King John, Revised edition [Paperback]

W.L. Warren begins this biography with an explanation of how and why King John ended up with the dastardly reputation we all know from Robin Hood stories and other popular fiction. John, Warren says, suffered from a confluence of factors that have rendered a slanted and warped portrait of him. Historiography methods of the past concentrated almost entirely on contemporary chronicles, practically ignoring administrative records and other types of extraneous material. John especially suffers under this kind of examination, since the chroniclers who wrote about his reign were all either poorly informed, outrageously prejudiced, or both.

John is mocked with the name "Softsword" for having lost his hold on the French domains his father, Henry II, and his brother, Richard I, worked so hard to keep. Warren points out, however, that such far-flung territories could never have been maintained, and, even had Richard lived, the French outcome would probably have been the same. Far from being a military do-nothing, John is the founder of the Royal Navy. Warren marvels that a nation that came to treasure its naval superiority as England did could so completely vilify the founder of its navy.

But this book is no whitewash, either. John was duplicitous and grasping and didn't trust anyone who wasn't beholden to him. He surrounded himself with baseborn hangers-on, excluding and alienating the barons of his realm. He took money for dispensing justice and then still ruled against the side that paid him. He was cunning and conniving, and was known to issue decrees that said one thing while secretly issuing instructions that ran exactly counter to what he wrote.

Yet this same king instituted something that, to historians, is even more important than the Royal Navy: the systematic keeping of government and court records. Before John ascended the throne in 1199, English government recordkeeping is spotty and haphazard - a frustratingly obscure and incomplete source for the study of history. But from 1199 on, these same records emerge as a rich and authoritative resource. Hmm, almost as if John knew the chroniclers weren't going to treat him fairly...

Another myth that gets busted in this book is the one about King John's being forced to sign the Magna Carta. While Warren concedes that John had backed himself into a corner by running roughshod over his barons, he explains that the Magna Carta was simply a compromise brokered between him and his opponents. Nobody was holding a gun to his head - and wouldn't have been even had guns been invented. And John had the last laugh when, days later, he made England a fief of the Pope, who reciprocated by declaring the Magna Carta null and void.

When I started reading this book, I had a fairly negative attitude about King John. By the time I finished, I still didn't like him much, but I had a new appreciation for him as a brilliant, complex, and probably tortured soul who tried to do great things and occasionally succeeded.

If you've been conditioned by the Robin Hood stories to think of King John as the ultimate bad guy, read this book. It will show you that, while he was not a saint and not the best ruler of England, he really was not all that bad. I found this to be a useful, informative, and well-written biography. One of the points I came away with was that King John was apparently the founder of the great British navy, that pride of later generations. His struggles with Pope Innocent III show him to be a nationalist, even a patriot of sorts. And those rebellious barons who forced the Magna Carta upon the king may have had some valid arguments, but it can also be argued that John was doing the best he could. This book shows that John compares favorably with his much more popular brother Richard the Lionheart.

While this is the best overall modern biography of King John, it is a bit dated with so much new research having been done in this field. For those seriously interested in this subject, the works of Ralph Turner and S.D.Church should also be considered. If possible, the best overall biography still remains Kate Norgates but it is ancient at this point.

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