I am hoping to challenge the verdict of history. Few British monarchs have suffered at the hands of history as much as King John doomed to our collective memory as the bumbling archenemy of Robin Hood, oppressor of the common folk, and Richard the Lionheart’s malingering, malcontent younger brother. While there may be very little good to say of King John as a man, we lawyers owe him a debt of gratitude because of his pivotal role in the early development of the common law. And so, I have begun to explore that aspect of his reign in the (perhaps vain) hope of restoring John’s reputation to its rightful place.
In the popular mind, John has devolved into a quasi-mythological figure: Reviled as a murderer, failed usurper, disloyal brother, adulterer and tyrant, and mocked as an incompetent (most memorably in the classic film “The Lion in Winter,” which portrayed him as a childish buffoon). In short, a cautionary tale, rather than an actual person. Even the British tourist industry, which coats almost every other royal with at least a glaze of respectability, notes despairingly in one publication that historians have attempted “to whitewash the characters of some of our less-admired sovereigns, but John, it seems, would require more than a whitewash: he does not seem to have had a single redeeming feature.”
