26. Was the Baddie King From Robin Hood Really That Bad? Or was it just perception?
The common perception of King John of England (1166 – 1216), best known as the baddie from the Robin Hood legend, is poor. John is depicted as the cowardly usurper who tries to seize the throne while his heroic brother, King Richard I the Lionheart, was doing God’s work, fighting in the Crusades. While the reality was more complicated, and Richard was actually a bad king who detested England, John was no saint. Among other things, he personally murdered his teenaged nephew, Arthur of Brittany, in a drunken rage. However, major strides in the rule of law and the earliest stirrings of what we view as civil rights occurred during John’s reign.
It was a continuation of a trend of advances in civil liberties that took place during the rule of the Plantagenet Dynasty, of which John was the third monarch. They often occurred despite Plantagenet monarchs’ opposition, or only with their reluctant acquiescence – but they occurred. King Henry II, John’s father and the dynasty’s founder, initiated things by reforming the legal system. The next step, taken in John’s reign, was to establish the principle that the king’s power is not absolute, but is limited by law and custom.
