Coronation Charter Research Articles

Coronation Charter of the Russian Empire of 1801 as a constitutional charter

Coronation Charter of the Russian Empire of 1801 as a constitutional charter

Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta by Jennifer Jahner

Reviewed by: Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta by Jennifer Jahner Tom Johnson Jennifer Jahner. Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. $85.00. "To accept domination by an abstract idea has never been a weakness of England," wrote Ernst Kantorowicz in The King's Two Bodies, his famous analysis of medieval sovereignty, "though a useful fiction might more readily be accepted." And indeed, historians have long noted the fictive qualities of the legal texts that make up the English constitution. As long ago as 1965, Jim Holt pointed to the rhetorical and highly partial histories that underlay baronial claims in Magna Carta, as they looked back to rights supposedly granted to them in the coronation charter of Henry I and the laws of Edward the Confessor (J. C. Holt, Magna Carta [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965]). But historians are rarely prepared to attend to the broader understandings of fictionality within which these useful constitutional fictions are constructed. In this impressive new book, Jennifer Jahner shows the compelling breadth of interpretations afforded by literary readings of English law during its period of critical formation. Central to her claim is the premise that law was "dependent both procedurally and theoretically on the flexible capacities of metaphor and fiction" (6). This means that it is the grammar classroom, rather than the law-book, to which we must look in order to understand the formation of the constitutional imagination in this period. Jahner ably exposes this connection in the first half of the book. But she also pursues a bolder argument, which is that through a literary attention to jurisdiction, we can more easily critique the vexed teleological narratives that frame constitutionalism as a progressive process that gradually clarifies the nation state. Borrowing from the legal scholar Richard T. Ford, she sees two mutually constitutive concepts of jurisdiction, representing either a "synthetic" state bureaucracy or an "organic" autonomous community, [End Page 409] embedded in the very foundations of English constitutionalism. These concepts can both act as vehicles for discourse framed around the nation, but the creative tensions between them ought to be understood as a jurisdictional poetics. Their incommensurability, Jahner suggests, prefigure the binary conflicts between different powers—king and baron, Church and state, regnal and local—that characterize subsequent constitutional struggles over the nature of political legitimacy. Writing as a captive passenger in the front seat of the Brexit death-drive, this emphasis seems to me a useful explanation for England's longue durée pyschodrama with authority, in the Middle Ages and beyond. It is a mark of Jahner's range and subtlety that she turns, in the final word, not to these obvious resonances with contemporary Britain, but to Carter Revard, the Osage medievalist-turned-poet. In a poignant meditation on his poem "Starring America" in the coda to the book, Jahner suggests the possibilities of poetic composition as a way of exploding the flattened vision of empire. But these more explorative reflections build upon an extremely scholarly account of the literary and legal culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The first chapter explores the "paradigmatic jurisdictional drama" of the Becket controversy, which works to set up some of the broader arguments about law and its exemptions and to provide a sketch of the range of literary education in this period, encompassing both the trivium, and the emerging disciplines of canon and civil law. The main analysis focuses upon John of Salisbury's Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum, a poem often understood as an inferior, early draft of the Policraticus. Jahner draws out not only the text's juxtaposition of the "law" of grammar with jurisdictional order, but the way in which it exposes the tensions of the just royal counselor's position, caught between king and conscience. Becket's rhetorical mastery thus comes to be framed by his supporters not as courtly guile, but as a consequence of his ethical idealism; his capacity to speak freely is paired with his status as a living embodiment of ecclesiastical liberty. The second chapter moves these themes forward by examining the development of a new educational form, the...

Introduction

Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky Last year marked the seven hundredth anniversary of Magna Carta. Pick up any constitutional history textbook and you will learn that there were several such documents. Every time a new king seized power, he promised not to abuse his powers and assured his barons that their privileges would be safe. In fact, the document that is so revered in the world of Anglo-American law itself reaf­ firmed the substance of pledges made in Henry I’s Coronation Charter in the twelfth century. But the one signed by King John at Runnymede on June 15,1215, holds a special place in our history. To mark the anniversary, the Society invited the Rt. Hon. Brenda Hale, Baroness of Richmond, to give its annual lecture. An English barrister, jurist, and judge, she is currently the Deputy President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, and therefore familiar with the Great Charter on a regular basis. When former law clerks write about “their”judges, their reminiscences are usually overflowing with both praise and affection. Even the clerks of curmudgeonly Justices like William O. Douglas found much to like in recalling their year at the Court. There is one exception, however, and that is James Clark McReynolds, who served on the high court from 1914 to 1941, and was considered a nasty person not only by his clerks but by his fellow Justices as well. Several years ago scholars unearthed a manuscript memoir by one of his clerks, John Knox, which did nothing to redeem McReynolds’s reputation. Our managing editor, as well as Director of Publications at the Society, Clare Cush­ man, found a cache ofletters at the Utah State Historical Society from Milton Musser, who clerked for McReynolds in the 1938 and 1939 Terms, to his mother. He wrote home regularly, and his letters are a fascinating glimpse into McReynolds’s Chambers. The documents also confirm how difficult it was to work for the man. Edward T. Sanford is not one of the better-known members of the Court, on which he served from 1923 until his sudden death in 1930. A member of the inaugural staff of the Harvard Law Review, he then returned to his native Knoxville and practiced 134 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY law there for fifteen years, until he entered government service and became assistant attorney general. In 1908 Theodore Roosevelt named him to a federal district court in Tennessee, and fifteen years later, Warren Harding named him to take Mahlon Pitney’s place on the High Court. Today he is perhaps best remembered as the author of two First Amendment speech cases, Gitlow v. New York (1925) and Whitney v. California (1927), in which he ruled that states could limit anti-government speech. Yet for all his low historical profile, this issue has two articles about him. John M. Scheb II, a professor of political science at the University of Knoxville, Tennessee, has written about Sanford’s life in Knoxville, his law practice, and his tenure on the district court. Stephanie L. Slater is an attorney with the Tennessee Court of Appeals, and she examines in-depth Sanford’s judicial opinions as a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Finally, in the Judicial Bookshelf, our resident book reviewer gives us a look at recently published volumes. D. Grier Stephenson, Jr., is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Government at Franklin & Marshall College, and has been writing the Bookshelf for many years now, for which all of us, especially me, are quite grateful As always, an interesting buffet. Enjoy! ...

The Accession of King Henry I, August 1100

This article reexamines the dramatic and rapid accession of Henry I as king of England in August 1100. It casts new light on accounts of the sudden death of Henry’s predecessor, William Rufus, and the steps taken by Henry to secure power. Henry is shown to have been ruthless to the point of using violence to secure his ends, and crucially supported by a small group of magnates who had been among the closest men of William Rufus. The article supports the possibility that Henry’s famous “coronation charter” actually post-dates his coronation and was foreshadowed by developments in Rufus’s reign. It explores the importance of ideas about the will of God and the common counsel of the barons in legitimizing Henry’s accession. It also elucidates the significance of the letter by which Henry sought the support of Archbishop Anselm, including its appeal to Anselm’s deepest religious beliefs, and the nature of the alliance it proposed between king and archbishop.

Master Stephen Langton, Future Archbishop of Canterbury: The Paris Schools and Magna Carta

Master Stephen Langton was without doubt the most prolific of the theologians teaching at Paris around 1200; later as archbishop of Canterbury he was the leading figure in the negotiations between King John and barons leading to Magna Carta. This study seeks to relate these two phases of his life by exploring three elements: (1) From the mass of biblical commentaries and theological questiones, as yet unpublished, Langton formulated political propositions of which the most striking included the necessity of written law to protect the people from the king and, in particular, the people's right to resist a decision that was rendered without a judgment of the king's court (sine sententia). (2) After his return to England in 1213 as archbishop, Langton mediated between the king and barons by resurrecting at St Paul's in London the coronation charter of Henry I that provided a written basis for the present baronial demands. A copy of this charter has surfaced in Paris at the Archives Nationales to which is attached the “Unknown Charter” of King John that responds directly to the issues raised in Henry's charter and specifically promises not to condemn anyone without judgment (absque judicio). This principle of “due process” became one of the celebrated clauses of Magna Carta. Admittedly this account of Langton's role relies on the chronicler Roger of Wendover, generally distrusted by modern historians, but Roger provides a compelling context to Langton's application of his Parisian teaching in England. (3) How the “Unknown Charter” came to Paris is resolved by a close examination of the fonds d'Angleterre in the Archives Nationales. Simon Langton, the archbishop's brother, and Elias de Derehem, both clerics and collaborators of the archbishop and Prince Louis undoubtedly brought it to Paris at the conclusion of the latter's unsuccessful expedition to England in 1217.

Spontaneously Evolved Social Order versus Positive Legislation in English Constitutional History

Medieval institutions contain an important strain of spontaneous order, especially from the pre-Christian period. A series of irregular successions after the Norman conquest made royal charters increasingly important in establishing the sovereign's legitimacy. Henry I's coronation charter (1100) formed the basis of Henry II's aggressive program of reform legislation, as well as for Magna Carta (1215). Henry II aimed at restoring the legal and political institutions of his grandfather Henry I after a period of civil strife and social degeneration. The fact that almost all later charters grew out of Henry I's charter, combined with the fact that later charters expanded and refined legal and political institutions, establishes the evolution of spontaneous order in the English charters. This evolution continued throughout the middle ages as subsequent kings confirmed Magna Carta.

Henry I's coronation charter, ch. 6

Henry I's coronation charter, ch. 6

The coronation charter of 1100: a postponement of decision. What did not happen in Henry I's reign

The charter issued by Henry I on his coronation in 1100 has been regarded since Stubb's time as a prefigurement of Magna Carta, since it restricted the rights of the monarch. It has also been seen as a cunning political manoeuvre designed to strengthen the shaky position of Henry I during the tense days and months following the death of William Rufus. The present article does not set out to undermine either of these two positions. The charter played a part in the discussions between the king, the Church and the barons in 1135, 1154 and 1213. There was no such discussion in 1100 when the charter was formulated. At that earlier date the role of the monarch was predominant, as it had been since 1066. As yet the Church and the barons had no active part to play.

The English Coronation Oath

To the early history of the coronation oath it would be difficult to add, unless, which seems unlikely, some altogether fresh documents are discovered. In any case, the course of history is plain. The king bound himself by a threefold promise to preserve peace and protect the church, to maintain good laws and abolish bad, to dispense justice to all. This oath had been taken by English kings from the tenth century: it was taken by William the Conqueror and by his successors. But more than this, Henry I, Stephen, and Henry II all issued coronation charters. Neither Richard I nor John did so, but Henry III went back to the practice that had been followed by his grandfather, and the great charter as it was reissued in 1216 was, in effect, a coronation charter.

The English Coronation Oath

To the early history of the coronation oath it would be difficult to add, unless, which seems unlikely, some altogether fresh documents are discovered. In any case, the course of history is plain. The king bound himself by a threefold promise to preserve peace and protect the church, to maintain good laws and abolish bad, to dispense justice to all. This oath had been taken by English kings from the tenth century: it was taken by William the Conqueror and by his successors. But more than this, Henry I, Stephen, and Henry II all issued coronation charters. Neither Richard I nor John did so, but Henry III went back to the practice that had been followed by his grandfather, and the great charter as it was reissued in 1216 was, in effect, a coronation charter.

Ranulf Flambard and Early Anglo-Norman Administration. (The Alexander Prize Essay)

The importance of Flambard in Rufus's reign has always been acknowledged. All the chroniclers, in more or less strident language, put him in the forefront of those responsible for Rufus's exactions and lay the blame chiefly on him for the misfortunes they relate. Stubbs in working out his idea of constitutional development gave Flambard a more determined position in this scheme than he had ever held before. It will first be useful to see what kind of picture of Flambard he and, later, Freeman evolved. The chief difficulty Stubbs had in Rufus's reign was to find some guiding hand for the “hardening and sharpening” of feudalism which in his view was going on at that time, and for the introduction of new feudal practices. He required some single and unscrupulous innovator to account for a process which he thought time alone would not have brought about. Stubbs, looking from the point of view of constitutional development, explained the evolution of the conditions described in Henry I's coronation charter as the work of Flambard. The charter showed, for instance, heirs to feudal fiefs having to buy back their lands on the death of the holder instead of merely paying a relief—a stringency which he explained by the discovery of a legal mind working out feudal principle.

The Reissue of Henry I’s Coronation Charter

The Reissue of Henry I’s Coronation Charter Get access LUDWIG RIESS LUDWIG RIESS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume XLI, Issue CLXIII, July 1926, Pages 321–331, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/XLI.CLXIII.321 Published: 01 July 1926