A quick post as I sit killing time in a café. It's Maundy Thursday. The queen has been distributing alms to the deserving poor, and several newspapers have remarked upon the fact that this act of charity was introduced by King John, who is usually regarded as a bit of a rotter. An article from History Today Magazine, written in 1990, is available to read free online.
The problem comes in the middle of the article, where we are told that the evidence for John's distribution of alms to the poor, a Mise Roll of 1210, is 'the earliest of the personal expense accounts to survive. In the absence of older records of this nature we cannot prove that King John, or some other English monarch, did not give alms on Maundy Thursday before 1210. All we can say with certainty is that it is the first known occasion.'
This is a problem with John's reign in general. From his accession in 1199, his writing office, or chancery, began keeping copies of his letters and charters by enrolling them, and most of these rolls still survive today in the National Archives. They were published in the nineteenth century, so you can download most of them for free. (Coincidentally, I'll be talking about King John and the beginnings of royal bureaucracy tomorrow on The Verb on BBC Radio 3).
The survival of this evidence is wonderful. It means we can see inside John's administration in far greater detail than is possible for any of his predecessors. We can reconstruct his itinerary for more or less every day of his reign, and see who was at his court. We can see what he ate, what he wore, the gifts he gave and the books he read. In some royal letters, we even get flashes of what seems to be the king's own personality. It is difficult to imagine a chancery clerk, for example, deciding to say to the mariners of the Welsh coast that if they failed to turn out for a campaign as commanded, 'we will have your bodies hanged, and those of the owners of your ships, and all your possessions taken for our own use without compensation.' The reasonable presumption is we are hearing the authentic voice of the king himself.
The problem is that, presented with this mountain of evidence, the temptation is to assume that these things are happening for the first time. In most cases, however, the likeliest scenario is that we are simply seeing these things for the first time. The Royal Maundy in 1210 is a case in point. Another good example is the sudden appearance of information about the building of ships and dockyards, which led nineteenth-century historians to declare that King John was the founder of the Royal Navy. As has been shown by careful consideration of the scrappy evidence before his accession, that credit properly belongs to his elder brother and predecessor, Richard the Lionheart.
'Attention to documentary evidence,' concludes the author of the History Today article, 'saves us from the simplistic notion that John was a bad man and worse monarch'. No it doesn't. The documentary evidence can't be used to overturn the chorus of disapproval from contemporary chroniclers, both clerical and lay, who thought John was a terrible tyrant and an awful human being. 'He was a very bad man', wrote the Anonymous of Bethune, who offers the best informed account of the king's last years, 'more cruel than all others... He was brim-full of evil qualities'. The year that we have the first evidence of the king (or rather, the clerks of his chapel, who had their own routine and momentum) distributing alms to the poor on Maundy Thursday is 1210. In the autumn of that same year, John captured Matilda de Briouze and her son William and starved them to death.
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