9780465092994Americans devoted significant attention this summer to the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, including a well-attended John Locke Foundation panel discussion. Most of the discussion surrounding the anniversary focused on the document’s ongoing significance.

University of East Anglia history professor Stephen Church’s latest book helps put the 1215 “Great Charter” in context. Church tells the story of King John and the Road to Magna Carta. We learn that John, accurately remembered as one of England’s least successful monarchs, spent most of his reign fighting challenges to his authority, especially from a provocative French king and a powerful pope.

While trying to consolidate his own position, John made many enemies. One key reason: taxes.

Immediately on his return, John began to milk his kingdom in a way that would gain him the widespread criticism of his subjects. The chroniclers were most vociferous about the new tax that John levied: he wanted a thirteenth on all movables and revenues. The king dressed up his demand as an “aid.” …

… The demand for the Thirteenth was an arbitrary act of taxation, carried out without the consent of the bishops, and the language of contemporary documents suggests that the secular magnates were also equivocal about it. After the experience of the Poitevin campaign, John had returned to England not a conciliator and a seeker of consensus amongst his ecclesiastical and secular magnates, but a man who was coming to see them as a problem getting in the way of his right to pursue his inheritance; those who opposed him were to be bullied, threatened, and browbeaten into submission.

The tax itself was extraordinarily successful, realizing in excess of £57,000, twice the amount raised through mechanisms by which the king ordinarily raised revenue. …

… It was the innovative nature of the tax that struck men hard. And given that the bishops had already proclaimed that it was unprecedented, so must others have been aware of its significance. For what it presaged was the king’s attempt to open up direct taxation to a wider proportion of the population of England than had hitherto experienced the attentions of his tax gatherers.

The notion of precedent proves critical, as Church details later in the book. In late 1214, “the earls and barons of England” gathered and determined to exact from John an oath to confirm the liberties contained within Henry I’s coronation charter of 1100, which contained concessions that “came to have a totemic value.”

The text of the charter of 1100 began by bemoaning the heavy taxation that had been laid on the kingdom, which must have had a particular resonance for those reading its terms in 1214.

So, as in late 18th-century America, unpopular tax schemes helped propel people into seeking greater protection of life, liberty, and … you get the picture.