King John resigns his crown to Pope Innocent
The Flowers of History reports that King John of England resigned his crown to Pope Innocent and did homage to him.
What this does and does not establish
Yonge’s 1853 English translation, vol. II, read from OCR. The sentence stands in the annal that opens “A.D. 1213.”, after the passage in which John, waiting on the coast for the arrival of the king of France, swears before the envoy Pandulph to submit to the judgment of the church; the chronicle then quotes the king’s charter. The passage gives no day or month for the act. The place is not named beyond the coast and, in the quoted charter, “the house of the military order of the temple”. The chronicler’s verdict that John made a free country “a slave” is his own.
- Quoted from a published English translation, not from the original-language text.
- Region
- Europe
- Theme
- Politics and institutions
- Kind of record
- Placed in a year. A source places this in one year. It is listed under that year; no day precision is invented.
How it is dated
- Date reference
- A.D. 1213; no day or month given in the passage
- How we use it
- Year-level placement is limited to the dated source entry.
The date reference is this project’s reading of the source’s date. It may give an era name, a reign or a calendar in a normalised form rather than in the source’s own words; the dating notes say what the source prints.
Dating notes from the research record
Examined the retained text, lines 5699–5900. The annal opens at line 5699, ‘A.D. 1213. King John held his court at the feast of the Nativity’; the quoted sentence follows at lines 5766–5767 in the same annal; the running heads of the printed pages that carry the passage read A.D. 1213 (lines 5750 and 5797). The next page’s running head reads A.D. 1214 (line 5843). The printed year is used without conversion; the chronicle opens its year with the Christmas court.
File names and line numbers in these notes, and in the limits above, refer to the project’s retained copies of the cited sources. Names such as calendar_headers are the project’s calendar look-ups, and “the investigator” is the research step that prepared the record.
Sources and quoted text
Line and character numbers under “Location” refer to the project’s retained copy of the source. For database rows, “Edition” names the batch of rows that was fetched together.
Source 1 · Supports the statement
Flores historiarum, St Albans and Westminster tradition
Medieval compilers at St Albans and Westminster; English translation by C. D. Yonge (1812–1891)
Published English translation, as quoted
Accordingly, he resigned his
crown to pope Innocent, and did homage to himSource credit and reuse conditions recorded for this source: Flores historiarum, C. D. Yonge, trans., vol. II (London, 1853); OCR of the public-domain translation.
Exact source version
36a27829268cf9e9a6d98e2f44084f7c44895c6671534eefa7ec373916775635Checks and changes
Source checked 2026-11-12. An independent AI evidence review supports this bounded, attributed wording. That review does not guarantee historical truth. How records are checked
No correction has been made to this record’s statement or limits.
Revision s2a_1213_flores_1
Exact revision fingerprint
49e91298352b00c5d1f7c159e8411b408f2c1aef6bdc66f2d52f2073d8994a93