695. Who Was Stephen Langton? The Man Who Told a King “No” and Helped Shape Magna Carta

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. Today we get to do my favorite thing in the world, which is find a way to talk about the Magna Carta again, because Magna Carta is my favorite story in all of human history.

I won't go on and on about it because I've already gone on and on about it for several other episodes, but I was so excited when I found a way to bring it up again, but from a slightly different angle. So today we're going to talk about a man named Stephen Langton, who was kind of a man behind the Baron's decision to tell the King that he had to live within the rule of law and force him to sign the Magna Carta, or Great Charter, as we call it. And this story comes from, of course, the wonderful Title Twins Guide to Courageous Heroes.

He is in this book. And so I was, again, so excited to find a way to once again bore you about the Magna Carta. Or actually, it's just Magna Carta, not the Magna Carta.

Fun trivia for you. But let's jump right in. So again, we know the story.

I'm not going to tell you again. We know about Magna Carta, how it helped set up, you know, history. It was 1215, but it helped set up our Declaration, helped set up our Constitution.

We're still very much living in a world that is possible because of Magna Carta. But who is this guy? So he is the Archbishop of Canterbury. He's very religious.

He's a teacher, too. And he's a truth seeker. He loves learning about the truth.

And he is going to teach at a very famous, very prominent school in Paris, and he's going to specialize in the Bible. That's going to be his main thing. In fact, the Bible and the way that the chapters are separated in the Bible, a lot of that is credited to him.

So we still see some of his legacy today. So for him, the biggest thing was truth, right? I think that's for not only as a scholar, but as a religious man. But in 1207, the king is going to ask him to be the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Now, it's a very interesting time in history because the church and the king work too closely sometimes. There's going to be a very close relationship, which is one reason why you're going to see the founders be so adamant on, you know, separation of church and state, because you are going to see the king feed into, you know, certain religious leaders, and it's going to create big problems, and they're going to kind of prop each other up. So in this case, he is asked in 1207 to take on this big position, and he actually says, nah, not for me.

Thank you anyway. Thanks, but no thanks. Not going to do it.

Now, the king that asked him to do this is King John. And again, we've talked about him before, but we'll just give you a brief refresher. King John is not cool.

He's not chill. He's not a good guy, right? King John is taking people's property. He's going through different towns, basically eating them at a house and home sometime, because if the king came through your town, you have to remember this is a feudal system.

So nobody really owned anything, not even the landowners, the barons who were going to make him sign Magna Carta. Basically, the king owns everything, and by his good graces, he leases something to you. So if you are fortunate enough to be a land baron, he's going to, the king is going to lend you, lease you land, and then you're going to lease some of that land to your feudal serfs, right, to your people, and they're going to give you some of what they have, whether that's crops or taxes.

It was all kind of a tax, but however that ended up being, whether it was money or the actual crop or whatever, and then you're going to kick that to the baron, and the baron's going to pay taxes to the king. So everyone's paying somebody. So the only person who's really owning anything is going to be the king, and John is not great about that.

He's overtaxing people because there's wars he has to pay for. He is not, you know, he's punishing people without jury trials. Sometimes there were barons that were like on his side, and then they didn't do one thing he liked, so he ends up like going after them.

John has a very bad reputation. He is not great. So John is who is going to ask our buddy Stephen Langdon to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he's going to say no, he doesn't want to be in that position.

He doesn't want to have to work with John. So what ends up happening? Well, Langdon is actually exiled from England, not allowed to come back, and then there's all these issues with John and the church, and so things are kind of a cluster. But Langdon is essentially exiled for daring to say no to the king and for not wanting to do what he wanted to do because he's worried, again, if he took the position, he would basically just be a pawn for the king.

So for years, Langdon is in exile. He's living somewhere else. He's watching and he's paying attention to what's going on in his country, and of course he's still learning.

He's still observing. He's still seeking truth like he always does, but he's not even allowed to enter because of King John. So I'm not exactly sure what changed King John's mind.

I don't think anybody does because he was kind of a wishy-washy, volatile leader, but he decides that Langdon can come back, so he comes back. He does become archbishop, but this is the year 1213. Now if you've listened to me and know my love for Magna Carta, you will know that 1215 is the big year, so we're getting close, guys.

And in this lead up to 1215, a lot of things are happening. King John, again, has a bad reputation, but things are starting to escalate. I did another episode where we kind of talk about one of the straw that broke the camel's back moments.

I'm not going to rehash that, so go back and listen. It'll be a teaser. They're good.

Those are good episodes. So we're getting to the point where barons are almost fed up, and Magna Carta wasn't this all of a sudden one day they decide to circle the king and make him scientist. These small little battles, and there were actually battles, were going on before then, so things are escalating.

Now this puts Langton in a really interesting position because he obviously sees what King John is up to. He knows he's no good. His whole life has been, his meaning Langton, his whole life has been devoted to truth and to doing what is right and to teaching other people how to do what's right.

So he's seeing this and he thinks, okay, I'm kind of in the middle. What do I do? And above all, Langton is someone I think the founders would have gotten behind because he did not believe that the king should have almighty authority. He did not believe the king was above the law.

He believed in this idea of the rule of law. He believed in this idea that even kings need to be kept reigned in by something, whether that's a constitution like we have here. We don't have kings, but we have the constitution to keep leaders in line.

He believed the king needed that because for far too long, the king had believed in this thing called the divine right of kings, which basically meant like, I was anointed by God so I can do anything. And here you have a man, a man who lives his life to serve God is saying, no, no, no, that's not true. We need boundaries here, guys.

We need to have this king live within something so he's not treating us all horribly all the time. And here's where Langton plays a really big role. You know, I'm always really big on when we talk about things like the revolution or big events like this in history about the people who weren't fighting with their swords, but were fighting with words or fighting with ideas.

And Langton is one of those people. So he's actually going to help the barons. He's going to help the barons kind of vocalize or put into words or have the theory to back up what it is they're fighting for.

So Langton is going to say, listen, this idea of limited power, yeah, we've never written it in a, like a document like this before, but these ideas are not new. In fact, Henry the first, there was this charter and you know, we still, we had these like loose like rule of law things like this is actually not something we're inventing from scratch. It's something we are, we are borrowing from other things that were said throughout, throughout history, throughout time, throughout our traditions.

This is what we need to do. You know, we need to write this all down. We need to tell the King, he cannot do this.

So he's helping give them, you know, he's a teacher at his core. So he's helping give them the words, helping give them the knowledge, the ideas behind these things. So then they can take their swords and, you know, make, make the King sign this document, bring in the cool stuff, right? May bring in all the, the, the swords and, and the, the stuff that makes us, makes the story really come to life.

But you've got to remember that that wouldn't have happened without the teachers behind the scenes. So LinkedIn is not like rousing them to fight. He's not, you know, telling them, Oh, go forward, you know, raise your swords.

What he's saying is, all right, let's organize, but let's do this by ideas. We all know what's going on. Let me help you put it down.

Let me help you like put it into words. Let's get together. Let's make this organized.

Let's make sure our demands are tight. Let's make sure that what we're trying to say is going to get across in this, you know, they could not have known at the time that this was such a historic thing they were doing. And this is a really big risk for LinkedIn.

Remember, he's just barely been allowed back in his own country. He's no stranger to what the King is going to do. He might be exiled again, but he knew he was right.

And he knew that that's what he stood for. And he knew that, that, that he, he had to do it. It really wasn't a choice in his head.

And I think for a lot of these heroes, especially the courageous ones in the book that we talk about, that's a big theme, right? They don't really have to think twice about it because they just knew it was right. So they did it. And so that's, what's going to happen.

And now I'm not going to get into, I'd actually don't think we've ever gotten into the aftermath of Magna Carta. Obviously, we know what happens, but there's actually like back and forth. Usually we end the story with, it was, you know, they forced the King to put a seal on it and every, you know, yay, then we got the declaration of the constitution.

There's actually back and forth. The Pope gets involved. The Pope says, nope, we're making this not valid.

I don't think it was. It turns into a whole mess. All this to say, as far as LinkedIn goes, his part is going to end here.

He's got not, not because he dies or anything. He actually just, it's, it's one of these stories in history that actually has kind of a kind of blah ending in the best possible way. Like the King doesn't come after him or anything.

He helps the Barons. He does what he needs to do. He just kind of disappears into the background, but I'm not, you know, nothing severe happens to him again, but he, he was the, the voice of reason.

He was the voice of, of really intellect behind Magna Carta. He was the one who was able to say, here's what we're really asking. We can all notice when injustice is happening.

We notice when something is bad, I'm going to help you put it into words and to really show you what the King is doing. So this document is as good as it can possibly be. And it was pretty darn good.

Uh, like I said, the aftermath was kind of crazy. Maybe one day we'll get into that. It's, I read a whole book on Magna Carta this year and it was, it's just crazy.

The whole background of it is crazy, but we will leave it there. You guys pick up this book because there's so many other great heroes in this book that, that are just not talked about enough that you get to read about as a family and discussion. So good for dinner table discussions, for family discussions.

So pick it up. I will leave it there. As always, don't forget to like, and subscribe to the podcast and until next time, I will talk to you later.