01/01/2024
Patrick Chandler, Maryalice Foisy, Anne Dolack, Julie Chandler, Charles Chandler
This is pretty interesting. I saw a photo of a family chart (more than a hundred years old) on FB and I saw the name of one of our ancestors, Henry de Bohun. He was one of the 25 Barons chosen to ensure King John (also our ancestor) respected the rights assigned in the Magna Carta. Also, two other Barons chosen (Geoffrey de Mandeville and Geoffrey de Saye) are possibly our ancestors. I need to do more research on that.
Henry de Bohun
1st Earl of Hereford, 1200
Born about 1175
Died 1 June 1220 in the Holy Land
Married Maud de Mandeville, sister of Geoffrey de Mandeville
Hereditary Constable of England, 1182
Sheriff of Kent
Died on 5th Crusade in the Holy Land
Fought for Louis of France in the Battle of Lincoln, taken prisoner 20 May 1217
One of the envoys sent to summon his uncle, William the Lion, King of Scotland, to do homage to King John in 1200
D MAGNA CARTA
The Sheriff and Magna Carta
“The tradition of the Office of Sheriff truly began in England, dating back at least to the reign of Alfred the Great of England, and some scholars even argue that the Office of Sheriff was first created during the Roman occupation of England.
In 1116, Henry I, established a penal code, in which murder, arson, counterfeiting, and robbery were made felonies. Although the Crown reserved to itself the power to punish, investigation and apprehension were delegated to his law enforcement officials, the sheriffs. Through the next century, as the power of the king increased, so did that of his law enforcement officers.
Dictatorial rule by a series of powerful kings became more and more intolerable over the years. Finally, in 1215, an army of rebellious noblemen forced the despotic King John to sign the Magna Carta. This important document restored a number of rights to the noblemen and guaranteed certain basic freedoms. The sheriff played a prominent part in the creation of the Magna Carta, with fourteen former and existing holders of the office either in an advisory capacity or as the main participants. Of the 63 clauses, 27 are directly concerned with the sheriff and his office, and so the Magna Carta is looked upon as the finest proof of the importance of the sheriff in the governing of medieval England. The Magna Carta, firmly and permanently established the importance and authority of the Office of Sheriff.
The Office of Sheriff became bedrock of English society and government, and the High Sheriff was for centuries the pivot around which the machinery of government was to turn. The whole constitutional, economic, judicial and administrative development was dependent on the office of High Sheriff. The concepts of “county” and “Sheriff” were essentially the same today as they have been during the previous 1200 years of English legal history. The county form of government and the Office of Sheriff are inseparable and because of the English heritage of the American colonies; the new United States of America adopted the English law and legal institutions as it’s own.”
The 25 Barons of Magna Carta
The committee of Twenty Five were a group of barons in the forefront of the opposition to King John who were entrusted by the terms of clause 61 of Magna Carta to ensure the king’s compliance with its terms.
The Barons
• Eustace de Vesci
• Robert de Ros
• Richard de Percy
• William de Mowbray
• Roger de Montbegon
• John FitzRobert
• William de Forz
• John de Lacy
• Saer de Quincy, Earl of Wi******er
• Richard de Montfichet
• William de Huntingfield
• Roger Bigod and Hugh Bigod
• Robert de Vere
• Geoffrey de Mandeville
• Henry de Bohun
• Richard de Clare and Gilbert de Clare
• William D'Albini
• Robert Fitzwalter
• William Hardel
• William de Lanvallei
• William Malet
• William Marshall II
• Geoffrey de Say
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. The barons came up with a novel solution to the problem in the famous clause 61, the security clause. 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’. 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 remarkable clause, then, the charter introduced the novelty of obliging the king to sanction and institute armed action against none other than himself. 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.
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. Consequently, the committee’s composition is known principally from the list given later in his chronicle by Matthew Paris, the celebrated chronicler of St Albans Abbey (Herts.). The twenty five were: Richard, earl of Clare; William de Fors, count of Aumale; Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Gloucester; Saer de Quincy, earl of Wi******er; Henry de Bohun, earl of Hereford; Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk; Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford; William Marshal junior; Robert FitzWalter; Gilbert de Clare; Eustace de Vesci; Hugh Bigod; William de Mowbray; the Mayor of London; William de Lanvallei; Robert de Ros; John de Lacy, constable of Chester; Richard de Percy; John FitzRobert; William Malet; Geoffrey de Say; Roger de Montbegon; William de Huntingfield; Richard de Munfichet; and William d’Aubigny.
It is noteworthy that these men were all layfolk, and for the most part members of the hard-line baronial opposition to the king. No bishop or other Churchman appears, not even, for example, Giles de Braose, bishop of Hereford, who had long been hostile to John. The committee was seen in clear terms as a committee of enforcers, a group whose main responsibilities were to be of a military nature.
Why did the barons alight on the number twenty-five in particular? One very obvious reason, it being an odd number, was to avoid split voting. More mystically, however, the number twenty-five was highly significant in the Bible. It was, for example, the age from which God instructed Moses to permit the Levites to be consecrated to God’s service and the age from which many of the kings of Judea had come to the throne; while it also represented ‘the law squared’ in the sense that there are five books to the Pentateuch and, in the New Testament, five loaves for feeding the five thousand. These legitimising links from the Bible were of great importance in the Middle Ages.
At a more prosaic level, it is worth remembering that the court of aldermen of the city of London, which is known to have been in existence by 1200, was made up of twenty-five members. It may have been from the number of this body that the barons drew their most immediate inspiration.
Over the next two years, on a monthly basis, we will be publishing a short biography of each of the members of this famous group. They were a body linked together by ties of blood, kinship, association and, in many cases, neighbourhood. Most of all, however, they were brought together by their opposition to what they considered the unjust rule of King John.
The first Baron we have details on is Eustace de Vesci: click on the link on the left to find out more.
(This page and the details of each of the Barons are written by and copyright held by Professor Nigel Saul of Royal Holloway, University of London)
