Читать книгу A Concise History of the Common Law - Theodore F. T. Plucknett - Страница 24

Of all the threads which run through this period, many of them highly important, we shall here follow only one—the struggle for the charters. The absence of Richard I had shown that it was possible for the machinery to work without a king to direct it, provided that there was a trusty minister to take his place. The great Archbishop Hubert Walter took this rôle, and assisted by the great council of magnates ruled well, retaining his power into the next reign. The brilliant outburst of literature, art, law and general culture which marked the close of the twelfth century was accompanied by the development of an idea of government of which Hubert Walter¹ was the embodiment.

“King John, in fact, felt with much truth that he was not his own master so long as his great minister was alive. Hubert Walter held the view, natural in an ecclesiastical statesman, that the kingship was an office invested with solemn duties. Royal power must be inseparable from the law. And the Archbishop’s prestige was so great that a word from him on the interpretation of the law could set aside the opinion of the King and his advisers.”²

His successor, Stephen Langton, whom Pope Innocent III forced John to accept, was of the same school, holding that “loyalty was devotion, not to a man, but to a system of law and order which he believed to be a reflection of the law and order of the universe”.³ Conflict was inevitable between such statesmen and John, whose life had been spent in constant turbulence, intrigue and treachery, with complete indifference to “those principles of harmony in life and nature which underlay all the current belief in justice and responsibility”.⁴ The rapid growth of the central administration and the development of the courts of law (which we shall consider in more detail later⁵) was only equalled by the growth of local government, of boroughs, of trade both internal and foreign, and the close co-operation of central and local authorities. Litigation, negotiations, compromises, definitions of official power, the statement of precise limits to all sorts of jurisdictions public and private, organisation between groups of towns and the elaboration of machinery for holding international representative chapters in certain religious bodies—these are all signs of the spirit of legal order which filled the opening years of the thirteenth century. It is from this standpoint that the events leading to Magna Carta must be considered.