It marks also the commencement of a new grouping of political forces in England; indeed without such a rearrangement the winning of the Charter would have been impossible. Throughout the reign of Richard I. the old tacit understanding between the king and the lower classes had been endangered by the heavy drain of taxation; but the actual break-up of the old alliance only came in the crisis of John’s reign. Henceforward can be traced a gradual change in the balance of parties in the commonwealth. No longer are Crown and people united, in the name of law and order, against the baronage, standing for feudal disintegration. The mass of humble freemen and the Church are for the moment in league with the barons, in the name of law and order, against the Crown, recently become the chief law-breaker. The possibility of the existence of such an alliance, even on a temporary basis, involved the adoption by its chief members of a new baronial policy. Hitherto each great baron had aimed at his own independence or aggrandisement, striving on the one hand to gain new franchises for himself, or to widen the scope of those he already had, and on the other to weaken the king and to keep him outside these franchises. This policy, which succeeded both in France and in Scotland, had before John’s reign already failed signally in England, and the English barons now, on the whole, came to admit the hopelessness of renewing the struggle for feudal independence. They substituted for this ideal of an earlier age a more progressive policy. The king, whose interference they could no longer hope completely to shake off, must at least be taught to interfere justly and according to rule; he must walk only by law and custom, not by the caprices of his evil heart. The barons sought henceforward, to control the royal power they could not exclude; they desired some determining share in the national councils, if they could no longer hope to create little nations of their own within the four corners of their fiefs. Magna Carta was the fruit of this new policy. It has been often repeated, and with truth, that the Great Charter marks also a stage in the growth of national unity or nationality. Here, however, it is necessary to guard against exaggeration. It is merely one movement in a process, rather than a final achievement. We must somewhat discount, while still agreeing in the main with, statements which declare the Charter to be “the first documentary proof of the existence of a united English nation”; or with the often-quoted words of Dr. Stubbs, that “The Great Charter is the first great public act of the nation, after it has realised its own identity.”[223] ----- Footnote 223: