14 saturday review 1GR Saturday November 14 2020 | the timessocial divisions, facing rebellion and
foreign invasion; dogs were seen tearing
the flesh from fallen French soldiers who
had almost reached Winchester.
John thus died, by medieval standards,
perhaps a penitent and certainly a failure.
The chronicler monk Matthew Paris
remarked that “England reeks with John’s
filthy deeds; the foulness of Hell is defiled
by John”. To this, Jones adds: “Surely,
though, even John could not have plunged
Hell into a very much worse state than the
earthly realm he left behind.”
Jones’s books include The Plantagenets
and another on Magna Carta, which John
was forced by landowning rebels to
approve in 1215. Pope Innocent the Great
was appalled by the charter’s “shameful
and demeaning” limitations on monarchi-
cal power and he threatened anyone who
supported it with “the anger of AlmightyGod”, as well as, for good measure, the fury
of Saint Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and
Saint Paul. Jones rightly calls it an
“extraordinarily muscular era in the
history of Christianity” and contends that
many of John’s subjects would have been
less concerned with the constitutional
wrangling at Runnymede than the deci-
sions reached in 1215 by the Church’s
Fourth Lateran Council in Rome, which
issued commands on everything from the
sacrament of confession to the number of
times that parish churches were to be
cleaned.
High politics, however, while intelli-
gently and entertainingly discussed here,
function as a frame for a travelogue
through Plantagenet England. It was a
multilingual realm — Latin, French and
English were the main languages — but
Welsh, Cornish and Hebrew were alsospoken. At the University of
Cambridge, then six years old,
students read Cicero, Ovid,
Virgil, Horace and Aristotle.
There is something timely as
well as reassuring about this
narrative of presenting 1215
as “a year of world-changing
importance but also of what it
was for most people: just another
year”. The attention to the de-
tails of everyday life is extraordi-
nary — cats with a fine coat were
liable to meet a horrible death to
provide the poor with a cheap
alternative source of fur for
their outfits. It was not a good
year to be an animal. Jones
records that John sent a writ
to one of his noblemen de-
manding “forty of the fattest
pigs of the sort least good for
eating”. They were used for the
siege of Rochester castle.
Slaughtered and set on fire, they
reached such an intense heat
that they helped to bring down
part of the castle’s walls.
When not skinning cats or
dodging porcine infernos,
John’s subjects generally had a
fairly broad and varied diet, although the
bulk of calories came from wheat, oats and
barley. The religiously observant were
expected to become pescatarians or
vegetarians every Friday and Saturday,
throughout the 40 days of Lent, during
Advent, and on holy days associated with
the Apostles and the Virgin Mary. The
Church’s dietary strictures meant that
fishing became one of the leading indus-
tries in medieval England. When meat was
permitted, it, like nearly everything else,
told a story of hierarchy, with pork being
reserved mostly for the tables of the elite,
while bacon was for the poorer classes.
This could all be washed down by the
copious amounts of alcohol. The cry of
“Wesheil!” around a table was the 13th-
century equivalent of “Down it!” and even
the royal family seemed to think it poor
form to scorn that challenge. John’s father,
Henry II, got into a drinking competition
with the reverend father of a Cistercian
monastery, although such boozy bon-
homie with the brothers did not prevent
the king’s visible amusement when, during
a public procession, an unfortunate monk
fell whereupon his cowl billowed up to ex-
pose his bare buttocks to king and crowd.
A variety of sources and examples are
used well to make wider points. The
exhumed body of an archbishop of
Canterbury was found with his sumptuous
funerary robes perfectly preserved,
through which we learn of the English
embroidery, known as opus anglicanum;
England had become the best spot in
Europe to have one’s clothing decorated.
Similarly, we learn something of
women’s rights, from John’s disgraceful
decision to heavily fine Hawise, Dowager
Countess of Aumale, before he would
allow her inheritance. The deliciously
gruesome section on medicine reinforces
this; one potion — made from treesap, red
clay, oak apples and plantain juice — could
be applied by a pessary so that “a woman
who has been corrupted might be thought
a virgin”. John, for all his energy, failures,
ambition, towering rages and pitiful death,
is put into the shade by the fascinating
country that he misruled.Slaughtered pigs
were set on fire and
used for the siege of
Rochester Castle
Gareth Russell enjoys
this lushly illustrated
account of life in the
England of King John
K
ing John has gone down in
English history as an avaricious
autocrat with a penchant for
peaches and prostitutes. Some
of his previous biographers have
reported that his predilection for other
men’s wives was so notorious that, when
faced with a royal visit, noblemen hid their
spouses and instead dressed local prosti-
tutes in their stead, until John and his lusts
had departed.
This anecdote has been dismissed by
other historians as yet another example of
the gossipy canards that frequently attachIn the Reign
of King John
A Year in the Life of
Plantagenet England
by Dan JonesHead of Zeus,
360pp; £nonfiction
A travelogue for Plantagenet England
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is no more reflective of the real John’s
personality than the Robin Hood legends,
in which he is cast as a villainous, tax-
inflicting incompetent.
Dan Jones’s latest work has King John at
its head, if not quite at its centre. In the
Reign of King John is beautifully illustrated,
somewhere between a chronicle and a
coffee-table book. It’s a style previously
used to good effect by its publisher, Head
of Zeus, in Suzannah Lipscomb’s The King
is Dead, which had as its focus the bone-
chilling months of Henry VIII’s decline
when, like an obese Ozymandias, he
heaved his way towards death. Here too
the focus is the final act of a tyrant, with
Jones analysing 1215-16, the last of John’s
17 years as England’s monarch.
We are introduced to a king who was not
quite as repulsive as myth would have it,
but rather “a striking man. He stood
slightly below average height at about five
foot six and a half inches. Middle age had
begun to grey his hair, although his teeth
remained in good condition. He wore
expensive clothes with miniver fur, and he
loved jewels.”
The narrative begins with the royal
family’s Christmas celebrations at
Worcester in 1214 — Jones uses previous
household receipts to show this as a season
of conspicuous consumption, when the
royal kitchens took delivery of 400 pigs’
heads, 16,000 hens, 10,000 salted eels and
15,000 herrings. The book ends with the
king’s death aged 49 in 1216 from dysen-
tery after apparently gorging too enthusi-
astically on peaches and cider.
Witnesses reported that in extremis
John writhed with guilt as much as pain,
repenting for his misdeeds and writing to
the new Pope, Honorius III, begging for
absolution. He certainly had sufficient sins
on his conscience, with unsavoury con-
temporary accounts recalling how John
had taken pleasure “with the damage done
to his enemies” by watching as their towns,
villages and hedges burnt. He left a
country crippled by political, religious andbig bad john The man who ruled in 1215 has a reputation as villainous and ineptPRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGESK8P0V4L