ABSTRACT
On 19 October 1216, John 'Lackland' king of England died at Newark near Nottingham. His body was dismembered by his confessor, the abbot of Crokestone, who had the king's entrails packed in salt and conveyed to his monastery. The body itself was clothed and buried with honour in Worcester Cathedral. The body was cut into pieces, covered in salt and wrapped up in a leather bag. In medieval Europe in the thirteenth century, the dismemberment of a corpse was an essential procedure in cases where the bodily remains of the dead person had to be transported, as soon as possible after the demise, to a burial-place some distance from the site of death. If every embalmment was a challenge to the body's decay, in the Middle Ages what mattered especially was the preservation of a body destined for public exposure, for the glory of the dead person, his or her family and the institution he or she had represented.
