Once upon a time, there was a handsome count who went on a long journey. When he returned to his castle some years later, he brought with him a beautiful bride. His courtiers remarked that she was obviously of noble birth. She bore him four children, and the family looked set to live happily ever after.
However, as time went by, it was noticed that there was something strange about the countess. No relatives or friends from her past life ever came to visit her, and no one knew exactly where she came from. The other odd thing was that, when the family went to church, she often found an excuse to stay at home, and even on those rare occasions when she did accompany her husband and children to mass, she would always slip away just before the priest consecrated the bread and wine at holy communion. The count became more and more puzzled and troubled by her behaviour, and could get no explanation from her. So he decided to put her to the test, and the next time she came to church, he quietly instructed four of his loyal knights to stay close to her and to stop her from leaving.
The moment arrived when the priest prepared to consecrate the bread and wine, and when as usual the countess turned to head for the door, one of the knights trod on the hem of her dress so she couldn’t get away. She struggled, and as the priest raised the Host above his head, she let out a blood-curdling scream. She wrenched and tore her robe free, then, still shrieking, she snatched up two of her children, and like a startled raven clutching its carrion, flew out of the window.
She was Melusine, Satan’s daughter. The count was the Count of Anjou. And from the two children she left behind were descended Henry II and his two sons, Richard and John. This ancestry, it was said, accounted for the vile tempers of the Angevin kings and for the way they fought each other. They were the devil’s brood.
Richard and John used to banter about the story, saying, ‘You can’t blame us for the way we are, it’s in our genes,’ or twelfth-century words to that effect. But they were only half-joking. In the days before Freud, Darwin and the Wright brothers, attributing your bad behaviour to a flying demon who was your great-grandmother was not so outrageous and would have been believed by many who heard the tale. In the thirteenth century, the logical line between the fanciful and the provable was blurred, and sometimes non-existent. And it was in such a sludgy mix of fact and fiction that the seeds of John’s own reputation first took root.
From the later historian’s point of view, it wouldn’t have mattered if the gossip about ‘bad King John’ had been limited to the rough alehouse or the genteel embroidery circle. But it wasn’t. It was written down and preserved for posterity by men of God in their chronicles with every appearance of fact.
Today, medieval chronicles, written in abbeys and monasteries scattered across the land, are all available for the curious reader in one place. Or, should I say in two and a half billion places. Or, to be to be strictly accurate, they’re in one place and are capable of appearing at the same time in two and a half billion other places. Rather like the Holy Spirit, in fact. The one place being the Internet and the two and a half billion places the total of downloaded web browsers throughout the world, a concept which would certainly have seemed miraculous and mystical to a thirteenth-century monk.
Of course, a monk, scratching away at his parchment in a cell at St Albans or Coggeshall, had none of the benefits available to a present-day political, social or economic commentator writing about contemporary affairs. The monk’s only source of information was usually the guests who broke their journeys to stay the odd night at his abbey, and he couldn’t Google or make a quick phone call to check what they told him. And anyway, the monk’s objective in writing his chronicle wasn’t necessarily to set down an objective account of the day’s news for future generations. More likely it was to preach a lesson on how the sinful get their comeuppance, or just to indulge a prejudice against people or institutions that irritated him, or even to make political propaganda on behalf of a favourite party.
The limited perspective of the chroniclers, however, doesn’t mean their works are useless fables for the historian. At the very least twelfth- and thirteenth-century writers might reflect what contemporaries felt or thought about kings and lords and popes and their doings. the chroniclers undoubtedly recorded events of note and cast clarifying light upon them. But the danger is that the existence of some undoubtedly reliable information can lure the unwary into mistaking other trumped-up anecdotes or unsubstantiated comments, for the unalloyed truth. It was into this trap that eminent Victorian historians sometimes fell, so bestowing the stamp of academic approval on what we now know to be myths about King John.
John was cursed with bad luck when it came to the chronicles. He got a bad press. Worse than he deserved. And it tarnished his image over the centuries, which in turn has made it more difficult for historians to get to the truth about him.
For a start, there were few well-informed and reliable writers at work during his reign. The best of them was a monk called Gervase, who lived in Canterbury. He was well placed there to gather news from the constant stream of travellers crossing back and forth over the Channel, and he seems to have done a fairly objective job as far as it went. But he died in 1210, so was not around to tell us about the dramatic events leading up to Magna Carta, or to pull together any overall assessment of the king’s legacy. Typical of the other chroniclers was Ralph, Abbot of Coggershall Abbey in Essex. His was less a chronicle, more jottings, mainly about the weather and harvests in East Anglia. Otherwise, the only contemporary accounts came from monks who were even more isolated from mainstream events and who slipped into their journals the occasional jibe at the king, coloured by their knowledge that his actions had cast the country out of God’s grace during the Interdict, that he had been excommunicated, and that he had plundered the Church’s property. Then, as now, you can’t expect a good write-up from someone whose beliefs and livelihood you’ve attacked.
For John and his reputation, it was especially unfortunate that no one writing at the time was a loyal friend who knew him personally. His brother Richard had been far luckier on this score. For instance, later generations learned from an anonymous author who accompanied him on his crusade that when he fell ill during the siege of Acre Richard still insisted on being carried on his litter before the walls of the city so he could loose his crossbow at the defenders. By contrast, there was no sympathetic journalist with John when he made his heroic dash to Mirebeau to rescue his mother and capture his arch-enemy, Arthur.
There are, however, two chronicles which deal in detail with the deeds of King John and the dramatic events of his reign. The first attempt at a comprehensive account of John’s reign wasn’t written until ten years or so after he died. It came from the quill of a monk at St Albans Abbey known to us as Roger of Wendover. Roger had set himself the task of writing a history of the world, and when he reached the years following 1199, he must have despaired at how thin was the reliable information available. But not to be put off, he simply rehashed the tittle-tattle about the dead king, or, where that seemed inadequate, he just sexed up the story a bit. Roger wrote how John threatened the Pope’s representatives with having their noses slit or their eyes poked out, and how the king extorted money from a Jew in Bristol by the daily routine of knocking one of his teeth out.
Roger’s best anecdote concerned Geoffrey, Archdeacon of Norwich. According to our chronicler, in 1209 Geoffrey declared that it was no longer safe for priests to serve the king. John heard about this, and went into a rage. He had Geoffrey arrested, imprisoned, and chained up with lead weights hung on his body like a cloak. In this agonising state, the archdeacon was then starved to death. The problem with this gripping little tale is that we know for certain that this same Geoffrey, Archdeacon of Norwich, was made Bishop of Ely sixteen years after his own alleged death.
To be fair to Roger and his chronicle, he didn’t see himself as a historian. He regarded his writings as more of an extended sermon, a warning to his readers that God’s wrath is visited on evil men like John. We may see his chronicle as a dodgy dossier. For Roger, it justified a righteous war, against worldly sin.
But even more influential in forming John’s image throughout history were the writings of Roger’s successor as the official chronicler at St Albans, one Matthew Paris. Matthew was even further removed from the events of John’ reign – he didn’t start his own chronicle until 1235, nineteen years after John’s death. And what he wrote was even more trap-ridden for the unwary historian than his predecessor’s words. Not only did Matthew embellish Roger’s anecdotes even further, he also added a few of his own. What’s more, he knew how to entice his readers with a cracking narrative mixed with lively commentary.
Matthew missed no opportunity to blacken John’s name. At Christmas 1203, we’re told, the king, ‘effeminate and dissolved in luxury’, spends the night drinking. A year later, when Château Gaillard has fallen, John lazes about, ‘indulging his gluttony and luxury with his wanton queen while lying in whose bosom he thought that he was in possession of every joy’. We hear him swearing ‘By God’s feet,’ that ‘the sterling money of England should restore everything’. By 1208, he’s ‘oppressing one or other of the nobles of the kingdom, either by extorting money from them unjustly, or by stripping them of their privileges and properties’. Next, we see him hanging children at Nottingham, before throwing all the country’s Jews, of both sexes, into prison. By 1213, he’s accusing his barons of treason, calling them ‘jealous, miserable idiots, boasting he’s violated their wives and deflowered their daughters’. The following year, the Battle of Bouvines is lost because the king has fled ‘most disgracefully and ignominiously’. After the Charter with the barons is sealed at Runnymede, John soon reneges on the deal, and when the barons demand he fulfil his promises, he laughs at them. During the subsequent war, he becomes ‘a destroyer of his own kingdom, hiring as his soldiers a detestable troop of foreigners such as Falkes de Breauté, a man of ignoble birth and a bastard.’ Finally on his deathbed, John – according to Matthew Paris – ‘cursed all his barons instead of bidding them farewell. And thus, poor and deprived of all treasure, and not retaining the smallest portion of land in peace, so that he is truly called Lackland, he most miserably departed this life.’
But the most extraordinary story of all those pedalled by Paris is of John’s failed attempt to turn England into an Islamic nation. The St Alban’s chronicle alleges that in 1213, the king tried to enlist the military help of the Muslim emir of North Africa, offering in return to renounce Christianity himself and convert to Islam, as well as to make his kingdom a dependency of the Muslim ruler. When John’s ambassadors arrived at the Muslim court with this proposal, the emir was flabbergasted, and even he disapproved of the Christian king’s betrayal of his religion and his people (remember that, as a Muslim and the enemy of crusaders, he was generally regarded as little better than the devil himself). The emir asked one of John’s representatives to tell him more about John’s character. According to Matthew Paris, the ambassador, a priest named Robert, replied that:
John was a tyrant not a king, a destroyer instead of a governor, crushing his own people and favouring aliens, a lion to his subjects but a lamb to foreigners and rebels. He had lost the duchy of Normandy and many other territories through sloth, and was actually keen to lose his kingdom of England or to ruin it. He was an insatiable extorter of money. He invaded and destroyed his subjects’ property. He detested his wife and she him. She was an incestuous and depraved woman, so notoriously guilty of adultery that the king had given orders that her lovers were to be seized and strangled to death on her bed. He himself was envious of many of his barons and kinfolk, and seduced their more attractive daughters and sisters. As for his Christianity, the King was unstable and unfaithful.
This, then, is the foundation of the myth of the irredeemably evil King John.
Why, we may ask, did Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris paint such a diabolic picture of him? The answer is simple. Both were faithful servants at the right hand of the abbots of St Albans. The abbots were more than high-standing, respected prelates. They were lords of vast estates; in other words they were barons themselves, among the most powerful in the realm. In addition, the abbey of St Albans stood on the main route from London to the north, and its guests frequently numbered the nobility of the realm. So the news and opinions that were bandied about the cloisters and refectory of St Albans Abbey were solidly those of the baronial party. Roger’s and Matthew’s chronicles were baronial propaganda, as distorted as anything that Soviet-era information ministries could turn out.
Matthew Paris, the chronicler of St Albans, kneeling in prayer, a self-portrait. Matthew was a talented artist; the face is unusually personal and expressive for a thirteenth-century drawing.
All would have been well, if historians had always understood this. But the great Victorian antiquarians did not, and it’s to them that we owe much of the abiding strength of the myths about John.
William Stubbs, the most respected nineteenth-century historian, wrote of King John:
There is nothing in him which for a single moment calls out for our better sentiments; in his prosperity there is nothing we can admire, and in his adversity nothing we can pity … He had neither energy, nor capacity, nor honesty … the very worst of all our kings … a faithless son, a treacherous brother … polluted with every crime … false to every obligation … in the whole view there is no redeeming trait.
In his renowned Short History of the English People, Stubbs’s contemporary J.R. Green wrote:
In his inner soul, John was the worst outcome of the Angevins … His punishments were the refinements of cruelty, the starvation of children, the crushing of old men under copes of lead. His court was a brothel where no woman was safe from the royal lust, and where his cynicism loved to publish the news of his victim’s shame. He was as craven in his superstitions as he was daring in his impiety. He scoffed at priests and turned his back on the mass, even amid the solemnities of his coronation, but he never stirred on a journey without hanging relics round his neck.
It reads like a paraphrase of Roger of Wendover or Matthew Paris. Green’s ultimate damnation of John was one which both of those priests might have wished they had written themselves: ‘Foul as it is,’ wrote Green, ‘Hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of King John.’ He added, ‘The terrible verdict of the king’s contemporaries has passed into the sober judgement of history’, which might prompt us to wonder which dictionary Green was using for his definitions of ‘contemporaries’ and ‘sober’.
The great Victorian writers, like Green and Stubbs, with their view of history as the unstoppable march of progress – industrial, constitutional and moral – seized on the writings of the St Albans chroniclers and made of John a monster. The Victorians needed a medieval villain, one they could see being tamed by their own values, those of democracy and the rule of law. And they had one ready made in King John.
By the judgement of these respected nineteenth-century academics, John’s reputation as a tyrannical, vicious, depraved, cowardly, sacrilegious and incompetent king then entered folklore. It spread from the libraries of Oxford to the parlours and pubs of middle- and working-class England.
It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that this image of John was seriously challenged by historians, when they began to place more faith in the detailed analysis of thousands of documents from the royal archive rather than in the biased opinions of thirteenth-century clergymen. As it happens, many more such administrative documents have survived from John’s reign than from those of his predecessors. This fact alone is testament to the thoroughness and comparative efficiency of his government. The judicial and chancery rolls of King John not only tell us about court decisions and the state of the royal finances, they also throw up many personal details about the king too. His laundress was named Florence, for instance; and one night he lost 5s playing games of chance with Brian Delisle.
And so it was that historians like W.L. Warren in the latter half of the twentieth century presented a more balanced view of John, one that showed him as a man of many faults but not the devil incarnate. This more subtle, nuanced, ambiguous King John, however, is not so easy to jeer at and boo off the stage, and so the popular image of bad King John has been slow to catch up with the latest academic research.
But this is only half the story. The distorted image of John is an important element in producing the impression that has come down through history of the Great Charter. Just as John’s role in history had been rewritten to make him a monster, so Magna Carta also been recast as the sword capable of slaying such monsters. From its origins as a medieval feudal document with limited short-term aims, subsequent generations transformed it into the origins of parliamentary democracy, the first British constitution, and the foundation stone of some of our most treasured legal rights.
That transformation occurred during the years between 1215 and the English civil war in the seventeenth century. To see how that happened, we’re going to the Palace of Westminster, mother of parliaments, home to the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and a spectacular hall which is more than a century older than Magna Carta itself.