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This study is strikingly different in style from the later book Henry II about King John's father. The near continuous narrative is easy to read and uninterrupted by the detailed discussion of government, law and the church that there is in the later book. Nor is there any discussion of what life was like at the time of King John (although we do learn that he did have a portable urinal and a dressing gown to wear if he needed to find it in the middle of the night). If those are things you are interested in - look elsewhere.

Instead there is the story of King John rise to power and his eventual fall. John was the fourth of Henry II and opinion was divided over whether he or his nephew, Arthur should inherit - a vexed legal question that in the finest medieval fashion was eventually resolved in the court of war.

Within days of Richard I's death John and Arthur began to seize strong points and fight each other. The capture and (at some stage) death of Arthur didn't end the conflict as the King of France had joined in. By the time of his own death John had lost most of his lands in France and was fighting an alliance of his Barons and invading French in England.

John's fall reminded me of Dunbar's number, the idea that there is upper limit (somewhere between 100 and 230 apparently) to the number of people that you can maintain stable social relationships with. A medieval monarch was entirely reliant on their ability to build and maintain relationships perhaps as King of England, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou, Duke of Aquitaine and Lord of Ireland there were simply too many people to deal with.

Mistrust and treachery (and John had himself started out as a rebel against his father and had attempted to seize power in England while Richard was away on the Third Crusade) worked together to form a very effective negative feedback loop with a marked unwillingness on both sides to commit to trusting each other.

The very effectiveness of those Angevin kings as administrators, squeezing the pennies out of their barons through the use of Forest law, the control of heiresses, and widows, and generally exploiting their Feudal rights to pursue their interests won them no friends. And once John was seen not to be consistently winning, few supporters.

There's a sense reading this book of networks of people. The dense alliances of kinship bringing people together or setting them up as rivals. Networks that spread across Europe. Any promotion or disgrace to one person could set off flash points of trouble. Sadly though there no network diagrams and no geography of family relationships here.

King John begins with a discussion of the sources for his reign. The various chroniclers are weighed up and assessed, this is a nice touch as you proceed with the book, then Warren brings in the documents that survive from the Royal archives. There's at once a tremendous intimacy here. From those payroll documents we know that the woman who washed his clothes was called Florence and the man responsible for drying them was called William. But there's also a distance. They are just names and sums of money in a ledger. The payment to messenger to take a chaplet of roses from the King to his mistress the intimate oddly captured in accountancy.

In comparison with the later book on Henry II you can see that Warren's opinions on a couple of points shifted over time. It is perhaps a slightly less careful study, at a couple of places Warren slips in his interpretation as fact, and certainly less analytical than the later book on King John's Father. Despite its age and despite wrestling (and I suppose having to wrestle) with the Victorian opinions of J.R. Green and Bishop William Stubbs it is a lively and readable account.

While reading I wondered about chance. The judgement and skill required to be a successful ruler had to be learnt on the job. The limits of power were discovered by pushing too far. Had Henry II died in 1167 his reputation would have been that of a martinet who pushed his territories into rebellion. Could John have established himself as a successful ruler if he hadn't died in 1216? Or was the mistrust between himself and the people he needed to work with too deep-seated?