REIGN OF KINGS MAP COMMANDS FULL

Since the clause anticipated the election of the twenty-five at some time in the future, their names are not actually listed in the charter. The means by which they sought to achieve this was use of the common law doctrine of distraint, the means by which debts were collected from debtors and malefactors obliged to answer for their actions in court. In this remarkable clause, then, the charter introduced the novelty of obliging the king to sanction and institute armed action against none other than himself.

REIGN OF KINGS MAP COMMANDS FULL

Any infringement of the charter’s terms by the king or his officials was to be notified to any four of the committee and, if within forty days no remedy or redress had been offered, then the king was to empower the full committee to ‘distrain and distress us in every way they can, namely by seizing castles, lands and possessions’ until he made amends. In this, King John conceded that ‘the barons shall choose any twenty-five barons of the realm as they wish, who with all their might are to observe, maintain and cause to be observed the peace and liberties which we have granted’.

The barons came up with a novel solution to the problem in the famous clause 61, the security clause. From the outset, the opposition barons had been aware of the danger that, once King John had left Runnymede, he would renege on the Charter on the grounds that it constituted an illegitimate infringement of his authority.

Reign of kings map commands