The First Barons' War

Fought from 1215 to 1217, the First Barons' War broke out within weeks of King John's repudiation of Magna Carta, when the rebel barons, having lost faith in the annulled charter, invited the French crown prince Louis (the future Louis VIII) to take the English throne in John's place. Louis landed in Kent in May 1216 and took London and much of the southeast, but John's death that October, and the regency government his nine year old son Henry III inherited under the guardianship of William Marshal, cut the ground from under the rebellion: many barons returned to the young king's side once John himself was no longer the grievance. The regency's decisive victories, the land battle at Lincoln in May 1217 and the naval battle off Sandwich that August destroying the French relief fleet, forced Louis to make peace and withdraw under the Treaty of Lambeth. William Marshal's regency reissued Magna Carta in 1216 and again in 1217, the second reissue split off the Charter of the Forest as a separate document, as the settlement that ended the war and gave the Charter the durable, reissued form that let it outlive the single crisis of 1215.