Lost Liberties Found

The Rule of Law

England was on the razor's edge between war and peace. The barons planned to assassinate King John. He had raped one of their wives and sexually assaulted one of their daughters. He had murdered another baron's wife and his son, by starving them to death in Windsor Castle. However, news of the assassination plot leaked out. The king was warned by two different sources, located hundreds of miles apart--in Scotland and Wales. Instead of being killed during his Welsh campaign and uncertain as to which of his barons to trust, the king dismissed all English barons and knights from his army and retreated to London guarded only by European mercenaries. Then, with a French fleet assembled for the invasion of England, John, who had battled Pope Innocent III for years over the Pope's choice as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, finally surrendered to the Pope and turned him from an enemy into an ally. That allowed John to narrowly avoid the French invasion when the Pope excommunicated the French King Philip Augustus. That excommunication caused a key ally of Philip's to defect to the English, resulting in the destruction of the French invasion fleet. When Stephen Langton finally entered England as the new Archbishop of Canterbury he met the king at Winchester, where King John swore that he would restore the good laws of Edward the Confessor. Langton had left England as a boy to study in Paris in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral (then under construction) and became a doctor of both theology and liberal arts--an expert on Aristotle. He was involved in the creation of the University of Paris in 1200. Because of his long absence, Langton was unfamiliar with the laws of England that King John had sworn to uphold. So, after Winchester, he had his clerics hunt the archives in England's cathedrals to find out what was meant by the "good laws of the Confessor." What he found became the first draft of Magna Carta. Langton was a catalyst in transforming that document into the monumental achievement of English law--Magna Carta. "Lost Liberties Found" is the story of how that happened.