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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
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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 Nicholas Vincent provided me with transcripts of unpublished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to use an unpublished article on John’s illegitimate children.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advance of publication and Ryan Kemp supplied me with an unpublished article.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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that and the second shoe were gone. Yussuf was much pleased and
rewarded Abou with a new coat later, but for the present he was not
done. Judging by long experience that the peasant had either bought
the sheep and was taking it home or that he was carrying it to market
to sell, he said to Abou: ‘Let us wait. It may be that he will return with
another.’”
“Ah, shrewd,” muttered Ajeeb, nodding his head gravely.
“Accordingly,” went on Gazzar-al-Din, “they waited and soon the
peasant returned carrying another sheep. Yussuf asked Abou if he
could take this one also, and Abou told him that when he saw the
sheep alone to take it.”
“Dunce!” declared Chudi, the baker. “Will he put another sheep
down after just losing one? This is a thin tale!” But Gazzar was not to
be disconcerted.
“Now Yussuf was a great thief,” he went on, “but this wit of Abou’s
puzzled him. Of all the thieves he had trained few could solve the
various problems which he put before them, and in Abou he saw the
makings of a great thief. As the peasant approached, Abou motioned
to Yussuf to conceal himself in a crevice in the nearby rocks, while
he hid in the woods. When the peasant drew near Abou placed his
hands to his lips and imitated a sheep bleating, whereupon the
peasant, thinking it must be his lost sheep, put down behind a stone
the one he was carrying, for its feet were tied, and went into the
woods to seek the lost one. Yussuf, watching from his cave, then ran
forth and made off with the sheep. When the peasant approached,
Abou climbed a tree and smiled down on him as he sought his
sheep, for he had been taught that to steal was clever and wise, and
the one from whom he could steal was a fool.”
“And so he is,” thought Waidi, who had stolen much in his time.
“When the peasant had gone his way lamenting, Abou came down
and joined Yussuf. They returned to the city and the home of Yussuf,
where the latter, much pleased, decided to adopt Abou as his son.”
Gazzar now paused upon seeing the interest of his hearers and held
out his tambour. “Anna, O friends, anna! Is not the teller of tales, the
sweetener of weariness, worthy of his hire? I have less than a score
of anna, and ten will buy no more than a bowl of curds or a cup of
kishr, and the road I have traveled has been long. So much as the
right to sleep in a stall with the camels is held at ten anna, and I am
no longer young.” He moved the tambour about appealingly.
“Dog!” growled Soudi. “Must thy tambour be filled before we hear
more?”
“Bismillah! This is no story-teller but a robber,” declared Parfi.
“Peace, friends,” said Gazzar, who was afraid to irritate his hearers
in this strange city. “The best of the tale comes but now—the
marvelous beauty of the Princess Yanee and the story of the caliph’s
treasury and the master thief. But, for the love of Allah, yield me but
ten more anna and I pause no more. It is late. A cup of kishr, a
camel’s stall—” He waved the tambour. Some three of his hearers
who had not yet contributed anything dropped each an anna into his
tambour.
“Now,” continued Gazzar somewhat gloomily, seeing how small
were his earnings for all his art, “aside from stealing and plundering
caravans upon the great desert, and the murdering of men for their
treasure, the great Yussuf conducted a rug bazaar as a blind for
more thievery and murder. This bazaar was in the principal street of
the merchants, and at times he was to be seen there, his legs
crossed upon his pillows. But let a merchant of wealth appear, a
stranger, and although he might wish only to ask prices Yussuf would
offer some rug or cloth so low that even a beggar would wish to take
it. When the stranger, astonished at its price, would draw his purse a
hand-clap from Yussuf would bring forth slaves from behind
hangings who would fall upon and bind him, take his purse and
clothes and throw his body into the river.”
“An excellent robber indeed!” approved Soudi.
“Yussuf, once he had adopted Abou as his son, admitted him to
his own home, where were many chambers and a garden, a court
with a pool, and many servants and cushions and low divans in
arcades and chambers; then he dressed him in silks and took him to
his false rug market, where he introduced him with a great flourish as
one who would continue his affairs after he, Yussuf, was no more.
He called his slaves and said: ‘Behold thy master after myself. When
I am not here, or by chance am no more—praise be to Allah, the
good, the great!—see that thou obey him, for I have found him very
wise.’ Soon Yussuf disguised himself as a dervish and departed
upon a new venture. As for Abou, being left in charge of the rug
market, he busied himself with examining its treasures and their
values and thinking on how the cruel trade of robbery, and, if
necessary, murder, which had been taught him, and how best it was
to be conducted.
“For although Abou was good and kind of heart, still being taken
so young and sharply trained in theft and all things evil, and having
been taught from day to day that not only were murder and robbery
commendable but that softness or error in their pursuit was wrong
and to be severely punished, he believed all this and yet innocently
enough at times sorrowed for those whom he injured. Yet also he
knew that he durst not show his sorrow in the presence of Yussuf, for
the latter, though kind to him, was savage to all who showed the
least mercy or failed to do his bidding, even going so far as to slay
them when they sought to cross or betray him.”
“Ay-ee, a savage one was that,” muttered Al Hadjaz, the cook.
“And I doubt not there are such in Yemen to this day,” added
Ajeeb, the cleaner of stalls. “Was not Osman Hassan, the spice-
seller, robbed and slain?”
“Soon after Yussuf had left on the secret adventure, there
happened to Abou a great thing. For it should be known that at this
time there ruled in Baghdad the great and wise Yianko I., Caliph of
the Faithful in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris and master
of provinces and principalities, and the possessor of an enormous
treasury of gold, which was in a great building of stone. Also he
possessed a palace of such beauty that travelers came from many
parts and far countries to see. It was built of many-colored stones
and rare woods, and possessed walks and corridors and gardens
and flowers and pools and balconies and latticed chambers into
which the sun never burst, but where were always cool airs and
sweet. Here were myrtle and jasmine and the palm and the cedar,
and birds of many colors, and the tall ibis and the bright flamingo. It
was here, with his many wives and concubines and slaves and
courtiers, and many wise men come from far parts of the world to
advise with him and bring him wisdom, that he ruled and was
beloved and admired.
“Now by his favorite wife, Atrisha, there had been born to him
some thirteen years before the beautiful and tender and delicate and
loving and much-beloved Yanee, the sweetest and fairest of all his
daughters, whom from the very first he designed should be the wife
of some great prince, the mother of beautiful and wise children, and
the heir, through her husband, whoever he should be, to all the
greatness and power which the same must possess to be worthy of
her. And also, because he had decided that whoever should be wise
and great and deserving enough to be worthy of Yanee should also
be worthy of him and all that he possessed—the great Caliphate of
Baghdad. To this end, therefore, he called to Baghdad instructors of
the greatest wisdom and learning of all kinds, the art of the lute and
the tambour and the dance. And from among his wives and
concubines he had chosen those who knew most of the art of dress
and deportment and the care of the face and the body; so that now,
having come to the age of the ripest perfection, thirteen, she was the
most beautiful of all the maidens that had appeared in Arabia or any
of the countries beyond it. Her hair was as spun gold, her teeth as
pearls of the greatest price, lustrous and delicate; her skin as the
bright moon when it rises in the east, and her hands and feet as
petals in full bloom. Her lips were as the pomegranate when it is
newly cut, and her eyes as those deep pools into which the moon
looks when it is night.”
“Yea, I have heard of such, in fairy-tales,” sighed Chudi, the baker,
whose wife was as parchment that has cracked with age.
“And I, behind the walls of palaces and in far cities, but never
here,” added Zad-el-Din, for neither his wife nor his daughters was
any too fair to look upon. “They come not to Hodeidah.”
“Ay-ee, were any so beautiful,” sighed Al Tadjaz, “there would be
no man worthy. But there are none.”
“Peace!” cried Ahmed. “Let us have the tale.”
“Yea, before he thinks him to plead for more anna,” muttered
Hadjaz, the sweeper, softly.
But Gazzar, not to be robbed of this evidence of interest, was
already astir. Even as they talked he held out the tambour, crying:
“Anna, anna, anna!” But so great was the opposition that he dared
not persist.
“Dog!” cried Waidi. “Wilt thou never be satisfied? There is another
for thee, but come no more.”
“Thou miser!” said Haifa, still greatly interested, “tell thy tale and
be done!”
“The thief has rupees and to spare, I warrant,” added Scudi,
contributing yet another anna.
And Zad-el-Din and Ahmed, because they were lustful of the great
beauty of Yanee, each added an anna to his takings.
“Berate me not, O friends,” pleaded Gazzar tactfully, hiding his
anna in his cloak, “for I am as poor as thou seest—a son of the road,
a beggar, a wanderer, with nowhere to lay my head. Other than my
tales I have nothing.” But seeing scant sympathy in the faces of his
hearers, he resumed.
“Now at the time that Abou was in charge of the dark bazaar it
chanced that the caliph, who annually arranged for the departure of
his daughter for the mountains which are beyond Azol in Bactria,
where he maintained a summer palace of great beauty, sent forth a
vast company mounted upon elephants and camels out of Ullar and
Cerf and horses of the rarest blood from Taif. This company was
caparisoned and swathed in silks and thin wool and the braided and
spun cloth of Esher and Bar with their knitted threads of gold. And it
made a glorious spectacle indeed, and all paused to behold. But it
also chanced that as this cavalcade passed through the streets of
Baghdad, Abou, hearing a great tumult and the cries of the multitude
and the drivers and the tramp of the horses’ feet and the pad of the
camels’, came to the door of his bazaar, his robes of silk about him,
a turban of rare cloth knitted with silver threads upon his head. He
had now grown to be a youth of eighteen summers. His hair was as
black as the wing of the duck, his eyes large and dark and sad from
many thoughts as is the pool into which the moon falls. His face and
hands were tinted as with henna when it is spread very thin, and his
manners were graceful and languorous. As he paused within his
doorway he looked wonderingly at the great company as it moved
and disappeared about the curves of the long street. And it could not
but occur to him, trained as he was, how rich would be the prize
could one but seize upon such a company and take all the wealth
that was here and the men and women as slaves.
“Yet, even as he gazed and so thought, so strange are the ways of
Allah, there passed a camel, its houdah heavy with rich silks, and
ornaments of the rarest within, but without disguised as humble, so
that none might guess. And within was the beautiful Princess Yanee,
hidden darkly behind folds of fluttering silk, her face and forehead
covered to her starry eyes, as is prescribed, and even these veiled.
Yet so strange are the ways of life and of Allah that, being young and
full of the wonder which is youth and the curiosity and awe which
that which is unknown or strange begets in us all, she was at this
very moment engaged in peeping out from behind her veils, the
while the bright panorama of the world was passing. And as she
looked, behold, there was Abou, gazing wonderingly upon her fine
accoutrements. So lithe was his form and so deep his eyes and so
fair his face that, transfixed as by a beam, her heart melted and
without thought she threw back her veil and parted the curtains of
the houdah the better to see, and the better that he might see. And
Abou, seeing the curtains put to one side and the vision of eyes that
were as pools and the cheeks as the leaf of the rose shine upon him,
was transfixed and could no longer move or think.
“So gazing, he stood until her camel and those of many others had
passed and turned beyond a curve of the street. Then bethinking
himself that he might never more see her, he awoke and ran after,
throwing one citizen and another to the right and the left. When at
last he came up to the camel of his fair one, guarded by eunuchs
and slaves, he drew one aside and said softly: ‘Friend, be not
wrathful and I will give thee a hundred dinars in gold do thou, within
such time as thou canst, report to me at the bazaar of Yussuf, the
rug-merchant, who it is that rides within this houdah. Ask thou only
for Abou. No more will I ask.’ The slave, noting his fine robes and the
green-and-silver turban, thought him to be no less than a noble, and
replied: ‘Young master, be not overcurious. Remember the
vengeance of the caliph.... ‘Yet dinars have I to give.’... ‘I will yet
come to thee.’
“Abou was enraptured by even so little as this, and yet dejected
also by the swift approach and departure of joy. ‘For what am I now?’
he asked himself. ‘But a moment since, I was whole and one who
could find delight in all things that were given me to do; but now I am
as one who is lost and knows not his way.’”
“Ay-ee,” sighed Azad Bakht, the barber, “I have had that same
feeling more than once. It is something that one may not overcome.”
“Al Tzoud, in the desert—” began Parfi, but he was interrupted by
cries of “Peace—Peace!”
“Thereafter, for all of a moon,” went on Gazzar, “Abou was as one
in a dream, wandering here and there drearily, bethinking him how
he was ever to know more of the face that had appeared to him
through the curtains of the houdah. And whether the driver of the
camel would ever return. As day after day passed and there was no
word, he grew thin and began to despair and to grow weary of life. At
last there came to his shop an aged man, long of beard and dusty of
garb, who inquired for Abou. And being shown him said: ‘I would
speak with thee alone.’ And when Abou drew him aside he said:
‘Dost thou recall the procession of the caliph’s daughter to Ish-Pari in
the mountains beyond Azol?’ And Abou answered, ‘Ay, by Allah!’
‘And dost thou recall one of whom thou madest inquiry?’ ‘Aye,’
replied Abou, vastly stirred. ‘I asked who it was that was being borne
aloft in state.’ ‘And what was the price for that knowledge?’ ‘A
hundred dinars.’ ‘Keep thy dinars—or, better yet, give them to me
that I may give them to the poor, for I bring thee news. She who was
in the houdah was none other than the Princess Yanee, daughter of
the caliph and heir to all his realm. But keep thou thy counsel and all
thought of this visit and let no one know of thy inquiry. There are
many who watch, and death may yet be thy portion and mine. Yet,
since thou art as thou art, young and without knowledge of life, here
is a spray of the myrtles of Ish-Pari—but thou art to think no further
on anything thou hast seen or heard. And thou dost not—death!’ He
made the sign of three fingers to the forehead and the neck and
gave Abou the spray, receiving in return the gold.”
“Marhallah!” cried Soudi. “How pleasant it is to think of so much
gold!”
“Yea,” added Haifa, “there is that about great wealth and beauty
and comfort that is soothing to the heart of every man.”
“Yet for ten more anna,” began Gazzar, “the price of a bed in the
stall of a camel, how much more glorious could I make it—the
sweetness of the love that might be, the wonder of the skill of Abou
—anna, anna—but five more, that I may take up this thread with
great heart.”
“Jackal!” screamed Ajeeb fiercely. “Thou barkst for but one thing—
anna. But now thou saidst if thou hadst but ten more, and by now
thou hast a hundred. On with thy tale!”
“Reremouse!” said Chudi. “Thou art worse than thy Yussuf
himself!” And none gave an anna more.
“Knowing that the myrtle was from the princess,” went on Gazzar
wearily, “and that henceforth he might seek but durst not even so
much as breathe of what he thought or knew, he sighed and returned
to his place in the bazaar.
“But now, Yussuf, returning not long after from a far journey, came
to Abou with a bold thought. For it related to no other thing than the
great treasury of the caliph, which stood in the heart of the city
before the public market, and was sealed and guarded and built of
stone and carried the wealth of an hundred provinces. Besides, it
was now the time of the taking of tithes throughout the caliphate, as
Yussuf knew, and the great treasury was filled to the roof, or so it
was said, with golden dinars. It was a four-square building of heavy
stone, with lesser squares superimposed one above the other after
the fashion of pyramids. On each level was a parapet, and upon
each side of every parapet as well as on the ground below there
walked two guards, each first away from the centre of their side to
the end and then back, meeting at the centre to reverse and return.
And on each side and on each level were two other guards. No two
of these, of any level or side, were permitted to arrive at the centre or
the ends of their parapet at the same time, as those of the parapets
above or below, lest any portion of the treasury be left unguarded.
There was but one entrance, which was upon the ground and facing
the market. And through this no one save the caliph or the caliph’s
treasurer or his delegated aides might enter. The guards ascended
and descended via a guarded stair. “Anna, O friends,” pleaded
Gazzar once more, “for now comes the wonder of the robbing of the
great treasury—the wit and subtlety of Abou—and craft and yet
confusion of the treasurer and the Caliph—anna!—A few miserable
anna!”
“Jackal!” shouted Azad Bakht, getting up. “Thou robbest worse
than any robber! Hast thou a treasury of thine own that thou hopest
to fill?”
“Give him no more anna,” called Feruz stoutly. “There is not an
anna’s worth in all his maunderings.”
“Be not unkind, O friends,” pleaded Gazzar soothingly. “As thou
seest, I have but twenty annas—not the price of a meal, let alone of
a bed. But ten—but—five—and I proceed.”
“Come, then, here they are,” cried Al Hadjaz, casting down four;
and Zad-el-Din and Haifa and Chudi each likewise added one, and
Gazzar swiftly gathered them up and continued:
“Yussuf, who had long contemplated this wondrous storehouse,
had also long racked his wits as to how it might be entered and a
portion of the gold taken. Also he had counseled with many of his
pupils, but in vain. No one had solved the riddle for him. Yet one day
as he and Abou passed the treasury on their way to the mosque for
the look of honor, Yussuf said to Abou: ‘Bethink thee, my son; here is
a marvelous building, carefully constructed and guarded. How
wouldst thou come to the store of gold within?’ Abou, whose
thoughts were not upon the building but upon Yanee, betrayed no
look of surprise at the request, so accustomed was he to having
difficult and fearsome matters put before him, but gazed upon it so
calmly that Yussuf exclaimed: ‘How now? Hast thou a plan?’ ‘Never
have I given it a thought, O Yussuf,’ replied Abou; ‘but if it is thy wish,
let us go and look more closely.’
“Accordingly, through the crowds of merchants and strangers and
donkeys and the veiled daughters of the harem and the idlers
generally, they approached and surveyed it. At once Abou observed
the movement of the guards, saw that as the guards of one tier were
walking away from each other those of the tiers above or below were
walking toward each other. And although the one entrance to the
treasury was well guarded still there was a vulnerable spot, which
was the crowning cupola, also four-square and flat, where none
walked or looked. ‘It is difficult,’ he said after a time, ‘but it can be
done. Let me think.’
“Accordingly, after due meditation and without consulting Yussuf,
he disguised himself as a dispenser of fodder for camels, secured a
rope of silk, four bags and an iron hook. Returning to his home he
caused the hook to be covered with soft cloth so that its fall would
make no sound, then fastened it to one end of the silken cord and
said to Yussuf: ‘Come now and let us try this.’ Yussuf, curious as to
what Abou could mean, went with him and together they tried their
weight upon it to see if it would hold. Then Abou, learning by
observation the hour at night wherein the guards were changed, and
choosing a night without moon or stars, disguised himself and
Yussuf as watchmen of the city and went to the treasury. Though it
was as well guarded as ever they stationed themselves in an alley
nearby. And Abou, seeing a muleteer approaching and wishing to
test his disguise, ordered him away and he went. Then Abou,
watching the guards who were upon the ground meet and turn, and
seeing those upon the first tier still in the distance but pacing toward
the centre, gave a word to Yussuf and they ran forward, threw the
hook over the rim of the first tier and then drew themselves up
quickly, hanging there above the lower guards until those of the first
tier met and turned. Then they climbed over the wall and repeated
this trick upon the guards of the second tier, the third and fourth, until
at last they were upon the roof of the cupola where they lay flat.
Then Abou, who was prepared, unscrewed one of the plates of the
dome, hooked the cord over the side and whispered: ‘Now, master,
which?’ Yussuf, ever cautious in his life, replied: ‘Go thou and report.’
“Slipping down the rope, Abou at last came upon a great store of
gold and loose jewels piled in heaps, from which he filled the bags
he had brought. These he fastened to the rope and ascended.
Yussuf, astounded by the sight of so much wealth, was for making
many trips, but Abou, detecting a rift where shone a star, urged that
they cease for the night. Accordingly, after having fastened these at
their waists and the plate to the roof as it had been, they descended
as they had come.”
“A rare trick,” commented Zad-el-Din.
“A treasury after mine own heart,” supplied Al Hadjaz.
“Thus for three nights,” continued Gazzar, fearing to cry for more
anna, “they succeeded in robbing the treasury, taking from it many
thousands of dinars and jewels. On the fourth night, however, a
guard saw them hurrying away and gave the alarm. At that, Abou
and Yussuf turned here and there in strange ways, Yussuf betaking
himself to his home, while Abou fled to his master’s shop. Once
there he threw off the disguise of a guard and reappeared as an
aged vendor of rugs and was asked by the pursuing guards if he had
seen anybody enter his shop. Abou motioned them to the rear of the
shop, where they were bound and removed by Yussuf’s robber
slaves. Others of the guards, however, had betaken themselves to
their captain and reported, who immediately informed the treasurer.
Torches were brought and a search made, and then he repaired to
the caliph. The latter, much astonished that no trace of the entrance
or departure of the thieves could be found, sent for a master thief
recently taken in crime and sentenced to be gibbeted, and said to
him:
“‘Wouldst thou have thy life?’
“‘Aye, if thy grace will yield it.’
“‘Look you,’ said the caliph. ‘Our treasury has but now been
robbed and there is no trace. Solve me this mystery within the moon,
and thy life, though not thy freedom, is thine.’
“‘O Protector of the Faithful,’ said the thief, ‘do thou but let me see
within the treasury.’
“And so, chained and in care of the treasurer himself and the
caliph, he was taken to the treasury. Looking about him he at length
saw a faint ray penetrating through the plate that had been loosed in
the dome.
“‘O Guardian of the Faithful,’ said the thief wisely and hopefully,
‘do thou place a cauldron of hot pitch under this dome and then see
if the thief is not taken.’
“Thereupon the caliph did as advised, the while the treasury was
resealed and fresh guards set to watch and daily the pitch was
renewed, only Abou and Yussuf came not. Yet in due time, the
avarice of Yussuf growing, they chose another night in the dark of
the second moon and repaired once more to the treasury, where, so
lax already had become the watch, they mounted to the dome. Abou,
upon removing the plate, at once detected the odor of pitch and
advised Yussuf not to descend, but he would none of this. The
thought of the gold and jewels into which on previous nights he had
dipped urged him, and he descended. However, when he neared the
gold he reached for it, but instead of gold he seized the scalding
pitch, which when it burned, caused him to loose his hold and fall.
He cried to Abou: ‘I burn in hot pitch. Help me!’ Abou descended and
took the hand but felt it waver and grow slack. Knowing that death
was at hand and that should Yussuf’s body be found not only himself
but Yussuf’s wife and slaves would all suffer, he drew his scimitar,
which was ever at his belt, and struck off the head. Fastening this to
his belt, he reascended the rope, replaced the plate and carefully
made his way from the treasury. He then went to the house of Yussuf
and gave the head to Yussuf’s wife, cautioning her to secrecy.
“But the caliph, coming now every day with his treasurer to look at
the treasury, was amazed to find it sealed and yet the headless body
within. Knowing not how to solve the mystery of this body, he
ordered the thief before him, who advised him to hang the body in
the market-place and set guards to watch any who might come to
mourn or spy. Accordingly, the headless body was gibbeted and set
up in the market-place where Abou, passing afar, recognized it.
Fearing that Mirza, the wife of Yussuf, who was of the tribe of the
Veddi, upon whom it is obligatory that they mourn in the presence of
the dead, should come to mourn here, he hastened to caution her.
‘Go thou not thither,’ he said; ‘or, if thou must, fill two bowls with milk
and go as a seller of it. If thou must weep drop one of the bowls as if
by accident and make as if thou wept over that.’ Mirza accordingly
filled two bowls and passing near the gibbet in the public square
dropped one and thereupon began weeping as her faith demanded.
The guards, noting her, thought nothing—‘for here is one,’ said they,
‘so poor that she cries because of her misfortune.’ But the caliph,
calling for the guards at the end of the day to report to himself and
the master thief, inquired as to what they had seen. ‘We saw none,’
said the chief of the guard, ‘save an old woman so poor that she
wept for the breaking of a bowl!’ ‘Dolts!’ cried the master thief. ‘Pigs!
Did I not say take any who came to mourn? She is the widow of the
thief. Try again. Scatter gold pieces under the gibbet and take any
that touch them.’
“The guards scattered gold, as was commanded, and took their
positions. Abou, pleased that the widow had been able to mourn and
yet not be taken, came now to see what more might be done by the
caliph. Seeing the gold he said: ‘It is with that he wishes to tempt.’ At
once his pride in his skill was aroused and he determined to take
some of the gold and yet not be taken. To this end he disguised
himself as a ragged young beggar and one weak of wit, and with the
aid of an urchin younger than himself and as wretched he began to
play about the square, running here and there as if in some game.
But before doing this he had fastened to the sole of his shoes a thick
gum so that the gold might stick. The guards, deceived by the
seeming youth and foolishness of Abou and his friend, said: ‘These
are but a child and a fool. They take no gold.’ But by night, coming to
count the gold, there were many pieces missing and they were sore
afraid. When they reported to the caliph that night he had them
flogged and new guards placed in their stead. Yet again he
consulted with the master thief, who advised him to load a camel
with enticing riches and have it led through the streets of the city by
seeming strangers who were the worse for wine. ‘This thief who
eludes thee will be tempted by these riches and seek to rob them.’
“Soon after it was Abou, who, prowling about the market-place,
noticed this camel laden with great wealth and led by seeming
strangers. But because it was led to no particular market he thought
that it must be of the caliph. He decided to take this also, for there
was in his blood that which sought contest, and by now he wished
the caliph, because of Yanee, to fix his thought upon him. He filled a
skin with the best of wine, into which he placed a drug of the dead
Yussuf’s devising, and dressing himself as a shabby vendor, set
forth. When he came to the street in which was the camel and saw
how the drivers idled and gaped, he began to cry, ‘Wine for a para! A
drink of wine for a para!’ The drivers drank and found it good,
following Abou as he walked, drinking and chaffering with him and
laughing at his dumbness, until they were within a door of the house
of Mirza, the wife of the dead Yussuf, where was a gate giving into a
secret court. Pausing before this until the wine should take effect, he
suddenly began to gaze upward and then to point. The drivers
looked but saw nothing. And the drug taking effect they fell down;
whereupon Abou quickly led the camel into the court and closed the
gate. When he returned and found the drivers still asleep he shaved
off half the hair of their heads and their beards, then disappeared
and changed his dress and joined those who were now laughing at
the strangers in their plight, for they had awakened and were running
here and there in search of a camel and its load and unaware of their
grotesque appearance. Mirza, in order to remove all traces, had the
camel killed and the goods distributed. A careful woman and
housewifely, she had caused all the fat to be boiled from the meat
and preserved in jars, it having a medicinal value. The caliph, having
learned how it had gone with his camel, now meditated anew on how
this great thief, who mocked him and who was of great wit, might be
taken. Calling the master thief and others in council he recited the
entire tale and asked how this prince of thieves might be caught. ‘Try
but one more ruse, O master,’ said the master thief, who was now
greatly shaken and feared for his life. ‘Do thou send an old woman
from house to house asking for camel’s grease. Let her plead that it
is for one who is ill. It may be that, fearing detection, the camel has
been slain and the fat preserved. If any is found, mark the door of
that house with grease and take all within.’
“Accordingly an old woman was sent forth chaffering of pain. In
due time she came to the house of Mirza, who gave her of the
grease, and when she left she made a cross upon the door. When
she returned to the caliph he called his officers and guards and all
proceeded toward the marked door. In the meantime Abou, having
returned and seen the mark, inquired of Mirza as to what it meant.
When told of the old woman’s visit he called for a bowl of the camel’s
grease and marked the doors in all the nearest streets. The caliph,
coming into the street and seeing the marks, was both enraged and
filled with awe and admiration for of such wisdom he had never
known. ‘I give thee thy life,’ he said to the master thief, ‘for now I see
that thou art as nothing to this one. He is shrewd beyond the wisdom
of caliphs and thieves. Let us return,’ and he retraced his steps to
the palace, curious as to the nature and soul of this one who could
so easily outwit him.
“Time went on and the caliph one day said to his vizier: ‘I have
been thinking of the one who robbed the treasury and my camel and
the gold from under the gibbet. Such an one is wise above his day
and generation and worthy of a better task. What think you? Shall I
offer him a full pardon so that he may appear and be taken—or think
you he will appear?’ ‘Do but try it, O Commander of the Faithful,’ said
the vizier. A proclamation was prepared and given to the criers, who
announced that it was commanded by the caliph that, should the
great thief appear on the market-place at a given hour and yield
himself up, a pardon full and free would be granted him and gifts of
rare value heaped upon him. Yet it was not thus that the caliph
intended to do.
“Now, Abou, hearing of this and being despondent over his life and
the loss of Yanee and the death of Yussuf and wishing to advantage
himself in some way other than by thievery, bethought him how he
might accept this offer of the caliph and declare himself and yet,
supposing it were a trap to seize him, escape. Accordingly he
awaited the time prescribed, and when the public square was filled
with guards instructed to seize him if he appeared he donned the
costume of a guard and appeared among the soldiers dressed as all
the others. The caliph was present to witness the taking, and when
the criers surrounding him begged the thief to appear and be
pardoned, Abou called out from the thick of the throng: ‘Here I am, O
Caliph! Amnesty!’ Whereupon the caliph, thinking that now surely he
would be taken, cried: ‘Seize him! Seize him!’ But Abou, mingling
with the others, also cried: ‘Seize him! Seize him!’ and looked here
and there as did the others. The guards, thinking him a guard,
allowed him to escape, and the caliph, once more enraged and
chagrined, retired. Once within his chambers he called to him his
chief advisers and had prepared the following proclamation:
“‘BE IT KNOWN TO ALL

“‘Since within the boundaries of our realm there exists
one so wise that despite our commands and best efforts
he is still able to work his will against ours and to elude
our every effort to detect him, be it known that from having
been amazed and disturbed we are now pleased and
gratified that one so skilful of wit and resourceful should
exist in our realm. To make plain that our appreciation is
now sincere and our anger allayed it is hereby covenant
with him and with all our people, to whom he may appeal if
we fail in our word, that if he will now present himself in
person and recount to one whom we shall appoint his
various adventures, it will be our pleasure to signally
distinguish him above others. Upon corroboration by us of
that which he tells, he shall be given riches, our royal
friendship and a councillor’s place in our council. I have
said it.
“‘Yianko I.’
“This was signed by the caliph and cried in the public places. Abou
heard all but because of the previous treachery of the caliph he was
now unwilling to believe that this was true. At the same time he was
pleased to know that he was now held in great consideration, either
for good or ill, by the caliph and his advisers, and bethought him that
if it were for ill perhaps by continuing to outwit the caliph he might
still succeed in winning his favor and so to a further knowledge of
Yanee. To this end he prepared a reply which he posted in the public
square, reading:
“‘PROCLAMATION BY THE ONE WHOM

THE CALIPH SEEKS
“‘Know, O Commander of the Faithful, that the one
whom the caliph seeks is here among his people free from
harm. He respects the will of the caliph and his good
intentions, but is restrained by fear. He therefore requests
that instead of being commanded to reveal himself the
caliph devise a way and appoint a time where in darkness
and without danger to himself he may behold the face of
the one to whom he is to reveal himself. It must be that
none are present to seize him.
“‘The One Whom the Caliph Seeks.’
“Notice of this reply being brought to the caliph he forthwith took

counsel with his advisers and decided that since it was plain the thief
might not otherwise be taken, recourse must be had to a device that
might be depended upon to lure him. Behind a certain window in the
palace wall known as ‘The Whispering Window,’ and constantly used
by all who were in distress or had suffered a wrong which owing to
the craft of others there was no hope of righting, sat at stated times
and always at night, the caliph’s own daughter Yanee, whose tender
heart and unseeking soul were counted upon to see to it that the
saddest of stories came to the ears of the caliph. It was by this
means that the caliph now hoped to capture the thief. To insure that
the thief should come it was publicly announced that should any one
that came be able to tell how the treasury had been entered and the
gold pieces taken from under the gibbet or the camel stolen and
killed, he was to be handed a bag of many dinars and a pardon in
writing; later, should he present himself, he would be made a
councillor of state.
“Struck by this new proclamation and the possibility of once more
beholding the princess, Abou decided to match his skill against that
of the caliph. He disguised himself as a vendor of tobacco and
approached the window, peered through the lattice which screened it
and said: ‘O daughter of the great caliph, behold one who is in
distress. I am he whom the caliph seeks, either to honor or slay, I
know not which. Also I am he who, on one of thy journeys to the
mountain of Azol and thy palace at Ish-Pari thou beheldest while
passing the door of my father’s rug-market, for thou didst lift the
curtains of thy houdah and also thy veil and didst deign to smile at
me. And I have here,’ and he touched his heart, ‘a faded spray of the
myrtles of Ish-Pari, or so it has been told me, over which I weep.’
“Yanee, shocked that she should be confronted with the great thief
whom her father sought and that he should claim to be the beautiful
youth she so well remembered, and yet fearing this to be some new
device of the vizier or of the women of the harem, who might have
heard of her strange love and who ever prayed evil against all who
were younger or more beautiful than they, she was at a loss how to
proceed. Feeling the need of wisdom and charity, she said: ‘How
sayst thou? Thou are the great thief whom my father seeks and yet
the son of a rug-merchant on whom I smiled? Had I ever smiled on a
thief, which Allah forbid, would I not remember it and thee?
Therefore, if it be as thou sayst, permit it that I should have a light
brought that I may behold thee. And if thou art the rug-merchant’s
son or the great thief, or both, and wishest thy pardon and the bag of
dinars which here awaits thee, thou must relate to me how it was the
treasury was entered, how the gold was taken from under the gibbet
and my father’s camel from its drivers.’ ‘Readily enough, O Princess,’
replied Abou, ‘only if I am thus to reveal myself to thee must I not
know first that thou art the maiden whom I saw? For she was kind as
she was fair and would do no man an ill. Therefore if thou wilt lower
thy veil, as thou didst on the day of thy departure, so that I may see,
I will lift my hood so that thou mayst know that I lie not.’
“The princess, troubled to think that the one whom she had so
much admired might indeed be the great thief whose life her father
sought, and yet wavering between duty to her father and loyalty to
her ideal, replied: ‘So will I, but upon one condition: should it be that
thou art he upon whom thou sayst I looked with favor and yet he who
also has committed these great crimes in my father’s kingdom, know
that thou mayst take thy pardon and thy gold and depart; but only
upon the condition that never more wilt thou trouble either me or my
father. For I cannot bear to think that I have looked with favor upon
one who, however fair, is yet a thief.’
“At this Abou shrank inwardly and a great sorrow fell upon him; for
now, as at the death of Yussuf, he saw again the horror of his way.
Yet feeling the justice of that which was said, he answered: ‘Yea, O
Princess, so will I, for I have long since resolved to be done with evil,
which was not of my own making, and will trouble thee no more.
Should this one glance show me that beloved face over which I have
dreamed, I will pass hence, never more to return, for I will not dwell
in a realm where another may dwell with thee in love. I am, alas, the
great thief and will tell thee how I came by the gold under the gibbet
and in thy father’s treasury; but I will not take his gold. Only will I
accept his pardon sure and true. For though born a thief I am no
longer one.’ The princess, struck by the nobility of these words as
well as by his manner, said sadly, fearing the light would reveal the
end of her dreams: ‘Be it so. But if thou art indeed he thou wilt tell
me how thou camest to be a thief, for I cannot believe that one of
whom I thought so well can do so ill.’
“Abou, sadly punished for his deeds, promised, and when the
torch was brought the princess lifted her veil. Then it was that Abou
again saw the face upon which his soul had dwelt and which had
caused him so much unrest. He was now so moved that he could not
speak. He drew from his face its disguise and confronted her. And
Yanee, seeing for the second time the face of the youth upon whom
her memory had dwelt these many days, her heart misgave her and
she dared not speak. Instead she lowered her veil and sat in silence,
the while Abou recounted the history of his troubled life and early
youth, how he could recall nothing of it save that he had been beaten
and trained in evil ways until he knew naught else; also of how he
came to rob the treasury, and how the deeds since of which the
caliph complained had been in part due to his wish to protect the
widow of Yussuf and to defeat the skill of the caliph. The princess,
admiring his skill and beauty in spite of his deeds, was at a loss how
to do. For despite his promise and his proclamation, the caliph had
exacted of her that in case Abou appeared she was to aid in his
capture, and this she could not do. At last she said: ‘Go, and come
no more, for I dare not look upon thee, and the caliph wishes thee
only ill. Yet let me tell my father that thou wilt trouble him no more,’ to
which Abou replied: ‘Know, O Princess, thus will I do.’ Then opening
the lattice, Yanee handed him the false pardon and the gold, which
Abou would not take. Instead he seized and kissed her hand
tenderly and then departed.
“Yanee returned to her father and recounted to him the story of the
robbery of the treasury and all that followed, but added that she had
not been able to obtain his hand in order to have him seized
because he refused to reach for the gold. The caliph, once more
chagrined by Abou’s cleverness in obtaining his written pardon
without being taken, now meditated anew on how he might be
trapped. His daughter having described Abou as both young and
handsome, the caliph thought that perhaps the bait of his daughter
might win him to capture and now prepared the following and last
pronunciamento, to wit:
“‘TO THE PEOPLE OF BAGHDAD

“‘Having been defeated in all our contests with the one
who signs himself The One Whom the Caliph Seeks, and
yet having extended to him a full pardon signed by our
own hand and to which has been affixed the caliphate
seal, we now deign to declare that if this wisest of

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Power and Pleasure: Court Life under

King John, 1199-1216 Hugh M. Thomas

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

10 Power and Pleasure

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.

12 Power and Pleasure

14 Power and Pleasure

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

18 Power and Pleasure

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.

24 Power and Pleasure

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

“‘BE IT KNOWN TO ALL

“‘PROCLAMATION BY THE ONE WHOM

“Notice of this reply being brought to the caliph he forthwith took

“‘TO THE PEOPLE OF BAGHDAD

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Appendix 1: Royal Hunting Expenses 231

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