Customer Reviews

Reign of King John (Johns Hopkins University Press Reprints)

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So I was writing a novel and realized I didn't know enough about John's reign to make it sound right. I found references to two books that might help and this one was available on Interlibrary Loan. It turned out better than I expected.

OK it begins with a lot of hard stuff about money but that is part of an illustration of the horrendous problems John started out with. Richard Lionheart in his "chivalry" had left the cupboard pretty bare by getting himself captured for ransom, and then made things worse by not really endorsing anybody for his heir. That was the first knot John had to unravel.

Then it goes into a lot of economics about how John's income was effectively much less than his father's and brother's because they bought loyalty by giving away revenue-making property. To get around his pig-headed rebellious magnates, John had to buy mercenary forces and the price had quadrupled in a period of about 20 years.

What he did about it involves a main character of my novel, Hugh de Neville, a crusader who didn't get knighted by Richard and didn't get knighted by John for services rendered, but who basically made it possible for John to do what he needed to do to put England back on a healthy financial footing. Kind of different from the image you get from the classic Robin Hood stories, isn't it? (Neville was related to but not the ancestor of the famous "last baron", Richard Neville the Kingmaker.)

Painter does a masterful job of going through the facts of the Papal controversy in all their complexity and showing their relationship to the barons' revolt -- which to me cast a new light onto Magna Carta and also illustrated Stephen Langton's character in a less than favorable light without actually saying he was an over-educated political incompetent.

Yes, there are lots of hard facts in here and for an American who doesn't get the old pounds-shilling-pence system (240 pennies to the pound), it's a little nerve-wracking to try to understand the relationship between pounds and marks in turn-of-the-13th-century England until Painter explains it. But I don't think you'll find a better overview of what John accomplished in his brief reign, at least not in such a brief book.