The Magna Carta Project

Clause 52 was one of the longest in the 1215 Magna Carta. Expressing the determination of the barons to enforce retrospectively an important element in Clause 39 of the Charter, its basic issue was a simple one, the right of free landowners who had been deprived – `disseised’ – of estates, castles and rights by King John, or by his father, Henry II, and elder brother, Richard I, to recover what had been unlawfully taken from them. That the Clause differed in significant respects from no. 25 of the Articles of the Barons, on which it was based, was principally due to complications resulting from John’s having taken the cross on 4 March 1215, and from his claim that he was therefore entitled to the exemptions from legal processes which had come to be granted to crusaders. Eventually it was decided that he must restore immediately what he himself had had taken, but that seizures by his father and brother should await his return from the Holy Land, or alternatively, his decision not to go there.

The wording of Clause 52 makes it clear that the barons expected resistance from King John. When that happened, the twenty-five barons in whose hands the enforcement of the whole Charter was to be placed were to give judgment. There was likely to be much for them to do, since John had disseised men and women of their lands throughout his reign. His actions could have been justified on a variety of grounds, for instance a failure to pay debts owing to the crown, but often arose from political or personal considerations. Many disseisins followed the conspiracy of 1212 against John’s life, while in the weeks before Runnymede he had ordered the seizure in every county of the estates of those he now described as his enemies, creating a good deal of confusion in the process. Disseisins could be carried out through chicanery, for instance by manipulating the proceedings of the courts, but most were implemented by force. A number of orders for their rectification were given in the weeks following the negotiation of Magna Carta, and show that those affected had been free landholders of all ranks, but inevitably the claims of the magnates for repossession received most attention and are best recorded.

How far the twenty-five barons were involved in dealing with them is unclear – in some cases John may have pre-empted their intervention by ordering restitution himself – but it seems likely (not least because a number of them had themselves been disseised by the king) that they did play a part, perhaps a significant one, in restoring the king’s victims to their lands, and to the rights and castles to whose recovery they were also entitled. A number of castles were handed back, while Eustace de Vesci, one of the conspirators of 1212 and one of the twenty-five in 1215, regained hunting rights in Northumberland which King John, with characteristic petty-mindedness, had evidently withheld when Eustace recovered his lands in 1213. Other barons seized the opportunity presented by the king’s weakness to claim more than they had lost, or even what they had never held. William de Mowbray, a leading baron in Yorkshire, asserted his right to hold the king’s forest in that county and the royal castle in York, proffering as evidence the findings of an inquest which probably never took place. John successfully resisted Mowbray’s claim, as he also did that of Nicholas de Stuteville to Knaresborough Castle, which he had held since 1205 as pledge for Nicholas’s payment of a huge fine for the right to succeed to his family’s lands. The fine was never paid, and the castle was not given back, in defiance of a direct order by the twenty-five barons. The cases of York and Knaresborough, like Clause 52 itself, illustrate both John’s methods of government and the breakdown of relations between king and barons which resulted from them.