King John receives considerable attention from scholars writing books focusing on his reign and, inevitably, on Magna Carta—both boosted considerably by the 800th anniversaries of John's accession to the throne in 1199 and of the issuing of the Great Charter in 2015. Specific monographs are much rarer, but even then they are tied into those dates. Thus, it is a great boon for Johannine historians to now have available to them Hugh Thomas's exemplary study of King John's court. Indeed, the scholarship of Power and Pleasure: Court Life under King John, 1199–1216 will be appreciated by court historians everywhere.

The wealthy Angevin court under John's father, Henry II, quickly established itself as the preeminent one in twelfth-century Europe. The subject has attracted studies from Nicholas Vincent and Sybil Schröder; there is also Martin Aurell's La cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204) (2000). Thomas also had access to a not-yet published paper on Henry III's court by David Carpenter. Thomas has already written on the subject of clothing and textiles at John's court, so broadening his research to the larger, more encompassing topic of the court in toto makes perfect sense, especially as the abundant records that he mines allow for a fairly comprehensive analysis. Historians are now therefore building up a strong understanding of personal and gradual generational changes in Angevin court life.

A court reflects its prince, so it is interesting to make frequent comparisons between John's court and his father's. Thomas portrays the court of John as being equally magnificent in material terms, but the king's distinctive ineptitude meant that he was unable to gain the benefits from it one would have expected; his court offers yet another example of his failure, this time in soft power (to accompany his abject failure in hard power). It need not have been this way. Thomas opens Power and Pleasure with a telling quote from the Anonymous of Béthune, praising John's undeniable generosity at court while lambasting him for his wicked ways: one might summarize the situation as courtiers feasting away at the king's table while he feasted on their wives and daughters (philandering was another of John's activities). It is too often thought that John's bad press was the result of outraged monastic chroniclers, but here we see him being condemned by someone whose knightly patron dined with the king and fought on his side. However, as Thomas points out, despite the universal and well-deserved criticism of the king, there were those who would balance his largesse at court against his manifold failings. Conspicuous consumption and display were maintained at the highest level, “even during a period of ruinously expensive wars” (9). The court was the epicenter of all-important patronage; courtiers, of course, recognized and responded to this. John's enemies also understood and accordingly strove to undermine it. Thomas is particularly excellent in his discussions of such expressions of soft power and is right to stress the significance of the court in John's power plays.

In the introduction, Thomas clearly sets out his aims in Power and Pleasure while succinctly examining the abundance of sources and contextualizing courts and their nature, not least the constancies of itineration and changes in size (expanding significantly at Easter and Christmas, for example). Hunting and falconry are the subjects of the first of the thematic chapters. All kings hunted, but John's indulgence in this sport instead of warfare (or even tournaments, as Thomas rightly highlights) marks it as a negative against him. Thus, Thomas points out that in the crisis days immediately before Magna Carta, John was preoccupied with his falcons (perhaps revealing his tendency to micromanage). Thomas, in keeping to a major argument of Power and Pleasure, observes that “courts were designed as much to produce pleasure as to produce power” (53), and so defends John here, arguing persuasively that hunting and falconry provided intangible but noteworthy benefits to the crown, including patronage, shared status, and, in a sense, bonding (the last very infrequently associated with John), which explains the high priority John gave to them. In so doing, Thomas interestingly takes on John of Salisbury's mocking of hunting in his Policraticus.

In the next chapter, on luxury and material culture at court, Thomas reinforces his arguments while offering the first systematic study of luxury goods at John's court. Even the effluence of affluence was influence. John was an “exuberant” collector of jewelry (60). Gifts lubricated diplomacy and were, unsurprisingly, used to entice disgruntled nobles back into the royal fold; but, as Thomas notes, John had antagonized the barons in the first instance by his demands for money. The following chapter on aspects of court life covers not only its high—and frequently low—culture but also, importantly, provides a strong reminder of its darker side. Thomas offers a convincingly damning analysis of John's sexual predation, notable even “by the standards of his own day” (96), that was much commentated on in the chronicles as a source of baronial discontent. None of this seems to have troubled John's conscience (until the time of his death, anyway), as seen in the next chapter, on religious practice at court, where Thomas shows that John's outward conventional piety was insufficient for sacral kingship.

Thomas thus covers the courtly social-political interactions of food, feasting, drinking, and places before he returns to a central theme of soft power in a dedicated chapter, to explain why “John, despite having a magnificent court that displayed wealth, power, and generosity, apparently benefitted so little from it” (185). Thomas repeats the obvious but necessary point that too much expenditure on soft power left too little expenditure for hard power, questioning whether the former “would have hampered John's war efforts” (204). The evidence is, Thomas explains, very fragmentary, but would suggest not: John was a very wealthy king. But it did contribute to overall political unrest through its knock-on effect. As always, the ultimate responsibility for failure lay with John himself.

The endlessly fascinating details of John's court from Thomas's exhaustive research provide invaluable insights into the king's use of power, greatly clarifying the larger picture. This is an outstanding book.