Back to the Plantagenets calendar
The barons, upset that John wasn't keeping
to the terms of the Magna Carta, decided to offer the throne to Louis, the son of Philip of France. Louis landed in Kent in May 1216 and John panicked. He fled
north taking all the crown jewels with him. He stayed first in King's Lynn (map time) in Norfolk then headed on to Wisbech (well, you shouldn't have put it away)
in Cambridgeshire. His baggage train, not a real train as we know it but a collection of carts carrying all his possessions pulled by horses, tried to take a
short cut across some marshes and the tide was still in and the carts were all lost together with all the crown jewels. John was still panicking and maybe the
baggage train set off too early trying to keep up with him.
So, within two years, John had lost possessions in France, his power and his wealth. He then finished this spell of carelessness by losing the only
thing he really had left when he died in October from dysentery, which is an infection of the intestines causing severe diarrhoea, among other things. There is a
rumour that he may have been poisoned by the monks at Swineshead Abbey where he had stayed for the night.
However this sudden upset, his death not the diarrhoea, changed the luck for the monarchy and it began to run more smoothly, the monarchy not his
diarrhoea. Some barons, who had not really been that keen on giving the throne to a Frenchman, changed their minds and offered it to John’s son, Henry, who
then became Henry III, although he was only 9 years old at the time. In 1217 the French withdrew and everything was more solid again, the reign that is not………..
I wonder how many people who lived in the countryside actually knew what was going on. There were no newspapers and of course no television. The
only way you got news was if someone rode into your village and told you. Can you imagine that?
Forward to 1220AD
