Once I was a clever boy learning the arts of Oxford... is a quotation from the verses written by Bishop Richard Fleming (c.1385-1431) for his tomb in Lincoln Cathedral. Fleming, the founder of Lincoln College in Oxford, is the subject of my research for a D. Phil., and, like me, a son of the West Riding. I have remarked in the past that I have a deeply meaningful on-going relationship with a dead fifteenth century bishop... it was Fleming who, in effect, enabled me to come to Oxford and to learn its arts, and for that I am immensely grateful.


Thursday, 26 February 2026

King John and his jewellery


Medievalists.net has an extremely interesting article about King John and his love of both ceremonial and personal jewellery, including pieces that were talismans.

The article can be read at The Magical Gemstones of King John of England

There is more about the King, his appearance, his possessions, his clothes, his court, and the cultural milieu he inhabited in an online article from 2015 which can be read at KING JOHN'S BLING

On the basis of this evidence the loss of his baggage train in The Wash in 1216 must have been all the more destabilising for an already sick man.

His love of jewellery is indicated clearly in the effigy created a few years after his death in his beloved Worcester Cathedral where he had requested burial. If one mentally fills the depressions in his crown and collar with paste stones one can begin to envisage how the effigy once looked and, by extension, what the King looked like in life.

King John effigy in Worcester Cathedral Magna Carta

King John 

A detail from his funerary effigy in Worcester Cathedral. Image: copyright the Dean and Chapter of Worcester Cathedral 


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