Was violence the norm in the past?

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I remember watching a documentary about King John and the Magna carta and talked about some of the "bad" things he did. But I remember the presenter saying at the end that he did lot of things which nowadays we would consider "barbaric" but this was the 13th century, that behaviour just goes with the territory and that tyranny was in the job description.
It makes me think we'll when was it beginning to become unacceptable ? Was it during the 18th or 19th century? I mean by the time of king Leopold's reign in the Congo, people were criticising him for the atrocities there in the 1890s/1900s.

Human beings are violent animals full stop

Yes, day-to-day violence was more common in the past in most societies.

Acts that we would recognize as denial of basic human rights were much more common in the past.

Acts that we would recognize as war crimes were much more common in pre-modern conflicts.

I'm not sure a concrete answer exists to when these acts started to be considered unacceptable. The Congo Free State was so horrible it shocked other colonial states that also engaged in slavery, so you might make the case those actions weren't even considered acceptable at that time they were occurring.

One of the main issues, historically speaking, wasn't that brutality was more accepted (although that might be a factor), so much as the people who perpetrated it were often able to insulate themselves from being held accountable. Either they were connected to the "legitimate" power structure and were insulated like that, or they had near sovereignty through force of arms and no competing "legitimate" power was willing to invest resources into holding them accountable.

A modern example of this might be Israeli war crimes in Palestine. No one's going to hold the Israelis accountable, so they get away with it, so they feel emboldened to not even bother concealing their war crimes.