A memorial to the Battle of Lewes on the battlefield near the town of Lewes in Sussex. The Second Barons’ War was part of the same conflict between the Crown and the barons that had led in 1215 to the signing of The Signing of the Great Charter at Runnymede. King John immediately reneged on it. His son Henry III put his own name to the Great Charter in 1258, along with the The Provisions of Oxford, but he too went back on his word.
Part 1 of 2
IN 1264 the crisis was reached,* and war broke out between the king and his brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, on the heights above the town of Lewes, in Sussex.* The result of the great battle fought there, was as decisive as that fought two centuries before by William the Conqueror, not many miles distant on the same coast.* Bracton, the foremost jurist of that day, said in his comments on the dangerous state of the times, “If the king were without a bridle, — that is, the law, — his subjects ought to put a bridle on him.”
Earl Simon had that bridle ready, or rather he saw clearly where to get it. The battle of Lewes had gone against Henry, who had fallen captive to De Montfort.* As head of the state the earl now called a parliament, which differed from all its predecessors in the fact that for the first time two citizens from each city, and two townsmen from each borough, or town, together with two knights, or country gentlemen, from each county, were summoned to London to join the barons and clergy in their deliberations.
* For Montgomery’s summary of the events leading up this, see The Provisions of Oxford.
* Simon’s army took up a defensive position on Offham Hill, and Henry obligingly attacked it. Henry’s son Edward (later King Edward I), who had driven the left wing of Simon’s baronial army from the field, returned from the chase to find that his father and what remained of the royalist army had been forced to take refuge in Lewes Castle and the nearby Priory of St Pancras.
* See The Battle of Hastings, the beginning of the Norman Conquest of 1066.
* Henry’s general, Richard of Cornwall, had also been captured, after he was discovered hiding in a windmill. ‘Come down, come down, thou wicked miller’ laughed Simon’s men.
Précis
In 1264, simmering tensions between Henry III and his barons reached boiling point. Henry’s brother-in-law Simon de Montfort assembled an army and captured Henry in battle near Lewes in Sussex. Simon then used his new-found powers to establish a governing council that for the first time included townspeople and not just noblemen and clergy among its members. (56 / 60 words)
Part Two
The ruins of the Priory of St Pancras in Lewes, Sussex. It was here that Henry III set up his headquarters before the battle; his son Edward occupied the neighbouring castle. It was also here that the King reluctantly signed the Mise of Lewes, by which he agreed to the Provisions of Oxford and to Simon’s direction in matters of state. It was not long, however, before some barons began to resent Simon’s position. Prince Edward broke out of Simon’s custody and capitalised on the dissatisfaction, assembling an army that surprised and defeated the baronial army at Evesham in 1265, and de Montfort was killed in the battle.
THUS, in the winter of 1265, that House of Commons, or legislative assembly of the people, originated, which, when fully established in the next reign,* was to sit for more than three hundred years in the chapter-house of Westminster Abbey. At last those who had neither land nor rank, but who paid taxes on personal property only, had obtained representation.* Henceforth the king had a bridle which he could not shake off. Henceforth Magna Carta* was no longer to be a dead parchment promise of reform, rolled up and hidden away, but was to become a living, ever-present, effective truth.
From this date the Parliament of England began to lose its exclusive character and to become a true representative body standing for the whole nation, and hence the model of every such assembly which now meets, whether in the old world or the new; the beginning of what President Lincoln called, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”*
* The ‘Model Parliament’ met in 1295 under Henry’s son Edward I. For a later edition of his book, Montgomery extended this passage to emphasise that de Montfort’s Parliament left something to be desired, since “de Montfort failed to summon all who were entitled to have seat in such a body; and secondly he summoned only those who favoured his policy.”
* Montgomery, an American writing for American readers, is suggesting a parallel with the American Revolutionary War and the battle-cry ‘No taxation without representation.’ See The Boston Tea Party in 1773.
* ‘Magna Carta’ is the Latin name for the Great Charter of Liberties signed by King John in 1215. See The Signing of the Great Charter.
* See The Gettysburg Address.
Précis
Simon de Montfort’s new council was the first step towards a permanent constitutional bridle on the power of the Crown. The precedent he set was taken further by Henry’s son Edward I, who in 1295 summoned a Parliament widely regarded as the formal beginning of the constitutional democracy so famously acclaimed by Abraham Lincoln six hundred years later. (57 / 60 words)
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