263 The Period of Constitution Making
billty of winning power from the king on the part of the
nation. In England, from the Conquest to the end of
the twelfth century the feudal nobility had received such
a succession of staggering blows that royalty reached at
a stride a position which it took centuries longer to reach
in Prance or Spain. Also in England large parts of the
nobility had been forced by strong kings to stay at home
and quit fighting and were used by the kings in all sorts
of governmental work. The English knighthood was
not the continental knighthood. It was a knighthood
with which church and middle class might make common
cause. Stephen Langton became the brains of the
barons* movement.1 When a chronicler told how the
Londoners, at the critical point in the rising against John,
on their own motion entered into negotiations with the
barons and actually opened their gates to a feudal army,
he recorded a very great event. The simple but funda-
mental causes of this difference in England's history were
insularity, the Norman Conquest, and the remarkable
post-Conquest sovereigns.
The atrocious character of John's reign was suited in
every detail to rouse the opposition of every element
that could make itself felt. The situation is significant
beyond exaggeration, not so much in making national
opposition possible at an early date, for opposition with-
out a guiding principle would have wasted itself; but in
bringing it about just early enough to use to the full
feudalism's principle of contract2 and to revive the long
interrupted series of royal charters of liberties. How
* The stand of the church was doubly notable, for English churchmen
were not only uniting with their age-long enemies, the lay nobles, but were
at the same time defying the pope, John's overlord and ruler. It is interest-
ing that in John's reign the term *'English church" (Anglicana ecclesm)
was being used. A chronicle (Annals of Waverley) has it for the year 1207.
See Sttibbs, S&lect Charters, p. 268. And it is used twice in article I of
Magna Carta—perhaps its first use in an official document. One cannot
help wondering what of national stirrings in the church in England the
rise of this term reflects.
a See below, pp. 270,271. In decadent continental feudalism, the nobility
retained a character which made co-operation with church or people impos-
sible long after the contract idea had become obscured