King John and Religion by Paul Webster (review)

This book makes a timely appearance, considering all of the recent attention given to King John as part of the Magna Carta 800th anniversary celebrations during 2015. It is well known that John’s reputation—as one of the worst of English monarchs (and a thoroughly ‘bad thing’)—is largely the result of negative opinions expressed by chroniclers in his own day. Modern scholarship has gone some way to challenging this stereotype but John continues to suffer, perhaps unfairly, from the accumulated weight of centuries of prejudice. A strong assumption remains in place that his grudging acceptance and subsequent rejection of Magna Carta represent some sort of absolutist stumbling block impeding history’s inevitable progress toward liberty, democracy, human rights, and other assorted forms of feel-good fluffiness, which in reality have little or no connection to the early thirteenth century. Without intending to ignore the king’s many faults, Paul Webster’s study offers a more balanced view by showing John as essentially a man of his time in the sphere of religious observance. When it came to piety, or at least to its public display, John was much less the exceptional ogre and much more the willing traditionalist following the path laid down by his family members and royal predecessors.

Chapters 1 to 5 examine in detail the evidence for John’s religious activities including attendance at mass, endowment and patronage of religious establishments (notably Beaulieu Abbey), and charitable undertakings. Financial and administrative records, which begin to survive in considerable numbers from this time, indicate the extent of religious infrastructure surrounding the royal household. John maintained chapels and chaplains at each of his many residences and used a ‘travelling chapel’ which, Webster suggests, ‘had a role of daily importance’ when the king was on the move (p. 27). Almsgiving was an essential aspect of royal activity, undertaken either by the king himself or by others whom he funded. As did many medieval monarchs, John amassed a private relic collection, probably lost in the famous ‘disaster in the Wash’ in 1216, and called upon the intercession of favoured saints when necessary. In the context of studies of kingship, Webster acknowledges scholarly preference for the phrase ‘personal religion’ rather than piety, emphasising those factors on which we can comment (public and external displays of a religious nature) rather than those on which we cannot (genuine belief or its absence). Yet it is clear that John went to considerable efforts to make provision for his soul and to fulfil the role expected of a royal figure in spiritual affairs.

Chapters 6 and 7 reassess John’s conflict with the papacy and its resolution, demonstrating how the episode was primarily political in nature. The interdict placed on England between 1208 and 1214, as well as the king’s personal excommunication by Innocent III, were part of a pattern in which John asserted his regal right to make ecclesiastical appointments. Similar earlier conflicts, such as that over the succession to the episcopal seat of Sées in Normandy between 1201 and 1203, reinforce the point. Two conclusions ensue. First, conflict with the Church as a political institution does not imply that John was unconcerned for the fate of his soul, nor was he the only monarch to have engaged in such behaviour. Second, despite problems with the limited evidence surviving from the years of the interdict, it can be inferred that church services carried on in some cases, often at the king’s bidding and in defiance of the papal ban. The view expressed by the chronicler Matthew Paris, writing several decades later, that John was intending to abandon Christianity and adhere to Islam is only the most outlandish of the stories questioning his piety. Matthew claimed that the king had sent envoys to the North African emir Muhammad al-Nasir with this intention (cited here on p. 150) but such slander flies in the face of John’s evident intention to maintain regular religious services and to force clerics...