The Forgotten Man Who Gave Us the Magna Carta and the Chapters of the Bible

On July 15, 1207, King John of England expelled the Canterbury monks for supporting newly elected Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton. This series of events led to the signing of the Magna Carta. From the article:

"The Forgotten Man Who Gave Us the Magna Carta and the Chapters of the Bible
Gary North - June 15, 2015
Eight hundred years ago today, John Lackland, king of England, was compelled by the barons of the land to sign the Magna Carta.

He soon repudiated it. Pope Innocent III joined with him in this annulment. But in 1216, they both died. The Magna Carta survived. It gave the Anglo-American world a parliament that could control the executive's purse.

Who was the brains behind it?

Who was the power broker who acted on behalf of the barons?

He was the man who gave us the chapter numbers in the Bible. If you have ever said the phrase, "I want to see proof, chapter and verse," you are in his debt. (With respect to the verses, you are indebted to Robert Estienne ["Stephanus"], who introduced them in 1551.)

He has been dropped down the memory hole. He was one of the great legal minds in Western history. His name was Stephen Langton.

Here is Wikipedia's account of him. It fails to mention his mastery of both canon law (church) and civil law. It fails to mention that he was the main author of the Magna Carta. Yet the intersection of canon law and English feudal law was basic to Magna Carta. The central figure at that intersection was Stephen Langton.

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Stephen Langton (c.?1150 -- 9 July 1228) was Archbishop of Canterbury between 1207 and his death in 1228. The dispute between King John of England and Pope Innocent III over his election was a major factor to the crisis which produced the Magna Carta in 1215. Archbishop Langton is also credited with having divided the Bible into the standard modern arrangement of chapters used today. He was also a Cardinal.

He studied at the University of Paris and lectured there on theology until 1206, when Pope Innocent III, with whom he had formed a friendship at Paris, called him to Rome and made him cardinal-priest of San Crisogono. His piety and learning had already won him prebends at Paris and York and he was recognised as the foremost English churchman.

On the death of Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1205, some of the younger monks elected to the see Reginald, the subprior of Christ Church, Canterbury, while another faction under pressure from King John chose John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich. Both elections were quashed on appeal to Rome and sixteen monks of Christ Church, who had gone to Rome empowered to act for the whole chapter, were ordered to proceed to a new election in presence of the Pope. Langton was chosen and was consecrated by the Pope at Viterbo on 17 June 1207.

There followed a hard political struggle between John of England and Pope Innocent III. The King proclaimed as a public enemy anyone who recognised Stephen as Archbishop. On 15 July 1207, John expelled the Canterbury monks, who were now unanimous in support of Stephen. In March 1208, Pope Innocent III placed England under interdict and at the close of 1212, after repeated negotiations had failed, he passed sentence of deposition against John, committing the execution of the sentence to Philip II of France in January 1213.

In May 1213 King John yielded and thus in July, Stephen (who since his consecration had lived at Pontigny Abbey in Burgundy [France]) and his fellow exiles returned to England. His first episcopal act was to absolve the King, who swore that unjust laws should be repealed and the liberties granted by Henry I should be observed--an oath which he almost immediately violated.

Stephen now became a leader in the struggle against King John. At a council of churchmen at Westminster on 25 August 1213, to which certain barons were invited, he read the text of the charter of Henry I and called for its renewal. In the sequel, Stephen's energetic leadership and the Barons' military strength forced John to sign the Magna Carta (15 June 1215).

Since King John now held his kingdom as a fief of the Holy See, the Pope espoused his cause and excommunicated the barons. For refusing to publish the excommunication, Stephen was suspended from all ecclesiastical functions by the papal commissioners, and on 4 November this sentence was confirmed by the Pope, although Stephen appealed to him in person. He was released from suspension the following spring on condition that he keep out of England until peace was restored, and he remained abroad till May 1218. Meanwhile both Pope Innocent and King John died [in 1216] and all parties in England rallied to the support of Henry III. . . .

Of great importance in the ecclesiastical history of England was a council which Stephen opened at Osney on 17 April 1222; its decrees, known as the Constitutions of Stephen Langton, are the earliest provincial canons which are still recognised as binding in English church courts.

He died at Slindon, Sussex (fifty miles southwest of London), on 9 July 1228. . . .

Stephen was a voluminous writer. Glosses, commentaries, expositions, and treatises by him on almost all the books of the Old Testament, and many sermons, are preserved in manuscript at Lambeth Palace, at Oxford and Cambridge, and in France.

The only other of his works which has been printed, besides a few letters (in The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs, ii. London, 1880, Rolls Series, no. 71, appendix to preface) is a Tractatus de translatione Beati Thomae (in J. A. Giles's Thomas of Canterbury, Oxford, 1845), which is probably an expansion of a sermon he preached in 1220, on occasion of the translation of the relics of Thomas Becket; the ceremony was the most splendid that had ever been seen in England. He also wrote a life of Richard I, and other historical works and poems are attributed to him.

Chapters of the Bible

Classically, scrolls of the books of the Bible have always been divided by blank spaces at the end (petuhoth) or middle (setumoth) of the lines. However, Langton is believed to be the one who divided the Bible into the standard modern arrangement of chapters. While Cardinal Hugo de Sancto Caro is also known to have come up with a systematic division of the Bible (between 1244 and 1248), it is Langton's arrangement of the chapters that remains in use today.

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Far more informative is the account written by Prof. Sophie Ambler, who is part of the Magna Carta Project.

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Stephen Langton (archbishop of Canterbury 1207-1228) was a famous scholar and leading figure in the Church, and is also one of the most important figures in the history of Magna Carta. He was born around 1150 to an English family in rural Lincolnshire and was probably educated in his local cathedral school. At the age of about fifteen Langton left home for Paris, the site of a burgeoning university. He studied the arts and then theology, for about fifteen years, and became a 'master' (the equivalent of a university professor today). He was a prolific and influential scholar, known particularly for his exegisis (that is, detailed analysis) of the Bible. Langton's biblical scholarship included what we would now call 'political thought', because he looked to the Bible for guidance on how society in his own day should he ordered. Langton argued that God had not intended the world to be ruled by kings, who were predisposed to rule oppressively and with disregard for the law. Langton used examples from the Bible, as well as scenarios from his own world, in thought experiments designed to investigate whether subjects were obliged to obey a king who made unjust decisions. If a king condemns a man to death, but the prisoner has not been convicted by a court, is the executioner obliged to carry out the sentence? Although Langton was inclined to think that kings in his own day, like their Biblical predecessors, often behaved badly, he was no radical. He thought that in most circumstances subjects should obey their kings -- at the most they could refuse to carry out an unlawful command.

Such questions were not just classroom exercises but real dilemmas for people ruled by kings, especially kings such as John of England, who often made important decisions and inflicted harsh punishments on his subjects without recourse to the law or troubling to obtain the agreement of his bishops and barons. In 1206, these became pressing issues for Langton too, when Pope Innocent III called him to Rome and made him a cardinal, before arranging for him to be appointed archbishop of Canterbury. King John refused to accept the pope's choice of archbishop; he, like his predecessors, expected to influence the outcome of elections to English bishoprics, so that he could reward his servants and ensure that such important offices were held by men who were faithful to him. Both parties refused to back down and so the pope imposed an interdict on England, meaning that the Church's sacraments (such as Confession and the Eucharist) were forbidden to everyone in the kingdom. Innocent also excommunicated the king (the Church's equivalent of outlawry). Almost all of England's bishops sided with the pope and left England to join Langton in exile in France. Eventually, the threat of rebellion in England and war with France forced King John to accept the pope's terms, in order to secure the support of the Church. He agreed to become the pope's vassal and to allow Langton to take up his appointment. The bishops, with Langton at their head, returned to England in the summer of 1213 and began the difficult task of trying to prevent a civil war between the king and his barons.

It might be thought that Langton's scholarly ideas -- his belief that kings were by nature oppressive and likely to act with disregard to the law -- would make him King John's enemy and, indeed, this has been suggested by more than one historian. Langton was keenly aware of the brutal realities of John's rule. He was also attached to St Thomas Becket, his predecessor as archbishop of Canterbury, who had suffered persecution at the hands of John's father, Henry II, and had been martyred in the cause of the liberty of the Church. Langton could draw strength -- and, indeed, political capital -- from Becket's example when dealing with John. But Langton had never argued that subjects were entitled to rebel against their king -- even a king as harsh as John -- only that they could refuse to obey illegal orders. Thus, in 1215, Langton refused to give up command of Rochester castle to the king because John's demand had been made 'without judgement'. For this act John considered Langton 'a notorious and barefaced traitor', and suspected him of complicity with the rebel barons. But it is unlikely that the archbishop ever encouraged rebellion against an anointed king, especially knowing the damage that civil war would inflict upon the kingdom.

Instead, Langton and his fellow bishops worked for a peaceful settlement -- a settlement that was to be enshrined in the original issue of Magna Carta in 1215. The archbishop might [sic: she means "may"] well have helped to compose the Charter, for he certainly agreed with many of its principles, but if so he was probably was one of several authors working on behalf of king, barons and bishops. When it became clear in the weeks after the agreement at Runnymede that the Charter had failed as a peace treaty, Langton continued in his efforts to bring king and barons to terms, refusing to excommunicate the rebels. The king was furious and had Langton suspended from office. The sentence was read out as Langton and his colleagues were readying to embark on the voyage to Rome, where the pope had summoned a council of the Church (the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215).

Langton was not to return to England until 1218. In his absence, Prince Louis of France invaded England at the request of the rebels, King John died, the nine-year-old Henry III was crowned, and two new issues of Magna Carta were granted, in 1216 and 1217, by the young king's ministers in an effort to woo the rebel barons away from the French cause. With brilliant military victories at the Battles of Lincoln and Sandwich in 1217, Henry III's supporters were able to secure the kingdom. But the rebuilding of royal authority and finances after the ravages of war was still a huge and difficult task, and Langton toiled hard in the young king's cause on his return.

It was during the years of Henry III's minority that Langton was to become the champion of Magna Carta. In 1225, Henry issued what was to be the definitive version of the Charter. This differed in important ways from the original version of 1215. The first Charter had included the controversial 'security for peace' that empowered twenty-five barons to 'distrain and afflict' the king (to seize his property) if he broke the Charter's terms. This clause effectively licensed the barons to rebel against the king, which did not sit well with Langton's principles. The 1225 version of Magna Carta, like those of 1216 and 1217, was issued without this clause. It was also issued in return for a grant of taxation from the bishops and barons. There could now be no suggestion that the Charter had been extracted from the king by force, or that it licensed civil war. These changes allowed Langton to support the Charter unreservedly. In 1225, he pronounced a broad sentence of excommunication in support of Magna Carta. This meant that anyone -- king, royal officer, or baron -- would automatically be outlawed from the Church if they violated the Charter. When Magna Carta was confirmed in later years, the bishops renewed Langton's sentence. Langton and his successors were instrumental in promoting and upholding the Charter and, thus, in ensuring its survival.

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On the impact of the Magna Carta, this Wikipedia summary is accurate.

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Magna Carta (Latin for "the Great Charter"), also called Magna Carta Libertatum (Latin for "the Great Charter of the Liberties"), is a charter agreed by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215.[a] First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury to make peace between the unpopular King and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. Neither side stood behind their commitments, and the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons' War. After John's death, the regency government of his young son, Henry III, reissued the document in 1216, stripped of some of its more radical content, in an unsuccessful bid to build political support for their cause.

At the end of the war in 1217, it formed part of the peace treaty agreed at Lambeth, where the document acquired the name Magna Carta, to distinguish it from the smaller Charter of the Forest which was issued at the same time. Short of funds, Henry reissued the charter again in 1225 in exchange for a grant of new taxes; his son, Edward I, repeated the exercise in 1297, this time confirming it as part of England's statute law.

The charter became part of English political life and was typically renewed by each monarch in turn, although as time went by, and the fledgling English Parliament passed new laws, it lost some of its practical significance.

At the end of the 16th century, there was an upsurge in interest in Magna Carta. Lawyers and historians at the time believed that there was an ancient English constitution, going back to the days of the Anglo-Saxons, that protected individual English freedoms. They argued that the Norman invasion of 1066 had overthrown these rights, and that Magna Carta had been a popular attempt to restore them, making the charter an essential foundation for the contemporary powers of Parliament and legal principles such as habeas corpus. Although this historical account was badly flawed, jurists such as Sir Edward Coke ["Cook"] used Magna Carta extensively in the early 17th century, arguing against the divine right of kings propounded by the Stuart monarchs. Both James I and his son Charles I attempted to suppress the discussion of Magna Carta, until the issue was curtailed by the English Civil War of the 1640s and the execution of Charles [in 1649].

The political myth of Magna Carta and its protection of ancient personal liberties persisted after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 until well into the 19th century. It influenced the early American colonists in the Thirteen Colonies and the formation of the American Constitution in 1789, which became the supreme law of the land in the new republic of the United States. Research by Victorian historians showed that the original 1215 charter had concerned the medieval relationship between the monarch and the barons, rather than the rights of ordinary people, but the charter remained a powerful, iconic document, even after almost all of its content was repealed from the statute books in the 19th and 20th centuries. Magna Carta still forms an important symbol of liberty today, often cited by politicians and campaigners, and is held in great respect by the British and American legal communities, Lord Denning describing it as 'the greatest constitutional document of all times -- the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.'"