1 Introduction
1.1 King John, Royal Courts, and Historiography
King John was a very bad man; crueler than all others; he was too covetous of beautiful women and because of this he shamed the high men of the land, for which reason he was greatly hated. He never wished to speak truth. He set his barons against one another whenever he could; he was very happy when he saw hate between them. He hated and was jealous of all honourable noblemen. It greatly displeased him when he saw anyone acting well. He was full of evil qualities. But he spent lavishly; he gave plenty to eat and did so generously and willingly. People never found the gate or the doors of John’s hall barred against them, so that all who wanted to eat at his court could do so. At the three great feasts he gave robes aplenty to his knights. This was a good quality of his.
The Anonymous of Béthune1
King John is one of the best known and most thoroughly studied of England’s medieval rulers. There are several reasons for this scholarly interest. As the quotation above indicates, he was a controversial king, despised by many in his day, and the nature of his character continues to fascinate. Unlike many influential rulers who have received scholarly attention, he was an overwhelming failure, but his political failures had great consequences. His loss of Normandy and other continental lands to the French king, Philip II Augustus, left his dynasty primarily an insular power thereafter and meant that the Capetian kings would dominate France. His alienation of so many of his barons led to the issuing of Magna Carta, a document that no longer receives the quasireligious reverence it once did, but which remains deeply important, both in its historical and mythological aspects. His reign was pivotal, if not in ways he would have imagined or welcomed.2
1 Anonymous of Béthune, Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre, ed. Francisque Michel (Paris, 1840), 105. The translation is adapted from John Gillingham, ‘The Anonymous of Béthune, King John and Magna Carta,’ in Janet S. Loengard, ed., Magna Carta and the England of King John (Woodbridge, 2010), 27–44, at 37–8.
2 For biographies of John, see Kate Norgate, John Lackland (London, 1902); Sidney Painter, The Reign of King John (Baltimore, MD, 1949); W. L. Warren, King John (Berkeley, CA, 1961); Ralph V. Turner, King John (London, 1994); S. D. Church, King John: And the Road to Magna Carta (New York, 2015); Marc Morris, King John: Treachery and Tyranny in Medieval England—The Road to
Power and Pleasure: Court Life under King John, 1199–1216. Hugh M. Thomas, Oxford University Press (2020). © Hugh M. Thomas. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802518.003.0001
One area of marked success, however, was that John’s government was remarkably innovative and successful in compiling and preserving records. As a result, we have far more detailed information on the workings of his government than that of any previous European ruler, giving us a good window into one of the key changes of the central Middle Ages: the development of royal bureaucracies and institutions. Several generations of historians have exploited these rich records for a variety of purposes, including biographies of John, histories of his reign, studies of his government and fiscal policies, and, above all, research on Magna Carta. This body of work surrounding King John’s rule remains one of the great historiographic achievements of medieval history, and excellent work continues to be done on these subjects. One aspect of John’s reign has been relatively neglected, however: the social and cultural life at his court. As the quotation above reveals, however, feasts and the giving of robes mattered greatly to his contemporaries, so greatly that to one critic John’s generosity in these matters offset—at least partially—his many character flaws. As we shall see, contemporaries also saw other aspects of life at court as very important, suggesting that we need to look more carefully at court life.
The subject of life at court, of course, has not been entirely ignored. John’s biographers have often made passing reference to the king’s love of hunting, and other aspects of court culture appear in various contexts.3 No one, however, has used the reign’s rich records to focus on court life under John. This is partly because topics such as Magna Carta have understandably captured scholarly attention. Another key reason, however, was that for a long time few historians considered premodern court life worth studying. As Robert Bucholz noted in his history of the court of Queen Anne of England, scholars of the Whig, Marxist, or revisionist schools found royal courts elitist, reactionary, and wasteful.4 Many
Magna Carta (New York, 2015); Frédérique Lachaud, Jean sans Terre (Paris, 2018). These works on Magna Carta or government in the period also offer extensive information about the reign, the revolt, and the document: H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, The Governance of Mediaeval England from the Conquest to Magna Carta (Edinburgh, 1963), 321–94; J. C. Holt, The Northerners: A Study in the Reign of King John (Oxford, 1992); J. C. Holt, Magna Carta and Medieval Government (London, 1985); J. C. Holt, ‘Magna Carta, 1215–1217: The Legal and Social Context,’ in Colonial England, 1066–1215 (London, 1997), 291–306; Natalie Fryde, Why Magna Carta? Angevin England Revisited (Munster, 2001); Janet S. Loengard, ed., Magna Carta and the England of King John (Woodbridge, 2010); Nicholas Vincent, Magna Carta: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2012); J. C. Holt, Magna Carta, ed. George Garnett and John Hudson, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, 2015); David Carpenter, Magna Carta (London, 2015). See also the excellent website on Magna Carta at http://magnacartaresearch.org. For the loss of continental possessions, the classic work is F. M. Powicke, The Loss of Normandy, 1189–1204: Studies in the History of the Angevin Empire, 2nd ed. (Manchester, 1960). See also Daniel Power, The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 2004), 406–45, 532–8; Martin Aurell and Noël Tonnerre, eds., Plantagenêts et Capétiens: confrontations et héritages (Turnhout, 2006); AnneMarie Flambard Héricher and Véronique Gazeau, eds., 1204, la Normandie entre Plantagenêts et Capétiens (Caen, 2007).
3 The fullest discussion of cultural issues is in Lachaud, Jean sans Terre, 203–5, 219–42.
4 R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, CA, 1993), 2.
professional historians saw the study of court life as frivolous; better suited to antiquarians than serious scholars. As Timothy Reuter put it when noting the focus of historians of medieval English politics on administration, court activities like hunting, praying, court ceremony, and womanizing have been treated as ‘simply the froth on the top of serious government.’5 The very characteristics that make court life intriguing, even seductive, to modern people—hunting and falconry, feasting upon exotic foods on gold and silver plate, luxurious clothing and lavish jewellery, chivalric pastimes—made it a dubious subject for most serious historians. The modern British monarchy, which has so little political power but receives so much attention for both its daily life and ceremonies, may make earlier periods of court life seem politically trivial as well—the stuff of tabloid journalism and popular enthusiasm rather than scholarly history. Only when it came to patronage of high culture—painting, music, ballet, and so forth—did earlier generations of scholars tend to take court life seriously. In recent decades, however, the general attitude to the subject has begun to change.
Norbert Elias, a sociologist with a strong historical bent, was instrumental in this change and is widely acknowledged as the progenitor of modern court studies.6 His two key works, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation and Höfische Gesellschaft, which began receiving widespread attention in the 1970s, made two broad arguments. First, he claimed that royal courts had a profound influence in reshaping aristocratic manners, thereby softening a warrior nobility and teaching nobles to restrain their impulses and aggressiveness and embrace selfcontrol. This, he believed, helped modernize European culture. Second, he argued that the elaborate round of court life at Versailles, and by implication other royal courts, had the profoundly important role of reinforcing royal absolutist control by creating a peaceful competition for royal favour within the palace.7 Many of Elias’s
5 Timothy Reuter, ‘The Making of England and Germany, 850–1050: Points of Comparison and Difference,’ in Janet L. Nelson, ed., Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities (Cambridge, 2006), 284–99, at 294.
6 John Adamson, ‘The Making of the AncienRégime Court 1500–1700,’ in John Adamson, ed., The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Régime, 1500–1750 (London, 1999), 7–41, at 8–10; Ronald G. Asch, ‘Introduction: Court and Household from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries,’ in Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke, eds., Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c. 1450–1650 (Oxford, 1991), 1–38, at 1–2; Bucholz, The Augustan Court, 1; Jeroen Duindam, Myths of Power: Norbert Elias and the Early Modern European Court (Amsterdam, 1995); Jeroen Duindam, Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Major Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 2003), 7–9; Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998); Rita CostaGomes, The Making of a Court Society: Kings and Nobles in Late Medieval Portugal (Cambridge, 2003), 1–2; Janet L. Nelson, ‘Was Charlemagne’s Court a Courtly Society?’ in Courts, Elites, and Gendered Power in the Early Middle Ages: Charlemagne and Others (Aldershot, 2007), 39–57, at 39; A. J. S. Spawforth, ed., The Court and Court Society in Ancient Monarchies (Cambridge, 2007), 4–7.
7 Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, 2 vols. (Basel, 1939); Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (New York, 1978); Norbert Elias, Power and Civility: The Civilizing Process, Volume II (New York, 1982); Norbert Elias, Die höfische Gesellschaft: Untersuchungen zur Soziologie des Königtums und der höfischen Aristokratie (Neuwied, 1969); Norbert Elias, The Court Society (New York, 1983).
conclusions have been challenged, particularly by early modernists, but the books remain influential, in part because they made scholars see the historical importance of royal courts.8
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz has also had an important influence on court studies, especially with his 1980 work Negara: The Theatre State in 19thCentury Bali. His emphasis on symbolic power, on what he calls the poetics of power, is especially useful in uncovering aspects of royal power that exist alongside the kinds of military, administrative, and economic forms of power that historians have traditionally studied. Drawing on Walter Bagehot’s distinction between the dignified and efficient parts of government, Geertz aimed to correct what he saw as a persistent misconception about the relation between the two, namely that ‘the office of the dignified parts is to serve the efficient, that they are artifices, more or less cunning, more or less illusional, designed to facilitate the prosier aims of rule.’ While he may have gone too far in reversing matters and placing the efficient largely in service of the dignified, his work is helpful in rethinking older assumptions about the nature of power.9
Elias’s work, combined with the rise of social history, the increasing influence of anthropology on history, and the subsequent ‘cultural’ turn, fostered considerable interest among early modernists in royal and princely courts.10 The concerns of these scholars have varied widely, but there are several common themes. The first is the study of the organization of royal households, in many ways simply an extension of traditional interest in administrative history. The second is the study of cultural activity at court. This too has its traditional aspects, and it is shaped by an interdisciplinary concern for the history of art, music, and other forms of high
8 For criticism, see Duindam, Myths of Power; Adamson, ‘Making of the AncienRégime Court,’ 15–16; Asch, ‘Introduction,’ 15–16; Duindam, Vienna and Versailles, 7–9.
9 Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, NJ, 1980). Quotation on p. 122.
10 The bibliography is extensive, but important works include: Sidney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford, 1969); Roy Strong, Splendor at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and the Theater of Power (Boston, MA, 1973); John Adamson, ed., The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Régime, 1500–1750 (London, 1999); Bucholz, The Augustan Court; Duindam, Vienna and Versailles; D. M. Loades, The Tudor Court (Totowa, NJ, 1987); Gregory Lubkin, A Renaissance Court: Milan under Galeazzo Maria Sforza (Berkeley, CA, 1994); Robert Muchembled, ‘Manners, Courts, and Civility,’ in Guido Ruggiero, ed., A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance (Oxford, 2002), 156–72; Guido Ruggiero, The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento (New York, 2015), 268–325. Some works and collections that extend the subject to the Middle Ages and other periods are Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke, eds., Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c. 1450–1650 (Oxford, 1991); A. G. Dickens, ed., The Courts of Europe: Politics, Patronage, and Royalty, 1400–1800 (New York, 1977); David Starkey, ed., The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London, 1987); Sergio Bertelli, The King’s Body: Sacred Rituals of Power in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (University Park, PA, 2001); Werner Paravacini, ed., Luxus und Integration: Materielle Hofkultur Westeuropas vom 12. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2010). Some good comparative works for courts around the world are Jeroen Duindam, Tülay Artan, and Metin Kunt, eds., Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires: A Global Perspective (Leiden, 2011); Jeroen Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800 (Cambridge, 2016).
culture, but recent work has started to look beyond the aspects of court life that fit into a modern highculture framework. A third broad theme is the study of ritualized or at least highly formalized activities at royal and princely courts, both religious and secular. A fourth and particularly important theme has to do with courts, power, and politics, including how courts shaped relations between rulers and their nobles and other subjects; how courts strengthened and legitimized rulers by spreading propaganda; and how courts reified intangible aspects of royal authority.
Historians of Western Europe in the Middle Ages have also begun to study royal and princely courts. One cluster of such studies focuses on the late Middle Ages. Not surprisingly, these have much in common with similar studies on the early modern period, though they have perhaps been less interested in purely cultural matters.11 Another group has focused on the early Middle Ages, but they have a very different historiographic origin and a somewhat different set of interests: in particular, there is a great deal of work on ritual in politics, much of it influenced by anthropological models.12 Some of the subjects will seem obvious:
11 CostaGomes, Making of a Court Society; Chris GivenWilson, The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity: Service, Politics and Finance in England, 1360–1413 (New Haven, CT, 1986); V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne, eds., English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages (New York, 1983); M. G. A. Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270–1380 (Oxford, 2003); C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT, 1999); Steven Gunn and Antheun Janse, eds., The Court as a Stage: England and the Low Countries in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2006); John Carmi Parsons, ed., The Court and Household of Eleanor of Castile in 1290 (Toronto, 1977); Werner Rösener, Leben am Hof: Königs- und Fürstenhöfe im Mittelalter (Ostfildern, 2008); KarlHeinz Spieß, Fürsten und Höfe im Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 2008). For work on the influential Burgundian court, see Chapter 9, note 52.
12 Important works on early medieval courts and the role of ritual include J. L. Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London, 1984), 133–71, 239–401; J. L. Nelson, ‘The Lord’s Anointed and the People’s Choice: Carolingian Royal Ritual,’ in David Cannadine and Simon Price, eds., Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1987), 137–80; Janet L. Nelson, Courts, Elites, and Gendered Power in the Early Middle Ages: Charlemagne and Others (Aldershot, 2007); Gerald Bayreuther, ‘Die Osterfeier als Akt königlicher Repräsentanz und Herrschaftsausübung unter Heinrich II (1002–1024),’ in Detlef Altenburg, Jörg Jarnut, and HansHugo Steinhoff, eds., Feste und Feiern im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 1991), 245–53; Gerd Althoff, ‘Fest und Bündnis,’ in Detlef Altenburg, Jörg Jarnut, and HansHugo Steinhoff, eds., Feste und Feiern im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 1991), 29–38; Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997); Gerd Althoff, ‘Der frieden, bündnis, und gemeinschaftstiftende Charakter des Mahles im früheren Mittelalter,’ in Irmgard Bitsch, Trude Ehlert, and Xenja von Erzdorff, eds., Essen und Trinken in Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Wiesbaden, 1997), 13–25; Gerd Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale: Symbolik und Herrschaft im Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 2003); Gerd Althoff, Family, Friends and Followers: Political and Social Bonds in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 2004), 136–59; Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY, 1992); Karl Leyser, ‘Ritual, Ceremony, and Gesture: Ottonian Germany,’ Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries (London, 1994), 189–213; Frans Theuws and J. L. Nelson, Rituals of Power: From Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2000); JeanClaude Schmitt and Otto G. Oexle, eds., Les tendances actuelles de l’histoire du Moyen Âge en France et en Allemagne (Paris, 2002), 231–81; Catherine Cubitt, ed., Court Culture in the Early Middle Ages: The Proceedings of the First Alcuin Conference (Turnhout, 2003); Timothy Reuter, ‘Regemque, quem in Francia pene perdidit, in patria magnifice recepit: Ottonian Ruler Representation in Synchronic and Diachronic Comparison,’ in Janet L. Nelson, Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities (Cambridge, 2006), 127–46; Julia Barrow, ‘Demonstrative Behaviour and Political Communication in Later AngloSaxon England,’
politically important religious rites like coronation or secular ceremonies like the granting of arms. However, subtler matters—gestures such as bowing, kneeling, performing prostrations, embracing, and kissing—have also come under study. Various scholars have argued that supplication or ceremonial greetings that involved these gestures could have important political implications, as could activities we might categorize as mere etiquette, like going out to greet guests or carefully arranging seating at feasts. Scholars have even studied the political purposes of displays of emotion. Though modern people tend to treat emotions (at least ‘true’ emotions) as spontaneous, welling up rather than planned, a number of scholars have argued that the ferocious displays of anger by powerful people described in many sources did not result from a lack of control but were instead signals designed to elicit a response such as submission or compromise.13 One need not divorce medieval emotions too much from modern ones to recognize this as a possibility—calculated displays of rage and other emotions occur in modern politics as well.14 Much of what has been described here can be categorized as symbolic communication, a phrase I will adopt because so many of these acts were designed to convey messages.15 Although the scholarship on ritual, ceremonial, and symbolic communication has not been without controversy, it has played a decisive role in our understanding of early medieval culture.16
In part, scholars of early medieval Europe have focused on such subjects because they lack the kind of administrative records allowing one to reconstruct court life as fully as other scholars have done for later periods, and as I intend to
Anglo-Saxon England 36 (2007), 127–50; Yitzhak Hen, Roman Barbarians: The Royal Court and Culture and the Early Medieval West (London, 2007); Levi Roach, ‘Penance, Submission and Deditio: Religious Influences on Dispute Settlement in Later AngloSaxon England (871–1066),’ Anglo-Saxon England 41 (2013), 343–72. A good overview of the literature may be found in Alexander Beihammer, ‘Comparative Approaches to the Ritual World of the Medieval Mediterranean,’ in Alexander Beihammer, Stavroula Constantinou, and Maria Parani, eds., Court Ceremonies and Rituals of Power in Byzantium and the Medieval Mediterranean (Leiden, 2013), 1–33, at 1–14.
13 See in particular Gerd Althoff, ‘Empörung, Tränen, Zerknirschung: Emotionen in der öffentlichen Kommunikation des Mittelalters,’ in Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997), 258–81; Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1998); Fredric L. Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours (Ithaca, NY, 2001), 199–219; Stephen J. Spencer, ‘ “Like a Raging Lion”: Richard the Lionheart’s Anger during the Third Crusade in Medieval and Modern Historiography,’ English Historical Review 132 (2017), 495–532; Kate McGrath, Royal Rage and the Construction of Anglo-Norman Authority, c. 1000–1250 (London, 2019).
14 For some useful cautions about taking the difference between medieval and modern emotions too far, see Geoffrey Koziol, The Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas: The West Frankish Kingdom (840–987) (Turnhout, 2012), 403–5.
15 For this term, see Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale; Björn Weiler, ‘Symbolism and Politics in the Reign of Henry III,’ Thirteenth-Century England (2003), 15–41, at 17; Björn Weiler, ‘Knighting, Homage, and the Meaning of Ritual: The Kings of England and Their Neighbors in the Thirteenth Century,’ Viator 37 (2006), 275–99, at 275–6. An alternative is Julia Barrow’s ‘demonstrative behaviour’; Barrow, ‘Demonstrative Behaviour,’ 127–50.
16 For discussion of the controversy, see Chapter 8, 188.
do for John’s reign. However, a more important motive for medievalists has been to try to understand how early medieval polities were held together in the absence of the kinds of institutions and bureaucracies that John and other rulers in the central Middle Ages were noted for building—and that grew ever more significant over time. Early explanations focused on the idea that sacral kingship gave rulers, particularly in certain dynasties like the Carolingians and Ottonians, a religious authority that could offset the lack of developed institutions. More recent scholarship has emphasized the role of all kinds of rituals and ceremonies, secular and religious alike, in binding early medieval polities together and allowing their rulers to function.
A number of historians have begun to investigate similar practices at royal courts in the central Middle Ages.17 However, such studies are not nearly as prominent for the period as for the early Middle Ages. More prominent has been the study of courtliness, which obviously delves into court life.18 But this has drawn more on literature and narrative sources than the kinds of records that allow one to observe court life in detail, and has focused more on broad social phenomena than reconstructing life at any particular court. There has been hardly any of this last kind of work for the period. The main exception is for the court of John’s parents, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Martin Aurell devoted much of his book on the Plantagenet court to Henry’s reign; Nicholas Vincent has produced an important article on Henry’s court; and Sybil Schröder has written a significant book on material culture at that court, drawing heavily on the king’s
17 Martin Aurell, ‘La cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204): entourage, savoir et civilité,’ in La cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204) (Poitiers, 2000), 9–46, at 39–46; Klaus Van Eickels, Vom inszenierten Konsens zum systematisierten Konflikt. Die englisch-französischen Beziehungen und ihre Wahrnemung an der Wende vom Hoch- zum Spätmittelalter (Stuttgart, 2002), 287–398; Weiler, ‘Symbolism and Politics,’ 15–41; Weiler, ‘Knighting, Homage, and the Meaning of Ritual,’ 275–88; Björn Weiler, Kingship, Rebellion and Political Culture: England and Germany, c. 1215–c. 1250 (Basingstoke, 2007); Scott Waugh, ‘Histoire, hagiographie et le souverain ideal à la cour des Plantagenêt,’ in Martin Aurell and Noël Tonnerre, eds., Plantagenêts et Capétiens: confrontations et héritages (Turnhout, 2006), 429–46; Nicholas Vincent, ‘The Court of Henry II,’ in Christopher HarperBill and Nicholas Vincent, eds., Henry II: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 2007), 278–334; Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Notre Dame, IN, 2009), 480–518; Rebecca L. Slitt, ‘Acting Out Friendship: Signs and Gestures of Aristocratic Male Friendship in the Twelfth Century,’ Haskins Society Journal 21 (2010), 147–64; Lars Kjær, ‘Food, Drink and Ritualized Communication in the Household of Eleanor de Montfort, February to August 1265,’ Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011), 75–89; Fanny Madeline, Les Plantagenêts et leur empire: Construire un territoire politique (Rennes, 2014), 279–86; Wojtek Jezierski et al., eds., Rituals, Performatives, and Political Order in Northern Europe, c. 650–1350 (Turnhout, 2015). Even when not consciously addressing these issues, many other scholars have touched on them when speaking of things like political theatre: see, for instance, R. R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2002), 23–5.
18 The literature is vast, but see, for instance, C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210 (Philadelphia, PA, 1985); Josef Fleckenstein, ed., Curialitas: Studien zu Grundfragen der höfisch-ritterlichen Kultur (Göttingen, 1990); Aldo D. Scaglione, Knights at Court: Courtliness, Chivalry, and Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance (Berkeley, CA, 1991).
financial records.19 The narrative sources for Henry’s court, it must be admitted, are somewhat better than for John’s, and shed much light on his court. However, it is only with John’s reign that one finds the records that allow a reasonably comprehensive description of a royal court in the central Middle Ages, comparable to the scholarly work on later periods. Thus, a history of the court of King John can greatly expand our knowledge of the royal court in the central Middle Ages.
1.2 Goals of This Book
1.2.1
Reconstruction of Court Life
The first aim of this book is, to the degree possible, to reconstruct social and cultural life at King John’s court. To some degree, the contents of the archives shape which topics receive the most attention, including hunting; material culture; religious ceremonial; and food and feasting. However, these subjects appear frequently in the records precisely because they were of special interest to John and his court, as they were to most royal and princely courts of the time. The primarily descriptive layer of this project is fundamentally important precisely because so little work has appeared on court life in this period. Moreover, as individual chapters and sections will show, this reconstruction contributes to large existing literatures on medieval hunting, clothing and textiles, learning at court, chivalry, courtly love, feasting, etiquette, and ceremonial royal entries into towns. In some cases, it will also contribute to important current debates, for instance over the survival of sacral kingship after the Investiture Strife, the uses of castles, and medieval experiences of place and space. In other cases, it will provide useful specific findings. For example, wine historians have long associated the English shift to consuming Bordeaux rather than Loire valley wines with John’s loss of territories north of Gascony; my research not only confirms this but also shows how fast it happened, since the change is already apparent in wine purchasing for the royal court within a few years of 1204.
However useful these contributions to the study of individual aspects of court life may be, it is the focus on a single court rather than a single topic that is crucial to providing a fuller understanding of the significance of courts. Though specialists in such subjects as hunting and feasting often try to provide context for such activities, the context here will be deeper and much more concrete. Moreover, looking at the court in the round allows one to see the pervasiveness of important
19 Martin Aurell, ed., La cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204) (Poitiers, 2000); Sybille Schröder, Macht und Gabe: materielle Kultur am Hof Heinrichs II. von England (Husum, 2004); Vincent, ‘The Court of Henry II,’ 278–344. See also Martin Aurell, ed., Culture politique des Plantagenêt (1154–1224) (Poitiers, 2003). For an important work that focuses on specific aspects of court life but extends to the reigns of Henry II’s sons, see Madeline, Les Plantagenêts et leur empire
practices like gift exchange or displays of power and wealth across a range of court activities. More important still, researching a variety of activities reveals just how much effort and money went into maintaining court life. The English royal government strove not only to win wars and oversee justice, the traditional duties of a king, but also to maintain a magnificent court for the king. Though the surviving records do not allow a systematic accounting of royal costs, various individual figures I discuss throughout the book give a sense of just how much the royal government spent on activities such as hunting, distributing robes at feasts, and other aspects of court life—even during a period of ruinously expensive wars. These expenditures only increased the financial pressures John felt. Moreover, though the financial demands of warfare were the chief force impelling kings to develop ever more sophisticated methods to collect money, the desire to have a spectacular court was also a motive for the English kings to develop their precocious bureaucracy.
Finally, reconstruction of life at John’s court will provide a baseline for comparison with other courts, a subject I turn to in Chapter 9. Though, as I have stressed, similar systematic work has not been done for other princely and royal courts in the central Middle Ages, I hope to begin such work by looking at royal records from other courts around 1200 and piecing together material from a variety of other primary and secondary sources. The resulting comparison is highly tentative, but I suggest that many similarities existed not only between John’s court and those of other rulers in core cultural areas of Western Europe such as France, but also with the courts of rulers in places ranging from Wales and Norway to Byzantium and the Islamic world. The lack of systematic studies of courts until the late Middle Ages and early modern period presents challenges for a temporal comparison as well, but I have also ventured tentative comparisons there. In particular, I propose a combination of strong continuity with slow but cumulatively powerful change that meant that court life altered only gradually from generation to generation but far more radically in the span of centuries, so that early modern courts were very different from ones from the central Middle Ages.
1.2.2 Analysis of Court Life, Soft Power, and John’s Successes and Failures
Norbert Elias placed the study of power at the centre of his exploration of court life, and most of his successors have followed his lead. Power will be one of the main subjects of this book as well. Much of the existing work on King John’s reign also focuses on power, of course, but mostly on institutional, military, or economic forms rather than the kinds of symbolic or cultural power provided by activities like hunting and feasting. In his recent book, The Normans and Empire, David Bates has persuasively argued for extending the modern term ‘soft power’
to medieval settings.20 I explore soft power at John’s court by focusing on four important questions. First, how did social and cultural life at John’s court provide him with soft power (though I will also look briefly at some ways in which the very nature of court life could undermine a ruler’s position)? Second, how did John’s enemies seek to contest and undermine the power he gained from his court? Third, how did the rise of administrative kingship affect earlier forms of soft power?21 Fourth, how effective was John at using soft power?
I noted above that focusing on the court life of a single ruler allows the researcher to study court life in a thicker context and more concrete setting. As an example, instead of asking in the abstract what difference soft power made, one can ask how it helped, or failed to help, the particular ruler succeed. Though failure is obviously a major theme in John’s case, it is not the whole picture; John had successes as well as failures. He successfully laid claim to the inheritance of his brother Richard despite the competition of Arthur, the son of John’s older brother Geoffrey. I have already noted the growth of government, and this was accompanied by a notable expansion of revenue collection during his reign. In a series of expeditions to Scotland, Ireland, and Wales from 1209 to 1211, John established an impressive if temporary dominance within Britain and Ireland.22 Though few scholars would say John handled the crises he faced brilliantly, he did sometimes handle them well. For instance, faced with Innocent III, a pope who aggressively advanced papal rights, John entered into a dispute over succession to the archbishopric of Canterbury that led to personal excommunication and an interdict on England. He extracted himself from this by ultimately giving in to the pope on the narrow issue of the pope’s appointment of Stephen Langton to the position, but then cleverly gained papal support by making himself the pope’s vassal for England and Ireland.23 At the end of his reign, John faced a powerful array of enemies, including many English barons, the King of Scotland, Welsh
20 David Bates, The Normans and Empire (Oxford, 2013), 4, 18–23.
21 I draw the useful phrase ‘administrative kingship’ from C. Warren Hollister and John W. Baldwin, ‘The Rise of Administrative Kingship: Henry I and Philip Augustus,’ American Historical Review 83 (1978), 867–905.
22 For these expeditions and relations with Scotland, Ireland, and Wales more generally, see Seán Duffy, ‘King John’s Expedition to Ireland, 1210: The Evidence Reconsidered,’ Irish Historical Studies 30 (1996), 1–24; S. D. Church, ‘The 1210 Campaign in Ireland: Evidence for a Military Revolution?’ Anglo-Norman Studies 20 (1998), 45–57; A. A. M. Duncan, ‘King John of England and the Kings of Scots,’ in S. D. Church, ed., King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), 247–71; Seán Duffy, ‘John and Ireland: The Origins of England’s Irish Problem,’ in S. D. Church, ed., King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), 221–45; I. W. Rowlands, ‘King John and Wales,’ in S. D. Church, ed., King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), 273–87; K. J. Stringer, ‘Kingship, Conflict, and State Making in the Reign of Alexander II: The War of 1215–1217 and Its Context,’ in Richard Oram, ed., The Reign of Alexander II 1214–1249 (Leiden, 2005), 99–156; Louise J. Wilkinson, ‘Joan, Wife of Llywelyn the Great,’ Thirteenth-Century England 10 (2005), 81–93; Colin Veach, ‘King John and Royal Control in Ireland: Why William de Briouze Had to Be Destroyed,’ English Historical Review 129 (2014), 1051–78; Carpenter, Magna Carta, 238–41, 473–5.
23 For a recent discussion of this dispute, see Christopher HarperBill, ‘John and the Church of Rome,’ in S. D. Church, ed., King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), 289–315.
rulers, and (from May 1216) the future Louis VIII of France. His position could have collapsed in England, as it had in Normandy a decade earlier, but John recruited and maintained sufficient military strength to prevent this. After his death, this military power allowed the supporters of his young son, Henry, to drive out Louis and crown Henry king. John had many failures, but they were not the whole story.
Moreover, when it came to his greatest failures, many factors worked against him or were beyond his control. The Angevin Empire was an unwieldy affair, involving too many territories, frontiers, and enemies.24 As is well known, many of the governing practices and techniques the rebels objected to in Magna Carta had been developed and used by John’s predecessors, even if the loss of his most important continental possessions forced him to ratchet up the financial pressure on his English subjects to dangerous levels. A significant if somewhat mysterious episode of inflation, now thought to be centred on John’s earliest years, added to the turmoil in royal finances caused by John’s efforts to recover Normandy, Maine, and Anjou.25 Despite the apparently overwhelming advantage in territories the Angevin dynasty had over the Capetians, their advantage in wealth was not commensurate. Moreover, Philip’s acquisition of territories elsewhere in France, along with other financial initiatives, shifted the economic balance towards the French king, though historians debate which ruler had more income at the beginning of John’s reign.26 Clearly, there were many factors involved in the successes and
24 For recent work on the Angevin Empire, see RobertHenri Bautier, ‘Empire Plantagenêt ou “éspace Plantagenêt” y eutil une civilization du monde Plantagenêt?’ Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 29 (1983), 139–47; John Le Patourel, Feudal Empires: Norman and Plantagenet (London, 1984), 1–17, 289–309; J. C. Holt, ‘The End of the AngloNorman Realm,’ in Magna Carta and Medieval Government (London, 1985), 23–65; C. Warren Hollister, ‘Normandy, France, and the AngloNorman Regnum,’ in Monarchy, Magnates and Institutions in the Anglo-Norman World (London, 1986), 17–57; Turner, King John, 59–86; Ralph V. Turner, ‘The Problem of Survival for the Angevin “Empire”: Henry II’s and His Sons’ Vision versus Late TwelfthCentury Realities,’ American Historical Review 100 (1995), 78–96; Aurell, ‘La cour Plantagenêt,’ 9–46; Nicholas Vincent, ‘King Henry II and the Poitevins,’ in Martin Aurell, ed., La cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204) (Poitiers, 2000), 103–35; John Gillingham, The Angevin Empire, 2nd ed. (London, 2001); Martin Aurell, The Plantagenet Empire, 1154–1224 (Harlow, 2007), 1–10, 186–218, 263–72; Aurell and Tonnerre, eds., Plantagenêts et Capétiens: confrontations et héritages; Martin Aurell and Frédéric Boutoulle, eds., Les seigneuries dan l’espace Plantagenêt (c. 1150–c. 1250) (Paris, 2009); Nicholas Vincent, ‘Jean sans Terre et l’origine de la Gascogne anglaise: droits et pouvoirs dans les arcanes des sources,’ Annales du Midi 123 (2011), 533–66.
25 For recent work, see J. L. Bolton, ‘The English Economy in the Early Thirteenth Century,’ in S. D. Church, ed., King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), 27–40; Paul Latimer, ‘Early ThirteenthCentury Prices,’ in S. D. Church, ed., King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), 41–73; Paul Latimer, ‘The English Inflation of 1180–1220 Reconsidered,’ Past and Present 171 (2001), 3–29.
26 J. C. Holt, ‘The Loss of Normandy and Royal Finance,’ in John Gillingham and J. C. Holt, eds., War and Government in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of J.O. Prestwich (Woodbridge, 1984), 92–105; Nick Barratt, ‘The Revenue of King John,’ English Historical Review 111 (1996), 835–55; Nick Barratt, ‘The Revenues of King John and Philip Augustus Revisited,’ in S. D. Church, ed., King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), 75–99; V. D. Moss, ‘The Norman Exchequer Rolls of King John,’ in S. D. Church, ed., King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), 101–16; Nick Barratt, ‘Counting the Cost: The Financial Implications of the Loss of Normandy,’ Thirteenth-Century England 10 (2005), 31–9; John Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven, CT, 1999), 338–48; Vincent D. Moss, ‘La
