Hello, welcome to the History of England, episode 52, John Soft Sword.

For the book this week, I thought I'd recommend Matilda, Queen of the Conqueror by Lisa

Hilton. I had to confess I'd not read it personally, but I did hear Lisa being interviewed

and she sounded really good.

Matilda was clearly a formidable person in her own right, and she and William were

very close partners until they fell out over their son Robert, some shores a great story

to tell. If any of you do read it or have read it, let me know what you think. Plus, just

as a general point, it'd be good to get recommendations from any of you about history

books you particularly enjoyed. Stephen got in touch recently to recommend a book by Joseph

Hussinger called Waning of the Middle Ages, which looked really interesting, so I'm going

to give that a go. So do pop along to the website or Facebook or wherever, and make any

recommendations you think people might be interested in.

Okay, so when we left John in September 1199, he'd really been as effective as he'd

ever been in his 31 years. A few months later, in January 1200, he signed the Treaty of

Lagoula with Philip. Here are the main terms. Philip gave full recognition to John as Richard

Er, and abandoned any support for Arthur of Brittany. As far as John was concerned, this

was of course great. In return, the Treaty recognised the situation in Normandy as it

was at the time of the truce. So this meant that Philip kept a few frontier feasts, which

were demilitarised. Philip's heir, Louis, was to marry John's niece, Blanche of Castile,

and he'd be given Shizor as a dowry. Now Shizor had been a big point of contention between

Richard and Philip, but Philip had held it anyway for a while, and Richard's best efforts

had failed to dislodge him. John also then had to give away some land in

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