Poor John. After more than 500 years of being dissed by Shakespeare and Robin Hood, there was nothing left but having Alan Rickman play him in a Kevin Costner film to confirm him as England’s greatest villain. John was actually no more villainous than any other king, but he was short, paranoid, irreligious and broke. and he was the son and younger brother of tall glamorous warriors. When history is written by the clergy and funded by the victors, John’s reputation had no chance of anything but infamy.

John was the youngest of the four sons of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was born when Eleanor was in her early 40s, eight years after his nearest brother and by the time he was born, all the land to be inherited from his father’s empire had already been parcelled out amongst his older brothers — thus his first nickname, John Lackland. John was too young to join most of his brother’s rebellions against their father, so Henry used his landless state as a tool against the older brothers, pinching various castles and fiefs from them to give to John and drive them on to further rebellions. When dysfunctional families command armies, wackiness most definitely ensues.

When he wasn’t using John’s landless state to pick fights with his other sons, Henry was casting about to find John an inheritance. There was a brief discussion about making him King of Jerusalem, but Henry thought it might get a bit complicated, so he decided to start the English conquest of Ireland instead. He sent the then eighteen year old John to Ireland with instructions to take advantage of the perpetual internecine warfare between the Irish tribes and establish English rule. John spent most of his time in Ireland getting drunk and insulting the natives, culminating at an treaty meeting where he collapsed with laughter at the ridiculousness of the Irish facial hair and thus achieved a miracle: he united Irish tribes against the only enemy they have ever hated more than each other: the English. John called himself the Lord of Ireland for the rest of his life, but he was rarely game to actually go there and try it in person.

As the years passed, John’s childless oldest brother died of dysentery and his middle brother Geoffrey of Brittany, died in a jousting match, leaving behind a daughter and posthumous son. Which left the Angevian empire to the second son, Richard and, as the laws of primogenitor were still quite fluid, a choice between brother John and nephew Arthur as his heir.

Richard, known as the Lionheart, was a 6’4” warrior who spent his entire reign stripping the resources of the empire to fund his crusade against Muslims living peacefully in their own country. As soon as Henry II died, Richard began his preparations for shipping his vast army of mercenaries, landless knights and convicted murders off to the holy land. He sold land, political offices, heiresses, inheritances, crown jewels, legal judgments and barrels of rotten fish to pay for God’s war against a peaceful Middle East. Richard’s part in the crusade that destroyed his economy lasted two years, killed hundreds of thousands of people and gained him the town of Acre and the island of Cyprus. While he was gone John stirred up the barons and rebellions flared up all over the empire. Richard was taken prisoner on his way home and, despite John and the King of France offering money to keep him prisoner, Richard’s ransom — a mere quarter of all England’s income and assets — was eventually paid. Richard arrived home, causing one highly stung baron to die of fright and, after 5 years of making war on his hapless vassals, died in a squabble over a pot of worthless roman coins. He had spent less then eight months of his reign in England and his only real contribution to its development was to ruin its economy and leave it unaccustomed to the presence of its ruler. Thus the English have venerated him as a mighty warrior king for centuries.

John’s succession to the Angevian throne was slightly complicated by his older brother Geoffrey’s two children, Arthur and Eleanor. The English, who had never seen them, were happy to abide by the better-the-devil-you-know principle, but most of the French fiefdoms, egged on by the King of France, declared for Arthur. In the early years John managed to imitate his predecessors’ military genius and captured Arthur after he bungled an assault on his own grandmother. Arthur disappeared into a dungeon in Rouen and was never heard from again.

While most of the English accepted the murder of a teenage nephew as a perfectly acceptable political manoeuvre, the French King was outraged and, with much sacre bleuing, kicked John’s armies out of France and claimed it for himself.

John’s intermittent efforts to regain the French territories were hampered by the economic destruction left by Richard’s crusade and his own inability to terrify his vassals into shivering obedience. So, for the first time since the Norman conquest, England had a king in residence who had nothing to do with his time but attempt to rebuild the economy and solidify the power of the English throne.

Middle Ages history is a complicated thing. There are almost no surviving personal letters or documents from the people involved, so most of our information is derived from chronicles left by monks and the remaining scraps of official documents.

There are several surviving contemporary chronicles about Henry and Richard, they were written by educated, skilful writers who knew their subjects personally. There are no such chronicles left from John’s reign, most of what we know comes from those writing at least a decade after his death, the most quoted one being from Roger of Wendover. Roger was not a historian, he was a monk who wrote stories he hoped would demonstrate the “chastisement of God’s wrath”. He was not a particularly good storyteller and would probably have sunk into obscurity were it not for the interference of his successor, Mathew Paris. Paris was the middle ages version of an internet troll, he hated theologians, lawyers, taxation and foreigners, but he was a superlative writer. He took Roger’s wildly inaccurate accounts of John’s doings, polished it with some godly sensationalism and published it as a factual account. Paris was a one man twelfth century Daily Telegraph and, if he indulged in other un-monkish behaviour, one harbours horrible suspicions about what his descendents are doing today.

What we do know from the official documents is that John, like his father, had a keen administrative sense and a great interest in the law. Particularly the laws that handed out royal fines and taxes. All his predecessors except Richard had put in place general guidelines for centralised rule and had then scampered off to France for some jolly peasant burning fun. John was the first English king in over 100 years who hung around to oversee the implementation of his administrative dictates. For the freemen and wealthy tenants who had little political power and thus not a great deal to offer him, this was a boon. They benefited from a knowledgeable, well trained judiciary and a reliable legal system that was no longer dependent on the baron’s whims. The barons themselves, however, were a different matter. John was desperately short of money and his political machinations were rarely successful, so the barons found themselves subject to arbitrary and frequently vindictive royal justice. Nobody bothered about the peasants, because, well, they were just peasants, why would you?

The king had three main source of income: taxation, personal lands and feudal rights. Richard had sold so much of the royal holdings that little income could be derived from what remained of his personal lands; he had also so devastated the economy that taxation could no longer support the royal lifestyle, hence feudal rights were the only way open to John in his efforts to exhort money. Scutage (the fee paid by barons who couldn’t be arsed going to war when the king demanded it) was levied almost every year during John’s reign, often having nothing to do with any wars being fought. He charged exorbitant fees to widows for the right to avoid being married off against their will. He doubled the tax on being Jewish and sold town charters (codifying freedoms and rights under the King’s law) increased fines for the crime of ‘falling under the King’s displeasure’ and still couldn’t raise enough money to win back the French lands or make a convincing conquest of Wales. He did, however succeed in getting the barons mightily pissed.

And, because having a nation of baronial nincompoops pissed at you just isn’t enough fun, John also started squabbling with the pope over who had the right to appoint the Canterbury Archbisopric. John’s standard method of dealing with any dispute was to tell tact and diplomacy to kiss his arse and take wild and sadistic overreaction out for a run instead. In his fight with the pope he seized clergy lands, arrested the hearth mates (illicit wives) that many clerics kept and demanded payment for their release and promised protection only to those clergy willing to remain loyal to him. The pope retaliated by excommunicating him and placing England under interdict. By modern standards this seems like nothing more than a UN-style shouty letter, but it had quite serious consequences in the middle ages. Barons were absolved of their allegiance to an excommunicate king, no Christian could break bread with him, foreign treaties were under threat and it was the moral duty of any Christian king to make war upon him, which his old enemy the king of France immediately prepared to do.

Just as the English barons and the French king were about to descend upon him with the full force of God’s wrath and rebellious acquisitiveness John made peace with the pope by selling England to him as a papal fief, which he would hold in trust as a good and loyal son of the church. As political moves go it was a work of genius. Overnight he turned the pope into a steadfast ally and any rebellion against him into a sacrilegious war against the church. John may have been short, paranoid, avaricious and vindictive, but no one can deny you can only admire his trapped rat cunning.

The papal move put a lid on rebellion for a while, but as John got older and more paranoid he started swatting flies that didn’t exist with increasingly heavy war hammers. He imprisoned the wife and sons of William de Braose and starved them to death in a dungeon. He hung 30 Welsh hostages, mostly boys under 14, because the Welsh wouldn’t settle down and do what they were told. However, these and a few other similar instances of infamy didn’t do the damage to his relationships with the barons that the smaller but more pervasive acts of interfering with marriage, property and inheritance achieved. In his never ending search for funds, John imposed heavy fines on marriages made without his consent, heavy fees for marriages made with his consent, adjudicated inheritance disputes by handing over vast tracts of lands to the highest bidder, took guardianship of minor landowners (and the income from their lands during their minority) for himself, wed heiresses to his supporters with no regard to family arrangements and dispossessed landowners of their holdings if they could not pay their fines (levied for the crime of displeasing the King) within his arbitrarily allotted time.

John was not an innovator, Kings of England had been using these tool to raise funds since the conquest, but John didn’t have the French lands to distract him, the barons had no respite from his demands and particularly in the North, where earlier kings hadn’t bothered to interfere too much, resentment boiled over into a full scale rebellion that even the threat of a papal smacking couldn’t dissipate.

John didn’t have the funds or the support to fight the barons indefinitely and eventually he was forced to attend a peace negotiation at Runnymede field, the end result of which was the Magna Carta.

Runnymede was not chosen by chance, it was the site of the old saxon Witenagemot (meeting of wise men), which in turn was a development of the ancient Volkmoot (meeting of the people). ‘The wise men’ and ‘the people’ actually meant the wealthy and politically influential men meeting to discuss how they should share power and wealth between them. Thus the Witenagemot and the Volkmoot are the forerunners of modern parliament.

Anyone searching the Magna Carta for great expressions of liberty, democracy or personal freedoms will be greatly disappointed. Most of it is concerned with succession dues, wardships, widows, forest laws and forced marriages. The source of the Magna Carta’s status as a document of liberty comes from clause 39:

No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be deprived of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will we not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right

Essentially, it’s the right to due process, and it wasn’t the first time it had been included in a royal charter, nor was it the first time it was ignored after the charter settled rebellious barons down enough to send them home.

John, forced to the negotiations at Runnymeade, had no intention of complying with the charter, and England continued to seethe with discontent for another year after the Magna Carta was signed. So pouty were the barons, that they invited the King of France to come and take the English crown and thus release them from John’s ever present monarchy.

The French king was delighted to help out and sent his oldest son to aid the cause by taking over London and being terribly French about it all. Luckily for everyone, John died just as the barons reached their oh-shit-what-have-we-done moment. The English promptly decided that John’s nine year old son would be a far better alternative to anything the French could come up with and turfed them out.

For lack of anything else to hang their hats on, the baronial council set up to manage the boy king’s regency, retained the Magna Carta as the basis for their government, thus entrenching it into the political landscape for a decade, before the next king took power.

John, despite his faults and infamy was not England’s worst king. In the long view, the much lauded Richard the Lionheart probably has better claim to that title. John pushed the country further along the road of limiting royal power than anything previously done by the Normans. Where self interest didn’t interfere, his genuine fascination with law and justice strengthened the English judicial system and made the common law more common.

In the sliding doors of human history it’s difficult to know what would have happened had Richard lived longer and Arthur survived to take the English throne, but it is true that John’s reign had an impact on the path to democracy that we are still grateful for today.

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Other articles in this series:

Henry II

Henry I

Next month we leave the monarchy and I get to do one of my favourite heros, Simon de Montfort, the father of parliament

Jane Shaw is the editor of The King’s Tribune. Follow her on twitter @JaneTribune

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