John (1166-1216), King of England from 1199 to 1216, and the first English king to take the King of Mann under his protection.

The instrument survives among the Manx national documents. In 1205 the King declared to all that he had taken his beloved kinsman Reginald, King of Mann, under his keeping, protection and defence, together with all his lands and people, and forbade any person to trouble them.

There was a price on both sides. Reginald, the fifth of the Norse line and reckoned a usurper by the Manx chroniclers, agreed to do homage to John for the Isle of Man and the out Isles, and by John's charter he was to receive a knight's fee of two tuns of wine and a hundred and twenty quarters of corn yearly out of Ireland. The kings of that race had until then been held to take their sovereignty from the kings of Norway, to whom they owed homage, so the arrangement of 1205 marks the point at which an English claim was formally admitted.

Reginald went further in the same direction and took the Pope for his lord as well. In 1219, following the example of his protector King John, he became the vassal of the Roman Church, engaging to hold his kingdom of it for an annual payment of twelve marks sterling, and the kingdom of Man thereby became a dependency of the Papacy. Manx writers set the two acts side by side, and note that it was Edward I who broke John's papal yoke of tribute from England's neck, while the reversal of the same process in the Island was left to the greatest of the insular kings of the house of Stanley.