not grow up expecting to be king. He was born on December 24, 1166, and likely named in honour of the feast day of St. John the Evangelist, which fell three days after his birth. At the time of John’s birth, Eleanor was over forty and his arrival was probably a surprise to his parents, who already had plans to divide their vast Anglo-French Angevin domains between their three elder surviving sons, Henry, Richard, and Geoffrey. The young Henry would receive his father’s inheritance of England, Normandy, and Anjou; Richard would receive his mother’s lands in Aquitaine; and Geoffrey would marry Constance, heiress to Brittany, and gain her lands. From a young age, John was therefore known as Jean sans terre or John Lackland. John and his sister, Joan, spent their early childhood at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou, and Henry and Eleanor may have initially intended for their landless youngest son to enter the church. After leaving the abbey at age six, John continued his education with tutors in the household of his eldest brother, young Henry. As a result of his education, John was better educated than most laymen of his time; as king it was common for him to travel with a personal library.
Plantagenet family tree.
Fontevraud Abbey, where King John spent his early childhood.
Canterbury Cathedral, the site of Thomas Becket’s murder and Henry II’s penance.
Henry II’s determination to ensure that his youngest son received a share of the Angevin domains, despite the inheritance customs of the time, brought John’s interests into conflict with those of his mother and older brothers from a young age. In the early 1170s, Henry II decided to remove three castles from young Henry’s inheritance and give them to John on the occasion of his betrothal to Alicia of Savoy. At the time of these negotiations, Henry II was extremely unpopular with the barons and clergy because of his conflict with Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, which had ended with the archbishop’s murder by four knights in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. Henry was also in conflict with his family because of his interference in Eleanor’s governance of her domains in Aquitaine and his refusal to allow his three oldest sons to have influence over his administration. In 1173–74, at the age of eighteen, young Henry led the Revolt of the Eaglets against his father, with support from his mother and brothers, senior barons, and the kings of France and Scotland. Henry II’s superior military experience ultimately led to him defeating the uprising.
Chinon Castle was a favourite residence of Henry II, who died there in 1189.
Henry II made efforts to repair his relationship with the church by doing penance for his role in Becket’s death. On July 12, 1174, Henry II walked barefoot to Becket’s tomb in the crypt, receiving lashes from the monks. This act was a public reconciliation of king and church. When the king’s forces captured King William the Lion of Scotland the next day, the victory therefore appeared to be divine providence. Like king and church, Henry II and his sons were publicly reconciled. The revolt was blamed on young Henry’s advisers. John’s mother, Eleanor, however, was not forgiven by her husband for her support of her sons, and she spent the rest of Henry II’s reign imprisoned in a series of castles, playing little part in John’s early life.
The reconciliation of Henry II and his sons in 1174, and the death of Alicia of Savoy in 1178, meant that a new role had to be found for John. When young Henry died of dysentery in 1183, the king expected Richard, now heir to the English throne, to cede Aquitaine to John. Richard refused, prompting John’s first military campaign, an invasion of Aquitaine with the support of his father and brother, Geoffrey, that ended in a stalemate in 1184. With John’s prospects in Aquitaine uncertain, Henry II decided that Ireland would be the place where his youngest son would make his fortune and wield political influence. John travelled there as Lord of Ireland in April 1185 at the age of nineteen. From the moment of his arrival in Waterford, however, John made a poor impression on the local Irish leaders.
The Wider World in 1215
The known world for the English in 1215 was certainly not the entire world. In central Asia, Genghis Khan was building a vast Mongol Empire. The same year as Magna Carta, Genghis captured modern-day Beijing in the Battle of Zhongdu, following a two-year siege, gaining control of northern China. Contact between Western Europe and the Mongol Empire would not occur until the reign of John’s son, Henry III, when the papacy unsuccessfully called for the Mongols to convert to Christianity and devote their military might to the crusades.
The possibility of lands across the Atlantic Ocean or south of the equator had been a subject of speculation by European scholars and clergymen since the eleventh century. German missionaries who travelled north to Scandinavia to convert the Vikings heard sagas of past expeditions to Vinland (modern-day Newfoundland). The eleventh-century German chronicler Adam of Bremen believed that Vinland was the only land to the west, across the Atlantic. “[V]ines producing excellent wine grow wild,” he observed, “but beyond that island no habitable land is found in the ocean, every place beyond it is full of impenetrable ice and intense darkness.” Europeans were unaware of the other lands and civilizations in the Americas, including the Mayan Empire, which was in decline after an eleventh-century period of drought, and the Mexica, who founded Tenochtitlan on the site of what is now Mexico City around the year 1200.
The English scholar Alexander of Neckam, whose mother, Hodierna, had nursed the future king Richard, speculated that there might be Antipodean people living “beneath our feet.” Alexander was pessimistic about Europeans ever contacting these people because Aristotle believed that ships could not sail across the equator due to his belief that the intense heat of this region would make travel from the northern to southern hemisphere impossible.
Statue of John’s elder brother, Richard I “the Lionhearted,” outside the Houses of Parliament, Westminster.
The young Lord of Ireland mocked the appearance and customs of the Gaelic chieftains, pulled their beards, and showed himself to be “a mere youth, with an entourage composed only of youths, a stripling who listened only to youthful advice.”6 John’s frivolity and disrespect attracted criticism as he travelled from Waterford to Dublin. He proved a poor administrator. He may have spent funds provided by Henry for military campaigns on lavish entertainments for his household. John demonstrated some interest in fulfilling his duties as Lord of Ireland, establishing several castles and providing land grants for royal administrators, but his administration there was judged to be a failure by his contemporaries and subsequent historians because of his reckless spending and poor relations with the local elites.
The royal party departed for England in December 1185 after only eight months in Ireland. Despite John’s failures in Ireland, there is circumstantial evidence that Henry considered leaving the Angevin domains to him instead of Richard, who represented Eleanor’s interests. The uncertainty Henry introduced into the succession may have been an attempt to control his eldest surviving son, who remained in conflict with his father. When it became clear in 1189 that Henry was dying and that Richard would be his undisputed successor, John joined forces with his elder brother against his father to gain the favour of the next king. John acquired a reputation for disloyalty by leaving his father’s deathbed. Henry II died on July 6, 1189, at the fortified château de Chinon in Anjou in western France, cursing the faithlessness of his sons.
John, twenty-three at the time of Richard’s ascension to the English throne, was nine years his brother’s junior
