JACK Sprat could eat no fat,
His wife could eat no lean,
And so between them both
They licked the platter clean.
In 1190, King Richard I (the Lionheart) set off on the Third Crusade. Unfortunately, that left room for his younger brother John to try and take control. It was a turbulent time for England. The youngest of the four princes (Jack Sprat), John was a highly unpopular figure – nicknamed John Lackland for his lack of territories and John Softsword for his lack of military success. The attempt by John and his greedy wife, Isabella of Gloucester, to claim the throne was regarded as an act of treachery, although Richard later forgave his younger sibling.
John is now best known as the enemy of the fictional hero Robin Hood. While the ballads were inspired by his apparent greed, it seems that the money wasn’t for him, or not all of it, in any case. When Richard was captured and held hostage by Duke Leopold, 150,000 marks was demanded – a king’s ransom in more ways than one. John and Isabella raised the funds by allegedly clearing out the coffers of England after finding they were unable to raise enough money from the royal vaults alone (between them both / They licked the platter clean). When Richard died in 1199, John took over as king but he was not an effective monarch and, tired of having their country mismanaged by a series of unreliable kings and queens, the barons famously forced him at Runnymede to sign the Magna Carta (1215), which limited the powers of the monarch and paved the way for modern democracy. In the words of Winston Churchill: ‘When the long tally is added, it will be seen that the British nation and the English-speaking world owe far more to the vices of John than to the labours of virtuous sovereigns.’
In more recent times, one Jack Spratt appears as the main character in two novels, The Big Over Easy (2005) and The Fourth Bear (2006), by Jasper Fforde. This Jack, a detective inspector in the Reading police force, investigates the crimes committed by other nursery rhyme characters. Like his namesake in the rhyme, the detective inspector neatly trims all the fat from his food before he eats it because he claims his wife died from eating too much fat.