In the summer of 1797 a group of workmen in Worcester Cathedral caused a sensation, locally if not nationally, by discovering the body of King John.
John’s tomb had long stood in the middle of the cathedral’s choir, but the consensus view in 1797 was that it was empty. Although the stone likeness (or effigy) on top dated from not long after the king’s death in 1216, the tomb chest had been created in the sixteenth century in the style of more recent burials (most notably Henry VIII’s older brother, Arthur, who died in 1502). It was known from the testimony of ancient chronicles that John had been buried in the Lady Chapel, and so it was assumed that, although his effigy had been moved in Tudor times, his bones had been left undisturbed in their original resting place.
The cathedral clergy found John’s tomb a cause of ‘much annoyance’, because its central position obstructed the approach to the altar, and their plan was to move it to some more convenient part of the church. And so, on 17 July 1797, the workmen set about dismantling it. They removed the effigy and the cracked stone slab underneath, to discover that the chest had been partitioned by two brick walls, and the sections in between filled with builders’ rubble. But when they removed the sides of the tomb and cleared out the debris, the workmen, ‘to their astonishment’, found a stone coffin. Immediately the dean and chapter of the cathedral were convened, as well as some local worthies with relevant expertise (the antiquarian Mr James Ross, and Mr Sandford, ‘an eminent surgeon of Worcester’).
Inside the coffin they found ‘the entire remains of King John’. His corpse had obviously decomposed somewhat in the course of nearly six centuries. Despite being embalmed, some parts had putrefied, and so ‘a vast quantity of the dry skins of maggots were dispersed over the body’. Parts of the body had also been displaced, presumably when it was moved in the sixteenth century. A section of the left arm was found lying at an angle on the chest; the upper jaw was found near the elbow. But otherwise the king was arranged in exactly the same position as his effigy, and was similarly attired. He was dressed from head to foot in a robe of crimson damask (a rich fabric of wool woven with silk) and in his left hand – as on the effigy – he held a sword, in a scabbard, both badly decayed. Curiously, however, whereas on the effigy John wore a crown, his skull was wearing a coif, which the antiquarians took to be a monk’s cowl, placed on the king’s head after his death to help reduce his time in Purgatory. Measuring the body they found that John had been five foot six-and-a-half inches tall.
The experts might have continued their investigations further, but were prevented from doing so by a large number of people who had crowded into the cathedral to see the dead monarch. ‘It is much to be regretted’, explained the antiquarian Valentine Green in his published account of the exhumation, ‘that the impatience of the multitude to view the royal remains, so unexpectedly found, should have become so ungovernable, as to make it necessary to close up the object of their curiosity.’ He was not exaggerating. In the short time that the tomb was open, several bits of John’s body were removed by souvenir hunters. His thumb bone was later recovered and can now be seen in the cathedral’s own archives, along with some fragments of sandals and stocking, obtained at auction by Edward Elgar. Two of the king’s teeth, stolen by a stationer’s apprentice in 1797, were ‘secretly treasured’ until 1923, when they were handed over to the Worcester County Museum.1
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It is easy to understand the excitement of the people of Worcester in 1797. King John is one of those characters from English history who has always exerted a hold on the public’s imagination. Almost everyone, even if they know nothing else about the Middle Ages, must feel they know something about him. Unlike other famous medieval monarchs, this is not down to Shakespeare, whose Life and Times of King John is one of his worst (and hence least-performed) plays. We are introduced to John much earlier, as children, through the tales of Robin Hood. My own introduction to him, I’m sure, was Disney’s Robin Hood, released in 1973 (the year I was born), in which the king, voiced by Peter Ustinov, is memorably portrayed by a scrawny lion, with a head too small for the crown he has pinched from his older brother, Richard the Lionheart.
As we will see, there is an element of truth in this story – John did at one point try to usurp the throne from Richard. But the association of John with Robin Hood is pure fiction. The tales of Robin Hood were not written down until the fifteenth century, and in their earliest versions they are said to take place during the time of ‘King Edward’. It was not until the sixteenth century that a Scottish writer, John Mair, thought to relocate them to the reign of Richard the Lionheart. From that point, however, the association of John and Robin took firm root. The story was given an immense boost by Walter Scott in his 1820 novel, Ivanhoe, which became the basis for the celebrated 1938 Errol Flynn film, The Adventures of Robin Hood, itself the basis of the Disney animation.2
To get to the real King John, we have to look at the evidence from his own day – what was said about him by contemporary chroniclers, and what can be learned about him from official records. John’s reign was a watershed moment in many important respects, including the amount of government archive. From the time of his accession in 1199, the king’s chancery, or writing office, began to keep copies of the documents it produced by enrolling them, and these rolls have for the most part survived. (They are now housed in the National Archives at Kew.) As a result we have far more letters, charters, memoranda – in short, far more information – about John than we do for any of his predecessors. Most of the time we can see where he is, who he is with, and what is on his agenda.
Once he is king, that is. One of the problems with telling John’s story is that he was the youngest of five brothers, and as such did not grow up expecting to inherit very much at all, let alone the most extensive dominion in Europe. There is evidence for John before his accession, but it is altogether more patchy. His life prior to that point has moments of high drama, but there are also long periods during which he almost completely disappears. For this reason, I decided to start my account a few years into his reign, and to look back to the earlier episodes in his life. Plotting the book in this way, it seemed to fall quite naturally into two themes or strands, with a turning point in 1203.
That, therefore, is where we find John at the beginning of Chapter One.