when I visited Expo ‘67 in Canada I discovered Jackdaws – British publications that consist of a packet of reproductions of historicval documents, along with supporting literature, all packed into a sturdy folder. Great fun for a nerd like me. They’;re still turning them out, and I’d get more if they weren’t so expensive.
So I bought one on the Magna Carta, which included a photo of one of the extant copies of the Magna Carta, along with various supporting documents you probably never heard of. I know I hadn’t.
There were also some modern “Broadsheets” explaining historical background, and one of them related an incident that I’d never heard of. Apparently King John lost a substantial portion of the British treasury, and there’s speculation that it happened in a tidal flat called The Wash. Hence the title of this thread, which was the title of the broadsheet: Did King John Lose His Treasure in The Wash?
The problem is, of course, that the headline doesn’t conjure up the correct image. I look at it and I imagine King John, after a rough night, coming down the stairs in his old slippers and his ermine-lined nightrope, his crown perched carelessly atop his head like Jughead Jones’ “whoopie cap”. He’s going down to the Royal Basement, where The Queen is already bending over the Maytag, wearing her pink royal dressing gown and the royal bunny slippers, her head in curlers and a half-smoked cigarette hanging from her lip.
“Honey,” asks King John. "Have you seen my Treasure?’
“Where did you leave it?” she asks without looking up, in the flat accent of a trailer=park landlady.
Yup it’s true - Bad King John was pretty unlucky. Kings at that time took their court (retenue and treasure) on an almost perpetual prgress around the country. At some point John’s baggage train, including all the gold etc. got caught by the tide crossing some mud flats in an area on the east coast called The Wash.
In general tidal ranges around the UK are huge and incoming tides on mud flats are often quoted as being able to outrun a galloping horse. (Only a couple of years ago there was a scandal when a group of Chinese cockle pickers got cut off and were drowned by the incoming tide near Morcombe on the other side of the country.) Good local knowledge is imperative , I don’t recall what was happening at that time but I think John took a risk either to escape an enemy attack or to get somewhere in a rush. Bad choice.
Sorry I also meant to add that, unlike Alfred the Great burning the cakes or Charles II hiding in an oak tree, this story is unlikely to be a mere ‘legend’ as the loss of the throne’s treasure would have been chronicled at the time.
there doesn’t appear to be any contemporary mention of this event, and it may well have been made up by his entourage to account for the absence of his possessions after his death
King John losing his crown in the Wash is chronicled by Roger of Wendover and Ralph of Cogeshall:
“[John] lost his chapel with his relics, and some of his packhorses with divers household effects at the Wellstream, and many members of his household were submerged in the waters of the sea, and sucked into the quicksand there…” – R of C
R of W says that John lost his treasures and other things he loved “with special care”, which possibly included the Imperial crown and regalia inherited from his grandmother, who had been empress of Germany.
Well, considering that I opened this just to throw in the last paragraph, I’d say “yes”:
But, as long as we’ve gone all serious about this, I gotta ask:
Did anyone ever go looking for this? If so, did they find it?
I was amazed to learn that they actually found pieces of the statue of King George that stood in New York before the Revolution, so it’s certainly possible that they found pieces of King John’s treasure (a la The Musgrave Ritual)
There was a BBC Radio 4 programme a few years back about some amateur researcher who was looking. As I recall, he had some theory that supposedly narrowed things down to a relatively small area, but the whole enterprise didn’t sound especially convincing to me and I don’t remember the details.
After losing his treasure in the Wash , King John came here to Newark and promptly died of dysentery in the castle. The remains of which I can see from my house. (that’s the castle’s and not King John’s ! )
“Get your cockle-pickin’ hands off King John’s Treasure!”
Actually, the story of the people harvesting cockles is tragic, as Cat Jones relates it, since many were drowned.
This is so much better if you juxtapose the story in the OP with the idea that Newark is in New Jersey.
King John and his long-suffering wife, Alice, forever locked in mutual recrimination over that damned lost treasure, in a fifth-story walk-up in an apartment building called The Castle down near the waterfront.
I once had a blog post about Roger of Wendover, quoting John’s biographer, W. L. Warren, which indicated a certain unreliability. …Wendover’s chronicle is full of anecdotes of a highly dubious nature. There is one about a washerwoman who tried to earn an extra penny by plying her trade on the Sabbath, and was sucked dry by a small black pig as punishment. There is one ( it is eighteen pages long ) about a peasant named Thurkhill from the village of Twinstead in Essex who, in 1206, was led through the realms of Purgatory by St Julian.
As a royalist I reckon John a usurper, but his son not.
As for the poor Chinese, I recall my uncle saying this was the first time he’d heard the word Gangmaster used in modern Britain.
Thanks be to you, Neo-Liberalism !
