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
A detail from his funerary effigy in Worcester Cathedral. Image: copyright the Dean and Chapter of Worcester Cathedral
4 comments:
King John was accessorized! And not just in Coronation regalia! Thank you for sharing this!
Maybe these days he would be in GQ
I wonder if his jewellery will ever turn up, lost with his baggage train in the Wash, and discovered by some metal detectorist in a Norfolk or Lincolnshire field. I very much doubt it, because crafty locals or members of his staff who had accompanied him on his journey probably found and looted them shortly after they were lost.
Cheers,
John Ramsden (jrq@gmx.com)
A few years back someone claimed to have identified the site. Nothing since then. I suspect the waters carried quite a lot over a wide area and that it got buried in alluvial mud. As you say John’s retinue or the locals who knew the waterways may have salvaged something, but my hunch, regretfully, is that it was swept away and lost forever.
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