detested, and excommunicated, continued still refractory; he endeavored to maintain his authority by the most cruel acts of tyranny and violence. The pope, to finish his part, pronounced a sentence of deposition; and, at the same time, made a donation of the kingdom of England to Philip of France, who prepared immediately an immense land and naval armament to take possession of his new territories. But the scheme of the pope was deeper laid: it was by no means his intention that Philip should join England to the dominions of France; his view was to intimidate John into an absolute submission to his authority from the terror of the dangers that hung over him. At the same time that he made this donation to Philip, he sent his legate into England, who acquainted John, that it was still in his power to prevent the impending ruin by putting himself and his kingdom implicitly under the protection of the holy see. John eagerly grasped at the offered condition, and, in a solemn convocation of the nobles and people, took an oath, upon his knees, by which, for the expiation of his sins, he surrendered to pope Innocent, and his successors, all his dominions, and every prerogative of his crown, and engaged to hold them as his holiness's vassal for a yearly tribute of a thousand marks.

Philip, incensed at the intelligence of this negotiation, by which he saw the pope had plainly overreached him, determined, notwithstanding, to prosecute the war. An insurrection, however, in his own territories, and a successful attack made upon his fleet by the English admiral, in which four hundred of his ships were taken and destroyed, obliged him entirely to abandon the enter prise.

John was now at ease from foreign hostilities, but he had too plainly manifested his mean and odious character to hope for the allegiance or quiet submission of his subjects. Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, who had been installed, in consequence of the pope's nomination, against the will of the king, and who was his inveterate enemy, had formed a plan for the reformation of the government. A charter, very favorable to the liberties of the people, and tending to abridge the power of the sovereign in many capital articles, had been granted by Henry I. A copy of this charter, which had never been followed by any substantial effect, came into the possession of Langton, who, in a conference with some of the principal barons, proposed that, on the ground of these concessions from his predecessor, they should insist, that John should grant a solemn confirmation and ratification of their liberties and privileges. The barons bound themselves with an oath to support their claims by a vigorous and steady perseverance. An application was drawn up and presented to the sovereign, who, unwilling to yield and yet unable to refuse, appealed to the holy see. The pope had now an interest to support his vassal, and he wrote instantly to England, requiring by his supreme

authority, that all confederacies among the barons, which tended to disturb the peace of the kingdom, should be immediately put an end to. This requisition met with its just disregard. The associated barons had taken the most effectual measures to enforce their claims. They had assembled an army of two thousand knights, and a very numerous body of foot. With these forces they surrounded the residence of the court, which was then at Oxford, and transmitting to the king a scroll of the chief articles of their demand, they were answered, that he had solemnly sworn never to comply with any one of them. They proceeded immediately to hostilities, laid siege to Northampton, took the town of Bedford, and marched to London, where they were received with the acclamations of all ranks of the people. The king, who found his partisans daily abandoning him, began now to talk in a more submissive strain. He offered, first to submit all differences to the pope, and this being peremptorily refused, he at length acquainted the confederates, that it was his supreme pleasure to grant all their demands. At Runnymede, between Staines and Windsor, a spot which will be deemed sacred to the latest posterity, a solemn conference was held between John and the assembled barons of England, when, after a very short debate, the king signed and sealed that great charter, which is at this day the foundation and bulwark of English liberty,-MAGNA CHARTA.

The substance of this important charter is as follows. The clergy were allowed a free election to all vacant church preferments, the king renouncing his power of presentation. Every person aggrieved in ecclesiastical matters was allowed a freedom of appeal to the pope, and for that purpose allowance was given to every man to go out of the kingdom at pleasure. The fines upon churchmen for any offence were ordained to be proportional to their temporal, not their ecclesiastical, possessions. The barons were secured in the custody of the vacant abbeys and their dependent convents. The reliefs or duties to be paid for earldoms, baronies, and knights' fees, were fixed at a rated sum, according to their value, whereas before they had been arbitrary. It was decreed that barons should recover the lands of their vassals forfeited for felony, after being a year and a day in possession of the crown; that they should enjoy the wardships of their military tenants, who held other lands of the crown by a different tenure; that a person knighted by the king, though a minor, should enjoy the privileges of a man come of age, provided he was a ward of the crown. It was enacted, that heirs should marry without any disparagement, that is, that no sum should be demanded by the superior or overlord upon the marriage of his vassal. No scutage or tax was to be imposed upon the people, but by the great council of the nation, except in three particular cases, the king's captivity, the knighting his eldest son, and the marriage of his eldest daughter. When the great

council was to be assembled, the prelates, earls, and great barons were to be called to it by a particular writ, the lesser barons by summons from the sheriff. It was ordained that the king should not seize any baron's lands for a debt to the crown, if the baron possessed personal property sufficient to discharge the debt. No vassal was allowed to sell so much of his land as to incapacitate him from performing the necessary service to his lord.

With respect to the people, the following were the principal clauses calculated for their benefit. It was ordained that all the privileges and immunities granted by the king to his barons should be also granted by the barons to their vassals. That one weight and one measure should be observed throughout the kingdom. That merchants should be allowed to transact all business without being exposed to any arbitrary tolls or impositions; that they, and all freemen, should be allowed to go out of the kingdom and return to it at pleasure. London, and all cities and boroughs, shall preserve their ancient liberties, immunities, and free customs. Aids or taxes shall not be required of them, except by the consent of the great council. No towns or individuals shall be obliged to make or support bridges, unless it has been the immemorial cusThe goods of every freeman shall be disposed of according to his will or testament; if he die intestate, his heirs at law shall succeed to them. The king's courts of justice shall be stationary, and shall no longer follow his person; they shall be open to every one, and justice shall no longer be bought, refused, or delayed by them. mine pleas of the

The sheriff's shall be incapacitated to detercrown, and shall not put any person upon his trial from rumor or suspicion alone, but upon the evidence of lawful witnesses. No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or dispossessed of his free tenements or liberties, or outlawed or banished, or any way hurt or injured, unless by the legal judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land; and all who suffered otherwise in this and the former reigns, shall be restored to their rights and possessions. Every freeman shall be fined in propor tion to his fault, and no fine shall be levied on him to his utter ruin.

Such were the stipulations in favor of the higher orders of the state, the barons, the clergy, the landholders, and freemen. But that part of the people who tilled the ground, who constituted in all probability the majority of the nation, seem to have been very lightly considered in this great charter of freedom. They had but one single clause in their favor, which stipulated that no vallain or rustic should by any fine be bereaved of his carts, his ploughs, and instruments of husbandry; in other respects they were considered as a part of a property belonging to an estate, and were transferable along with the horses, cows, and other movables, at the will of the owner. John, at the same time that he signed the Magna Charta, was compelled by the barons to

sign the Charta de Foresta, a deed of a most important nature to the liberties of the subject. William the Conqueror, we have remarked, had reserved to himself the exclusive privilege of killing game over all England, and the penalties on any subject encroaching upon this right of the sovereign were most oppressive and tyrannical. The most rigorous of these penalties were abolished by the Charta de Foresta; pecuniary fines were substituted for death and demembration. Those woods and forests that had been taken from their proprietors in the former reigns were now restored to them, and every man was left at liberty to enclose his woods, or to convert them into arable land at his plea

sure.

The barons, in order to secure the observance of these important charters, prevailed likewise on John, who was ready to grant every thing, that twenty-five of their own number should be appointed conservators of the public liberty. The ease with which John had made all these concessions was entirely a piece of simulation on the part of that treacherous prince. The barons were lulled into security, and had disbanded their forces, without taking any measures for reassembling them, while John, in the meantime, had privately enlisted a large body of foreign troops, Germans, Brabantines, and Flemings, who, landing in the kingdom, immediately commenced hostilities. An English army, headed by the earl of Salisbury, was likewise in the king's interest; and by these acting in different parts at the same time, storming every citadel which refused to acknowledge the king's absolute authority, and burning, massacring, and plundering in every quarter, the whole kingdom was a scene of horror and devastation.

The barons, unable to act in concert or to raise an army that could stand before these ravagers, were reduced to the desperate measure of entreating aid from France. Philip immediately despatched his eldest son Lewis, at the head of an army of 7000 men. The barons became bound to acknowledge him as their lawful sovereign; and the first effect of his appearance in the kingdom was the desertion of a very large part of John's foreign troops, who refused to serve against the heir of their master. Lewis advanced to London, where he received the submissions of the people, who took the oath of fealty; but discoveries were soon made that tended at once to withdraw the English from all allegiance to their foreign master. One of the French courtiers (the Viscount de Melun) had declared upon his death bed that he knew, from the mouth of Lewis, that it was his intention to exterminate entirely the English barons, and to bestow their estates and dignities upon his own French subjects. This, though a most improbable scheme, received some confirmation from the visible partiality that Lewis already showed to his foreign subjects. The most powerful of the nobility took the alarm immediately; they even chose to join their unworthy sovereign, rather than be

the dupes and victims of a treacherous foreigner. John, with these aids, was resolved to make a vigorous effort for the preservation of his crown. But this vicious tyrant, from whom England could in no situation have ever received benefit, was cut off by a fever at Newark. Henry III., his son, a boy of nine years of age, was immediately crowned at Bristol, under the auspices of the earl of Pembroke, Mareschal of England, who was at the same time appointed guardian of the king and protector of the realm. The disaffected barons, whose object of hatred and enmity was now removed, returned cheerfully to their allegiance. Lewis found himself deserted by all his partisans among the English; an engagement ensued, in which the French troops were defeated; and their prince, finding his cause to be daily declining, was glad at last to conclude a peace with the protector, and entirely to evacuate the kingdom.

CHAPTER IX.

State of Europe in the Thirteenth Century-The Crusades.

WHILE these eventful transactions were carrying on in England, and John, by compulsion, was making those concessions to his barons, which a wise and a good prince would not have thought it injurious to regal dignity to have voluntarily granted, a young emperor had been elected in Germany, and enjoyed the throne which Otho IV. had resigned before his death; this was Frederick II., son of the emperor Henry VI. The emperors, at this time, were much more powerful than their neighboring monarchs of France; for, besides Suabia, and the other extensive territories which Frederick had in Germany, he likewise possessed Naples and Sicily by inheritance; and Lombardy, though sometimes struggling for independence, had long been considered as an appanage of the empire.

The pope reigned absolute at Rome, where all the municipal magistrates were subject to his control and authority. Milan, Brescia, Nantua, Vicenza, Padua, Ferrara, and almost all the cities of Romagna, had, under the pope's protection, entered into a confederacy against the emperor. Cremona, Bergamo, Modena, Parma, Reggio, and Trent were of the imperial party. These opposite interests produced the factions of Guelph and Ghibelline, which for a length of time embroiled all Italy in