King John has had a ‘bad press’ and despite the efforts of serious historians to challenge the prevailing popular narrative, he is usually remembered as, in Seller and Yeatman’s classic system, a “Bad King”. Shakespeare’s distinctly idiosyncratic retelling of the reign - no mention of Magna Carta, but a lot of trouble caused by the Pope for the Elizabethan audience - cannot make King John a hero king nor a martyr king. He is a Lear with bathos, not pathos.
Historically his reign is a series of melodramatic crises and losses - the loss of Normandy and Anjou, the loss of his nephew Arthur, the loss of the clash with Pope Innocent III over the appointment of Stephen Langton, the loss of the confidence of a substantial part of the political nation leading to Magna Carta, and the loss of his treasure in the Wash just before his death in 1216.
King John – detail from his funerary effigy in Worcester Cathedral.
Image: copyright the Dean and Chapter of Worcester Cathedral.
He does manage nevertheless to still look a little smug and not a little truculent in his effigy, which is often dated to about 1225, a man bowed perhaps, but not broken, as indeed one of his biographers, R.V.Turner, sees him.
I will admit to having a somewhat more favourable view of King John than the traditional one, if only because we have the same Christian name. Undoubtedly John did do a number of unattractive, cruel and malicious things, but as some of his biographers have seen he did things with flair and panache. He is the entertaining villain who the audience secretly cheers on. He was also unlucky - unlucky in the resolve of his opponents and also just plain unlucky as with the collapse of his grand strategy in 1214 to recover his lost lands in France, or the loss of his treasure in 1216.
There is something about the loss of the baggage train from Lincolnshire Live at The lost treasure in Lincolnshire missing for 100s of years
In respect of the treasure I wrote the other year about a claim that the site of King John’s treasure had been identified. That story goes back to a metal detectorist’s theories as set out in 2017 by the BBC at The lost jewels of Bad King John.
Nothing seems to have come from that so far but according to Yahoo News a new line of research has been triggered by plans to erect yet another proposed solar farm. The article can be read at Excavation looks to solve mystery of King John's lost treasure after 800 years
There is more about the prospect in an article from the Eastern Daily Press at Could new Norfolk search solve 800-year-old riddle of King John's lost treasure?
The borderlands of Lincolnshire and Norfolk where the Wellstream once flowed have changed very much over eight centuries and locating where the opening of the Wellstream into the Wash was is one thing, but whither the currents may have carried the contents of the baggage train is another matter. Various villages and towns strung out along the Old Sea Bank road are suggested for the site of the disaster.
The Newark Advertiser - which has an interest in the story because King John died at the castle in the town only days after the loss of his treasure - reports and speculates on the possibilities of finding the lost treasure at ‘One in a million chance’ of finding King John’s treasure with new search to get under way
The Daily Telegraph in 2022 reported on research that explains the scale of the incoming tide which swamped the baggage train, and includes a useful map. This can be seen at How King John really lost the Crown Jewels... according to an astronomer
Returning to Worcester, to whose Anglo-Saxon saints Oswald and Wulfstan the far from noticeably pious King had a strong devotion, the Cathedral Library and Archive blog has an interesting account of the King’s last Christmas spent at the cathedral priory in 1214. Both the cathedral and city were still recovering from a serious fire in 1202. Even as his authority crumbled this was still planned as a major event. It also describes some of the items which may have been swallowed by the Wellstream less than two years later and illustrates a fragment of the King’s shroud at Christmas 1214: King John at Worcester
The blog also writes about the King’s devotion to SS Oswald and Wulfstan in 1218 –Rededicating the Cathedral to Saints Wulfstan and Oswald
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