poliphilo

Fifty years ago a friend and I were travelling through Brittany. To pass the time we wrote poems. Mine were immature, his were neat and when we collaborated we produced doggerel. One of our collaborations was sparked by a visit to the cathedral at Dol, which- we learned- had once been burned to the ground by the Angevin monarch whom the French call Jean Sans Terre and the English call Lackland. We remembered A.A Milne's poem about King John and his big red India rubber ball and stole the first line and tagged on some rubbish of our own. I always thought the last line of our piece, which was almost certainly my friend's (because what did I know about architecture back then?) was really rather good. At intervals I've tried to rewrite the rubbishy middle section- and now- finally- I think I've succeeded in coming up with something passable. My friend's last line is still the best thing about it.

And it's still only doggerel...

But, I kinda like it.

It is also educational, because most of the history in it is true,

King John was not a good man,
He seldom went to mass,
He fancied other people's wives,
And liked a social glass.

He didn't love his barons,
His barons hated him.
They thought his stance on human rights
Egregiously dim.

But sometimes on life's pilgrimage
He'd do things that were right.
And though on his first trip to Dol
He set the church alight,

It later pained him on his rounds
To pass the smoking pile
And so he had the thing rebuilt
In Anglo-Norman style.

John gets a bad press. It wasn't always so. I looked it up on Wikipedia. The Elizabethans liked him for standing up to the pope and celebrated him as a Protestant hero avant la lettre. Shakespeare's play- one of the few I haven't read- treats him with sympathy. His bad reputation has a lot to do with Walter Scott casting him as a villain in the grossly unhistorical Ivanhoe- and that's the line that's been followed ever since, most notably by Hollywood. None of the Angevin kings were "good" men, whatever we mean by that, but John was no worse than any other and possibly a better ruler than his greedy, genocidal, monstrously self involved brother, Richard Coeur de Lion...

Most of the Angevins- being more French than English- got themselves buried in the Abbaye de Fontevrault, but John- who spent much of his time in England (another point in his favour)- is buried in Worcester Cathedral. His tomb is a fine thing....