On 17 July 1797, Valentine Green, a renowned engraver and antiquary, made a survey of Worcester Cathedral. He intended to produce an addendum of sorts to his History and Antiquities of the City and Suburbs of Worcester, which he published in 1796. In particular, he wished to locate the burial place of King John (1199–1216), which at the time was a subject of controversy. Although the sepulchral monument of King John stood prominently in the choir just before the high altar of the cathedral (Fig. 1), there was disagreement as to whether or not the sepulchre represented the location of King John's actual burial place. Green intended to show that upon the dismantling of King John's original tomb in 1540 the king's body was moved from Worcester's Lady Chapel to the location of the present monument in the choir. Putative apocryphal accounts reported, variously, that the monument was cosmetic and that the erstwhile King's body had not been moved. Green did not agree. Renovations undertaken at the cathedral in 1797 provided Green with the perfect opportunity to open the monument and see if King John was inside it. Green was anxious that his project be a success, for the question of the location of King John's corpse was quite literally a stone left unturned in the history of Worcester and its cathedral.

King John was no stranger to the subject of controversy in death. A large part of the controversy surrounding his posthumous legend is related directly to imaginative speculation and creative description of the events of his life and death. Most interestingly, much of this legend arose as the result of the development of King John as a character in literary texts. At first, his reputation as ‘Bad King John’ stemmed mostly from the chronicles, and then spread in a variety of imaginative but largely fictional directions. Ralph of Coggeshall and Raphael Holinshed depicted John as an unjust tyrant, his rule catastrophic. He was rumoured to be a man of uncontrollable lust and cruelty, who, at the last, requested to be buried in a monk's cowl in an effort to save his soul. There was little, if any, substance to these rumours, but they persisted nonetheless.