On the night of 18/19 October 1216 in eastern England's Newark Castle, died an exhausted King John. The official version has it was dysentery that carried off the fifty-year-old monarch. Food historians beg to differ.
So did and still does popular opinion. Let's face it: King John was disliked in his day and things have only been downhill since then, 800 years ago. In legends that persist into modern movies, Robin Hood is depicted as the-then Prince John's nemesis. Ascending the throne in 1199, he promptly lost much of England's French possessions. Pressured into making his mark on the Magna Carta at Runnymede.in 1215, he promptly repudiated it, and civil war broke out. In hastening to put down the insurrection, the exertion hastened the dysentery which destroyed him. Or did it?
Tales persist to this day that it was the royal appetite that did King John in. A 'surfeit of peaches and cider' is a favourite, although 'unripe peaches' is another. 'Poisoned plums' have also been suggested. There seems to be something of a lack of horticultural knowledge here. Neither peaches nor plums are likely to have been available in late October. Some say it was a gluttonous indulgence in peas--seven bowls of them to be exact. However, as the ever-vigilant Rebecca Rupp has pointed out, 13
th-century peas were tough, starchy and unpalatable compared with today's varieties tender and succulent samples. Besides which while medieval peasantry were, perforce, vegans, the upper crust were largely carnivores. Wine was also their favoured tipple so cider must be discounted. Ditto ale, pure or poisoned with a toad, as has also been promulgated.
Entertainer Stanley Holloway (1890-1982) had a humorous poem that had King John eating 'lamprey pie' at a pub after getting caught by the tide bathing at Skegness with a girlfriend. This maintains a source of kingly confusion. William the Conqueror's youngest and most able son, Henry I, died after eating a fishy dish of lampreys in 1135.
