow.

War Comes to Oxford

By the early 1260s, Oxford had become a place where scholars went to teach and learn. Violence was not unknown, as conflicts between students and townspeople were common. Town vs. Gown is not only a common phrase to express this conflict, it was the very first post in this blog.

Oxford became a center for another conflict, however, at the same time that the colleges of Balliol and Merton were beginning. This conflict was a little more widespread and is called the Second Barons War.

The First Barons War was a rebellion against King John and led to the Magna Carta in 1215. John's son Henry III had his own troubles with the barons who were always looking for ways to increase their own power and reduce the king's authority. Simon de Montfort, the 6th Earl of Leicester, in April 1263 called fellow barons to meet him at Oxford where they discussed rebellion against Henry's policies.

Oxford was a significant meeting place, because a few years earlier it was the site of the Provisions of Oxford, a series of reforms forced on Henry in 1258 in exchange for the barons agreeing to shore up the royal treasury (Henry had depleted it fighting in Sicily on behalf of the pope). The barons and their armies marched on London and trapped Henry in the Tower, taking him prisoner. Montfort took over the government, but his authority did not last long and Henry escaped.

Henry reached out to Louis IX of France to arbitrate. Simon de Montfort agreed to this. Louis declared the Provisions of Oxford annulled in January 1264. Henry prepared for the inevitable breakdown of negotiations and took his forces to Oxford (more centrally located than London) and made it his military headquarters. On 12 March in 1264 he suspended all teaching until Michaelmas (29 September).

Montfort, wishing to make sure he had funds to fight a war, did what many medieval nobles did: he made sure people would have money and be grateful to give it to him by eliminating their cash debts. He did this by attacks against Jews, the moneylenders, and therefore ensuring that debts would not have to be repaid. Let us go into some of the specific atrocities tomorrow.

Edward I — The Leopard

When Alfonso X of Castile looked northward over the Pyrenees and cast his eye on Gascony, Henry III of England decided he needed to do something. He took his son, Edward, and a retinue, and traveled south and made Alfonso an offer: marry your half-sister Eleanor to my 15-year-old son who will be King of England when I'm dead. Alfonso decided that was a good reason to abandon any claims on Gascony.

So on 1 November 1254, Edward and Eleanor of Castile were wed in the Abbey of Santa Maria la Real de Las Huelgas in Castile, to great fanfare. They moved to Gascony, which had been granted to Edward, at the end of the month, where they were warmly received. Edward styled himself "prince and lord" although he did not receive any revenue from the Duchy, since Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, had been made lieutenant of the place by Henry.

For the first few years of his marriage, Edward was close to the Savoyards, his bride's family. Starting in 1257, he became close to the Lusignans, his father's half-brothers, who were disliked by the ducal houses of Gloucester and Leicester. Neither group of foreigners was considered a welcome influence on the future King of England, and back home there was a growing hostility to Henry's policies and Edward's choice of mentors.

Moreover, according to chronicler Matthew Paris, Edward's youthful behavior was entirely unsuitable to a future king. He tells stories of Edward's retinue (remember, we are talking about a teenager raised to be ruler over a country) attacking a young man whose ear was cut off and eye gouged out at Edward's command. The Song of Lewes, celebrating Simon de Montfort's victory at Lewes, describes Edward as a leopard: a leo, a proud and fierce lion, but also a pard, unreliable. He is painted as changeable, frivolous, and known to get rowdy with his peers and trash places.

He also tended to take sides in disputes, rather than follow his father's policy of trying to mediate between factions. When the Provisions of Oxford were drawn up in defiance of his father's wants and threatening the influence of the Lusignans, Edward spoke out against the Provisions, but when the same Barons rebelled against Henry a few years later, Edward sided with their leader, Simon de Montfort, seeing de Montfort's influence as his best chance to keep Gascony under control.

In November of 1259, Henry went to France to negotiate peace with France over disputed territory, and Edward started [putting his own people in positions of power, siding with the Barons and planning with them to put his father in captivity when he returned. When Henry, forewarned of the events back home, returned many months later, he sent messages to his loyalists to meet him in London with the military force they were obligated to provide him. He came to London and met with the barons' leaders, but refused to see his son.

1264-1267 saw civil water in England, specifically the Second Barons' War against Henry. What did Edward do? I'll tell you tomorrow.

Criminal Intent

When Henry I (1068-1135) was king of England, the rule of the law was simple: someone had to pay for a crime. The philosophy was "who sins unwittingly shall knowingly make amends." This was a few decades into Norman rule in England, but it mirrored the previous Anglo-Saxon law as well: someone had to be responsible if a wrong had been committed. In fact, the law under King Cnut (985-1035) demanded that even an infant who broke a cup was guilty as if he were an adult acting deliberately. (Remember the importance of the wergild to pre-Norman England.) At least Henry's law allowed the very young and the insane to be considered innocent, being not in their right minds. Accidental injury was still injury, however, until a legal expert came forward who tried to change that.

Henry Bracton (1210-1268) was a jurist who worked hard to codify and update English law, using the well-developed Roman legal system as his guide. His four-volume De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliæ (On the Laws and Customs of England) informed much of English law afterward, even though he didn't finish it (I'll explain why shortly). He had a lot to say about the practice of seeking Sanctuary in a church, about "writs of appeal," and murder fines and dying intestate. But what we are looking at today is the concept of mens rea.

Mens rea, Latin for "guilty mind," was considered by Bracton to be a necessary element of a crime, as opposed to just an actus reus (guilty act). Just as Bracton insisted that stealing required an intent to steal, so the attitude of the law to killing must reflect the agent's intent to kill:

the crime of homicide, be it either accidental or voluntary, does not permit of suffering the same penalty, because on one case the full penalty must be exacted and in the other there should have been mercy. [De Legibus]

This was a significant change, and made a harsh law more reasonable. The fact that a felony in modern jurisprudence requires intent starts with Bracton's move away from a strictly "mathematical," eye-for-an-eye approach to punishment.

A page from De Legibus

So why didn't he finish it? Bracton rose far in his career: from being a justice at the age of 35 to being a member of what became the King's Court. But by 1257, something prompted him to quit his position not long before the summoning of the Mad Parliament by Henry III and the unrest that led to the Provisions of Oxford. By quitting, he had to turn in all of his papers, court cases, notes and copies of the law that he had been drawing on to write De Legibus. The timing is suspicious, especially considering the personal cost to him and his life's work. One wonders if he wanted to avoid taking sides, or, if he already had taken a side, who he was afraid of angering most: the king or the Barons.

Whatever the case, he walked away from law and courts for years, becoming a rector in a couple places, then an archdeacon, and finally the chancellor of Exeter Cathedral, in the nave of which he is buried. But in the last year of his life he was drawn into one more court case which, depending upon his reasons for leaving the law just before the second great conflict between a king of England and the Barons, might have been awkward for him. At the end of yesterday's post, the Dictum of Kenilworth  was mentioned, allowing the rebels to make a case to reclaim their estates from their king. Henry Bracton was appointed to the committee that heard their cases and decided the outcome, giving him one last chance to practice law—on behalf of people who had been his colleagues on the King's Court.

Provisions of Oxford

Henry III (1207-1272) spent much of his reign of 56 years dealing with fallout from the reign of his father, King John. For one thing, the Barons who pushed the Magna Carta on John were always looking for ways to increase their power. In 1258, they got their chance.

Henry had fought a military action against Sicily on behalf of Pope Alexander IV, and subsequently was out of money. So he summoned Parliament in the spring of 1258 to discuss a grant of revenue. The Barons agreed, with the provision that Henry would, in exchange, submit to a list of reforms. This Parliament is alternately called the Easter Parliament and the Mad Parliament. Henry (reluctantly) agreed, and on June 10th the 24-man commission created to develop the reforms (half appointed by the king and half by the Barons) submitted its report. The changes within were called the Provisions of Oxford.

Although considered by some to be the first written constitution in England (and the first published in English: copies were circulated to all of England in French, Latin, and Middle English), the Provisions were actually very short-lived, being superseded by the Provisions of Westminster in 1259. (In fact, they were only supposed to exist for 12 years, as a temporary measure while further reforms were being studied and put in place.) As a consequence, we are not sure that we have a complete record of the Provisions, relying instead on references to them found in contemporary and later documents. Still, we know enough to know that they attempted a series of regulations and "checks and balances" in government.

For instance, Parliament was to meet three times a year, not just when the King wanted them. All high officers were to swear loyalty to the king. Many positions (such as the chancellor, the chief justice, the treasurer) were appointments of only one year—helping to prevent the amassing of power and the temptation to long-term corruption—at the end of which the officer was to give an accounting of his actions while in office. A system was put in place for addressing grievances against sheriffs. Sheriffs were to be loyal landholders who would receive no fees for their work, but be subsidized by the exchequer for their expenses.

Ruins of Kenilworth, where it ended

Attempt to curtail royal power persisted, and the conflict see-sawed. Pope Urban IV annulled the Provisions in 1261 and 1262. The Barons restored and reinforced them in 1263, then modified them in 1264. Finally, the Barons took over England in 1264, Henry defeated them at the Battle of Evesham in 1265 and killed their leader, Simon de Montfort; some Barons held out at Kenilworth, and the siege that started by Henry was curtailed by the intervention of the pope, who suggested reconciliation. The resulting Dictum of Kenilworth allowed the rebels to have their estates back (at prices dependent on how rebellious they had been!), and many of the statutes in the earlier Provisions were overturned. Henry agreed to reconfirm Magna Carta, but the appointment of royal officers was re-recognized as a royal prerogative. The reconciliation between the levels of power lasted through Henry's reign and into that of his son, Edward I (1239-1307).