Places and Spaces

This chapter studies royal residences, reactions to various landscapes, and ceremonial practices that formed part of royal itineration. King John and his court travelled constantly, meaning that court life was not centred on a small number of palaces but on multiple castles, palaces, and other residences. Until recently, work on medieval royal residences focused largely on castles and their military functions, but now scholars are studying domestic aspects, including in castles, and the designed landscapes that surrounded castles and palaces. This chapter applies the new approach to John’s reign. In particular, it studies attitudes towards landscapes, both designed landscapes and the less heavily manipulated environments in which the court hunted. Because of the king’s travels, the court spent much time on the road, and the chapter also studies certain associated ceremonies, such as processions to greet the king and formal entries into important towns, also known as the adventus.

Religious Practices at Court

John oversaw a surprisingly active religious life at court that nonetheless failed to create an aura of pious kingship for him. Despite his reputation for impiety, recent work has shown that John carried out the religious practices expected of kings in his day, such as honouring saints’ relics, giving alms, and supporting religious houses. John’s religious activities were perforce generally court activities. Kingship was in part a religious office and religious activities at court were partly designed to project an image of sacral kingship. The chapter explores why the court’s many religious activities failed so miserably to improve John’s religious reputation and discusses the broader relationship between power, pleasure, and piety.

Luxury and Material Culture at Court

Material goods, above all luxuries, abounded at court. This chapter describes some key luxury goods at court, including precious textiles, gold and silver plate, and jewellery, and analyses their importance. Precious goods, above all the heavily symbolic royal regalia, underscored royal power. A luxurious material culture emphasized both unity and hierarchy at court. Gifts of precious items helped the king build loyalty and enhanced his reputation for generosity. Yet pleasure too was crucial to the love of luxury at court. People made up the court but the influence of objects on shaping court life should not be underestimated.

King John and the Wielding of Soft Power

Drawing on earlier parts of the book, this chapter focuses on the court as a source of soft power and investigates John’s effectiveness in wielding that power. Much recent scholarship on the early Middle Ages investigates ritual, gestures, and the display of emotions, activities that may be grouped together as symbolic communication. Major themes will be how John used various forms of symbolic communication to build power and how his enemies sought to contest his efforts. Gift exchange and its impact on power relations is another subject. The chapter then challenges the assumption that the rise of administrative kingship made traditional forms of soft power obsolete, arguing that increased bureaucratic and financial capacity allowed kings to employ soft power more effectively. However, though John and his officials created a magnificent court, well designed to enhance soft power, John, through his own blunders and desire for self-gratification, forfeited many of the advantages.

Hunting and Falconry

Hunting and falconry were important sources of both power and pleasure. King John had a huge hunting establishment, with hundreds of hunting dogs, scores of birds of prey, and dozens of huntsmen, falconers, and assistants. The costs were high, equivalent to the revenues drawn from the royal forests. Yet earlier scholars, though they often discussed royal forests in detail, generally mentioned the king’s love of hunting only in passing. The chapter describes John’s hunting establishment, compiles its costs, and analyses its purposes. Hunting was an important source of soft power, showing the king’s wealth, magnificence, and capacity for violence. Yet John’s enemies used his preference for hunting over the tournament, and allegedly over warfare, to contest his power and undermine his reputation. Hunting was also for pleasure, as many contemporaries emphasized, and the production of pleasure at court was as important as the production of power.

Aspects of Court Culture

This chapter explores the importance of various court activities for which less evidence survives. The king sponsored musicians, entertainers, and learned magistri. He owned fine animals of various sorts, most notably a lion, and surprising numbers of books. He indulged in games and gambling, paid for the dubbing of new knights and other chivalric practices, and even engaged in the occasional romantic gesture. He was also a notorious sexual predator according to chroniclers writing not long after his death. Many of these aspects of court life enhanced John’s reputation and provided him soft power. Often these activities produced power because they produced pleasure among the powerful who attended court. However, John’s pursuit of sexual gratification from noblewomen, sometimes through coercive means, produced a strong backlash that helped put his rule in jeopardy.

Introduction

This introductory chapter lays out the historiography and notes the major questions in the field. The chapter begins with the historiography. It then describes the book’s main goals: (1) to reconstruct life at King John’s court; (2) to investigate how John’s court generated soft power for the king and how his enemies contested that power; (3) to explore the production of pleasure at the court. There follows a brief discussion of the overall administrative structure of the court, with an emphasis on its ceaseless itineration, and a description of the sources used in the book, particularly the royal records. The chapter ends with brief comments on the organization of the book.

John’s Court in a Comparative Context

How did John’s court compare to those of other rulers in his own period and with earlier and later courts? Variation in the quality and quantity of sources makes precision difficult. Nonetheless, what we know about court culture in other European countries in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries suggests that many aspects of court culture were similar across a wide range of territories. Indeed, one can even find similarities with Byzantine and Islamic courts. The evidence also indicates a great deal of continuity across the long historic arc of court culture in Western Europe. However, this continuity was combined with gradual but cumulatively radical change, so that by the early modern period, courts had become much larger and more complex, and very different in other respects as well.

Conclusion

The splendour of John’s court may have fallen short of those of the early modern French kings at Versailles or his own Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverian successors, but he presided over an impressive establishment. He had an extraordinary hunting establishment, with scores of men; dozens of highly trained birds of prey; hundreds of hunting dogs; and a large network of hunting lodges, parks, and forests. His court boasted a luxurious material culture, with rich stores of gold and silver plate, hundreds of pieces of jewellery studded with gems, and exotic and costly textiles. Though some aspects of court culture left fewer traces in the surviving records, enough survives to show the patronage of art and music, entertainment and spectacle, and books and learning. John also sponsored chivalric practices such as heraldry, and though he was a notable sexual predator, the influence of new ideas about love and romance was not entirely absent from his court. Despite John’s reputation for impiety, he carried out the religious activities expected of a king, and religion was an integral part of court life. The royal records reveal the ongoing efforts to provide the court with good and often expensive food and wine throughout the year, and John was particularly admired for his generous distribution of robes, food, and drink at his feasts. A significant portion of the court’s time was spent on the road, but this too was an important cultural site for court life and display, particularly in formal processions and royal entries, in which peacock hats, lavish decoration on horses, and lances gilded with gold might make an appearance. The constant itineration of the court meant that there was no one great palace on which John lavished resources, but he still invested heavily in his castles, palaces, and hunting lodges, and on the landscapes around them. Court culture was already highly developed in the early thirteenth century and surviving sources from other realms show this was true not only of the Plantagenet dynasty....

Food and Feasting

Chapter 6 explores the purposes of fine food and elaborate feasting at court. John was noted by contemporaries for holding magnificent feasts, and his government went to great lengths to provide the best possible food and drink for the king and his close followers, including special bread, plentiful meat, spices, and imported wine, the last of which came increasingly from the Bordeaux region. Feasting was a key part of court life, featuring entertainment, the distribution of expensive clothing and other gifts, and religious activities as well as food and drink. Magnificent feasts provided John with a reputation for wealth and generosity and, because the manners of the day emphasized deference, helped reinforce his authority. Feasting was, of course, also a source of pleasure, but some of the foods consumed would displease modern people, reminding us that if gustatory pleasure is universal, it can also be culturally specific.