Another offering from the deservedly popular Dan Jones. I bought this one in an absolutely lovely multi-storey Waterstones in Durham. I don't remember what the lady behind the counter called it, but there was a special term for this particular sort of heavy discount. £8 for a fully-illustrated hardback is not to be sniffed at, even if the book is relatively short. It doesn't need to be any longer, covering as it does a single year in medieval England – 1215, the year of Magna Carta.
Physically the book is lovely. Roughly every other page or so is a full-cover medieval illustration, with occasional double-page photographs. This means you're really getting two for the price of one here : not only do you get a lavish set of illustrations, but you also get a prose text by Dan Jones.
Except, unfortunately, it's really three for one. If two's a company then three's a crowd and, I'm afraid even Jones has bitten off more than he can chew here. That is, the text is really two entirely separate works that alternate on a chapter-by-chapter basis. One chapter will be about some aspect of daily life for the ordinary folk, followed by what was going on in the world of high politics, then it'll revert to peasants, and so on. It's a good idea but the execution is sorely lacking. Each set of chapters could be read just fine on their own (especially the politics, which Jones delivers with his usual, skilful combination of rhetorical prose and thoughtful analysis), but neither relates in any way to the other.
This is a terrible shame : to show what effects, if any, the top-down political concerns made to those at the bottom would have been extremely interesting. To be fair, Jones does this brilliantly in Summer of Blood (covering the Peasant's Revolt), but there in a conventional, linear way. Here the attempted but failed blending just hurts both texts. The politics becomes harder to follow than it should be, and the daily life just becomes a distraction. If the two don't actually relate to each other in this particular case, then it would have been better to at least say this. It could still be interesting to consider how this earliest grasping struggle towards political reform didn't impact the everyday people, given how much Magna Carta has been put on something of an ideological pedestal.
There's not much point attempting a more detailed review of this and I won't try and give it a rating. Still, there are a few interesting things to point out.
On the character of John there's not much question that this man was a Bad King. He was incompetent but effectual, full of energy and ruthless determination, unwilling to listen, and incredibly self-centred. He was by no means a stupid man, but his reach exceeded his grasp. He was cunning and skilled at deception (both attributes not without legitimate uses for a medieval king), but he didn't seem to really understand the currents of history in which he was embedded. He seems to have thought he could literally fake it until he made it.
The problem was that being utterly insincere, unprincipled, and having absolutely no sense of loyalty didn't win him any really powerful, devoted followers (William Marshall, a.k.a. "The Greatest Knight", being an important exception). Total deception and constant betrayal, it turns out, don't make for a functional government, especially in a society where hierarchy and stability were highly valued.
To this end John's willingness to sell out his entire kingdom to the Pope serves as a prime example. At a stroke he went from the Pope's most hated (Christian) enemy to his firm favourite. But his plans to go on crusade appear to have been little more than a thinly-veiled excuse to fortify the kingdom against his own subjects; it's hard to imagine that he ever really would have gone through with it. There are more than a few parallels with modern events, but it's worth stressing that they're hardly exact.
It would seem like this environment of an oppressed people would be fertile ground indeed for folk heroes like Robin Hood. The problem is, says Jones, is that the earliest stories set him in the reign of Edward I, a century later. True, the common people were probably not equivalents of Make England Great Britain Eventually types; John was no cult leader. He actively tried to amass as much power and wealth from himself as he could, at the peasant's expense, and this doesn't seem to have gone down well at all... medieval peasants not being as stupid as their modern-day counterparts.
But they weren't proto-democrats either (again, Summer of Blood has far more interesting social parallels in that regard); there was no rising of the commons to overthrow the hated tyrant. The period has been understandably mythologised, but it's doubtful anyone at the time would have seen this as in any way the moment of birth of any kind of social revolution. At most, it appeared to be political reform for the upper echelons. The feudal system itself wasn't under threat.
Even the famous "trial by juries" bit of the Magna Carta isn't how it's often perceived. The earliest juries "did not determine cases, but rather identified those which needed prosecution" (by judges). The rest of Magna Carta is clearly, says Jones, a cobbled-together and unordered mess, undeniably containing some important stuff, but in no sense a coherent document, let alone any kind of prelude to a constitution. For that I would point readers not to the Peasant's Revolt (despite there being some important developments there) but the Civil War, which has language and aims far more in common with the events a century later across the pond.
One other point I have to make concerns religion. I've seen many internet articles claiming that atheism in the pre-modern age simply didn't exist, that while there were religious heretics and different considerations of the nature of God and the gods, pretty much nobody doubted in some kind of supernatural power. But Jones quotes a London monk Peter of Cornwall, who lamented that "there are many people who do not believe God exists. They consider that the universe... is ruled by chance rather than Providence... nor do they think that the human soul lives on after the death of the body". Cicero too, if I can manage to find the time to blog up On the Nature of the Gods, stated the case in equally blunt and unequivocal tones. So it seems to me that yes, full-blooded atheism was very much a thing, albeit perhaps rare, in the pre-modern era.
There are more amusing stories contained here as well, which similarly underscore just how similar medieval people could be to us moderns. There's the weird French poem about a bishop who finds a ring that gives "uncontrollable virility", giving him "a mighty erection that bursts through his breeches and drags along the ground". They also believed in bestiality, including a lion that "made love to a foolish woman called Joanna". So much for an age of religious purity and godliness.
In other ways, of course, they were radically unfamiliar. There's an early map of blood vessels in the human body which is a classic "but why did you draw it like that ?" moment (alas unreferenced so I can't link to it). There's the belief that eating the flesh of a lion would cure hallucinations, or that carrying either a weasel's testicles or the womb of a sterile/virgin goat would prevent conceptions. Perhaps the strangest advice found herein concerns how to deal with women who were thought to be too fat to conceive. The doctor's learned recommendation was that they should be "smeared in cow dung mixed with very good wine, then put in a steam bath – a process to be repeated 'two or three or four times a week and she will be found to be sufficiently thin'". (While we're at it, I have to point out that, dung aside, bathing in the middle ages was not at all uncommon.)
It's a cliché, but I'll end on it just the same. The medieval period is fascinating for its combination of similarities and differences to modern society. It seems as though some ideas just continuously burst forth regardless of their environment, but only flourish when conditions are right. The medieval era was similar enough to allow Magna Carta to germinate, but different enough that it had scarcely any chance of progressing further. Democracy's moment had not yet arrived, but if Magna Carta wasn't a crucial turning point, it was at least an important step along a difficult road.
