KING JOHN'S BLING by Elizabeth Chadwick

King John's tomb Worcester Cathedral

As a writer,  much of the need-to-know detail for my novel is the background material culture of my settings. While it's vitally important to get the mindset and attitudes right so that I don't end up with modern people in fancy dress, a part of this is knowing the world in which my characters lived, and immersing myself in it as thoroughly as I can in order to convince the readers – although the more I study the more I realise how much in the shallows I still am even after more than 40 years of research!

Since King John and Magna Carta are so much on the agenda at the moment I thought this might be fun for my June post on The History Girls.

Supposing King John walked in on us right this minute. What might we see? Let's take it that it's a decent time for him and not too politically fraught. He is prepared to be affable. What does he look like?
We don't have a lot to go on from his own time. Contemporary historian Gerald of Wales tells us that his height was slightly below average and he was not as tall as his father or his older brothers Henry and Richard.  His tomb in Worcester Cathedral was opened in 1797, where he was found to have been placed in a stone coffin. The corpse was somewhat decomposed with the dried skins of maggots dispersed over the body. He had been dressed in a full length robe of red damask. That's a kind of wool fabric woven with silk and often patterned. There was a badly decomposed sword and scabbard in his left hand. He didn't wear a crown, but on his head was a coif that the antiquarians thought was perhaps a monk's cowl, perhaps placed on his head to cut down the time he might have to spend in purgatory. Modern historians now believe the cowl to be the cap he wore on his head at his coronation that was intended to soak up the holy oil with which he had been anointed. So it was in its own way as Royal as a crown. The skeleton was measured and turned out to be 5 foot 6 1/2 inches tall. So we know John's height and part of what he was wearing. It's the same outfit more or less, that is on his tomb effigy today. He may well have worn this robe to his coronation too.

We don't know what colour his hair was. People often think that he was dark-haired but that comes from books, film and TV. An illuminated sketch of him hunting from a century after his death shows him as being blonde, but really we have no idea.

A blonde king John out hunting - made 100 years after his death.

We do know from his correspondence that he liked to wear jewels around his neck and a black leather belt. Here's the letter about the jewels:
  'The King to Geoffrey FitzPeter. We had lost the precious stones and jewels which we were accustomed to wear around our neck: and Berchal the bearer of these presents, found them, and liberally and faithfully brought them unto us; and for his service we have given him 20 shillings worth of rent at Berkhamsted, where he was born.'

And the piece about the black leather belt
'on 27 June at Winchester, know that on the Friday next after the nativity of St John the Baptist, we received at Winchester 12 silver cups, and amongst other articles is specified the plain black leather belt with which the king was usually girt.'

Plaster cast mould of John's effigy in the Cast Court
at the V&A Museum. Note the jewelled collar and red robe

So, we can imagine him in a full-length red patterned gown, jewels around his neck and a black leather belt around his waist. He might have one of those silver cups in his hand and it will contain wine. Perhaps a strong one from Poitou. We know his wife liked to drink strong wine from that region because he ordered it for her when she was at Marlborough. John himself enjoyed wine from Le Blanc near Poitiers. 150 casks of it were delivered to his sellers at Southampton sometime before September 1202. There were numerous wines at that period and they had different qualities. The wines of Auxerre were famous for being as 'clear as a sinner's tears.' Or how about this one  - here's a description of a raisin wine from John's time, written by Alexander Nequam who have been Richard the Lion heart's breast-brother.  Oz Clarke eat your heart out!

'Raisin wine which is clear to the bottom of the cup, in its clarity similar to the tears were penitent, and the colour is that of an ox horn. It descends like lightning upon one who takes it – most tasty as an almond nut, quick as a squirrel, frisky as a kid, strong in the manner of a host of Cistercians or grey monks, emitting a kind of spark; it is supplied with the subtlety of a syllogism of Petit-Pont; delicate as a fine cotton, it exceeds crystal in its coolness'

Royal servants Reginald of Cornhill and John Fitzhugh were vitally important in the procurement of luxury goods in John's household and the maintenance of the same. Luxury goods they purchased included spices, fabrics, fruit, nuts, fresh fish, wine and wax. Cups and dishes were bought and mended. There is a mention on the accounts requiring five drinking horns to be ornamented with silver, and for the Kings own drinking horn to be ornamented with gold. So perhaps we ought to take that silver cup off him and put a drinking horn in his hand instead, and it will be decorated with emeralds rubies and sapphires. Rings were bought from Italian merchants at one point amounting to £226 13s 4d. The major producer of emeralds, rubies and sapphires were India and Sri Lanka (the latter known in the Medieval period as Sarandib), so these jewels had a long way to travel. At this point in history the faceting that we see today on gemstones was unknown and the jewels would have been polished in the smooth cabocchon style that makes them look like lumpy boiled sweets!

Cabochon tourmaline ring circa 1200

If John was feeling magnanimous, he might hand over some of these cups and jewels as gifts, or as diplomatic sweeteners. So for example he gave three gold rings set with sapphires to the King Norway

William, John's tailor (who also had brief to buy luxury goods for the King), in November 1214 was given a pile of textiles intended to be made into clothes as gifts from King John to Peter des Roches Bishop of Winchester. The materials included silk cloths, quilts, squirrel furs, scarlet cloth, grey cloth for a bed covering, six pairs of fasteners, and a gilded saddle with silk cloth and gilded bridle reins. Scarlet cloth cost eight shillings for a length of 37 inches -a measurement that was known as a cloth yard. Each finished cloth was made of 24 of these clothyards and required about ninety pounds of the finest English wool. This would take at least 36 sheep to provide and probably a lot more and that was before the cost of the dyestuff.  Just over three modern yards of cloth cost eight shillings which would be somewhere around a week's wages for a household knight.

If King John's cloak happened to be lined with super special ermines, that is the winter coat of the stoat, it would have cost him 100 shillings. Lambskin linings cost between six and seven shillings each, and a panel of northern squirrel fur cost 20 shillings.

If King John had walked into this room with his servants you would have noticed that their outfits were colour-coded. Stewards had robes of black and brown. Huntsmen wore blue and green. The nurses and washer women wore blue and green also

Back to John himself. In March 1213, Reginald of Cornhill supplied gold lace to William the Tailor to make a surcoat for the King. That's interesting because lace from the 13th century doesn't seem to have many surviving examples. In Winchester in 1210, miniver was bought to make John a nightgown. This doesn't mean he actually slept in it as such, it was more in the way of a luxurious dressing gown to lounge about in!

At Easter 1213 William the Tailor made three blood red robes, one for John, one for his queen and one for William D'Albini, although the latter's cost less. He also received a gift of a ruby red robe that was lined with green cendal (a form of silk). True red being such an expensive dye, it was commonly featured in royal robes. Ghent in Flanders was the centre for the best dyed red cloth. There are more accounts for robes lined with green cendal for members of the royal household including John's brother William Longespee Earl of Salisbury and John's own bastard son Richard FitzRoy.

John loved his jewels and display as we've already seen. One of his purveyors bought  150 gold leaves to gild 567 lances for theatrical display. We have a chamber receipt for 'one staff ornamented with 19 sapphires, and another with 10. A golden cabinet set with stones. 21 rings. A staff ornamented with six garnets, a silver cabinet with precious stones. Then there was the golden case made to hold the Kings 'ambergris apples' - an early form of pomander. This really gives you a feel for the colour and the richness of the period which you don't see in the bare shells of  the draughty castles that are all that are left to use,  but if you go somewhere like reconstructed interpretation of the King's bedchamber at Dover you begin to realise what a colourful, rich and textured world the 12th century aristocracy lived in.

casket late 12thc

You see reenactors today – and I'm one myself - who strive to emulate the clothing and trappings of the time, but in high status cases we cannot begin to replicate the wealth of a medieval king such as John. People often say that his reign wasn't his fault that inherited Richard's debts and a bankrupted realm. Does this look like bankruptcy? John, whatever you think of him has to be one of the most gifted fiscal geniuses in terms of raising money that England has ever known. It's also one of the reasons among many for Magna Carta.  But I just wish I could blur time for a moment and experience the full effect as it originally was.
Elizabeth Chadwick

Henry II's bed replica. Dover Castle

If you can get to the Magna Carta Exhibition at the British Library in London, do go - there are some bishop's accoutrements that give an idea of the wonderful textiles being produced in the 13thc, as well as a scrap of embroidered fabric from John's tomb.

Other sources used in this article:
Lost Letters of Medieval Life English Society 1200-1250 edited and translated by Martha Carlin and David Crouch - University of Pennsylvania Press 2013

A Description of the The Patent Rolls in the Tower of London to which is added an Itinerary of King John with Prefatory Observations by Thomas Duffus Hardy, F.S.A. of the Inner Temple. 1835

Serving the Man that rules: Aspects of the domestic arrangements of the Household of King John 1199-1216 - Henrietta Kaye.  Thesis submitted to the School of History at the University of East Anglia 2013.

King John - Treachery, Tyranny and the Road to Magna Carta by Marc Morris - Hutchinson 2015

ISABEL DE WARENNE: An exercise in joining the dots by Elizabeth Chadwick.

When an author writes about people who actually lived, one of the challenges is finding out about the secondary characters; the people who interacted with the stars of the show but have left less of a trace. When writing my Eleanor of Aquitaine trilogy, I needed to find out about the life and circumstances of a lady called Isabel de Warenne, countess of Surrey and Warenne. She was a contemporary of Eleanor's and sometimes moved in her circles. Although she has left traces in the historical record, they're more hidden and fragmentary than Eleanor's, so it has involved some digging around.

I became interested in Isabel de Warenne because her second marriage was to Henry II's illegitimate half brother Hamelin, the latter of whom features as a strong secondary character in my Eleanor trilogy.  As I wrote his story into the fabric of Henry and Eleanor's, it became obvious that his wife was a major part of that thread, and when I began digging, I came across some very useful details and plot opportunities.

 Isabel de Warenne belonged to an illustrious line of Anglo Norman nobility with extensive lands in England and Normandy. Lewes Castle belonged to her family and they had the patronage of the Cluniac priory there founded by Isabel's grandfather.  Castle Acre in Norfolk, Conisbrough Castle and Sandal in Northern England were also theirs. In Normandy the castles of Bellencombre and Mortemer were de Warenne strongholds.   We don't know exactly when Isabel was born; dates are obscure, but a ball park of 1130 is not unreasonable to suggest.  Her family were one of the first to adopt a distinctive personal blazon of blue and yellow chequers and were already using the chequered device on their seals by the mid 12th century.

seal of John de Warenne, Isabel and Hamelin's grandson: 13th century

Her father, William de Warenne joined the Second Crusade in 1146 and never returned. He was cut to pieces when the army of Louis VII of France was crossing the slopes of Mount Cadmos (now  Mount Honaz) in Turkey and suffered a heavy mauling from the Saracens,

 Isabel's widowed mother married again, to Patrick Earl of Salisbury. Isabel herself, now in her teens and a great marriage prize as the sole child of the Earl of Warenne, was married to William of Boulogne, the youngest son of King Stephen, who, was a child of about eleven years old.  King Stephen at the time was at war with his cousin Matilda over the right to the English crown and Isabel would have grown to adulthood during a time fraught with anxiety and violence.  The situation was eventually resolved  when Stephen came to an agreement with Empress Matilda's son Henry, that the crown would pass to him when Stephen died.  Stephen's sons would be required to step down from their claims to the throne. Stephen's older son Eustace, died during these negotiations (some say very fortuitously) thus removing one stumbling block from the agreement. During this delicate time of settling the matter of the succession, there seem to have been plots by both sides to be rid of the opposition. An assassination attempt on  Henry II was foiled, and there may have been one on Isabel's young husband William, whose leg was broken in a fall from a horse.

Eventually, matters settled down.  William abjured his right to the throne. Given a different set of circumstances, he may have become King, and Isabel would then have been queen of England,  In the event, Stephen died and  Isabel and William of Boulogne swore allegiance to the new king.  Henry kept William on a tight leash and he was obviously watched just in case there was a chance that others would see him as a figurehead for rebellion.  Did Isabel stay on her estates during the early years of Henry;s reign or play her part at court?  We don't know, but she and her husband had no children and in my novel The Winter Crown I have thought it not inconceivable that some of her time was spent at court with the Queen to whom she could have imparted valuable information about the dealings of the English court prior to Henry's accession.  She was also in the same position as Eleanor of having married a husband several years younger than herself.

Isabel and William were still childless in 1159 when he went on battle campaign with King Henry to Toulouse and died later that year of disease during the retreat. He was buried at the abbey of Montmorel in Poitou.
His death left Isabel an heiress of considerable wealth, still only in her twenties. In usual medieval fashion this state of affairs had to be remedied and Henry II thought she would be the perfect wife for his youngest brother, also called William like her first husband.  What Isabel thought about this notion is not recorded, but if she had been at court in earlier years, she probably knew him and he her.
As it happened, the marriage never took place because Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury banned the match on the grounds that it was consanguineous.  Usually when this happened - that the couple were too closely related within the proscribed degree - a dispensation could be obtained, but Becket, whose quarrel with Henry II was beginning to escalate made his position clear. There was to be no dispensation.  Becket may have been making a stand because of Henry's dreadful behaviour in 1159/60  where he was behind the hauling of Isabel's sister in law Mary of Boulogne out of the convent where she had been a nun (an abbess no less) for ten years and forcing her to marry his nephew Matthew of Alsace.
There was nothing to be done. William went off empty handed to Normandy to visit his mother, and died soon afterwards - of a broken heart so the anti-Becket propagandists of the time were quick to say. However, no Angevin princeling ever died of such a complaint. One of the murderers of Becket, Richard Brito, had been one of William FitzEmpress's knights and as he struck his blow is supposed to have said 'And that is for the love of my lord William, brother of the King.'  One suspects that as a household knight Brito would have been hoping for gifts of land and money from the largesse William would have access to by marrying Isabel. This now being denied to him, he was bound to be miffed!

Henry II was furious at being thwarted but there were always ways round. Becket had played the consanguinity card, but there was still another Angevin brother waiting in the wings - Hamelin, Henry's bastard half brother and he had no blood ties to Isabel that would prevent the marriage taking place. Thus Henry still managed to draw the de Warenne estates firmly into his own family enclave.

Hamelin and Isabel were married at Easter 1164.  In March of that year a record appears in the pipe rolls for clothes for Isabel amounting to £41 10s 8d, presumably a wedding dress and trousseau.  She was now the King's sister in law and also sister in law to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Did this bring the women closer to each other still? We don't know, but there is a later reason to think that the two branches of the family kept close company - some of the time at least.  Isabel was no mere cipher and witnessed charters under her own seal during her widowhood and in her own court.

'coram Isabel comitissa Warennie domina nostra'  heads one such charter. 'Before Isabel, our lady, Countess of Warenne' is the heading on one such charter.

Example of 12th century silk textile from Sicily. Possibly Isabelle's wedding dress was
made of fabric like this.  She and Hamelin may have visited Sicily in 1176. V&A

We don't know from this far distance of time if Hamelin and Isabel's marriage was a happy one, but certainly in financial and business terms it appears to have been compatible, and was also a dynastic success.  Isabel had not borne any children to her first husband William of Boulogne, but she and Hamelin were to have three girls and a boy. William, their son and heir, and daughters Isabel, Adela and Matilda.  We don't have a specific birth order for the children,  Hamelin took his wife's family name and became Hamelin de Warenne, Earl of Surrey and Warenne.
In 1176, Hamelin escorted his niece Joanna, daughter of Henry II to Sicily for her marriage. We don't know if Isabel was with him, but Joanna would have had female attendants, so it's possible her aunt Isabel accompanied her, although again it is one of those grey areas where novelists have the leeway to explore the spaces between the lines.

Some time in the 1170's Hamelin set out to build a fine castle for himself and his countess at Conisborough in South Yorkshire.  The keep, recently refurbished by England Heritage is well worth visiting and features Isabel's own chamber near the top of the keep.  You can see a cutaway diagram of the keep at Conisbrough on the Castle's English Heritage website. with Isabelle's chamber near the top of the keep and Hamelin's below. There was also a chapel dedicated to St. Philip and St. James.

Conisbrough today

Isabel's chamber, complete with fireplace

An artis's impression of the chamvber brightened up and lived in.

Access onto the battlements from the chamber

One of the reasons I am positive that Isabel and Hamelin kept in close touch with their royal Angevin kin is because of an event that happened some time after 1180.  One of the de Warenne daughters became pregnant by her cousin John Count of Mortain, later to become the infamous King John.  We don't have a date for the event and we don't know which daughter.  Only one chronicle tells us that a daughter of Hamelin de Warenne bore John's son, and there are no charters mentioning her name in connection with the birth to give us any sort of idea. Popular histories online make all sorts of claims for this one or that one, but basically it's all utter speculation because we just don't know.  What we do know is that young John was sufficiently close to his de Warenne cousins to get one of them with child. While royal illegitimate children were often accepted as a matter of course, I suspect this particular pregnancy was regarded with a degree of dismay!
The child was christened Richard and can be found in various charters and in Henry III's pipe rolls. He is variously known as Richard of Dover, Richard of Chillham, Richard Fitzroy, and Richard de Warenne. There may be a clue to his mother in that Richard named his own daughter Isabel, but at the same time it was his mother in law's name (and his grandmother's), so there are no guarantees, however, it may be a pointer.

Another link that Isabel may have had with Eleanor of Aquitaine is Old Sarum which in the 12th century housed a royal palace and a cathedral. (It was the original Salisbury. The town and cathedral we now know as Salisbury was relocated from Old Sarum in the first quarter of the 13th century).  Eleanor was kept here under sometimes strict house arrest several times in  her 16 year imprisonment by Henry II.  Isabel may have visited her here, or have had some access to her because her own half-brother was the Earl of Salisbury and her mother the dowager countess, and family connections counted for much.  Again, it's one of those things we can't say for certain but it's one of those areas where as the novelist I can explore the possibility as a story line and know I am not going wildly outside the parameters of what is known.

To complete Isabel's story, she died on July 12th 1203, a year after her husband Hamelin and 9 months before Eleanor herself died at Fontevraud Abbey. Isabel was buried at Lewes Priory beside Hamelin and although their graves have been lost over the centuries, their bones are still there somewhere and near each other.

Since William Marshal and his family are my specialist subject I was interested to discover that Isabel's mother Adela was William Marshal's aunt by marriage, and her son William, Isabel's half-brother, was the Marshal's cousin.  There is a further link in that Hamelin and Isabel's son William, later married William Marshal's eldest daughter Mahelt when her first husband died in 1225.
When you begin looking, everything is connected to everything else!

Selected Sources:
Early Yorkshire Charters Volume 8 edited by William Farrer and Charles Travis Clay - Cambridge University Press
Noblewomen Aristocracy and Power in the 12th century Anglo Norman Realm by Susan M. Johns. Manchester University Press
Thomas Becket by John Guy - Penguin
Blog article by Elizabeth Chadwick Hamelin de Warenne
Online Dictionary of National Biography - article by Susan M. Johns
The Image of Aristocracy in Britain 1o00-1300 by David Crouch


Elizabeth Chadwick is a best selling, multi-award winning author of fiction set in the Middle Ages. She is currently completing The Autumn Throne, the 3rd book in  trilogy of novels about Eleanor of Aquitaine - and featuring among its cast Isabel and Hamelin de Warrene and their children.