I always question how accurate these types of accounts were. Even if she wrote this after his death, his successor obviously wouldn’t look too kindly on it being disparaging.
It reads a lot like those instagram/magazine profiles of "I get up at 7am and eat healthily" (author actually gets up at 9am and eats junk food on most other days).
Worth noting that this is a relatively immobile king. Various other kings spent a lot of time on:
- hunting for sport
- military campaigns (e.g. Richard Lionheart spent more time out of England than in it)
- assizes (mobile courts)
- summer residences (Versailles is a huge, late example of this, but lots of monarchs around the world have had holiday homes of one sort or another)
> To be fair, most of his prize holdings were also out of England.
To be fair, he wasn't really English and didn't speak the language either. It wasn't until Henry IV (reign 1399 - 1413) that a post-invasion King's mother tongue was English. Most people don't realise that for over 300 years the (language at) court was Norman French.
If you want to talk about competent governance, look to William II, the "Hammer of the Scots" villainized in Braveheart. He made it law that legally binding contracts must be written in plain English, so that both parties would (most likely) be able to understand what they were agreeing to...
Btw: The successor was “Charles the Mad” who is known for mental illness and psychotic/schizophrenic episodes and had to be placed under regency. So maybe she also wanted to give an example how a sane King normally ruled.
