Free The Great Turning Points of British History by Michael Wood

could stigmatize the Scots as bare-buttocked Highlanders and ridicule the Welsh as dwellers in dispersed settlements, who consumed nothing but milk and meat.
    Yet, in many ways, the peoples of Britain were becoming more alike. The structure of dioceses and parishes, and the houses of Benedictine and Cistercian monks, had spread through the island. The Scottish nobility had been transformed in the twelfth century by the king’s establishment of Anglo-Norman aristocrats, men of chivalric outlook. The castles, cavalry, armour, seals and documents of the Welsh rulers show how they had been influenced by their Anglo-Norman neighbours. Royal government in Scotland, however, was comparatively decentralized. Wales was divided between competing princes. Only in England was the power of the ruler so insistent and intrusive as to provoke demands for restraints.
    The grievances dealt with in Magna Carta had a long history. Many were the product of the way kings since the Norman Conquest had manipulated the judicial process and exploited the rights and revenues that came to them from the new tenurial structures introduced by the Norman Conquest. Already in 1100 Henry I’s Coronation Charter dealt (unavailingly) with the issues of relief, widows, and wardships of children later tackled in Magna Carta. This was why the 1100 charter was brought out again by the opposition to King John.
    John’s Angevin predecessors were also to blame. His father, Henry II (reigned 1154–89), had extended the royal forest, antagonizing wide sections of society. John’s brother Richard I, between 1194 and 1199, had placed novel financial burdens on the country. The need for money to preserve the continental empire against the power of the king of France was a constant problem facing these kings. Another was that the great base of land brought to the monarchy by the Norman Conquest had slowly been eroded as land was given away to reward followers. As a result, kings had to exploit other, more politically sensitive, sources of revenue. Of course, the Angevins gave as well as took; they had developed immensely popular legal procedures that lay at the heart of what was later called ‘the common law’. These were the assizes, which the charter sought to extend, not restrict. But here too was a problem, for the new procedures turned on due process of law. No free man was to lose his possessions ‘unjustly and without judgement’. The year 1215 was the moment when society turned on the king and demanded that he obey his own rules.
    Early in his reign John suffered two blows, first a rapid inflation for which he was blameless, and then, in 1204, the loss of Normandy. Thereafter he spent ‘ten furious years’ trying to raise the treasure to regain Normandy. The treasure went in an abortive military campaign in France of 1214. The grievances remained and produced Magna Carta.

OTHER KEY DATES IN THIS PERIOD
    1204 John loses Normandy . Normandy was finally conquered by Philip II of France. This was a pivotal event in European history – now the cross-channel Anglo-Norman state was over. King and barons, like everyone else, would be born and live only in England. They had far more time for the affairs of Britain. The English conquest of Wales in the 1280s and near-conquest of Scotland around 1300 was the result.
    1216 Llywelyn dominates Wales . Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, the ruler of Gwynedd, established his dominance over native Wales. His vision was of a principality in which he alone did homage to the king of England while the other native rulers did homage to him, in effect as prince of Wales. Two years later, in the Treaty of Worcester, Llywelyn’s territorial conquests and practical (if not theoretical) supremacy were recognized by the king of England.
    1217 The throne is secured for John’s son . Two victories, the first at Lincoln, the second at sea off Sandwich, secured the throne for John’s son, Henry III. Prince Louis, eldest son of Philip II of