Reclaiming John from the Monks

As J.C. Holt once put it, the “key-word” in any study of John’s reign is “inconsistency. No student of King John would wish to exclude it; it is appropriate, but it is wonderfully convenient, too, for it permits and demands contradiction and paradox.” ¹ Whereas modern historians have come to terms with and embraced the contradictions and ambivalence of John’s personality and reign, the first historiographers of his reign were thirteenth-century monks who had little taste for paradox. John’s portrait in their narratives is strikingly monochromatic. There is no need to revisit here the well-established facts about the devastating roles played by Roger of Wendover and his successor Matthew Paris in writing the St Albans Chronicle (as well as a number of other authors such as Ralph of Coggeshall or the Barnwell Chronicler) who relayed to future generations a much maligned portrait of the Angevin king at constant loggerheads with his clergy, the pope, his barons, and Philip Augustus of France. ² Sixteenth-century English chroniclers, in some cases due to a reforming zeal, but even more thanks to their period’s developing critical approach to historical sources, did much to excavate a historically nuanced yet ambivalent portrait of John and his reign’s troubles with each successive work, and to point out the flaws and blatant bias of the thirteenth-century chronicles. Yet, as V.H. Galbraith, one of the leading mid-twentieth-century historians who began the work of revising the historical presentation of John’s reign, points out, the Tudor historiographers “had outgrown medieval prejudices … only to substitute for them a new adoration of monarchy” while remaining “uneasy about the hell-deserving sinner in the background,” thus, essentially, going “from one extreme to the other” and ultimately failing in their efforts to “rehabilitate John.” The time for “a really historical judgment,” according to Galbraith, had not yet come, and it led to the return of the “old views” in subsequent centuries. ³ To be sure, Holinshed and his contemporaries did not practice the scholarly rigor of twentieth-century historians, nor did they consult the myriad documents accessible to modern scholars, but it is important to note that in many ways their conclusions anticipated the critical assessments of modern scholars like Galbraith, Holt, Warren, and Ralph Turner.