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Power and Pleasure

Power and Pleasure

Court Life under King John, 1199–1216
H U G H M . T HOM A S
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
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© Hugh M. Thomas 2020
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2020
Impression: 1
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
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contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
To my daughter, Bella
Acknowledgements
I have incurred many debts in the course of researching and writing this book
and it is my pleasure to acknowledge them here. Throughout my career, the
University of Miami has been very supportive of scholarly research and I have
greatly benefited in this project as in earlier ones. I carried out some of the earliest
research and writing during a semester’s teaching relief through the university’s
Center for the Humanities, where the other fellows provided useful feedback on
my first chapter. Later I received a sabbatical that greatly speeded work on the
project. The provost’s office and the College of Arts and Sciences provided money
for summer research trips, the latter through awarding me a Cooper Fellowship.
A&S also provided money for book production costs, including paying for the
creation of maps and image reproduction rights. A Fulbright Fellowship, supple-
mented by yet more funds from A&S, allowed me to spend a wonderful term at
King’s College, London, where David Carpenter and other members of the history
department and medieval studies welcomed me warmly.
The staffs of the Richter Library at the University of Miami, the British Library,
the Institute of Historical Research, and the National Archives in Kew all helped
me carry out my research. Jorge Alejandro Quintela Fernandez made two maps
for the book. Martha Schulman helped me tighten and improve the prose
throughout. Peter Dunn, Historic England, The National Trust, The Society of
Antiquaries, the provost and fellows of Eton College, and Oxford University Press
all gave permission to reproduce images. Many individual scholars also helped
me with this project. My colleagues at the University of Miami continue to pro-
vide a supportive atmosphere and have provided feedback on early drafts through
various seminars. Nicholas Vincent provided me with transcripts of unpublished
charters of John and his predecessors from the Angevin Acta project. Ralph
Turner gave me helpful notes and references from his own work and allowed me
to use an unpublished article on John’s illegitimate children. Jo Edge also directed
me to some good references. Lars Kjær provided me with a copy of his book in
advance of publication and Ryan Kemp supplied me with an unpublished article.
Stephen Mileson allowed me to use a map he had compiled and directed me to a
useful article I had not read. Oliver Creighton, Laura Gianetti, John Gillingham,
Leonie Hicks, Ben Jervis, Frédérique Lachaud, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Joe Snyder
have read parts of the manuscript. Jesse Izzo read the whole thing, as did David
Carpenter, who also shared a chapter on Henry III’s court in advance of publication.
The anonymous readers of the original proposal to Oxford University Press
helped set me on the right track. Bjorn Weiler, who read the final manuscript for
viii Acknowledgements
the Press, caught errors, supplied much new bibliography, made many useful
suggestions to revise the manuscript, and generally helped me make many

improvements. Terka Acton first contacted me from OUP about this project and
Stephanie Ireland, Cathryn Steele, Katie Bishop, and Sally Evans-Darby helped
shepherd it along. All this help made this book much better than it would have
been otherwise, and for that I am very grateful.
Contents
List of Illustrations xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
1. Introduction 1
2. Hunting and Falconry 25
3. Luxury and Material Culture at Court 54
4. Aspects of Court Culture 79
5. Religious Practices at Court 108
6. Food and Feasting 124
7. Places and Spaces 153
8. King John and the Wielding of Soft Power 184
9. John’s Court in a Comparative Context: A Preliminary Sketch 211
Conclusion228
Appendix 1: Royal Hunting Expenses 231
Bibliography 233
Index 265
List of Illustrations
2.1. Royal forests, royal dwellings, and a simplified royal itinerary, 1199–1307. 29
2.2. Seal of Isabella of Angoulême with bird of prey. 34
3.1. Obverse of King John’s seal. 70
4.1. Reverse of King John’s seal. 92
7.1. Plan of Corfe Castle. King John’s residential block with the gloriette
is in the upper right of the plan. 160
7.2. Reconstruction of Ludgershall Castle and view of the north deer park. 165
7.3. Plan of Ludgershall Castle. 165
7.4. Plan of Odiham Castle. 166
List of Abbreviations
Book of Fees Liber Feudorum: The Book of Fees Commonly called Testa de
Nevill. 3 vols. London, 1920–31.
Constitutio Domus Regis Constitutio Domus Regis: The Disposition of the King’s
Household, ed. S. D. Church, published in Dialogus de
Scaccario: The Dialogue of the Exchequer. Consitutio Domus
Regis: The Disposition of the King’s Household, ed. Emilie Amt,
195–215. Oxford, 2007.
Misae 11J Rotuli de Liberate (RL), 109–71.

Misae 14J Documents Illustrative of English History in the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth Centuries, ed. Henry Cole. London, 1844, 231–69.
MR 1J The Memoranda Roll for the Michaelmas Term of the First Year
of King John (1199–1200), ed. Dorothy Stenton and
H. G. Richardson. Pipe Roll Society n.s. 21. London, 1943.
MR 10J The Memoranda Roll for the Tenth Year of the Reign of King
John (1207–8), ed. R. Allen Brown. Pipe Roll Society n.s. 31.
London, 1957.
MRSN Magni Rotuli Scaccariae Normanniæ sub Regibus Angliæ, ed.
Thomas Stapleton. 2 vols. London, 1840–4.
Pipe Roll Ireland 14J ‘The Irish Pipe Roll of 14 John, 1211–12,’ ed. Oliver Davies and
David B. Quinn. Ulster Journal of Archaeology 4 (1941),
Supplement, 1–76.
PR Pipe Rolls. Citations are to the regnal years of reigning kings
for the volumes of the pipe rolls published by the Pipe Roll
Society.
Prest Roll 7J Documents Illustrative of English History in the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth Centuries, ed. Henry Cole. London, 1844, 270–6.
Prest Roll 12J Rotuli de Liberate (RL), 172–253.
Prest Roll 14–18J ‘Praestita Rolle 14–18 John,’ ed. J. C. Holt, in Pipe Roll 17 John,
ed. R. Allen Brown, 89–100. Pipe Roll Society n.s. 37.
London, 1961.
RCh Rotuli Chartarum in Turri Londinensi Asservati, ed. Thomas

Duffus Hardy. London, 1837.
Red Book of The Red Book of the Exchequer, ed. Hubert Hall. 3 vols.
the Exchequer London, 1896.
xiv List of Abbreviations
RL Rotuli de Liberate ac de Misis et Praestitis, Regnante Johanne,

ed. Thomas Duffus Hardy. London, 1844.
RLC Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum in Turri Londinensi Asservati, ed.
Thomas Duffus Hardy. London, 1833.
RLP Rotuli Litterarum Patentium in Turri Londinensi Asservati,
London, 1835.
RN Rotuli Normanniae in Turri Londinensi Asservati, Johanne et
Henrico quinto, Angliæ Regibus, ed. Thomas Duffus Hardy.
London, 1835.
ROF Rotuli de Oblatis et Finibus in Turri Londinensi Asservati,
Tempore Regis Johannis, ed. Thomas Duffus Hardy. London, 1835.
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 when
ever he could; he was very happy when he saw hate between them. He
hated and was jealous of all honourable noblemen. It greatly dis
pleased 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 gener
ously 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 quota
tion 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 contin
ental 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 quasi-religious 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
2 Power and Pleasure
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 con
temporaries, so greatly that to one critic John’s generosity in these matters off
set—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 bio
graphers 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); Anne-Marie 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.
Introduction 3
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 ‘sim
ply the froth on the top of serious government.’5 The very characteristics that
make court life intriguing, even seductive, to modern people—hunting and fal
conry, 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 earl
ier periods of court life seem politically trivial as well—the stuff of tabloid jour
nalism 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, how
ever, 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 argu
ments. 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 self-control. This, he
believed, helped modernize European culture. Second, he argued that the elabor
ate 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 Ancien-Régime 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 Costa-Gomes, 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 höfis-
che 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 import
ance 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 19th-
Century 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 along
side the kinds of military, administrative, and economic forms of power that his
torians 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 consider
able 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 Ancien-Régime 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).
Introduction 5
culture, but recent work has started to look beyond the aspects of court life that fit
into a modern high-culture 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 cul
tural 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 inter
ests: 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 Costa-Gomes, Making of a Court Society; Chris Given-Wilson, 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); Karl-Heinz 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 Hans-Hugo Steinhoff, eds., Feste
und Feiern im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 1991), 245–53; Gerd Althoff, ‘Fest und Bündnis,’ in Detlef
Altenburg, Jörg Jarnut, and Hans-Hugo 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); Jean-Claude 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 per
didit, 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 Anglo-Saxon 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 categor
ized 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 Anglo-Saxon 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 öffentli
chen 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 behav
iour’; Barrow, ‘Demonstrative Behaviour,’ 127–50.
16 For discussion of the controversy, see Chapter 8, 188.
Introduction 7
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 signifi
cant 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 allow
ing 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 Harper-Bill 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 com
prehensive 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 cul
tural 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; reli
gious ceremonial; and food and feasting. However, these subjects appear fre
quently 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 primar
ily 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 spe
cific findings. For example, wine historians have long associated the English shift
to consuming Bordeaux rather than Loire valley wines with John’s loss of territor
ies 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 special
ists 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.
Introduction 9
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 sur
viving records do not allow a systematic accounting of royal costs, various indi
vidual 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 preco
cious bureaucracy.
Finally, reconstruction of life at John’s court will provide a baseline for compari
son 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 tenta
tive, 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 com
parison 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 eco
nomic 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 fail
ure 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 accom
panied 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 estab
lished 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 Harper-Bill, ‘John and the Church of
Rome,’ in S. D. Church, ed., King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), 289–315.
Introduction 11
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 com
mensurate. 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 Robert-Henri Bautier, ‘Empire Plantagenêt ou
“éspace Plantagenêt” y eut-il 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 Anglo-Norman Realm,’ in Magna Carta and Medieval Government
(London, 1985), 23–65; C. Warren Hollister, ‘Normandy, France, and the Anglo-Norman 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 Twelfth-Century 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
Thirteenth-Century 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
failures of John’s reign, many of them studied intensively. What this book seeks to
add is a sustained focus on how the soft power produced at and by the court fit
into the mix.
The discussion of soft power is particularly important because so much
depended on John’s personal relations with the powerful. For all the growing
sophistication of royal bureaucracy, John’s power still depended most heavily on
his ability to maintain the loyalty of existing noble and knightly followers and
recruit new ones. I will pursue this subject more fully in Chapter 8; it suffices to
say here that John lost most of his continental possessions early in 1204, and
nearly lost England late in his reign, first and foremost because so many nobles
and knights turned against him. Though Philip Augustus’s military prowess
should not be ignored, the French king was able to sweep through Normandy,
Maine, Anjou, and parts of Poitou so quickly because of a wave of defections. And
it was, of course, a baronial revolt that later threatened John’s control of England.
However, John avoided losing England to the rebel barons and subsequently to
Prince Louis primarily because he was able to retain the loyalty of some of his
nobles and knights and call on powerful followers from outside England. Of
course, many factors, including John’s patronage in land and office, his need to
raise money, and his use or abuse of his royal powers, shaped his followers’ reac
tions, but the social and cultural interactions discussed in this book were crucial
means for the king to potentially strengthen relations with his most powerful fol
lowers. All things being equal, a king who wielded soft power successfully was
more likely to succeed than a king who did not, and in close-run situations, soft
power could tip the balance. Despite this, John’s use of soft power has been a rela
tively neglected factor in his relations with the powerful: John Gillingham has
addressed aspects of the topic, particularly the impact of John’s lavish expenditure
on the court, and many others have touched on it, but more work is needed.27
However, one must look not only at John’s use of soft power, but also at how his
enemies tried to contest that power, sometimes by employing their own soft
power, but more often by undermining his. Much of the work on aspects of court
life such as ritual performances, feasting, hunting, and the deployment of m aterial
culture comes from functionalist social science theories that focus on these
activities’ purposes, most often with an eye to their role in relations of power.
Early work on these activities understandably focused on how they worked, not
on the potential for failure, on function rather than dysfunction, and often
perte de la Normandie et les finances de l’État: les limites des interprétations financières,’ in Anne-
Marie Flambard Héricher and Véronique Gazeau, eds., 1204, la Normandie entre Plantagenêts et
Capétiens (Caen, 2007), 75–91.
27 John Gillingham, ‘Wirtschaftlichkeit oder Ehre? Die Ausgaben der englischen Könige im 12.
und frühen 13. Jahrhundert,’ in Werner Paravacini, ed., Luxus und Integration: Materielle Hofkultur
Westeuropas vom 12. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2010), 151–67.
Introduction 13
discussed them abstractly, without much context. However, as Kim Esmark has
remarked of the medieval historiography on rituals and ceremonies, ‘In recent
years . . . attention has shifted toward problems of process, strategy, contention,
variability, ambiguity, struggles over interpretation, and so on.’28 In this book,
I will stress how John’s enemies, in their actions and the stories they told and
wrote about his activities, tried to counter and undermine the methods he
employed to draw soft power from his court, and to some degree succeeded.
Another major aim of this book is to use John’s reign to assess the impact that
the development of administrative kingship had on earlier structures of soft
power. There are several reasons for the difference between the early medieval
historiography of government, with its emphasis on rituals and ceremonies, and
that of the High Middle Ages, with its longstanding emphasis on administration.
Clearly, the survival of records for the latter period has had an effect, but there
also seems to be at least an implicit presumption that the rise of administration
made soft power less important over the course of the central Middle Ages.29
Perhaps a Weberian model of a shift from charismatic rule to routine bureaucracy
plays a role here. However, the scholars who are exploring ceremony and ritual
in the central Middle Ages are blurring boundaries in that area, and rightly so.
I argue that administrative kingship was in many ways compatible with traditional
uses of soft power. In particular, I point to the way that the rise of government
institutions gave rulers new tools and resources to project an aura of sacral king
ship, engage in impressive ceremonial activities, and generally promote soft
power. It is certainly possible that the rise of bureaucracies and institutions
reduced the relative importance of soft power, and it is likely that they created
challenges for the creation of soft power and altered aspects of how the court pro
duced it. Nonetheless, I intend to show that administrative kingship could not
only coexist with but actually strengthen many of the traditional practices of soft
power at royal courts.
Since the court remained an important potential source of soft power for John,
the question is how well he wielded it. The debate over how able a king John was
more generally and the degree to which he was responsible for the disasters of his
reign is a longstanding one. Given the many factors involved, including those
outside John’s direct control, any answer will be complicated. It is not my inten
tion to relitigate the question of John’s overall competence, though my own cau
tious view is that despite being reasonably intelligent and possessing some
political talents, overall he was a disastrous ruler who bears much responsibility
for his failures. Here, I simply wish to contribute to the larger discussion by
28 Kim Esmark, ‘Just Rituals: Masquerade, Manipulation, and Officializing Strategies in Saxo’s
Gesta Danorum,’ in Wojtek Jezierski et al., eds., Rituals, Performatives, and Political Order in Northern
Europe, c. 650–1350 (Turnhout, 2015), 237–67, at 237.
29 See the comments of Björn Weiler on this: Weiler, ‘Knighting, Homage, and the Meaning of
Ritual,’ 275, 277, 298–9; Weiler, Kingship, Rebellion and Political Culture, xi, 130, 148.
focusing on John’s skill at using soft power. As will become clear, John had an
impressive and magnificent court and, as the Anonymous of Béthune indicated,
he was generous in sharing its lavishness. Yet his glittering court seems not to
have helped him much: John’s image was perhaps even poorer among contempor
ary writers than modern historians.30 To some degree, this was due to his poor
handling of relations with his nobles at court. In particular, according to chronic
lers writing in the decade or so after John’s death, one major source of baronial
discontent, which most scholars have not sufficiently accounted for, stemmed
from a specific aspect of court life—John’s predatory pursuit of sexual relation
ships with the wives and female relatives of his barons, as noted in the quotation
at the beginning of this chapter. A less egregious but still important problem,
I will argue, is that John forfeited many of the advantages of his court through his
own bungling, especially at significant moments. Overall, John did not benefit as
much as he should have from the soft power his court could provide.
1.2.3 The Court as a Site of Pleasure and Self-Gratification
Although a significant portion of my analysis concentrates on power, it would be

a profound mistake to discuss royal and princely courts only as sources of power.
When contemporary sources wrote of court activities like hunting, they were
more likely to speak about pleasure than power. Yet like political, military, and
administrative histories, court histories tend to take a highly functionalist
approach, focusing on the accumulation of power—as though humans acquire
power, or use their existing power, solely to obtain more power. This is a mistake,
and an important theme of this book will be the way the court was designed to
provide pleasure and self-gratification to John and his leading followers.
There are a number of reasons court historians have focused on power rather
than pleasure. Power exerts a fascination, and it is easy to become fixated on it.
A deterrent to the study of pleasure may be that its importance seems both
obvious and analytically simple, indeed uninteresting, so that one can simply
30 For discussions of John’s medieval and modern reputation, see Painter, Reign of King John,
226–84; Richardson and Sayles, Governance of Mediaeval England, 321–36, 364–94; Warren, King
John, 1–16; Holt, ‘King John,’ 85–109; David Carpenter, ‘Abbot Ralph of Coggeshall’s Account of the
Last Years of King Richard and the First Years of King John,’ English Historical Review 113 (1998),
1210–30; John Gillingham, ‘Historians Without Hindsight: Coggeshall, Diceto and Howden on the
Early Years of John’s Reign,’ in S. D. Church, ed., King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999),
1–26; Turner, King John, 1–19, 258–65; Matthew Strickland, War and Chivalry: The Conduct and
Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217 (Cambridge, 1996), 53, 109–10, 203, 212–13,
223, 256–7; Jim Bradbury, ‘Philip Augustus and King John: Personality and History,’ in S. D. Church,
ed., King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), 347–61; Gillingham, Richard I, 335–48; Sean
McGlynn, Blood Cries Afar: The Magna Carta War and the Invasion of England, 1215–1217 (Stroud,
2011), 242–9; Vincent, Magna Carta, 6–20, 36–52; Carpenter, Magna Carta, 70–97; Morris, King John,
285–98; Lachaud, Jean sans Terre, 185–205.
Introduction 15
acknowledge it and move on. The latter supposition, however, is problematic. It

is true that evolution has created certain commonalities among the activities that
give humans pleasure. The biological need for sustenance, for instance, makes
consuming food a normal source of pleasure and it is therefore no surprise that
feasting is so common across radically different human societies. That said, both
pleasure and, as we shall see, comfort have a strong cultural element, for instance
when it comes to food preferences. A useful parallel is with the study of emo
tions, which have both a common evolutionary aspect and a strong cultural
basis. Pleasure is therefore less straightforward than it seems, and scholars
should study it with the same care and attention to nuance as we study power.
A more specific reason for avoiding discussion of pleasure among court histor
ians may be a reflexive defensiveness against the charge that studying courts is
frivolous or elitist. Discussing hunting and entertainment as sources of power
rather than pleasure perhaps makes them seem more respectable. Yet another
deterrent to discussion of pleasure is that it can generate the kind of moral judge
ments that Bucholz noted or that Elias described when he quoted at length from a
scholar who referred to ‘very opulent and very extravagant courts,’ ‘refined tastes
and perverse luxury,’ and ‘noble parasites.’31 I cannot claim to be free of such
moral judgements, and indeed my own interest in pleasure at court emerges
partly from civic and moral concerns about the growing inequality of our own
times and the increasing power of modern plutocrats. Nevertheless, the historical
importance of the elite pursuit of pleasure should not be ignored.
After all, pleasure and self-gratification are extremely important human motiv
ators. What could be more likely than that rulers used courts not only to build
power, but also to satisfy their own desires and those of privileged courtiers?
Indeed, at times rulers risked or sacrificed power in the pursuit of pleasure. John’s
pursuit of sexual gratification, as noted above, created major challenges to his
power. While some rulers no doubt used their court to build power for its own
sake, or perhaps for an ideological agenda, to ignore the way courts catered to the
whims of the powerful often entails naively accepting the self-justifications of
later monarchs and their supporters for the lavishness of royal courts.
Thus a major theme of this book will be the way John’s royal court was designed
to harness extensive resources in a very poor society to serve the pleasures of the
king and those he favoured. Where Geertz spoke of the efficient part of govern
ment serving the dignified part, I will speak of power sometimes serving pleasure.
In pursuing this theme, I try to deepen our understanding of the cultural aspects
of pleasure in the Middle Ages. I also discuss the complex relationship between
31 Elias, Court Society, 37–9. See also Alban Gautier, Le Festin dans l’Angleterre anglo-saxonne,
v e-xie siècles (Rennes, 2006), 23–4; Christina Normore, A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance and the
Late Medieval Banquet (Chicago, IL, 2015), 164–5, 192. See, however, Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A
Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 367.
power and pleasure. In Chapter 5, in which I discuss religious life at court, I add a
third variable to the relationship: piety. This was perhaps a less important consid
eration for John than for some other kings, but is worth considering briefly, even
though pleasure will remain the more important focus. Whereas there is a vast
amount of historiography on the court and power to build on, there is little on
pleasure, which means that I can only begin the task of applying sophisticated
analysis to pleasure. Nonetheless, by doing so I hope at least to start a conversa
tion among scholars about the subject.
1.3 The Structure of John’s Court
“In time I exist, and of time I speak,” said Augustine: and added,
“What time is I know not.” In a like spirit of perplexity I may say that
in the court I exist and of the court I speak, and what the court is,
God knows, I know not. I do know however that the court is not
time; but temporal it is, changeable and various, space-bound and
wandering, never continuing in one state. When I leave it, I know it
perfectly: when I come back to it I find nothing or but little of what
I left there: I am become a stranger to it, and it to me. The court is the
same, its members are changed.32
It has become traditional to use the above quotation from Walter Map, a courtier
and critic of the court writing in the reign of Henry II, to describe the protean
nature of the premodern court and the difficulty of defining it. The court’s precise
nature can indeed be difficult to pin down, since contemporaries had no clear-cut
definitions; in particular there was no clear dividing line between court and
household. Modern historians of royal and princely courts speak of the court in
various ways, often in terms of spaces, events, and processes, or as a group of
people.33 For practical purposes, I will use the description Malcolm Vale applied
to the court of John’s father: ‘The court of Henry II (1154–89), like its European
counterparts, predecessors, and successors, was essentially an itinerant body, a
place filled by a mobile assemblage of people. The court was where the ruler
was.’34 Fortunately, because so much of royal government remained within the
royal household in John’s reign, traditional administrative history has included
32 Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. M. R. James, C. N. L. Brooke, and
R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), 2–3.
33 For discussions of the definition and nature of the court and terminology used by people of the
time, see Asch, ‘Introduction,’ 7–9; Lubkin, Renaissance Court, ix–xii; Ralph V. Turner, Judges,
Administrators and the Common Law in Angevin England (London, 1994), xx–xxii; Vale, Princely
Court, 15–23; Costa-Gomes, Making of a Court Society, 2–3, 9–16.
34 Vale, Princely Court, 22. For a similar description of John’s court, see Carpenter, Magna
Carta, 157.
Introduction 17
much work on the structure of the court. There remains important work to be
done in this area, but here I will simply summarize some key aspects as back
ground for understanding the social and cultural life at court.35
John’s court moved constantly about his realms.36 He was what some scholars
have called a saddle king, and Julie Kanter has estimated that he travelled
79,612 miles (128,123 km) during his reign. His average stop was 2.1 days in length,
and stays of a week or more comprised only 12 per cent of his reign. On average,
including his days at rest, he travelled about 13 miles a day.37 John’s court was far
from unique. Walter Map compared Henry II’s court to a ghostly band that cease
lessly followed the cursed King Herla after their return from an otherworldly visit
to the court of a pygmy king.38 Itinerant rule, which can also be found in non-
Western societies from Java and Hawaii to East Africa and Morocco, was the
norm in Western Europe in the Middle Ages.39 Carolingian and Ottonian kings,
for instance, travelled at broadly comparable speeds to John.40 Rates did vary:
Henry III chose a more leisurely pace than his father, John, or son, Edward I,
though the latter also travelled less frenetically than John.41 England’s royal court
tended to slow down in the later Middle Ages, but it remained itinerant, as did
courts elsewhere in Europe.42 Indeed, European courts tended to settle in a fixed
place only from the middle of the sixteenth century on, and even then courts
35 For government in John’s reign and the Angevin period in general, in addition to relevant sec
tions of the biographies and works on Magna Carta, see T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative
History of Mediaeval England: The Wardrobe, the Chamber, and the Small Seals, 6 vols. (Manchester,
1967), 1:67–175; J. E. A. Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship (London, 1955); Richardson and Sayles, Governance
of Mediaeval England; Doris M. Stenton, English Justice Between the Norman Conquest and the Great
Charter, 1066–1215 (Philadelphia, PA, 1964); W. L. Warren, The Governance of Norman and Angevin
England, 1086–1272 (Stanford, CA, 1987); Ralph V. Turner, The English Judiciary in the Age of Glanvill
and Bracton, c. 1176–1239 (Cambridge, 1985); Turner, Judges, Administrators; David Carpenter, ‘The
English Royal Chancery in the Thirteenth Century,’ in Adrian Jobson, ed., English Government in the
Thirteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2004), 49–69.
36 Two important studies of royal itineration in the period are Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship, 139–65;
S. D. Church, ‘Some Aspects of the Royal Itinerary in the Twelfth Century,’ Thirteenth-Century
England 11 (2007), 31–45.
37 Julie Elizabeth Kanter, ‘Peripatetic and Sedentary Kingship: The Itineraries of John and Henry III,’
Thirteenth-Century England 13 (2011), 11–26, at 11–17. For the phrase saddle king, see A. G. Dickens,
‘Monarchy and Cultural Revival: Courts in the Middle Ages,’ The Courts of Europe: Politics, Patronage,
and Royalty, 1400–1800 (New York, 1977), 8–31, at 17; Loades, Tudor Court, 9.
38 Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, 26–31.
39 John William Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship and Royal Monasteries in Early Medieval Germany,
c. 936–1075 (Cambridge, 1993), 45–8; Clifford Geertz, ‘Centers, Kings and Charisma: Reflections on
the Symbolics of Power,’ in Joseph Ben-David and Terry Nichols Clark, eds., Culture and Its Creators:
Essays in Honor of Edward Shils (Chicago, IL, 1977), 150–71, 309–14.
40 Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge,
2008), 180–4.
41 Kanter, ‘Peripatetic and Sedentary Kingship,’ 18–24; Julie E. Crockford, ‘The Itinerary of Edward I
of England: Pleasure, Piety, and Governance,’ in Alison L. Gascoigne, Leonie V. Hicks, and Marianne
O’Doherty, eds., Medieval Routes in Europe and the Middle East (Turnhout, 2016), 231–57; Michael
Prestwich, ‘The Royal Itinerary and Roads in England under Edward I,’ in Anke Bernau, Valerie Allen,
and Ruth Evans, eds., Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads (Manchester, 2016), 177–97. See
Chapter 7, 169, for more on royal itineration.
42 Given-Wilson, Royal Household, 22, 28; Woolgar, Great Household, 46.
often travelled at certain times of the year.43 Though the change to sedentary
courts was slow, the cumulative effects were powerful. Elias could use descrip
tions of buildings to frame his study of court society at Versailles.44 In contrast,
John stayed at many different kinds of buildings, and probably spent more of his
waking hours on horseback than in any one type of structure. Essentially John
and those who travelled with him lived as nomads, albeit ones who could draw on
the resources of a sedentary society and who therefore enjoyed a lavish, if peripat
etic, lifestyle.
Though some servants, like the laundresses and carters who appear in one set
of John’s surviving records, followed him constantly, the overall composition of
the court changed continuously.45 Despite Walter Map’s learned comparison to
the abstract mysteries of time, he was partly making a fairly mundane point that
as the court moved, people constantly joined and left. One can see, for instance,
royal falconers bringing hawks and falcons to and from the king, or individual
royal huntsmen and their packs of hounds joining the court in hunting season
and leaving thereafter. Royal messengers and emissaries constantly travelled to
and from court, tying the king to his officials, subjects, allies, and enemies through
a stream of oral and written messages.46 Powerful officials, who often had duties
away from the king, came and went as well. Household accounts for March and
most of April 1207 survive for Hugh de Neville, an important royal official, and
they show Hugh and his household travelling in close proximity to the king
and queen for most of March but going their own way for most of April.47 Queen
Isabella sometimes accompanied the king and sometimes stayed apart from him
with her own household. Secular and ecclesiastical magnates and foreign rulers
and other powerful visitors would bring their retinues to travel with the king for a
while, before spinning back off onto their own, generally less gruelling itineraries.
At times, the court mushroomed, particularly for the great feasts of Christmas,
Easter, and Pentecost. At other times it shrunk nearly to its core. In terms of its
personnel, the court was constantly changing and therefore far more fluid than
the geographically fixed courts of more modern periods.
The court’s core was already well developed by the beginning of John’s reign.48
The earliest comprehensive overview we have of an English royal court comes
43 Adamson, ‘Making of the Ancien-Régime Court,’ 10. 44 Elias, Court Society, 41–65.
45 Misae 11J 110, 118–19, 128, 135, 143, 159, 164; Misae 14J 231, 234, 244, 249, 251, 254, 258.
46 Mary C. Hill, The King’s Messengers, 1199–1377: A Contribution to the History of the Royal
Household (London, 1961).
47 C. M. Woolgar, ed., Household Accounts from Medieval England, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1992), 1:110–16.
48 For work on the administration of the household/court of King John or of the Angevin period in
general, see notes 2 and 35 in this chapter. For the reign of Henry II, Schröder provides a particularly
good overview of the part of royal administration making purchases for the court; Schröder, Macht
und Gabe, 103–40. For later medieval royal households, see Given-Wilson, Royal Household, 1–27,
39–74; Vale, Princely Court, 34–68; Costa-Gomes, Making of a Court Society, 16–34. For medieval
English aristocratic households, see Margaret Wade Labarge, A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth
Century (New York, 1965), 53–70; Kate Mertes, The English Noble Household, 1250–1600: Good
Introduction 19
from the Constitutio Domus Regis, which describes the early twelfth-century court
of Henry I, John’s great-grandfather.49 Its most recent editor, Stephen Church,
notes that it includes over 150 individuals, though since at least some of these
received a daily ration of a loaf that fed four people, they probably had assistants,
meaning the total size of the court was larger. Some members, like the chancellor
and treasurer, were concerned with the wider government; others were focused
on guarding the household or court. The vast majority, however, had tasks involv
ing life at court. The largest single group, including bakers, butchers, cooks, but
lers, and a fruiterer, dealt with the preparation and serving of food and drink.
Others served in the royal hunt or the king’s chapel. One man was in charge of the
king’s cortinas (hangings or tapestries), another with transporting his bed, and
others with the royal table linens. Though no similar document survives for John’s
reign, the records that do survive indicate the broadly similar nature of his court.
In later periods, the government, including the royal household, was highly
structured and compartmentalized, with different offices having very specific tasks.
This process was already underway in the twelfth century, with the creation of the
exchequer for handling money, but the royal court itself remained very fluid in
John’s reign. For instance, the boundaries between the chamber and wardrobe, later
two distinct departments, were only beginning to develop under John. The Angevin
rulers were noted for the flexibility and omnicompetence of their officials, and these
traits extended to the royal court. Much of John’s government was decentralized, in
the hands of sheriffs and other local officials, or travelling justices, and some of it
was stationed at Westminster and, early in John’s reign, Caen. Nevertheless, the
court remained at the heart of the government, and many of those coming in and
out of court came to deal with administrative matters. Moreover, in wartime, the
court was the centre of the army. Even so, most of the royal court’s staff remained
focused on the court itself rather than broader administration.
In the medieval and early modern periods, members of royal families often
had satellite courts.50 John’s legitimate children were too young during his life
time to have their own establishments, but his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had
her own following, which remained sizeable even after her partial retirement to
Fontevraud Abbey.51 Queen Isabella also had her own household, but it appears
Governance and Politic Rule (Oxford, 1988), 53–70; David Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain,
1000–1300 (London, 1993), 281–310; C. M. Woolgar, ed., The Elite Household in England, 1100–1550
(Donington, 2018).
49 Constitutio Domus Regis, xxxviii–lxviii, 195–215.

50 Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History, 1:252–9; Costa-Gomes, Making of a Court
Society, 274–88.
51 Jane Martindale, ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Last Years,’ in S. D. Church, ed., King John: New
Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), 137–64; Marie Hivergneaux, ‘Aliènor d’Aquitaine: le pouvoir
d’une femme à la lumière de ses chartes (1152–1204),’ in Martin Aurell, ed., La cour Plantagenêt
(1154–1204) (Poitiers, 2000), 63–87; Nicholas Vincent, ‘Patronage, Politics and Piety in the Charters
of Eleanor of Aquitaine,’ in Martin Aurell and Noël Tonnerre, eds., Plantagenêts et Capétiens:
to have been small and unusually dependent on her husband’s.52 Unfortunately,

the households of the two queens left no surviving records, so we are left only
with the glimpses obtained from the records of John’s court.
How large was John’s court? The size of Henry I’s core staff of more than 150
plus an unknown number of assistants is a reasonable minimum. As we shall see
in Chapter 9, the general trend over the central and late Middle Ages was for
courts to get bigger. It therefore seems likely that John’s court was larger than
Henry I’s, but we should not assume that it had expanded by much, given that
Henry was very wealthy. Certainly, some records hint at a fairly small court for
John. For instance, the chamber/wardrobe operated with a handful of carters and
men guiding packhorses on the payroll, and had only one laundress at a time,
though she may have been expected to oversee local labour in the actual washing
of the king’s wardrobe.53 However, when one starts accounting for the various
branches of the household, the grooms accompanying horses, the many hunts
men and dog handlers following the court during the long hunting season, and
the retinues of magnates, officials, and other visitors, the number of people in the
king’s vicinity was likely large. David Carpenter suggests that John’s court rarely
had fewer than several hundred, while Stephen Church argues that there were
probably at least 500 people present even when the court was at its smallest and
that the number at grand feasts reached into the thousands, though of course
these numbers included magnates and other guests with their retinues.54 The evi
dence allows for no greater specificity, but these estimates are reasonable, if one
includes the visitors and their retinues, and when one allows that these people
could be spread across a fair amount of countryside at any given time. Already in
King John’s reign, the royal court was a sizeable institution, capable of sustaining
a complex social and cultural life.
1.4 Sources
For two years of King John’s reign we know on what days he took his infrequent
baths.55 This one detail gives some sense of just how much information the new
confrontations et héritages (Turnhout, 2006), 17–60; Ralph V. Turner, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of
France, Queen of England (New Haven, CT, 2009), 276–7, 285–8.
52 Nicholas Vincent, ‘Isabella of Angoulême: John’s Jezebel,’ in S. D. Church, ed., King John: New
Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), 165–219, at 185–93, 199–200, 205–6.
53 See note 45 in this chapter.
54 Misae 11J 115, 137, 170; Misae 14J 237, 249, 262; Church, ‘Royal Itinerary,’ 42; Carpenter, Magna
Carta, 157. The text of the Constitutio Domus Regis contains a reference to royal bakers being sent ahead
to buy for 40 pence a quantity of wheat that would allow them to make enough to feed 700 or 720 men
(depending on the manuscript). If this was a daily purchase, it might give a number for the ordinary size
of the court, including guests, but it is not certain this was the case; Constitutio Domus Regis, 200–1.
55 Constitutio Domus Regis, 208–9, note 30; Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and
Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford, 2000), 575.
Introduction 21
records of John’s reign provide about life at court. The period in general was one
of expanding record keeping and record preservation, but the shift from Richard’s
reign to John’s sees a quantum leap in what survives, probably because of
conscious attempts to copy and preserve records that had previously been ephem
eral.56 Carpenter has noted that by rough count, the records of John’s reign run to
approximately 8,650 pages in their modern printed editions.57 Many of the
records concern judicial affairs or the gathering of revenue and shed little direct
light on life at court, but there is still a wealth of pertinent information.
Various types of records survive, a few of which also survive for earlier
reigns.58 Pipe rolls, which mainly recorded moneys owed to the king but noted
some expenditures on the king’s behalf, were the most important, with one
from the reign of Henry I, and many more from the reigns of Henry II and
Richard I. Although not a new type of record, the pipe rolls for John’s reign tend
to be fuller than earlier ones, with more information about purchases for the
court. There exists nearly a full run of John’s English pipe rolls, fragments from
the Norman pipe rolls of his earlier years, and a modern copy of a single Irish
pipe roll (now lost) from his fourteenth regnal year.59 Charters and writs are
another traditional type of document, but in John’s reign the government began
systematically preserving copies of these in three types of rolls: charter rolls,
patent rolls, and close rolls, the last of which contain orders about purchasing
goods and thus supply a wealth of information about material culture at court.60
A variety of new records appear for the first time; memoranda rolls, recording
notes from the pipe rolls; fine and oblate rolls, recording offers people made to
the king for privileges and favours; and prest rolls, describing various advances
and payments to individuals. A particularly important source for court life were
the misae rolls, which record some of the day-to-day expenses of the king and his
household, from his bath expenses on.61 Finally, miscellaneous documents
56 There remains some debate about whether all these efforts were new in John’s reign and who was
responsible, but for our purposes the fact of their survival is key. For discussion of the rise in record
keeping, see Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History, 1:33–8; 2:38–45; Painter, Reign of King John,
93–105; Nicholas Vincent, ‘Why 1199? Bureaucracy and Enrolment under John and His
Contemporaries,’ in Adrian Jobson, ed., English Government in the Thirteenth Century (Woodbridge,
2004), 17–48; David Carpenter, ‘ “In Testimonium Factorum Brevium”: The Beginnings of the English
Chancery Rolls,’ in Nicholas Vincent, ed., Records, Administration and Aristocratic Society in the
Anglo-Norman Realm (Woodbridge, 2009), 1–28; Nicholas Vincent, ed., Records, Administration and
Aristocratic Society in the Anglo-Norman Realm (Woodbridge, 2009), xvi–xviii; M. T. Clanchy, From
Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 3rd ed. (Chichester, 2013), 58–75, 164–73.
57 Carpenter, Magna Carta, 89.
58 For a good discussion of what the various types of sources can tell us about the issues discussed
in this book, see Gillingham, ‘Wirtschaftlichkeit oder Ehre,’ 153–64.
59 PR1J to PR17J; MRSN 2:499–575; Pipe Roll Ireland 14J.
60 RCh; MR1J 88–97; RL 1–108; RC; RP; RN 1–36, 45–122. For some of the types of charters and
writs recorded, see Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship, 150–5.
61 Misae 11J; Misae 14J. For some useful comments on these, see Benjamin Wild, ed., The Wardrobe
Accounts of Henry III, Publications of the Pipe Roll Society, NS 58 (London, 2012), xi–xiii, xxv–xxx.
survive alongside the categories of purposely preserved documents, like lists of

royal plate or a record of pigs delivered to the royal residence at Freemantle.62
For all the richness of the surviving records, they also have some important
shortcomings. There are missing years for every sort of record and some of the
most useful, in particular the misae rolls, have the worst survival rate. Written
records for many routine aspects of court life were either not made or not pre
served. The amount of information that survives on a given topic is therefore
unpredictable; we can chart the king’s bath schedule but can make only rough
estimates of the size of his court. Overall, for all the wealth of the royal records,
they do not lend themselves to systematic analysis of, say, the amount of food the
court consumed or the percentage of the royal budget that it required, facts that
can sometimes be discovered for later courts. More important, even for the period
before 1204, more records survive about the time the court spent in England than
its sojourns on the continent, partly because many Norman records were lost and
partly because record keeping in other continental territories remained extremely
limited. As a result, it is hard to get a sense of how much the court changed as it
moved from territory to territory. More important, this work will necessarily per
petuate the usual unfortunate bias towards England at the expense of the contin
ental Angevin territories. Most important, the individual pieces of information
are often pretty barebones. In the absence of sources like diaries, one is left trying
to reconstruct court life and its symbolic systems through lists of purchases and
payments, or from terse royal orders with little context.
As a result, I will use a variety of sources beyond the royal records. A particu
larly useful set of sources are the works of court critics of the previous generation,
like John of Salisbury, Walter Map, Nigel of Whiteacre, and Peter of Blois, who
provided such a vivid picture of the court of Henry II, which John, of course,
inherited after his brother’s death, and in which he would have learned how courts
operated.63 For all their usefulness, however, these works need to be treated with
62 MR10J 119–25; National Archives C 47/3/46/4.

63 John of Salisbury, Policraticus sive de Nugis Curialium et de Vestigiis Philosophorum, ed.
Clement C. J. Webb, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1909); Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium; Nigel of Whiteacre,
Nigellus de Longchamp dit Wireker. Vol. 1 Introduction, Tractatus Contra Curiales et Officiales Clericos,
ed. André Boutemy (Paris, 1959); Peter of Blois, Opera, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1855), 121–2, 195–210;
Lena Wahlgren, The Letter Collections of Peter of Blois: Studies in the Manuscript Tradition (Göteberg,
1993), 140–73. For modern discussion of these sources and their biases, see Aurell, Plantagenet
Empire, 60–8; John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter
and His Circle, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1970), 1:175–204; Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146–1223
(Oxford, 1982), 58–65; John D. Cotts, The Clerical Dilemma: Peter of Blois and Literate Culture in the
Twelfth Century (Washington, D.C., 2009), 131–75; Jaeger, Origins of Courtliness, 54–100; Rolf Köhn,
‘ “Militia Curialis”. Die Kritik der Geistlichen Hofdienst bei Peter von Blois in der Lateinischen
Literatur des 9–12 Jahrhunderts,’ in Albert Zimmerman, ed., Soziale Ordnungen im Selbsverständnis
des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1979), 227–57; Gunnar Stollberg, Die soziale Stellung der intellektuellen
Oberschicht im England des 12. Jahrhunderts (Lubeck, 1973), 123–9; Egbert Türk, Nugae curialium: Le
règne d’Henri II Plantegenêt (1154–1189) et l’éthique politique (Geneva, 1977); Turner, Judges,
Administrators, 159–79; Turner, English Judiciary, 1–16; Rösener, Leben am Hof, 244–54; Frédérique
Lachaud, L’éthique du pouvoir au Moyen Âge: L’office dans la culture politique (Angleterre, vers
Introduction 23
caution, since they were intended as moral treatises, not as objective descriptions
of court life. Their works show that the Angevin royal court could be a difficult,
unpleasant milieu, a point to which I will return in Chapter 8. However, the
critics had strong motives to exaggerate the unpleasant aspects, since they wrote
to dissuade clerics from serving at court. Clerics were not supposed to serve there
except for religious purposes, but many did so, often in the hope of earthly reward
and advancement. The court critics were intent on discouraging this not only by
stressing the moral dangers of royal service but also by painting a vividly repellent
portrait of court life, and I do not think modern scholars have always appreciated
just how strong a motive the court critics had to depict court life in a negative way.
Nonetheless, such sources are very useful for fleshing out our picture of court life.
I use many other sources as well. Chronicles, saints’ lives, and other narrative
sources provide glimpses of life at the courts of John and contemporary rulers.
Chivalric romances, troubadour poems, and other literary works constitute
another valuable if tricky source of information. Writers drew on their knowledge
of historical courts, but one must account for fantasy, exaggeration, and the
impact of earlier literary traditions. I also draw on the works of archaeologists
and architectural and landscape historians to learn more about the material cul
ture of the court and the many different environments, built and partially natural,
in which it operated. Finally, I will use the pipe rolls of John’s predecessors and a
handful of surviving records from the courts of the kings of Aragon and Philip
Augustus for comparative purposes. All these sources have their own weaknesses
and shortcomings, but alongside the royal records, they provide a reasonably full
and rounded picture of life at the court of King John.
Even with the additional sources, there are holes in what we know about King
John’s court—there simply is not as much information as for many late medieval
or early modern European courts. Coronations were arguably the most important
royal ritual in Western Europe, and have been extensively studied, but we know
almost nothing about John’s, and it therefore appears only in passing. Similarly,
discussion of some important subjects, such as art and music or the lives of chil
dren at court, will be brief or virtually nonexistent. Much excellent work has been
done in recent decades on medieval queens and their households or courts, but
the surviving records for Queen Isabella allow one to say little about her role at
court, and what can be said has been covered in detail by Nicholas Vincent.64
1150–vers 1330) (Paris, 2010), 249–98, 590–8; Frédérique Lachaud, ‘La figure du clerc curial dans
l’oeuvre de Jean de Salisbury,’ in Murielle Gaude-Ferragu, Bruno Laurioux, and Jacques Paviot, eds.,
La cour du prince: cour de France, cours d’Europe XIIe–XVe siècle (Paris, 2011), 301–20;
Hugh M. Thomas, The Secular Clergy in England, 1066–1216 (Oxford, 2014), 139–53.
64 Vincent, ‘Isabella of Angoulême,’ 165–219. For some examples of works on medieval queens that
also cover aspects of court life, see Parsons, ed., Court and Household of Eleanor of Castile; John Carmi
Parsons, Eleanor of Castile: Queen and Society in Thirteenth-Century England (New York, 1995); Lindy
Grant, Blanche of Castile, Queen of France (New Haven, CT, 2016).
Nonetheless, the evidence for many subjects is extensive, and if the picture that
emerges of John’s court is uneven, it is also very rich.
1.5 The Structure of the Book
Although the subjects of each chapter will be obvious from the table of contents, a
few words about the organization of the book may be helpful. I start with hunting
because the available evidence is particularly rich, allowing me to put forth a
nuanced discussion of how it provided John with soft power, how his enemies
sought to counter that advantage, and how hunting gave pleasure. I follow with
several chapters on various court activities, culminating in Chapter 6 on feasting,
which incorporated or drew from many of the practices discussed earlier.
Discussion of power and pleasure will appear in all these chapters, but Chapter 5,
on religion at court, plays a particularly important role in discussion of power,
since sacral kingship must be discussed in this context. Some of the arguments
there will foreshadow a more focused exploration of power in Chapter 8. Before
getting to that chapter, however, I shift gears slightly to discuss space and place in
Chapter 7. Here, too, court activities appear, notably processions and formal royal
entries into towns and cities. However, the chapter as a whole is focused less on
activities than on the court’s relationship with and attitudes towards the various
environments through which it travelled. As noted, Chapter 8 focuses on power,
drawing on the evidence in earlier chapters to further analyse symbolic commu
nication and gift exchange at John’s court, to discuss the relationship between
administrative kingship and soft power, and to evaluate John’s handling of soft
power. In Chapter 9, I turn to comparisons with other courts.
2
Hunting and Falconry
2.1 Introduction
On 21 March 1215, at a politically fraught time, John sent five falcons, including
his best gyrfalcon, to two of his leading falconers, with very specific instructions
on feeding the falcons with the flesh of goats, hens, and hares while they moulted.
Nicholas Vincent has noted this letter as a sign of John’s tendency to micro
manage. It is also a sign of John’s personal interest in hunting.1 That many medi
eval kings, including John, had a passion for hunting is widely acknowledged in
the scholarly literature. Yet with few exceptions biographers and other historians
of English medieval rulers have devoted little attention to royal hunting or the
royal hunt establishment.2 There is much work on medieval hunting more gener
ally, and it often sheds light on royal practices, but only Robin Oggins’ work on
falconry has focused on hunting at the English royal court.3 In contrast to the
royal hunting establishment, the royal forests of England, which covered a sur
prisingly large part of King John’s main realm, and in which much of the royal
hunting took place, have received a great deal of attention.4 However, scholars of
1 RLC 192a. For a translation and commentary, see Nicholas Vincent, ‘King John’s Lost Language of
Cranes: Micromanagement, Meat-Eating and Mockery at Court,’ http://magnacarta.cmp.uea.ac.uk/
read/feature_of_the_month/Mar_2015_3.
2 Frank Barlow, William Rufus (New Haven, CT, 1983), 119–32; Frank Barlow, ‘Hunting in the
Middle Ages,’ The Norman Conquest and Beyond (London, 1983), 11–21; Schröder, Macht und Gabe,
41–6, 143–73; Vincent, ‘The Court of Henry II,’ 321–2; John M. Steane, The Archaeology of the
Medieval English Monarchy (London, 1993), 146–62.
3 Robin S. Oggins, The Kings and Their Hawks: Falconry in Medieval England (New Haven, CT,
2004). For other important works on medieval hunting, see La chasse au Moyen Age. Actes du Colloque
de Nice (22–24 juin 1979) (Nice, 1980); Jörg Jarnut, ‘Die frühmittelalterliche Jagd unter rechts- und
sozialgeschichtlichen Aspekten,’ Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo 31
(1985), 765–98; John Cummins, The Hound and the Hawk: The Art of Medieval Hunting (New York,
1988); André Chastel, ed., Le château, la chasse et la forêt. Les cahiers de Commarque (Commarque,
1990); Werner Rösener, ed., Jagd und höfische Kultur im Mittelalter (Göttingen, 1997); Richard
Almond, Medieval Hunting (Stroud, 2003); John Fletcher, Gardens of Earthly Delight: The History of
Deer Parks (Eynsham, 2011); Fernando Arias Guillén, ‘El rey cazador. Prácticas cinegéticas y discurso
ideológico durante el reinado de Alfonso XI,’ in Manual García Fernández, ed., El siglo XIV in primera
persona: Alfonso XI, rey de Castilla y León (1312–1350) (Seville, 2015), 139–52. For a broader perspec
tive, see Thomas T. Allsen, The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History (Philadelphia, PA, 2006).
4 Charles R. Young, The Royal Forests of Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA, 1979); Raymond
Grant, The Royal Forests of England (Stroud, 1991); Oliver Rackham, Ancient Woodland: Its History,
Vegetation and Uses in England, 2nd ed. (Dalbeattie, 2003), 177–88; David Crook, ‘The Forest Eyre in
the Reign of King John,’ in Janet S. Loengard, ed., Magna Carta and the England of King John
(Woodbridge, 2010), 63–82; Judith A. Green, ‘Forest Laws in England and Normandy in the Twelfth
Century,’ Historical Research 86 (2013), 416–31.
Power and Pleasure: Court Life under King John, 1199–1216. Hugh M. Thomas, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Hugh M. Thomas. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802518.003.0002
the royal forest have generally paid little attention to hunting, concentrating
instead on forest law and the opposition its onerous burdens created, the admin
istration of royal forests, and the income they generated. Indeed, some scholars
have argued that for the kings hunting soon became secondary to money in their
administration of the royal forest. As David Carpenter has recently written: ‘Its
main purpose was not to provide kings with areas for hunting, although they cer
tainly were great huntsmen. It was to provide them with money.’5 However, the
widespread failure by scholars of kingship in England to take the royal hunt as a
serious subject of research is a mistake.
Though the evidence for hunting, hawking, and falconry is scattered through
out the royal records, a careful reconstruction reveals that King John’s hunting
establishment was very large, that the government devoted considerable time and
effort to managing its logistics, and that the king spent large sums of money on it
despite needing to accumulate funds for his struggle with Philip Augustus. The
question therefore arises of why the king spent so much. Scholars of medieval
hunting have stressed that it could serve many purposes for aristocrats and rulers,
helping them to build prestige and soft power. This chapter applies their findings
to John’s court. However, I also show how critics of the king used his love of hunt
ing to criticize him and undermine his authority, and how hunting practices
themselves created opposition. In addition, I stress that when royal supporters
and critics alike wrote about hunting, they emphasized pleasure rather than
power, and that their views need to be taken seriously to understand royal invest
ment in the sport.
2.2 The Size, Importance, and Cost of the Royal

Hunting Establishment
Though the evidence for hunting is scattered throughout the records, collectively
it shows just how large a hunting establishment served the king, and how import
ant the activity was to him. The largest part of the hunting establishment was
devoted to hunting deer and other mammals with the assistance of hounds. The
king owned various kinds of dogs. Most common were greyhounds (leporarii)
that hunted by sight; pack dogs (canes de mota) or running hounds that hunted
by scent and could pursue deer; and lymer dogs and brachets or bercelets, used to
sniff out prey to start the hunt.6 One also finds references to boarhounds, wolf
hounds, foxhounds, and hounds for roe deer, as well as setters and Spanish dogs
5 Carpenter, Magna Carta, 176–7. See also Young, Royal Forests, 6.

6 For discussion of hunting dogs in the medieval period, see Cummins, Hound and the Hawk,
12–31; Almond, Medieval Hunting, 58–60.
Hunting and Falconry 27
(espainellos—hence spaniels) for falconry.7 More striking than the variety

was their sheer number. In late May to early June 1213 a total of 458 dogs
(163 greyhounds, 72 pack dogs, 223 unspecified type) were dispersed through
the countryside in eleven packs, and on 28 December of that year 438 dogs
(273 greyhounds, 158 pack dogs, 7 unspecified) were dispersed into three
groups.8 References to separate packs of wolfhounds and other evidence show
these numbers did not include all John’s dogs at that point, though it is impossible
to say precisely how many more he had.
With so many dogs, the king needed a large staff of huntsmen (occasionally
designated magistri or masters to acknowledge their expertise9), dog handlers
(berners for pack dogs and fewterers for greyhounds), and other helpers, simply
called men or boys. I have found around thirty huntsmen operating across mul
tiple years of the reign. As for dog handlers, one royal writ specified one fewterer
for every four greyhounds, though this may have been an ideal.10 In 1213, eleven
named huntsmen, fifty-six dog handlers, and fifteen other helpers oversaw the
dispersal of the 458 dogs noted above. One can only estimate, but between the
various kinds of men overseeing and handling the hunting dogs, there can hardly
have been fewer than a hundred men involved. Some of these huntsmen received
horses for their travels, and of course hunting itself involved large numbers of
horses, at least some of whom were designated as hunters and presumably trained
for that task. Not surprisingly, the king himself had at least one fine hunting
horse, named Liard.11 Horses and grooms added to the size and cost of the hunt
ing establishment.
The part of the king’s establishment devoted to hawking and falconry was
smaller but highly specialized, requiring the allocation of extensive resources.
King John favoured gyrfalcons, peregrine falcons, and goshawks, all large, impres
sive, and expensive birds of prey.12 Many of the best birds came from the north
Atlantic, and when Håkon IV of Norway sent thirteen gyrfalcons from Iceland to
Henry III in 1225, he said that Henry’s father, John, and his predecessors cher
ished birds from that land ‘more than gold and silver.’13 John’s own records show
the lengths to which he went to acquire northern birds of prey, frequently sending
falconers to the great fairs at King’s Lynn, Yarmouth, and Boston in Eastern
England, and on at least one occasion forbidding local officials from allowing
anyone to sell birds before his men arrived. Once he even sent a royal official to
7 Boarhounds: PR4J 85; PR14J 169; Misae 14J 241; Prest Roll 12J 248; wolfhounds: PR9J 209; PR10J
103; RLC 68b; foxhounds: PR11J 125; PR16J 55; hounds for roe deer: Misae 14J 236; setters (cucher-
etti): PR16J 32; Spanish dogs: PR13J 29.
8 RLC 133a–35a, 158b. 9 PR13J 149; RLC 4b, 179b, 286b.
10 RLC 206b. 11 PR12J 93.
12 For discussion of birds of prey, see Oggins, Kings and Their Hawks, 10–16; Cummins, Hound and
the Hawk, 187–92.
13 Pierre Chaplais, ed., Diplomatic Documents Preserved in the Public Record Office, Volume 1,
1101–1272 (London, 1964), 125–6.
Scandinavia, with letters of introduction to the king of Denmark, to purchase

birds.14 John accumulated large numbers of raptors; in his fourteenth year, one
set of payments went to eight falconers in charge of twenty-one gyrfalcons and
twelve other falcons, but there were other falconers, not to mention hawkers
(or ostringers) active in the same period who would have cared for other royal
birds, so the total was no doubt dozens if not scores.15 Falcons and hawks required
extensive and specialized training and care, especially since they were frequently
taught to attack unusually large prey, such as cranes and herons, or to hunt in
pairs, a behaviour not found in the wild.16 Individual royal falconers often led
teams of mounted assistants and bird dogs.17 Like some huntsmen, they were
sometimes designated as masters because of their skill and expertise, and
expected generous remuneration.18
Organizing so many men, hounds, and birds to follow the king’s itinerary and
meet the needs and opportunities of training and hunting represented a demanding
logistical challenge. Stephen Church has shown how hundreds of dogs could follow
the king during hunting seasons, and, as noted in Chapter 1, men, dogs, and birds
were constantly travelling to and from the royal court, journeying to training sites
and hunting grounds when away from court.19 In the winter of 1210–11, one pack
of dogs and their handlers made a lengthy journey of approximately 300 miles from
York via Stamford in Lincolnshire to Canford Magna in Dorsetshire in six weeks.20
Until the loss of Normandy, King John periodically had huntsmen, falconers,
hounds, and birds of prey shipped back and forth across the Channel, and he later
took part of his hunting establishment on his military campaigns to Poitou and
Ireland. More impressive still, John had live game moved around, sometimes by sea,
and occasionally had fallow deer or other game transported from England to
Normandy to restock his parks, in one case sending three shiploads of animals.21
Clearly the royal government made considerable efforts to make hunting available
to the king and his court wherever his journeys might take him.
Though most of the analysis of the king’s residences will take place in Chapter 7,
a brief discussion of their locations will further illustrate just how important
hunting was to John and his ancestors. The following map, created by Stephen
Mileson but based on an earlier one in the History of the King’s Works, shows just
how many castles and residences were located inside or close to royal forests (see
Figure 2.1). Fanny Madeline has also stressed the link between the forest and the
14 PR16J 20, 168; RLC 20a, 85a, 132a–b, 136a, 205b, 206b; Oggins, Kings and Their Hawks,
19–22, 56.
15 Misae 14J 251; Oggins, Kings and Their Hawks, 68.
16 For training and care, see Oggins, Kings and Their Hawks, 22–31; Cummins, Hound and the
Hawk, 200–9.
17 For instance, PR14J 87, 169.
18 For the use of the term magister see Misae 14J 237, 252, 258.
19 Church, ‘Royal Itinerary,’ 37–8. 20 Prest Roll 12J 249–50.
21 PR3J 101–2; PR5J 105; PR6J 125; RL 75, 82.
Hunting and Falconry 29
Figure 2.1 Royal forests, royal dwellings, and a simplified royal itinerary, 1199–1307.
Reproduced with permission of Steven Mileson and Oxford University Press.
residences of Henry II and his sons, showing that they had hunting lodges and
palatial dwellings near ducal forests in Normandy, though less so in their other
continental possessions, probably reflecting a lack of governmental infrastructure
outside of Normandy.22 The residences John himself built or remodelled tended
22 Madeline, Les Plantagenêts et leur empire, 294–303. See also Schröder, Macht und Gabe, 43–4.
Michael Prestwich argues that a desire for good hunting helped shape the itinerary of Edward I;
Prestwich, ‘Royal Itinerary and Roads,’ 182–3.
to be at good sites for hunting and falconry. John also inherited many enclosed
deer parks, which had various purposes but were designed above all for hunting,
near his residences.23 Though parks may well have existed in the Anglo-Saxon
period, kings and nobles had been building new ones since the Norman Conquest
and stocking them with game, including then-exotic species like fallow deer, pea
cocks, pheasants, and rabbits.24 John copied his forebears: in his second year he
enclosed parks at Bolsover and Melbourne in Derbyshire, and a reference to grain
fed to the king’s pheasants in the sole surviving Irish pipe roll from John’s reign
indicates that he wanted the possibility of hunting exotic game there as well.25
For John, as for many of his ancestors, home was often where the hunting was,
and they were willing to alter the environment to improve their chances of
slaughtering game.
John’s hunting establishment cost far more than historians have realized. The
evidence for hunting expenses is scattered, and individual entries can make them
seem trivial. For instance, various references suggest that the feeding of hunting
dogs was only a halfpenny per day per dog. However, if one takes the 458 dogs
recorded in late spring 1213, the total yearly costs for them would be £348 5s 5d,
less a discount for the days they hunted and were fed part of the quarry.26
Unfortunately, because the evidence is so scattered and unsystematic, one can only
suggest a very broad estimate of total costs, more an order of magnitude of spend
ing than anything. Nonetheless, an overall yearly expenditure of £1,000, plus or
minus several hundred pounds, seems to me a plausible estimate (I have provided
more detail on the basis for this estimate in Appendix 1). Services and renders
owed for tenancies granted by John’s ancestors would have cut some of his hunting
expenses.27 However, John invested new lands in rewards to his falconers and
hawkers, including grants or promises of estates worth over £70 yearly to members
of the extensive Hauville family, who provided many of his falconers.28 Given that
23 Jean Birrell-Hilton, ‘La chasse et la forêt en Angleterre médiévale,’ in André Chastel, ed., Le
c hâteau, la chasse et la forêt. Les cahiers de Commarque (Commarque, 1990), 69–80, at 69–72; Jean
Birrell, ‘Deer and Deer Farming in Medieval England,’ Agricultural History Review 40 (1992), 112–26;
Rackham, Ancient Woodland, 191–5; S. A. Mileson, Parks in Medieval England (Oxford, 2009),
4, 29–81.
24 Naomi Sykes, ‘Animal Bones and Animal Parks,’ in Robert Liddiard, ed., The Medieval Park:
New Perspectives (Windgather, 2007), 49–62, at 58–9; Naomi Sykes, The Norman Conquest: A
Zooarchaeological Perspective (Oxford, 2007), 64–5, 68, 76–85; Fletcher, Gardens of Earthly
Delight, 97–103.
25 PR2J 7–8; Pipe Roll Ireland 14J 32–3.
26 PR16J xii; Misae 14J 243–4, 246–8, 250, 254; RLC 21a, 26b, 51a, 53b, 125b–126b; NR 76; Prest
Roll 7J 276. For non-payment on hunting days, see RLC 225b–26a, 286b.
27 For just a few examples, see Book of Fees 1: 4, 6, 8–13, 33; Red Book of the Exchequer 2: 457–9,
461–2, 466, 468; RLC 96a, 129a 10; Oggins, Kings and Their Hawks, 73, 77–9.
28 For grants to the Hauville family, see PR7J 128; RL 26, 69, 91; RLC 15b, 27b, 140a, 158b, 161b,
251a, 259b, 281a. For grants to other falconers or hawkers, see PR6J 129; RLC 9a; Book of Fees 1: 151;
Red Book of the Exchequer 2: 530; RLCh 126b–127a; Tony K. Moore, ‘The Loss of Normandy and the
Invention of Terre Normannorum, 1204,’ English Historical Review 125 (2010), 1071–109, at 1100. For
both see Oggins, Kings and Their Hawks, 70–3.
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“You here, Mercèdes!” he said, as she threw her arms round his
neck.
“Yes, father. Are you not glad to see me?” she answered, tears
filling her eyes.
“I am glad to see you, my child, but not under present
circumstances,” he answered. “You should not have left Quebec
without my permission. In the present state of Canada it is a
disgrace to the Government to incur such unnecessary expenses,
and it is not well that my daughter should be mixed up with such
dissipation. I shall not allow you to join in the gaieties which are
probably about to take place. As soon as I can find an escort to take
you back to Quebec you will return thither; but not to Madame
Péan’s house. You will enter the Ursulines, and commence your
novitiate at once. I have temporised too long. Whatever happens,
you will be safer there.”
He conducted her straight to the apartment he occupied. His
annoyance was very great. He perfectly understood that Mercèdes
had been used as a tool by his enemies, to give the appearance of
his sanction to what was wanton extravagance and display.
That night there was a grand ball, followed by a sumptuous
supper, at the Government House, but neither Montcalm nor his
daughter was present. For the first time he explained the difficulties
of his position to Mercèdes, and she responded, showing herself
intelligent, and capable of understanding the annoyances to which
he was daily subject.
“I am sorry I came, dear father,” she said; “but I only thought of the
pleasure of seeing you, and the journey with Madame Péan seemed
such a simple thing, that I attached no importance to it. For myself, I
am such an insignificant little personage; I forgot I was your
daughter!”
He smiled. “We will say no more about it, my child. Do not doubt
for one moment that it is a great delight to have you with me, even
for a few days, especially as indirectly I have had news from
Candiac. Your brother the Count is betrothed to an heiress, and will
be married shortly; and your eldest sister is already Madame
d’Espineuse. You know that has been an attachment of long
standing; it is a great pleasure to me to think of her happiness.”
“I am indeed glad!” said Mercèdes. “Dear Louise! This good
account of the family ought to cheer you, father. Soon, very soon
perhaps, you will join them,” and a sigh escaped her.
Her father heard it, and, putting his arm round her, kissed her
affectionately. “If I return to my dear Candiac, Mercèdes, I shall
certainly not leave you behind. Had you taken the veil immediately
upon your arrival in Canada, the case would have been different: you
would have become accustomed to your life; but now you would feel
yourself forsaken—besides, it is too late. The war must come to a
close before next autumn, and you will not then have completed your
novitiate: therefore your residence at the Ursulines can only be
temporary; but I think it decidedly safer for you to take refuge there
at once. What does my daughter say?”
“That you are quite right; and, besides, you have brought your
children up to obey, and not reason, father. As soon as I return to
Quebec I will enter the convent. I am no stranger there; the good
sisters know me; and from my window I have looked down for
months past into the convent gardens, feeling always that my home
was there.”
“I am glad you are content,” answered her father. “I have blamed
myself for leaving you so long in the world, fearing it might have
taken hold of you and robbed you of your peace of mind.”
She coloured slightly. “I am satisfied,” she said, “to do what you
think best, father.”
At that moment there was a knock at the door, and the General’s
servant entered and handed his master a slip of folded paper. It was
from Charles Langlade, requesting an interview with the General.
CHAPTER XXIII
A CONFESSION
“Certainly, tell Monsieur Langlade I shall be most happy to receive
him,” said the General; and turning to his daughter, he added, “You
will be glad to see your old friend. He has done me good service: at
Ticonderoga he conducted several scouting parties; now he is in the
neighbourhood of Montreal. I always feel that I have some one I can
depend upon when he is near. I shall never understand how he
came to join the Indians. Love of freedom, I suppose.”
He had scarcely finished speaking when the door opened and
Charles Langlade entered. Mercèdes was sitting in the shadow, so
that he did not see her immediately, but she noticed at once that a
great change had come over him. There was a look of pain—even
more than pain, of great sorrow—in his face. The General was also
quick to see that something was wrong; and, holding out his hand to
welcome him, as if moved by some instinct, he asked,—
“What has happened?”
“Ah! you see it!” answered the young man, drawing his brows
together and compressing his lips. “My mother told me I should
repent of my self-will, and now I am truly punished. God has
humbled me. My people are slain and the home of my fathers is in
ruins.”
“I suppose you mean the Indians have made a raid on the Marsh
settlement and destroyed it?” said the General.
“Yes,” answered Charles sadly. “I am given to understand that a
tribe of the Iroquois attacked the Marshes. I believe it is the same
tribe which has been following up my old friend Roger the Ranger,
and from which he twice escaped. They were fearfully irritated
against him, and of course in my position I could not interfere to
protect him; but the Marshes they knew to be my home, and it was
an understood thing they were to respect them. I suppose they were,
as usual, carried away by their desire for vengeance. The man who
brought me the news says most of the women and children escaped;
but the men have perished or been taken prisoners, which is worse,
and the village was in flames when he left. He has been stopped on
the road by illness, or I should have known this a month ago. It
appears that at the last moment some one, I do not know who,
warned those at the Marshes that an attack was meditated, and so
to a certain extent they were prepared; as I said, the women and
children were got rid of, and the men defended themselves to the
death. Some must have escaped, but my informant was unable to
tell me who they were.” And having spoken, he stood with his head
bent and his eyes fixed on the ground, with all the appearance of a
man who has lost heart.
“It is indeed a terrible misfortune,” said the General; “but, who
knows? perhaps you have heard an exaggerated account. Come
and sit down. We are just going to supper; stay and have it with us.
You have not noticed my daughter; she came with Bigot and Co.
from Quebec to-day. You may imagine I am not best pleased.”
On hearing of Mercèdes’ presence, Charles looked up, and a light
came into his eyes; and going up to her, he said quietly,—
“This is unexpected; it does me good, if anything can do me
good.”
“I am so sorry for you,” said Mercèdes, holding out her hand.
“Won’t you sit down and tell us more about it? Surely you will cease
to live with the Indians now, and return to your own people.”
“Alas! I cannot,” answered Charles; “I am bound to them.” He
hesitated. “I married Ominipeg’s daughter. I have a squaw wife.”
If any one had observed her closely they would have seen
Mercèdes’ cheek pale for a second—only for a second; it was her
father who answered.
“It seems incredible,” he said; “how came you to commit such an
act of folly?”
“As early as I can remember,” said Charles thoughtfully, “my father
took me with him on his hunting expeditions. He was very popular
with the Indians, delighted in sport of every kind; and I grew
accustomed to the freedom. I was more at home in an Indian
wigwam than at Alpha Marsh. There I was impatient of restraint. I set
myself against a regular life with the headstrong self-will of youth;
and when my father died it was worse still. More was then expected
of me. I was the heir, and had to stay at home and attend to the
business of the settlement. Father Nat humoured me, Roger and
Loïs screened me; but it was of no use, I was like a spoilt child. I
wanted my own way, my liberty, and nothing short of it could satisfy
me. Besides, my sympathies were enlisted on the side of the French.
You know I am descended from a Chevalier de Langlade, one of the
earliest French colonists, and I considered, and do still consider, that
by right of pre-occupation Canada belongs to France and not to
England; and yet for no consideration would I have served under the
present Canadian Government. I am willing to fight for France freely
and independently, but not with those who are robbing her and
virtually bringing about her ruin. This was my excuse to my own
conscience for breaking the bonds which had become irksome to
me; and yet I loved my mother and sisters—above all, Loïs; and of
Roger I cannot speak. I do not think, if I had realised how completely
this contemplated act of mine would have parted us, I should have
had the courage to go through with it. But I imagined time would
reconcile him to the change, and that he would continue to join our
hunting parties and visit me in my wigwam; instead of which he
entirely withdrew himself, and after the expedition against Old Britain
it was open enmity between us. From that time to this he has waged
incessant war against the tribes. He is greatly feared; his name is
coupled with a sort of superstitious terror, and his unusual strength,
and the way in which he always manages to escape capture, tend to
make the Indians believe him invulnerable, and so they are set upon
destroying him. When I joined the Indians my first act was to marry
Nadjii, the chief Ominipeg’s daughter.”
He said this in a low voice, with averted head.
“You mean to say you deliberately married one of those wild
Indian women?” exclaimed Montcalm.
“Yes, in all honour, according to Indian rites, I took Nadjii for my
squaw. We have a son. I am irrevocably bound to her,” he continued.
“Fully as I recognise the mistake I have made, I would not have you
misjudge her. Nadjii is no wild Indian woman: she is very gentle,
tender, and true; her devotion to me is unbounded. I believe she
would lay down her life for me. No, she is not to blame; if a wrong
has been done it has been of my own doing, and in all honour I must
abide by it.”
“I pity you with all my heart,” said the General.
“I never felt the need of pity until now,” answered the hunter. “Of
course you cannot understand the charms of such a life as I have led
for nearly seven years. It is purely physical. To gallop over the
prairies, to hunt in the forests, to penetrate into mountain fastnesses
and deep, glorious valleys—no one who has not partaken of it can
conceive the delight of such an existence. The mere fact of living is
in itself a joy. You, with your high European civilisation, have mental
and intellectual enjoyments; but we colonists have nothing of all that
—we know only the primitive pleasures of hunting, fishing, and
warfare. And then there is a strange poetry, a wonderful charm, in
this Indian life. To lie in a birch canoe throughout the calm summer
days upon the bosom of some great inland lake, to cast the line into
its deep, pellucid waters, and, gazing down into its depths, watch the
trout glide shadowy and silent over the glistening pebbles, has a
mysterious fascination; or, again, to explore the forests, floating
down rivers or lakes beneath the shadows of moss-bearded firs, to
drag the canoes up on the sandy beach, and, lighting the camp fire,
recline beneath the trees, and smoke and laugh away the sultry
hours, in a lazy luxury of enjoyment, indescribable, and which you
cannot realise, but which I have lived and revelled in, forgetful, alas?
that there are higher duties incumbent upon man than mere personal
indulgence. And now I reap the bitter fruit. If I had remained at my
post, all this would not have happened.”
“But where was the Ranger?” asked Montcalm.
“In October he was, you know, somewhere up by Ticonderoga.
You remember he had a skirmish with one of our scouting parties
about that time?”
“Yes,” said Montcalm, “and he punished our men terribly, driving
them back with such heavy loss that I determined that for the winter,
at least, no more scouting parties should be sent out. But now what
are your plans? What do you propose doing?”
“I came to let you know that I am going down to the Marshes to
reconnoitre, and see with my own eyes the extent of the misfortune.
As you say, there may be exaggeration in the account I have
received, which was by no means through a direct channel. You will
not begin operations till March, and I shall be back long before that.”
“I hope so,” answered the General; “for I depend greatly upon you
to keep the Indians in order. I expect the English will attack us by
way of Lakes Champlain and Ontario; in any case, I am preparing
even now to resist them.”
“I am more inclined to think they will attack Quebec itself.”
“Hardly,” answered Montcalm; “the navigation of the St. Lawrence
is too difficult and dangerous for any hostile fleet to attempt. Besides,
the position of Quebec renders it impregnable unless we are
betrayed. I have a plan of defence which will prevent the enemy
approaching Quebec.”
“I am satisfied to believe such to be the case,” said Charles; “and
now, farewell, sir; you may trust me to be back before the rivers and
lakes are unthawed.”
“Will you not stay to supper?” said Montcalm. “We are alone; all
my officers are dancing attendance upon the Quebec ladies.”
“Thank you,” answered Charles; “I have still certain things to settle
with the chiefs, and I start to-morrow before dawn. I must therefore
take leave of you now. Farewell, Mademoiselle,” he said,
approaching Mercèdes.
“Adieu,” she answered; and for one second as their fingers
touched their eyes met. He bowed his head over her hand; then
turned away, and, with a hurried salutation to the General, left the
room.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE PRODIGAL
The moon was shining brightly on the snow-covered earth,
causing the outlines of the houses and buildings of the Marshes to
stand forth in bold relief, while the snow hid under its whiteness the
ruins of the late invasion. Not a sound was heard; perfect stillness
reigned over the land, even as it reigns in the chamber of death
where the still figure lies beneath the white shroud, soon to be put
away out of sight, until the dawn of the great resurrection day, when
earth and sea shall give up their dead.
In springtime the earth bursts forth, leaf and bud and flower, and
the heart of man rejoices and is made glad. Surely it is but the
shadow of that joy which shall be ours when the graves shall give up
their dead, and we shall see our loved ones glorified, made perfect,
released from the bondage of earth, knowing but one law, the great
law of Love, by the divine power of which their chains have been
broken and they have been loosed. Truly then, and then only, shall
we give utterance to the cry, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave,
where is thy victory?”
Oh! how the heart aches and strains after that consummation. Our
loved ones, who are gone before, whose spirits are still with us by
night and by day, in the busy crowd as in the solitude of our
chamber, whose voices we long to hear, whose hands we long to
press—what agony of patient waiting!
But there was one standing out in the snow looking up at the
Marshes travel-stained and worn, not daring to approach the home
of his fathers. He had come many miles over a trackless country,
over ice-bound rivers, through deep forests, over mountains and
valleys covered with snow, enduring hardships which would have
seemed intolerable to a less hardy nature, until at last he stood
before the home of his childhood; and tears blinded his eyes when
he saw that it was not utterly destroyed, that all had not perished,
that still the village steeple rose in the moonlight, telling of God’s
mercy.
Suddenly the loud bark of the house-dog warned him that, unless
he retreated, his presence would be discovered. He had been
standing in the high road; he moved quickly behind a clump of trees,
only just in time. The front door opened, and a stream of light poured
forth as Marcus stepped out on to the garden path and looked
around, cautiously peering into the dark shadows cast by the house
and the trees. He heard him say, “I can see no one. Had I better let
Bob loose?” The dog’s bark had changed into a whine, which
Charles Langlade knew full well to mean that his instinct had
discovered a friend, not a foe, in the night watcher.
“It might be as well,” said a woman’s voice; and a second later
there was a rush and a bound, and Charles Langlade felt two great
paws upon his shoulders, and a loud whine of welcome went up into
the still night air.
“Who’s there?” asked Marcus, in a clear, loud voice.
“Down, Bob; down, old boy,” said Charles, stepping out of the
shadow; and crossing the road, he opened the wicket gate and
entered.
“Marcus!”
“Charles!”
And the two brothers clasped hands.
“My poor boy! Will you ever forgive me?” said the elder.
“I have nothing to forgive,” answered Marcus; “you did what you
thought right.”
“Nay, I did what pleased me,” answered Charles. “But tell me who
is living and who is dead?”
At this moment Loïs came out of the house.
“Oh, Charles, my brother!” and her arms were round his neck.
The three stood there in the snow, so deeply moved they could
give no utterance to their feelings, and Bob leapt around them, giving
vent to his delight in short, sharp barks.
“Come in,” said Loïs. “We have so much to tell you.”
“My mother, the children?” said Charles.
“Are unhurt,” said Loïs.
“And Father Nat?”
“Ah! that is the worst of all; still, he is living. Come,” and she drew
him across the threshold of what had been his home; and as he
stood once more in the old familiar place, the glamour fell from his
eyes, and he exclaimed bitterly,—
“How could I forsake you?”
The front kitchen was empty; but there was fire on the hearth, and
the lighted lamp showed Loïs how worn and travel-stained he was.
His face was thin and haggard, his lips shrivelled with exposure and
cold; his bearskin partially hid the dilapidated condition of his clothes.
He drew near the fire and stretched out his hands to the flame.
Marcus, looking at him, said,—
“You will eat, Charles?”
“I have had no food since yesterday,” he said; “my provisions have
come to an end, and there is no game abroad in this weather.”
“Sit down and warm yourself,” said Loïs, pushing him gently into
the chair which had been his father’s. “All are gone to rest. I will get
your supper.”
“Tell me first what of Father Nat. Does Roger know?”
“Father Nat was terribly wounded,” said Loïs; “and for a long time
we despaired of saving him; but within the last fortnight there have
been signs of gradual improvement; he has seemed to recognise us
at times. But now ask no more until you are refreshed,” and she left
the kitchen, whilst Marcus filled a pipe and handed it to his brother.
“It is the calumet of peace,” he said.
“You heap coals of fire on my head.”
But nature was so exhausted that he sank back in his chair, and,
putting the pipe to his lips, slowly smoked.
The relief of finding that those nearest and dearest to him were
living was so great, that in his weariness he seemed powerless to
realise anything more; mind and body were alike benumbed; and
when Loïs brought in the supper they had to rouse him and force him
to eat. It was evident he had no idea of what had occurred, by the
words to which he had already given utterance. After he had eaten,
looking up at Loïs, he said,—
“I heard the settlement was burnt to the ground, and you were all
slain. The man who told me said he was an eye-witness, and had
fled when the village was in flames.”
“But for Nadjii’s warning and Roger’s sudden arrival, such would
have been the case,” answered Loïs.
“Nadjii! what had Nadjii to do with it?” said Charles sharply.
“She told me you had bidden her watch over us. She came to me,
and gave us notice that the Indians were coming to attack us; and so
they did not surprise us, and we were able to defend ourselves until
Roger came. It seems he had been warned by one of her people.”
“My true-hearted Nadjii, my brave little squaw!” said Charles, his
whole face lighting up with pleasure and emotion. “Where is she?
What has become of her? Has she returned to her tribe?”
There was a moment’s silence; he was quick to notice it.
“What has become of her? Where is she?” he asked hastily.
“She saved my life, she saved Father Nat’s life,—she died for us;”
and standing before him, Loïs burst into tears.
He started; every particle of colour forsook his face.
“Tell me all,” he said, in a low voice.
And Marcus told him, for Loïs could not, how Nadjii had covered
them with her own body, and how she had been wounded unto
death.
“And the child?” said Charles, burying his face in his hands. “She
would not have left it behind.”
Again there was a moment’s silence; then Loïs knelt down beside
him, and, laying her hand on his arm, said,—
“When she was dying, she told us where to find it—in the trunk of
a tree in the forest where she had laid it. Roger went to fetch it.”
“Roger did that?” exclaimed Charles. “Let me see my boy, Loïs!”
She hesitated just for one moment, then continued slowly, not
daring to raise her tearful eyes to his face,—
“He looked for the child carefully; he found the spot where Nadjii
had told him the babe was, but it was gone.”
Charles sprang up. “Stolen!” he exclaimed, his eyes flashing.
“We fear so,” said Loïs. “Certainly there was no trace of any bodily
harm having befallen him; he had simply been taken away.”
“Did Nadjii know of this before she died?” asked Charles, with set
teeth.
“No,” answered Loïs; “she thought she saw him. Her last words
were ‘Jesus, Nenemoosha.’ Was she a Christian, Charles?”
“Yes, thank God, I taught her all she could understand,” he
answered, “and her gentle soul delighted in the stories of Christ’s
love. She was a better Christian than many who enjoy far greater
privileges than did my squaw wife. I am glad she thought the child
was safe. The Indians must have found and taken him. If they have
wrought him harm, then his mother’s tribe will avenge him. He was
such a bonnie two-year-old boy, Loïs;” and as one oppressed with a
weight of sorrow, he let his head sink on to his bosom, and heavy
tears fell from his eyes. It was the strong man’s agony.
His past life of physical enjoyment, without thought of the morrow,
was fading as a mirage fades away even as he gazed, and his soul
was steeped in stern reality. Ruin and death were around him. He
had deemed himself all-powerful, capable of choosing his own way,
shaping his own course, unmindful of any will save his own. A
rebellious son! Even as the prodigal he had gone forth in the pride of
his youth and manhood, feeling himself strong, and he had wasted
his life, forgetful, or ignorant perhaps, that there is in man, made in
God’s image, a higher, nobler nature than in the brute creation. Soul,
heart, intellect, are surely given to bring the body into subjection—
not doing away with material enjoyment, but tempering it; and as
years go on we recognise that our bodies are but the caskets made
to contain the never-dying spirit which God breathed into man, even
the breath of life.
“My son was dead and is alive again.” Dead, though full of life and
health, clothed in rich raiment, going forth, having gathered together
all his substance, rich in friends and in all the world can give; yet he
was dead!
“Alive again!” when hungry and athirst, his rich raiment in tatters,
his head bowed in sorrow, and his lips giving utterance to the words,
“Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before thee!” And his
father rejoiced over him.
Suddenly Charles rose to his feet, threw one arm round Loïs, and
drew her close up to him.
“Dearest,” he said, “if I have sinned in the past, God pardon me! I
will find the boy and bring him to you; and when this war is over I will
come home, and ease the burden from your shoulders, Marcus, so
that you may take up your calling and be a minister of God,
according to your heart’s desire, and I will care for our mother and
the younger ones, and strive to do my duty in the land, as you, my
younger brother, have done in my stead.”
He held out his hand to Marcus, who grasped it, saying,—
“Why not stay with us now, Charles?”
“Because my honour is pledged,” he answered. “Not to the
Indians; I shall never again dwell among them or be one with them;
but to Canada, to General Montcalm. I have sworn to stand by him to
the end, and I will do so, not as an Indian chief if I can help it. I shall
join the Canadian militia as a volunteer, as I ought to have done from
the first, and fight for the cause which I still believe to be the right
one. Tell Roger this; he will understand. And now let me have one
look at Father Nat, after which I will lie down and sleep, for I am
terribly weary. I have been three weeks on the road from Montreal,
and must return as quickly as possible. Is Roger still here to protect
you?”
“He will not leave us till the spring,” said Marcus. “He is gone now
for a couple of days to Cauterets on business; when he does go for
good he will leave us well protected. You need not fear; we have
sentries out by night and by day now.”
“It is well; let me see Father Nat,” said Charles; and they led the
way to the room where Nathaniel Boscowen lay sleeping. Shading
the lamp she carried in her hand, Loïs approached the bed, and was
surprised to see that his eyes were open and that he moved
restlessly.
“Is that you, Loïs?” he asked.
“Yes, father,” she answered; “shall I arrange your pillows?” and
signing to the two young men to keep in the shadow, she bent over
him.
He lifted his hand. “My pillows are all right,” he said; “but I heard
voices in the room below, and it seemed to me I recognised
Charles’s. I would it were so; I loved the lad: if only I might see him
before I die!”
“You are not going to die, Father Nat; you are getting well, and will
be as hale and hearty as ever. Do you wish to see Charles so very
much?” said Loïs.
“Yes,” answered Nathaniel shortly, as if the question irritated him.
“Then I will tell you something. It was his voice you heard; he is
here,” said Loïs.
“Where?” asked Father Nat, trying to lift his head, but Charles was
quickly beside him.
“Dear Father Nat,” he said, “forgive me.”
“Ay, my lad, I forgive thee,” and he clasped his hand. “I always told
you they were a treacherous people. You will come back to us now?”
“Please God I will,” said Charles.
“Then I am content. The breach is healed; Langlade and
Boscowen are not riven!” and closing his eyes, he settled himself to
sleep. They watched him for a few minutes, and then crept softly out
of the room.
CHAPTER XXV
TO THE FORE
At the first sign of spring, General Montcalm prepared to take the
field and oppose a steady resistance to an attack which it was
generally believed would be made upon Quebec by way of Lakes
Champlain and Ontario.
He was sitting in his tent one afternoon, in company with General
Bougainville and Chevalier Levis. On a table before them maps were
spread out, and Montcalm was explaining his plan of defence,
supposing the English should attempt a regular siege of Quebec.
“I do not believe it possible for the English to approach the town,”
he said. “All round, on the high ground overlooking it, I shall station
the principal part of the army; the right wing will extend along the
river St. Charles and the left on to Montmorenci; by this means our
troops will cover an area of from seven to eight miles. The steep
ground rises almost from the water’s edge, and the guns from the
citadel itself will do the rest. Are you not both of my opinion?”
“We are,” said Levis. “If we can hold out till the winter, I believe we
shall see the last of the English.”
Even while he was speaking, voices were heard outside the tent,
and the sentinel, looking in, said,—
“A soldier with a despatch for the General.”
“Let him come in,” said Montcalm, looking up.
A Canadian, recognisable as such by his dress, entered. He was
covered with dust, and had evidently ridden hard. He laid a letter on
the table before the General.
“Who has sent you?” asked Montcalm, as he opened the
despatch.
“Captain Langlade,” was the ready answer.
The General’s face grew visibly sterner as he read, and when he
had finished, he laid the letter on the table, kept his hand upon it,
and said emphatically,—
“The decisive moment is approaching, gentlemen. This letter is to
inform me that the English with a great fleet are within three leagues
of Quebec; they have on board a large army, commanded by the
young General Wolfe. We know full well what sort of man he is! The
fate of Canada is now in the balance.”
“And you will come forth victorious, General, as you did at Fort
William Henry and Ticonderoga,” said Levis.
“God grant it!” answered the General. “I think our measures are
well taken,” he said, turning to the two officers. “In my opinion,
unless there be treason in the camp, the English will never make
themselves masters of the town. I believe it to be impregnable.”
“I am certain that, with intrenchments, I could hold the city with
three or four thousand men,” said Bougainville; adding, “In a few
days we shall muster sixteen thousand men in and round its walls.
There is nothing to fear; let the English come!”
“I am satisfied you are right,” answered the General.
Then, turning to the man who had brought the message, he said,
“You will return at once to Captain Langlade, and tell him we shall
join the army at Quebec as quickly as possible. And now, gentlemen,
we will call a general council of officers, and then to-morrow at dawn
en route; we are approaching the end.”
“And a good thing too,” said Bougainville. “We have shilly-shallied
long enough. It is time the English understood once for all that we
intend to remain masters of Canada, and to hold the fortress upon
which old Samuel Champlain first planted the French flag.”
The following day the whole forces of the French and Colonial
army were on their way to Quebec. Only three battalions were left at
Ticonderoga, and a strong detachment placed so as to resist any
possible attack by Lake Ontario. The French took up positions at the
mouth of the St. Charles on the east, and the river Montmorenci on
the north-east, which Montcalm had fortified with the greatest
possible skill. Across the mouth of the St. Charles a boom of logs
chained together was placed, protected by mounted cannon. A
bridge of boats crossing the river connected the city with the camp.
All the gates of Quebec except that of St. Charles were closed and
barricaded. A hundred and six cannon were mounted on the walls,
whilst on the river there was a floating battery of twelve heavy
pieces, a number of gunboats, and eight fireships.
The army for the defence mustered, they posted sixteen thousand
men, for the most part advantageously, behind defensive works. A
large portion of these were Canadians, who were of little use in the
open field, but fought well behind intrenchments; there were also
upwards of a thousand Indians from the brave tribes of the Iroquois,
or five nations. It was at the end of June, and the country round
Quebec, naturally fertile, was in the height of its summer glory. On
the curving shore from the St. Charles to the rocky gorge of
Montmorenci, for a distance of seven to eight miles, were to be seen
the whitewashed dwellings of the parish of Beauport, and the fields
on both sides studded with tents, huts, and Indian wigwams. Midway
between the little river of Beauport, on a rising ground, stood a large
stone house, round which tents were thickly clustered. Here
Montcalm had his headquarters.
Looking down upon her defenders, Quebec sat perched upon her
rock, a congregation of stone houses, palaces, convents, and
hospitals; the uniformity being broken by the green trees of the
seminary gardens, the spires of the cathedral, the Convent of the
Ursulines, and the monastic buildings of the Recollets and the
Jesuits. A firm, solid mass she looked in the summer sunshine,
unconquered, and it seemed unconquerable. A lovable town, quaint
even then, with its one-storied houses, built heavily of stone and
stuccoed brick, with two dormer windows full of house plants in each
roof. Here and there, higher still, a weather-worn wood-coloured
gallery was seen, pent-roofed and balustered, geraniums showing
through the balusters, and white doves circling around and cooing
upon the windowsills. Such as she was in her homely fashion,
French and English alike looked up to her—the one with loving pride,
the other with covetous desire.
On the 26th of June the English fleet anchored off the Island of
Orleans, a few miles below Quebec. A small party attempting to land
was opposed by the Canadians, but they were beaten off, and the
whole army then landed.
When William Pitt gave the command of the English army in
Canada to General Wolfe, it was but natural that such an act should
arouse feelings of jealousy in men older than himself, and under
whose orders he had served in the earlier part of the campaign.
Wolfe himself was more alive to the responsibility than to the honour
which was almost thrust upon him. The state of his health was most
precarious; in fact, he was rarely free from acute pain, and it required
an immense power of self-command and energy to enable him to
bear up against fatigue and mental anxiety. Nevertheless, he had
accepted the command unhesitatingly, and with the determination of
conquering Quebec and adding this new jewel to the English crown.
To accomplish this he knew that half measures were no longer
feasible. From the end of the Island of Orleans he could see and
judge the full strength of the enemy; three great batteries frowned
down upon him from above Quebec, behind which rose the redoubts
and parapets of Cape Diamond, whilst three other batteries down to
the river’s edge guarded the lower part of the town. The whole
country round was covered with earthworks, redoubts, and
intrenchments; the river with floating batteries, fireships, and other
engines of war. His first act was to issue a proclamation in the king’s
name:—
“His Excellency Major-General James Wolfe, Commander-in-

Chief of his Britannic Majesty’s troops now stationed in the river
St. Lawrence, to the people of Canada.
“My king and master George III., justly irritated against
France, has resolved to humble her pride and to revenge the
insults she has inflicted on the English colonies. With this
purpose in view he has sent me, at the head of a formidable
army, with a fleet which has already advanced almost into the
centre of their chief city, to deprive France of all her
establishments in North America, and to proclaim British rule.
This is my mission, and by the grace of God I hope to carry it
into effect.
“James Wolfe.”
This done, he took possession of Point Levis, a promontory on the
south bank of the St. Lawrence, where the current narrows into a
deep stream of only a mile in breadth. General Monckton occupied
this point with four battalions, and shelled the lower town across the
river, but the citadel was beyond his reach. Wolfe’s army consisted of
nine thousand troops: it should have amounted to fourteen thousand,
but at the last moment the orders for some of the West Indian troops
to join were countermanded; this was probably partly due to jealousy
at Wolfe’s having been nominated to the chief command.
The two armies were stationed opposite each other on either side
of the river. Vaudreuil, as Governor of Canada, still held command,
and by his mistakes frequently hampered Montcalm’s action. Had he
planted guns in such a manner as to fire down on the English fleet, it
could never have taken up a position so near the city; he failed to do
this, however, and the result was that the English fleet passed up the
river in safety, to the astonishment of the Canadians, who, until then,
had believed it impossible for large ships to be brought up the St.
Lawrence.
Again, very shortly after the landing of the English army on the
Island of Orleans, Vaudreuil made a desperate attempt to destroy
the English fleet by launching fireships against it. The English
sentries at the farther end of the island saw in the middle of the night
vessels coming down the river. These ships were really filled with
pitch, tar, and all sorts of combustibles mixed with shells and
grenades, and the decks crowded with a number of cannon
crammed with grape shot and musket balls. Suddenly they became
like pillars of flame, and advanced with tremendous explosion and
noise. But the French officers had lost their nerve, and set fire to the
ships too soon. The English, after their first surprise, recovered their
coolness, lowered their boats, and the sailors rowed out to meet the
fireships, and by means of grapnels they towed them towards land,
where they were stranded and left to burn themselves out.
Thus the fight might truly be said to have begun. To lookers on,
and at this distance of time, it almost bears the aspect of a duel, the
two principal actors standing out boldly in relief, fighting not for
themselves, but for their countries, and, to a certain extent, for their
religion. Catholic France, Protestant England! Noble men in every
sense of the word, worthy of each other, their names have come
down to posterity linked together—“Wolfe and Montcalm.”

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Power and Pleasure: Court Life under

King John, 1199–1216 Hugh M. Thomas

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Power and Pleasure

Power and Pleasure

Appendix 1: Royal Hunting Expenses 231

Misae 11J Rotuli de Liberate (RL), 109–71.

RCh Rotuli Chartarum in Turri Londinensi Asservati, ed. Thomas

xiv List of Abbreviations

RL Rotuli de Liberate ac de Misis et Praestitis, Regnante Johanne,

1.1 King John, Royal Courts, and Historiography

2 Power and Pleasure

4 Power and Pleasure

6 Power and Pleasure

8 Power and Pleasure

1.2 Goals of This Book

1.2.1 Reconstruction of Court Life

1.2.2 Analysis of Court Life, Soft Power, and John’s Successes

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to medieval settings.20 I explore soft power at John’s court by focusing on four

20 David Bates, The Normans and Empire (Oxford, 2013), 4, 18–23.

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1.2.3 The Court as a Site of Pleasure and Self-Gratification

Although a significant portion of my analysis concentrates on power, it would be

ac­know­ledge it and move on. The latter supposition, however, is problematic. It

16 Power and Pleasure

1.3 The Structure of John’s Court

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49 Constitutio Domus Regis, xxxviii–lxviii, 195–215.

20 Power and Pleasure

to have been small and unusually dependent on her husband’s.52 Unfortunately,

22 Power and Pleasure

survive alongside the categories of purposely preserved documents, like lists of

62 MR10J 119–25; National Archives C 47/3/46/4.

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1.5 The Structure of the Book

26 Power and Pleasure

2.2 The Size, Importance, and Cost of the Royal

5 Carpenter, Magna Carta, 176–7. See also Young, Royal Forests, 6.

Hunting and Falconry 27

(espainellos—hence spaniels) for falconry.7 More striking than the variety

28 Power and Pleasure

Scandinavia, with letters of introduction to the king of Denmark, to purchase

Hunting and Falconry 29

30 Power and Pleasure

“His Excellency Major-General James Wolfe, Commander-in-

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Appendix 1: Royal Hunting Expenses 231

acknowledge it and move on. The latter supposition, however, is problematic. It