"The ‘Madness’ of King John" Topic
4 Posts
All members in good standing are free to post here. Opinions expressed here are solely those of the posters, and have not been cleared with nor are they endorsed by The Miniatures Page.
Please use the Complaint button (!) to report problems on the forums.
For more information, see the TMP FAQ.
Back to the Medieval Media Message Board
Areas of InterestMedieval
Featured Hobby News Article
Featured Recent Link
Top-Rated Ruleset
Featured Showcase Article
Featured Profile Article
Featured Book Review
Featured Movie Review
|
The Membership System will be closing for maintenance in 3 minutes. Please finish anything that will involve the membership system, including membership changes or posting of messages.
Please sign in to your membership account, or, if you are not yet a member, please sign up for your free membership account.
Tango01 | 23 Feb 2015 9:58 p.m. PST |
"Introduction: The past is full of controversial characters. It would be difficult by the standards of any period to find a good word to say about individuals such as Emperor Nero (‘the enemy of mankind' according to one contemporary) or Ivan the Terrible, Tsar of All the Russians and prime despot of the sixteenth century. In more recent times, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot are names that chill the blood and bring to mind images of the twentieth century's worst atrocities. Drawing up a shortlist of history's main villains and miscreants would be an impossible task; suffice to say that every period has produced individuals who would fit the bill. An interview with Medieval historians, or a closer look at the works of observers chronicling the British Isles at the turn of the thirteenth century, might persuade us to add one more name to our list of historic villains. Here is a taste of what to expect when reading the opinions of contemporaries of John, king of England from 1199 to 1216. According to Gerald of Wales (d. c.1223), one of the shrewder observers of that period, John surpassed ‘every unjust oppressor … with ragerd to the abhorrence of his misdeeds'. Matthew Paris (d. 1259) painted a very similar picture some decades after John's death, describing him as ‘more of a tyrant than a king, more of a subversive than a ruler' (‘potius tirannus fuit quam rex, potius subversor quam gubernator')…" Full text here PDF link Amicalement Armand |
Parzival | 26 Feb 2015 9:51 a.m. PST |
King John has been recognized as a villain since his own time. He was bad enough in contemporary eyes to get so glommed in to the Robin Hood legend as to become insuperable from it. Plus, by comparison, he made the actually quite poor ruler (in terms of responsibility to actually rule his actual kingdom) King Richard into a folk hero in his own right. That's pretty bad! When you make the list of bad English kings, John is probably on the top in the popular imagination, even over the Shakespearean Richard III (who in real life was actually rather decent, as medieval kings go). |
Tango01 | 26 Feb 2015 11:16 a.m. PST |
Agree my friend. Amicalement Armand |
Parzival | 26 Feb 2015 4:22 p.m. PST |
"Insuperable" was meant to be "inseparable." Dang auto-replace feature. |
|