Notorious and barefaced traitors

Went to Rochester (UK) this Sunday and came under the spell of the castle and its siege in 1215. King John took the castle after a furious siege which included mining the outer wall and a tower of the keep. And even that didn't settle the contest. The defenders retreated into a defensible corner of the castle and only surrendered a week later when food ran out.

This led us to the rather unknown first Barons' War where John defended his rule against a rebellion by 2/3rds of his vassals, combined with Scotland and France. And all this happened after John had signed the Magna Carta (which surprised me), although half-heartedly.

Also, it turned out that John had his enemies largely beat by the time of his sudden death late in 1216.

Picked up Turner's King John, the evil king? as well as Carpenter's the Struggle for Mastery 1066-1284 at Gatwick on the way back. This is proving fascinating reading. SO far I'm learning about John's early life and administration of England and the French possesions (basically Western France from Normandy to the Pyrenees).

The Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare: the Middle Ages has a few pages with great maps showing the conflict and Hillaire Belloc's Warfare in England provides some brilliant insights in the geographical importance of royal castles such as Windsor and Dover.

All this makes for a great game, as the whole things is finely ballanced between John's control of strategic castles and highly trained and mobile army against a host of enemies which are in the end mostly a result of him being an utter prick. His death may even have saved England from French domination as John's young son Henry (III) was a much more agreeable monarch than French Louis.

John has a rather bad reputation, which doesn't entirely do him justice. He was an utter prick, but so were his father Henry II and brother Richard Lionheart. Richard's saving grace was his generosity, but his generous spending on his crusade, then his bail from captivity, followed by continuous war against France to retain hold of Normandy plundered the treasury.
The treasury was mostly filled from then English possessions as the power of the kings was greater here than in their other lands of Anjou, Normandy and Acquitaine. So John inherited a mostly bankrupt country from which he tried to squeeze the last drops. This was always unlikely to ingratiate him with the barons.
John's character didn't help, but he was a sound administrator and a capable commander, as his early campaigns in Normandy show, but even more so in 1215-1216, where he combined a small but high quality field army with a carefully laid out system of royal castles that allowed him to race from Rochester to Edinburgh in just over a month and then back south again in as much time. He also used his strategic mobility to outmanouvre the rebels and troops of Louis in 1216.

So UK Fatties: make sure to visit Rochester (take Chatham Docks in one sweep).
Another tip is Lewes, which also has a nice castle and sets the scene for the first battle in that other Barons' War. Oh, I could talk about this for hours!