He was the first baron to use a double-barrelled title, Lord Lovell and Holland.

Speaking of which, he married Maud Holland, heiress to the Holland barony. Even better, her father was the cousin of Thomas and John Holland, Richard II's half-brothers.

John Lovell also combined the Lovell and Holland coats of arms. He, his wife and children used this on their seals. This coat of arms can also be found as decoration, for example in the cloister and chapter house of Canterbury Cathedral. 

Though he came of age in 1363 he received his first summons to parliament only after his wife inherited her grandfather's lands in 1373. Coincidence? I think not.

Neither his father, another John Lovell, nor his elder brother - who was also called John - was summoned to parliament. He therefore should be referred to as the third Lord Lovell rather than the fifth, which is usually the case, but this is getting really technical. What it means is that he was something of a newcomer even though his family goes back to the eleventh century. 

John Lovell had the knack for getting along with just about everybody, Edmund Mortimer and William Latimer, Richard II and Thomas Arundel. A skill that certainly helped him come through the turbulent episodes of Richard II's reign unscathed.

In 1385, John Lovell and Thomas Morley were fighting about the right to a coat of arms before the Court of Chivalry. Two facts makes this interesting: It was not the Lovell arms but those claimed by the Burnells. (John Lovell's grandmother Maud Burnell had inherited the Burnell barony but the bulk of the estates and the name had gone to her son from her second marriage.) And, which is why I say claimed, about forty years earlier, during the siege of Calais, Nicholas Burnell and Robert Morley were quarrelling about the same thing. Nicholas Burnell had apparently lost the argument.

John Lovell was the victim of an administrative error when in 1388 some of his lands were impounded by the crown, though the John Lovell who had not paid his inheritance tax was another John Lovell altogether.

John Lovell was among the fifteen men and women the Lords Appellant demanded to be expelled from court in 1388. John Lovell bounced back from this setback with his usual aplomb and was back at court within a few months and helped sell the lands of those who had not survived the Merciless Parliament or had been dispossessed by it.

In 1391, several 'evildoers' tried to assassinate John Lovell. - It is worthwhile to mention that his father may have been murdered in 1347. Two years later, in 1349, ‘many evildoers indicted … of the death of John Lovel’ were in the goal in Norwich. However, there were too many Lovells around to be certain, this John Lovell was John Lovells father. But it is possible.

John Lovell himself was also not averse to use force to persuade his opponents to give him what he wanted, though, of course, he always strenuously denied it.

He built Wardour Castle.

During the tumultuous days of August 1399, the Vita Ricardi Secundi tells us, Edward, duke of Aumale, Thomas Holland, duke of Surrey, Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, John Lovell, and John Stanley arrived in Chester and put themselves in Henry Bolingbroke's mercy. What motivated them to leave Richard II at this point and why they thought it was necessary to appeal to Henry Bolingbroke is something I dearly would like to know. Though they were, as Chris Given-Wilson puts it, 'good royalist company',[1] they quickly arranged themselves with the new regime. Except Thomas Holland, but it is highly unlikely that he actually left Richard already at this stage.

He was called up as a character witness by Edward, Duke of Aumale (and Richard II's cousin) in the first parliament of Henry IV in October 1399 to assure the new king that he had always opposed Richard II's treatment of Henry. Unfortunately what John Lovell said about this is not recorded.

In 1402, John Lovell was one of the four men considered to become tutor of the future Henry V. In the end, the job went to Thomas Percy.

He is the only other Lovell next to Francis Lovell who was a Knight of the Garter. He is one of only three Lovells who has an entry in the Oxford National Dictionary of Biography. Next to him, Francis Lovell has one, naturally, and Philip Lovell (d. 1258), administrator and royal councillor. 

His second son Robert was one of the future Henry V's buddies. A friendship that ruined him, as he never recovered the money he had lent the prince and died bankrupt. Thank goodness his wife was rich.

One of John Lovell's servants broke into the treasury of receipt in 1403 to steal documents relating to a land transaction back in the 1330s.

He was buried in the Hospital of St. James and St. John Brackley (Northants.). The hospital had no prior connections with the Lovell family, but Maud Holland's father and grandfather were buried there.

He is one of the few people of this time of whom a portrait exists.

On the portrait he looks remarkably like Chaucer. (It's the beard.)

Already in the fifteenth century John Lovell is referred to as Lord John Lovell who was called 'the grete lord Lovell'. At least in a genealogy of his family compiled for the use of Sir John Fastolf. ('vocat.' is past tense, right?)