Tim Farr Report

• Still working on Samuel Farr's downlines. Samuel has a very large descendancy! I also discovered that I missed one of Stephen Farr Jr's lines and will have to go back and finish that one. I submitted 36 ordinances to the temple system and will update the website soon.
• While reading  "The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, the Power Behind Five English Thrones" and finding that our ancestor William Marshall" was a driving force behind King John to make peace with the barons in 1215, I discovered that we descend from 12 of the 25 barons of the Magna Charta. I'm not sure that Lisa and I will have time to go see the monument at Runnymede in England so I have included photos from Wikipedia and some excerpts from the same. Most of our connections are through Olive Hovey Freeman, wife of Winslow Farr Sr.
• Magna Charta: It influenced the early American colonists in the Thirteen Colonies and the formation of the American Constitution in 1787, which became the supreme law of the land in the new republic of the United States.[c] 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powerful, iconic document, even after almost all of its content was repealed from the statute books in the 19th and 20th centuries.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".
The American Bar Association erected a monument in Runnymede, England to commemorate the Magna Carta. Near the Magna Carta monument is a monument to Pres. John F. Kennedy.

​The following is a list of the Magna Charta Sureties. All of them were barons under King John. Of the twenty five barons, we descend from twelve of them (marked with "*") and from the father of another (marked with "**").

• ustace de Vesci
• Robert de Ros*
• Richard de Percy
• William de Mowbray*
• Roger de Montbegon
• John FitzRobert
• William de Forz
• John de Lacy*
• Saer de Quincy, Earl of Winchester*
• Richard de Montfichet
• William de Huntingfield
• Roger Bigod* and Hugh Bigod*
• Robert de Vere*
• Geoffrey de Mandeville
• Henry de Bohun*
• Richard de Clare* and Gilbert de Clare*
• William D'Albini
• Robert Fitzwalter*
• William Hardel
• William de Lanvallei
• William Malet*
• William Marshall II**
• Geoffrey de Say

From the outset, the opposition barons had been aware of the danger that, once King John had left Runnymede, he would renege on the Charter on the grounds that it constituted an illegitimate infringement of his authority.  The barons came up with a novel solution to the problem in the famous clause 61, the security clause.   In this, King John conceded that ‘the barons shall choose any twenty-five barons of the realm as they wish, who with all their might are to observe, maintain and cause to be observed the peace and liberties which we have granted’. Any infringement of the charter’s terms by the king or his officials was to be notified to any four of the committee; and, if within forty days no remedy or redress had been offered, then the king was to empower the full committee to ‘distrain and distress us in every way they can, namely by seizing castles, lands and possessions’ until he made amends.  In this remarkable clause, then, the charter introduced the novelty of obliging the king to sanction and institute armed action against none other than himself.  The means by which they sought to achieve this was use of the common law doctrine of distraint, the means by which debts were collected from debtors and malefactors obliged to answer for their actions in court.
Since the clause anticipated the election of the twenty-five at some time in the future, their names are not actually listed in the charter.   Consequently, the committee’s composition is known principally from the list given later in his chronicle by Matthew Paris, the celebrated chronicler of St Albans Abbey (Herts.).  
It is noteworthy that these men were all layfolk, and for the most part members of the hard-line baronial opposition to the king.  No bishop or other Churchman appears, not even, for example, Giles de Braose, bishop of Hereford, who had long been hostile to John.  The committee was seen in clear terms as a committee of enforcers, a group whose main responsibilities were to be of a military nature.
Why did the barons alight on the number twenty-five in particular?  One very obvious reason, it being an odd number, was to avoid split voting.  More mystically, however, the number twenty-five was highly significant in the Bible.  It was, for example, the age from which God instructed Moses to permit the Levites to be consecrated to God’s service and the age from which many of the kings of Judea had come to the throne; while it also represented ‘the law squared’ in the sense that there are five books to the Pentateuch and, in the New Testament, five loaves for feeding the five thousand.  These legitimising links from the Bible were of great importance in the Middle Ages.
At a more prosaic level, it is worth remembering that the court of aldermen of the city of London, which is known to have been in existence by 1200, was made up of twenty-five members.  It may have been from the number of this body that the barons drew their most immediate inspiration.