King John of England is best remembered for Magna Carta and military failure—but his fascination with gemstones reveals a different side of medieval kingship. In a world where jewels were believed to hold real protective and healing powers, John’s treasure hoard may have been as much about magic as it was about wealth.
By James Turner
1066 and All That, written by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatsman brilliantly satirises the then still highly influential Victorian and Edwardian approach to the writing of history. The book playfully exaggerates the conceits and conventions of the histories its authors read as schoolboys while somehow still capturing the soul of these works.
According to Sellar and Yeatsman, and therefore the generation of historians that they are satirising, England’s monarchs can, and probably should be, neatly organised into two simple categories, good or bad. Interestingly the main criteria against which the worthiness that the Kings and Queens of England was measured against was their historical contributions to the development of parliamentary democracy and the then contemporary British political establishment.
John is presented within 1066 and All That as a bad, perhaps even an awful, king yet his reign was ultimately a good thing because of the Magna Carta and its seminal role in English constitutional law. Nowadays most scholars would be extremely reluctant to assign similar value judgements to the reign of medieval kings.
Such an approach to history almost inevitably involves the projection of the values, practices and structures of the historian’s society onto a medieval world which would find them alien and almost incomprehensible. This danger is the primary source of Sellar and Yeatsman’s satire which lambasted the assumption of previous generations of historians that their own society was the crowning achievement and desired end point of history.
Of course, vigorous debate often takes place between historians regarding the effectiveness of certain king’s administration or the ramifications of certain policies. This distinction is more than simple semantics. It represents a commitment by historians to take great care to follow the evidence and avoid, as far as possible, the projection of their own values and cultural assumptions onto their subjects. More fundamentally, it touches upon our purpose in writing history and examining the past. Do we seek to learn and reflect or categorise and colonise?
The beginning of the section on King John in 1066 and All That, by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatsman
John is an interesting example because his effectiveness as a ruler and the degree of his personal culpability for the collapse of the Angevin empire still spark a degree of controversy. As we shall see, John’s interest, possible obsession, with the hoarding of precious gems and items of jewellery is a fantastic example of this need to approach and evaluate medieval personages on their own terms.
Hoarding Jewels: Regalia, Inventories, and Acquisition
In 1201, the third year of his reign, John awarded 20 shillings worth of land in Berkhamsted to a local man named Bartholomew. This land was a reward for the recovery and return of a prized item of jewellery containing precious stones that the king wore “around our neck.” The following year Bartholomew was granted a modest pension by the king. It seems that he and his rescue of the king’s jewels had not been forgotten.
An inventory carried out by royal favourite and Chief Forester, Hugh de Neville, in 1207 found that the royal household’s silverware collection contained over 150 pieces and weighed over 550 pounds. While gold plates were considerably rarer and more expensive, John appears to have ready access to considerable amounts. In 1214, hoping to impress and reassure his allies and vassals with a display of wealth, fifteen golden cups and a large bowl were taken on campaign with him in Poitiers. Several of the cups were described as weighing as much as 5 pounds.
Reserves of silver and gold plates were a necessity for a medieval king. They were regarded as an essential accessory of kingship, enabling the king to properly host even the most illustrious and high ranking of guests. The vast majority of medieval monarchs adopted an at least partially itinerant lifestyle, their courts travelling between a number of important royal centres and the homes of their regional lieutenants and deputies.
There were several practical considerations behind this practice. Firstly, and most importantly travelling across the length and breadth of their domains allowed the king to personally project his personal power and authority into the localities. This helped to remind everyone who was really in charge. The regional powerbrokers that the king normally ruled through were left keenly aware that royal visits and the scrutiny they brought were sporadic but almost inevitable.
King John – British Library Cotton MS Claudius D II fol. 116
Secondly the royal court was a sizable institution that consumed a great deal of resources. By moving around, no one area was overly burdened by the need to support such a large group to such a high standard. The presence of silver and gold plate in such quantities, signalled to whoever was present, the magnificence and elevated status of the king. Additionally, if there was an emergency or the court’s reserves of coinage were growing low, then a portion of the court’s plate could be sold or melted down as a way of quickly raising capital.
The splendour and luxuriousness of John’s court, as well as his own extravagant tastes, can be further viewed through the extensive formal royal regalia maintained during his reign. A staggering 56 pounds of gold and 86 pounds of silver were used in the new creation of the crowns, jewellery and other ornamentation used within John’s coronation.
He had also inherited a number of suitable crowns from his predecessors, including one brought back from Cyprus by his brother, Richard I, and a German style crown that may have belonged to his grandmother Empress Matilda. Later, towards the tail end of his reign, John managed to find the funds to fashion a new crown for himself. The regalia also consisted of two golden staffs or sceptres, one surmounted by a cross and the other a dove. John later had another golden staff, fitted with a dozen emeralds, added to the regalia.
Naturally the two swords that rounded off the items of the royal regalia were richly decorated with precious metal and gemstones, as did their accompanying accessories such as belts and scabbards. John also possessed two sets of regalia robes, one in white silk and the other in purple, both of which were heavily adorned with gold, pearls and other precious gems.
There is some evidence to suggest that John may have made some attempt to resurrect the Anglo-Norman tradition of seasonal public crown wearing. Certainly, John appeared before the court, crowned and in full royal regalia significantly more than previous Plantagenet monarchs, a deliberate affectation calculated to strengthen royal authority and status. John set aside an exceedingly generous £75 for new robes for the royal couple at the coronation of his second wife Isabella of Angoulême in 1200.
John took considerable pains to make sure that his court was at the forefront of contemporary fashion, importing huge quantities of expensive high end fabrics, some of which were even used to clothe the King’s household servants at his own expense. Of the numerous methods through which John chose to showcase his wealth and extravagance, jewels and jewellery seem to have engendered the most personal enthusiasm.
Like the majority of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries John travelled with only a fraction of his overall wealth. For reasons of ease and security, his reserves of cash and the majority of his other valuables were deposited at various royal centres and religious houses.
An inventory of the royal jewels housed within five of the most prominent of these religious houses found that between them they housed two hundred and twenty-one sapphires, a hundred and seventy-four emeralds, a hundred and one rubies, forty-one garnets and twenty-eight diamonds, all owned by the king. There was also a small smattering of less valuable or coveted gemstones, including pearls, turquoise and amethyst.
At the end of John’s reign, it was discovered that the royal stronghold of Devizes Castle housed a treasure hoard of just over two hundred and seventy rings. The two most valuable of these rings were valued jointly as being worth the equivalent of fifty marks of silver, suggesting they were set with numerous high-quality gems.
Statue of Hubert Walter from the exterior of Canterbury Cathedral – photo by Ealdgyth / Wikimedia Commons
While many of these gems had simply been inherited from the royal treasury, there is considerable surviving evidence that John made concerted efforts to grow and even curate his jewellery collection. When Hubert Walter, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Chief Justiciar, died in 1205, John had Hubert’s estate inventoried, claiming several items of jewellery for himself. In 1216, John purchased ten gold necklaces inlaid with precious stones from the Hospitaller Order. He also wrote to Reginald of Cornhill, one of the court procurers, giving him detailed instructions directing him to purchase a specific set of stones.
Largesse, Prestige, and the Royal Court
It is tempting to connect John’s lavish spending and obvious vanity with first the disintegration of the Angevin Empire and then the festering resentment of the English aristocracy that erupted into the First Barons War. It would seem obvious to most modern observers that the money John invested in his hoard of jewellery could probably have been spent on the raising of additional troops, the construction of fortifications and the fostering of allies.
It is notable however that none of John’s many contemporary critics ever levelled any substantive complaints about the king’s profligacy or insistence upon furnishing his court with so many luxuries. Indeed, they seem to have regarded John’s refined sense of fashion and style as one of his few positive characteristics.
As far as the elite of early thirteenth century Europe were concerned, kings were supposed to appear as magnificent figures who displayed and embodied otherwise unimaginable wealth. For a medieval king during this period, flagrant displays of wealth and conspicuous consumption were essential methods in the signalling and dissemination of their political authority.
Largesse and generosity were seen as essential kingly traits, one of the principal means through which kings could solicit and reward the cooperation of the aristocracy. John’s displays of his apparently great wealth communicated to his vassals and potential allies that he would be able to handsomely reward their service.
Likewise, the sophistication and scale of the royal court, replete with expensive furnishings and all the latest fashion trends, was seen as a source of pride that reflected positively upon the kingdom and its inhabitants. Henry II had placed England at the centre of one of the most powerful hegemonic constructions within Europe.
Richard I, maintained the borders of this patchwork polity while fortifying the English with his personal legend as a great warrior king and crusader. John’s maintenance of such a richly appointed royal court signalled to his vassals that England and the Angevin dynasty retained the prestige that it had enjoyed under his relatives.
John, in hoarding treasures and investing heavily in his own appearance and that of the royal regalia was behaving exactly as a medieval king should, in a manner calculated to impress and reassure his most valued subordinates. Whether it occurred to them or not, contemporary commentators never explicitly drew a connection between John’s lifestyle and their complaints regarding his greed and the many financial abuses he heaped upon the English nobility.
Indeed, most hostile primary sources focus their critique of John upon his perceived negligence of royal duties, suggesting he was too busy indulging in his passion for hunting and overactive libido to effectively reign. Fascinatingly, it was John’s sexual appetite, rather than his profligacy, that contemporaries most commonly linked to his financial squeezing of the aristocracy.
A persistent allegation levelled against the king was that John would spuriously claim nobles owed him money in order to pressure their female relatives into accepting his sexual advances. In fact, John’s son and successor Henry III would eventually be criticised for impoverishing his court by selling too much of his silver and gold plate, the king foolishly ignoring the artistic value and immense craftsmanship of these items in his desperation for bullion.
The “Power” of Stones: Lapidaries, Saints, and Politics
Perhaps part of the reason for John’s great appreciation for gemstones and the strange failure of his contemporaries to condemn his excesses in that regard was the belief that they possessed magical properties. The belief that some crystals had the magical ability to protect and even heal people was inherited directly from the ancient world and classical tradition.
Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia, an ambitious attempt to summarise the entirety of human understanding of the natural world, comments upon the then widespread belief vouching for its authenticity. According to the classical tradition, different varieties of gems had different properties. According to Pliny, for instance, amethysts helped people resist the intoxicating effects of alcohol, while carnelians helped healing.
Medieval authors replicated and expanded upon this tradition. Lapidaries, texts detailing the physical and magical properties of gemstones, proliferated within late Anglo-Saxon England, establishing a literary tradition that continued to thrive into John’s era and beyond. Such texts were consulted by jewellers, scholars and medical professionals, freely mingling practical and mystical knowledge.
As we have seen, sapphires seem to have been the gemstone best represented within John’s hoard. This was because they were considered the most precious and valuable of all gemstones, the near contemporary bishop, Marbond of Rennes, writing that they were associated with kingship and could fortify their wearers against illness.
French jewels dating to around the year 1300 – photo courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Adam of Eynsham, the early thirteenth century abbot and scholar, was a close associate and former chaplain of Bishop Hugh Avalon of Lincoln. Upon Hugh’s death in 1200, Adam began writing a hagiography of Hugh, a form of biography intended to promote and defend the sainthood of its subject.
In this work, Adam records an incident in which the newly crowned John boasted to Hugh that he possessed a particularly potent gem, that he had inherited from his ancestors, that bestowed upon his family such a degree of divine favour that it would protect them from losing lands and territory. Subsequent events would, of course, demonstrate John’s folly and the baselessness of this belief. Yet Adam, through Hugh, mocks John only for the excessive faith he placed in the crystal’s abilities and seems to accept implicitly the validity of their use in medicine.
In 1219, Earl Hubert de Burgh of Kent, a former member of the king’s inner circle, was appointed regent of John’s son, the young Henry III following the death of his predecessor, William Marshall. Hubert had been instrumental in the defeat of the French invasion that had sought to capitalise upon John’s war with the rebellious barons but inevitably the regency brought with it a number of political enemies and rivalries.
One of a number of treasonous charges levied by these enemies against Hubert, following the end of the regency and Henry’s assumption of direct rule, was that he removed a number of stones with the magical ability to protect their bearer from harm during battle from the royal treasury. It was further alleged that he then treacherously gifted these gems to the king’s enemy, Llewellyn of Wales, who now benefited from their protection.
Indeed, as an adult Henry III, while almost perpetually strapped for cash and far less ostentatious than his father in terms of personal appearance and taste, also held an appreciation for the magical protective properties of gemstones. Henry had a profound fear of thunder developed when a monstrously violent storm caught and almost wrecked his ship during a channel crossing.
In order to allay Henry’s fears and the undue stress they were causing him, a Gascon surgeon named Peter, who appeared at the English court about the same time of Henry’s marriage to Eleanor of Provence, presented Henry with a stone he claimed had the power to protect him from thunder and lightning. A grateful Henry had the stone fitted into a necklace which he habitually wore.
John’s passion for jewellery was greatly entangled in his belief in the fortifying, magical, properties of gemstones. Such beliefs were common at the time and are for some reason still extant today. John’s interaction with Bishop Hugh of Lincoln that John’s faith in the power of certain gems far expanded far further than the medicinal qualities they were routinely subscribed to. Yet such eccentricities were removed from the mainstream only by a matter of degree.
In the end John’s hoarding of treasure and his drive to acquire even more precious stones is a valuable reminder of the need to view individual actions within the context of their own culture. It seems obvious to modern commentators that John’s lavish spending on jewels was a severe liability that contributed to the rapid collapse of his military and political position. Yet from the perspective of his peers and subjects John’s lavish spending was seen as one of his few positive attributes.
James Turner has recently completed his doctoral studies at Durham University before which he attended the University of Glasgow. Deeply afraid of numbers and distrustful of counting, his main research interests surround medieval aristocratic culture and identity. You can follow James on X/Twitter @HistorySchmstry
King John of England is best remembered for Magna Carta and military failure—but his fascination with gemstones reveals a different side of medieval kingship. In a world where jewels were believed to hold real protective and healing powers, John’s treasure hoard may have been as much about magic as it was about wealth.
By James Turner
1066 and All That, written by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatsman brilliantly satirises the then still highly influential Victorian and Edwardian approach to the writing of history. The book playfully exaggerates the conceits and conventions of the histories its authors read as schoolboys while somehow still capturing the soul of these works.
According to Sellar and Yeatsman, and therefore the generation of historians that they are satirising, England’s monarchs can, and probably should be, neatly organised into two simple categories, good or bad. Interestingly the main criteria against which the worthiness that the Kings and Queens of England was measured against was their historical contributions to the development of parliamentary democracy and the then contemporary British political establishment.
John is presented within 1066 and All That as a bad, perhaps even an awful, king yet his reign was ultimately a good thing because of the Magna Carta and its seminal role in English constitutional law. Nowadays most scholars would be extremely reluctant to assign similar value judgements to the reign of medieval kings.
Such an approach to history almost inevitably involves the projection of the values, practices and structures of the historian’s society onto a medieval world which would find them alien and almost incomprehensible. This danger is the primary source of Sellar and Yeatsman’s satire which lambasted the assumption of previous generations of historians that their own society was the crowning achievement and desired end point of history.
Of course, vigorous debate often takes place between historians regarding the effectiveness of certain king’s administration or the ramifications of certain policies. This distinction is more than simple semantics. It represents a commitment by historians to take great care to follow the evidence and avoid, as far as possible, the projection of their own values and cultural assumptions onto their subjects. More fundamentally, it touches upon our purpose in writing history and examining the past. Do we seek to learn and reflect or categorise and colonise?
John is an interesting example because his effectiveness as a ruler and the degree of his personal culpability for the collapse of the Angevin empire still spark a degree of controversy. As we shall see, John’s interest, possible obsession, with the hoarding of precious gems and items of jewellery is a fantastic example of this need to approach and evaluate medieval personages on their own terms.
Hoarding Jewels: Regalia, Inventories, and Acquisition
In 1201, the third year of his reign, John awarded 20 shillings worth of land in Berkhamsted to a local man named Bartholomew. This land was a reward for the recovery and return of a prized item of jewellery containing precious stones that the king wore “around our neck.” The following year Bartholomew was granted a modest pension by the king. It seems that he and his rescue of the king’s jewels had not been forgotten.
An inventory carried out by royal favourite and Chief Forester, Hugh de Neville, in 1207 found that the royal household’s silverware collection contained over 150 pieces and weighed over 550 pounds. While gold plates were considerably rarer and more expensive, John appears to have ready access to considerable amounts. In 1214, hoping to impress and reassure his allies and vassals with a display of wealth, fifteen golden cups and a large bowl were taken on campaign with him in Poitiers. Several of the cups were described as weighing as much as 5 pounds.
Reserves of silver and gold plates were a necessity for a medieval king. They were regarded as an essential accessory of kingship, enabling the king to properly host even the most illustrious and high ranking of guests. The vast majority of medieval monarchs adopted an at least partially itinerant lifestyle, their courts travelling between a number of important royal centres and the homes of their regional lieutenants and deputies.
There were several practical considerations behind this practice. Firstly, and most importantly travelling across the length and breadth of their domains allowed the king to personally project his personal power and authority into the localities. This helped to remind everyone who was really in charge. The regional powerbrokers that the king normally ruled through were left keenly aware that royal visits and the scrutiny they brought were sporadic but almost inevitable.
Secondly the royal court was a sizable institution that consumed a great deal of resources. By moving around, no one area was overly burdened by the need to support such a large group to such a high standard. The presence of silver and gold plate in such quantities, signalled to whoever was present, the magnificence and elevated status of the king. Additionally, if there was an emergency or the court’s reserves of coinage were growing low, then a portion of the court’s plate could be sold or melted down as a way of quickly raising capital.
The splendour and luxuriousness of John’s court, as well as his own extravagant tastes, can be further viewed through the extensive formal royal regalia maintained during his reign. A staggering 56 pounds of gold and 86 pounds of silver were used in the new creation of the crowns, jewellery and other ornamentation used within John’s coronation.
He had also inherited a number of suitable crowns from his predecessors, including one brought back from Cyprus by his brother, Richard I, and a German style crown that may have belonged to his grandmother Empress Matilda. Later, towards the tail end of his reign, John managed to find the funds to fashion a new crown for himself. The regalia also consisted of two golden staffs or sceptres, one surmounted by a cross and the other a dove. John later had another golden staff, fitted with a dozen emeralds, added to the regalia.
Naturally the two swords that rounded off the items of the royal regalia were richly decorated with precious metal and gemstones, as did their accompanying accessories such as belts and scabbards. John also possessed two sets of regalia robes, one in white silk and the other in purple, both of which were heavily adorned with gold, pearls and other precious gems.
There is some evidence to suggest that John may have made some attempt to resurrect the Anglo-Norman tradition of seasonal public crown wearing. Certainly, John appeared before the court, crowned and in full royal regalia significantly more than previous Plantagenet monarchs, a deliberate affectation calculated to strengthen royal authority and status. John set aside an exceedingly generous £75 for new robes for the royal couple at the coronation of his second wife Isabella of Angoulême in 1200.
John took considerable pains to make sure that his court was at the forefront of contemporary fashion, importing huge quantities of expensive high end fabrics, some of which were even used to clothe the King’s household servants at his own expense. Of the numerous methods through which John chose to showcase his wealth and extravagance, jewels and jewellery seem to have engendered the most personal enthusiasm.
Like the majority of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries John travelled with only a fraction of his overall wealth. For reasons of ease and security, his reserves of cash and the majority of his other valuables were deposited at various royal centres and religious houses.
An inventory of the royal jewels housed within five of the most prominent of these religious houses found that between them they housed two hundred and twenty-one sapphires, a hundred and seventy-four emeralds, a hundred and one rubies, forty-one garnets and twenty-eight diamonds, all owned by the king. There was also a small smattering of less valuable or coveted gemstones, including pearls, turquoise and amethyst.
At the end of John’s reign, it was discovered that the royal stronghold of Devizes Castle housed a treasure hoard of just over two hundred and seventy rings. The two most valuable of these rings were valued jointly as being worth the equivalent of fifty marks of silver, suggesting they were set with numerous high-quality gems.
While many of these gems had simply been inherited from the royal treasury, there is considerable surviving evidence that John made concerted efforts to grow and even curate his jewellery collection. When Hubert Walter, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Chief Justiciar, died in 1205, John had Hubert’s estate inventoried, claiming several items of jewellery for himself. In 1216, John purchased ten gold necklaces inlaid with precious stones from the Hospitaller Order. He also wrote to Reginald of Cornhill, one of the court procurers, giving him detailed instructions directing him to purchase a specific set of stones.
Largesse, Prestige, and the Royal Court
It is tempting to connect John’s lavish spending and obvious vanity with first the disintegration of the Angevin Empire and then the festering resentment of the English aristocracy that erupted into the First Barons War. It would seem obvious to most modern observers that the money John invested in his hoard of jewellery could probably have been spent on the raising of additional troops, the construction of fortifications and the fostering of allies.
It is notable however that none of John’s many contemporary critics ever levelled any substantive complaints about the king’s profligacy or insistence upon furnishing his court with so many luxuries. Indeed, they seem to have regarded John’s refined sense of fashion and style as one of his few positive characteristics.
As far as the elite of early thirteenth century Europe were concerned, kings were supposed to appear as magnificent figures who displayed and embodied otherwise unimaginable wealth. For a medieval king during this period, flagrant displays of wealth and conspicuous consumption were essential methods in the signalling and dissemination of their political authority.
Largesse and generosity were seen as essential kingly traits, one of the principal means through which kings could solicit and reward the cooperation of the aristocracy. John’s displays of his apparently great wealth communicated to his vassals and potential allies that he would be able to handsomely reward their service.
Likewise, the sophistication and scale of the royal court, replete with expensive furnishings and all the latest fashion trends, was seen as a source of pride that reflected positively upon the kingdom and its inhabitants. Henry II had placed England at the centre of one of the most powerful hegemonic constructions within Europe.
Richard I, maintained the borders of this patchwork polity while fortifying the English with his personal legend as a great warrior king and crusader. John’s maintenance of such a richly appointed royal court signalled to his vassals that England and the Angevin dynasty retained the prestige that it had enjoyed under his relatives.
John, in hoarding treasures and investing heavily in his own appearance and that of the royal regalia was behaving exactly as a medieval king should, in a manner calculated to impress and reassure his most valued subordinates. Whether it occurred to them or not, contemporary commentators never explicitly drew a connection between John’s lifestyle and their complaints regarding his greed and the many financial abuses he heaped upon the English nobility.
Indeed, most hostile primary sources focus their critique of John upon his perceived negligence of royal duties, suggesting he was too busy indulging in his passion for hunting and overactive libido to effectively reign. Fascinatingly, it was John’s sexual appetite, rather than his profligacy, that contemporaries most commonly linked to his financial squeezing of the aristocracy.
A persistent allegation levelled against the king was that John would spuriously claim nobles owed him money in order to pressure their female relatives into accepting his sexual advances. In fact, John’s son and successor Henry III would eventually be criticised for impoverishing his court by selling too much of his silver and gold plate, the king foolishly ignoring the artistic value and immense craftsmanship of these items in his desperation for bullion.
The “Power” of Stones: Lapidaries, Saints, and Politics
Perhaps part of the reason for John’s great appreciation for gemstones and the strange failure of his contemporaries to condemn his excesses in that regard was the belief that they possessed magical properties. The belief that some crystals had the magical ability to protect and even heal people was inherited directly from the ancient world and classical tradition.
Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia, an ambitious attempt to summarise the entirety of human understanding of the natural world, comments upon the then widespread belief vouching for its authenticity. According to the classical tradition, different varieties of gems had different properties. According to Pliny, for instance, amethysts helped people resist the intoxicating effects of alcohol, while carnelians helped healing.
Medieval authors replicated and expanded upon this tradition. Lapidaries, texts detailing the physical and magical properties of gemstones, proliferated within late Anglo-Saxon England, establishing a literary tradition that continued to thrive into John’s era and beyond. Such texts were consulted by jewellers, scholars and medical professionals, freely mingling practical and mystical knowledge.
As we have seen, sapphires seem to have been the gemstone best represented within John’s hoard. This was because they were considered the most precious and valuable of all gemstones, the near contemporary bishop, Marbond of Rennes, writing that they were associated with kingship and could fortify their wearers against illness.
Adam of Eynsham, the early thirteenth century abbot and scholar, was a close associate and former chaplain of Bishop Hugh Avalon of Lincoln. Upon Hugh’s death in 1200, Adam began writing a hagiography of Hugh, a form of biography intended to promote and defend the sainthood of its subject.
In this work, Adam records an incident in which the newly crowned John boasted to Hugh that he possessed a particularly potent gem, that he had inherited from his ancestors, that bestowed upon his family such a degree of divine favour that it would protect them from losing lands and territory. Subsequent events would, of course, demonstrate John’s folly and the baselessness of this belief. Yet Adam, through Hugh, mocks John only for the excessive faith he placed in the crystal’s abilities and seems to accept implicitly the validity of their use in medicine.
In 1219, Earl Hubert de Burgh of Kent, a former member of the king’s inner circle, was appointed regent of John’s son, the young Henry III following the death of his predecessor, William Marshall. Hubert had been instrumental in the defeat of the French invasion that had sought to capitalise upon John’s war with the rebellious barons but inevitably the regency brought with it a number of political enemies and rivalries.
One of a number of treasonous charges levied by these enemies against Hubert, following the end of the regency and Henry’s assumption of direct rule, was that he removed a number of stones with the magical ability to protect their bearer from harm during battle from the royal treasury. It was further alleged that he then treacherously gifted these gems to the king’s enemy, Llewellyn of Wales, who now benefited from their protection.
Indeed, as an adult Henry III, while almost perpetually strapped for cash and far less ostentatious than his father in terms of personal appearance and taste, also held an appreciation for the magical protective properties of gemstones. Henry had a profound fear of thunder developed when a monstrously violent storm caught and almost wrecked his ship during a channel crossing.
In order to allay Henry’s fears and the undue stress they were causing him, a Gascon surgeon named Peter, who appeared at the English court about the same time of Henry’s marriage to Eleanor of Provence, presented Henry with a stone he claimed had the power to protect him from thunder and lightning. A grateful Henry had the stone fitted into a necklace which he habitually wore.
John’s passion for jewellery was greatly entangled in his belief in the fortifying, magical, properties of gemstones. Such beliefs were common at the time and are for some reason still extant today. John’s interaction with Bishop Hugh of Lincoln that John’s faith in the power of certain gems far expanded far further than the medicinal qualities they were routinely subscribed to. Yet such eccentricities were removed from the mainstream only by a matter of degree.
In the end John’s hoarding of treasure and his drive to acquire even more precious stones is a valuable reminder of the need to view individual actions within the context of their own culture. It seems obvious to modern commentators that John’s lavish spending on jewels was a severe liability that contributed to the rapid collapse of his military and political position. Yet from the perspective of his peers and subjects John’s lavish spending was seen as one of his few positive attributes.
James Turner has recently completed his doctoral studies at Durham University before which he attended the University of Glasgow. Deeply afraid of numbers and distrustful of counting, his main research interests surround medieval aristocratic culture and identity. You can follow James on X/Twitter @HistorySchmstry
Click here to read more from James Turner
Top Image: King John depicted in British Library MS Cotton Claudius D. VI, fol. 9v
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