King John's Ruin: The Peak District

S3 E5: Tony travels to Nottinghamshire to walk the ground of one of the most eventful and colourful periods of our medieval past. Legend has it that King John was probably the worst king ever, that Robin Hood defended the poor against him and his dastardly accomplice the Sheriff of Nottingham, and somehow it all ended up with John losing the Crown Jewels and signing the Magna Carta, the foundation stone of modern democracy. In 2015 is the 800th anniversary of the creation of Magna Carta, so it’s a good time for Tony to separate the fact from the fiction and uncover the events that brought this powerful document into being. Travelling through Sherwood Forest he does indeed find the King and the Sheriff extorting money at every opportunity, so becoming deeply unpopular, but not a lot of evidence of the altruistic Robin Hood. Crossing over into the Derbyshire Peak District, he discovers John becoming increasingly ineffectual and the country on the brink of civil war as the powerful landholding barons decide they have had enough of the hapless king. Magna Carta, Tony realises, is a peace Treaty but one that is only really implemented after John’s sudden death in 1216 from a surfeit of... not the eel-like lampreys, but rather more innocuous peaches!