A description of the Nine Circles of Hell.

Dante’s Inferno is the first part of Divine Comedy, a poem written by Dante Alighieri, an Italian poet, in the fourteenth century. Inferno is a fictional recount of Dante’s journey through the Nine Circles of Hell (as the medieval people envisioned it).

The First Circle

Limbo, Dante found the atheists; people who had never been baptised and despised Christianity. The first circle is not particularly horrific; in fact, Limbo is rather like a grassy meadow. This circle is designed to show atheists (who may not technically have sinned) that they can never quite reach heaven.

The Second Circle

Lust, is, unlike Limbo, a place of true punishment  People who, in life, have grown so in love for another that they have lost their minds, having been completely overcome by sexual temptation. Their souls are forever caught in the winds of a violent storm, never to rest.

The Third Circle

Gluttony houses people who have overindulged in various addictions and grown uncaring of others. The gluttons lie in a foul slush, guarded by a three-mouthed monster.

The Fourth Circle

Greed is the place home to the souls of those who have fallen victim to great greed over their lives. Their souls are split into two groups: The Avaricious  who hoard money and the Prodigal, who mindlessly throw it away. These two groups are forced to joust each other, using enormous sacks of money as weapons.

The Fifth Circle

Wrath and Sullenness is home to an eternal fight amongst the wrathful on the surface of the river Styx, beneath which lie the sullenly who are locked in a place where they can find no joy in God or the universe.

The Sixth Circle

Heresy is filled with flaming tombs, housing those who do not believe in any afterlife at all. These heretics are completely dead, with no thought, no feeling and no future.

The Seventh Circle

Violence is split into three rings. In the outer ring, reside the souls of people who are violent against people and property. Their souls are thrown into the river Phlegethon (boiling blood). In the second ring, the suicidal are turned into gnarly bushes and trees, which are then eaten by Harpies. In the innermost ring, the blasphemers are left in a desert where flaming flakes fall from the sky. This circle is guarded by the Minotaur.

The Eigth Circle

• Seducers are marched in all directions by demons for eternity (like they used other people’s passions to make them do their bidding).
• Flatterers are imprisoned in piles of human excrement, representing the empty words they used to manipulate people.
• Simoniacs (people who buy their way into high religious positions) are locked in stone stocks while their feet burn.
• False prophets, astrologers and sorcerers have their heads twisted around by 180 degrees so that they could not see ahead of them, and thus had to walk backwards (magic is twisted).
• Corrupt politicians are thrown into a lake of burning pitch.
• Hypocrites (those who hold fake beliefs) walk around wearing lead cloaks which “weigh them down and make spiritual process impossible.”
• Thieves are bitten by snakes and lizards, while being transformed into many different shapes (their identities are stolen). They are guarded by Carcus, a centaur with a fire breathing dragon on his shoulder.
• Evil councillors (who use their positions to engage in fraud) are each concealed in their own flame, where they burn forever.
• Those who cause angst and divide other people are continually hacked to bits by a demon.
• Falsifiers (who, in a nutshell, spread lies) are ripe with diseases.

The Seventh Circle

Betrayal is the final (and therefore presumably worst) circle of Hell. The ninth circle is split into four rounds, depending on what sort of traitors its inhabitants are:

• In the first round, traitors to their own kindred are submerged in ice from the face down.
• Those who betray society are imprisoned in round two, where their heads are feasted upon.
• In the third round, traitors to their own guests are also locked in ice, their bodies possessed by demons.
• In round four, people who have betrayed Christ are completely encased in ice.

Waist deep in the ice, in the centre of the ninth circle, is Satan (three-headed) who bites and claws at his three prisoners: Judas, Brutus and Cassius (who assassinated Julius Caesar), beneath Satan is the centre of the earth, Dante and Virgil’s escape route from Hell.

An essay on the merits and failures of his personality and politics, with notes on the public perception of him.

“Yes” is the typical answer to this question. King John has forever been portrayed as a wicked, vile ruler of England, who taxed the country out of everything they had and despised his own people. But then King Henry VIII went down in history as on overweight thug who attacked the Roman Catholic Church and went through six wives, two of them he executed! Edward the Confessor went down as a pathetic excuse for a king who could never stick to a decision. Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI of France, doesn’t get seen as much of a great figure either after her reaction to the peasants’ famine and Mary I wasn’t very popular with the British Protestants, whom she burned at the stake. It’s hard to think of any royal figure throughout history who has been particularly nice to their people, and who therefore has been recorded as “good”. All kings and queens up until the current Elizabeth II (who, when you think about it, doesn’t really get to be queen at all) were apparently “vile, cruel and greedy”. John, then, may well turn out to be no worse than any other historical king, not that we should let him off the hook straight away of course.

General opinion of King John has changed over the years from angel to devil, then back to angel. Walt Disney, of course, went straight for the villainous John, the evil John as the character for the Robin Hood film. Chances are, they were aiming purely for entertainment value with little or no regard for historical accuracy. This is understandable: a Disney film will never realistically be a historical documentary, any chance of that disappeared the moment the decision to have animal characters was made, so the only way they could succeed in making a good movie was to go for a pantomime villain. So they did. In the movie Prince (not yet king, you’ll note) John is a greedy fool, who is incredibly gullible and therefore easy to rob: when little John sucked all of the jewels from his rings, Prince John didn’t even notice. He also fell to pieces at any mention of his mother. I doubt that this had any relevance to the real Prince John.

Because Disney is not an established historical documenter, and most historians judge past events against their own time periods, the contemporaries of King John seem like a good source of information, providing the sources haven’t been tampered with over the centuries. Most of the contemporary passages are rather critical of King John, for instance “John trusted strangers but not the people he rules over.” were the words of one monk who thought John was a poor leader. It is also strongly suggested that John had a great loathing of religion, and apparently said that priests were “public enemies” before banishing them from England. Another aspect often applied to John is typical royal greed. Historical records from the time state that he heavily taxed the whole country, bleeding dry everyone from the lowest peasants to the richest lord and lady, he even made the barons pay “scutage”. This is not looking good for John.

These people, however, cannot be given my full trust before we look closer at who they really are. In order to be John’s contemporaries, they would have to have been his people, or to put in another way, his victims. They had to endure typical king’s cruelty such as taxes, wars, execution etc.  This makes them likely to see John in the worst light. There will not be many contemporary sources which portray John as a good character, as like most kings/queens he was the enemy of the people. He was, in particular, the enemy of all monks and Barons. He taxed the Barons, he ignored the needs of the church and he banished all of the monks from Canterbury, calling them “public enemies”! So it seems reasonable that they should call him a “poor leader” and a “tyrant”. Likewise, the Barons had not respect from John, who denied them their power and nearly started a civil war (the less said about him seducing their sisters and daughters the better).

Of course all kings have their good points (somewhere) and John did make several changes to England for the better, he reinforced the British Navy, for instance and introduced a new, presumably better, monetary system to make government finances easier and he revamped the country’s law courts. John also took control of Scotland, Wales and Ireland, thus bringing relative peace to the realms of Britain. To damp down the flames of the Barons I’m afraid I have to resort to saying that he raised taxes and killed those who disagreed with him by saying he had to. The wars of the Holy Land were raging, and Britain was under threat, John couldn’t afford any slip-ups, everything had to be perfect. Money was to be no obstacle, there could be no compromise in King John’s plans, and if money was needed to pay for a war then the Barons would have to cough up! Likewise, when John went to war, he couldn’t let God get in the way of his plans, he didn’t have time to pray before battle and most of the amendments would have gotten in the way of the mere action of killing the enemy, of taking their land, thus the only way to be successful was to dispense with religion altogether. The same may also apply with his ignorance of his Magna Carta agreement. Overall, he was just a man determined to get his job done, and nothing was going to stand in his way!

Historians’ opinions of King John have fluctuated over the centuries depending on what was fashionable at the time. In Tudor times, people supported King John because he attacked the Catholic Church as Henry VIII had done (or rather, Henry declared that the Catholic Church was bad, and that King John was therefore good, forcing schoolmasters to pass this on to their pupils) whereas the people of Queen Victoria were used to being in the capital country of an enormous empire covering a quarter of the Earth, thus they despised John for the way he lost many foreign battles and considered him to be a rather poor leader. By the mid-20th century, historians no longer had to write according to the opinions of the current ruler (or peer pressure) and they began to look a little more sympathetically at John, saying he worked hard and suffered merely from a lack of luck during his reign. They have a point: John was given the crown only because his brother – Richard the Lionheart – was away in the Holy Land, fighting in the crusades, England was under threat, there was no money to pay for the war, John had to raise taxes as high as they could go and the public hated him, very unlucky!

Overall I think John was quite good, for a king. He brought in new currency, strengthened the Navy and united Britain as one, but that’s the problem: He is a king from the past. As I said (or rather wrote) at the beginning of this essay, all kings and queens have gone down in history as being greedy, cruel and vicious, and clearly John is no exception. While historians may well find some good features, most people (particularly those who only know King John from Robin Hood) will automatically judge him to be a villain. It doesn’t matter to the general public that King John strengthened the Navy and improved Britain’s financial systems, he will always be remembered as the evil tyrant who stole the crown from his brother, taxed England half to death and put priests in lead cloaks before leaving them to die. Which brings me to my final point: A guide dog, no matter how well supermarket trained it is, is still a dog; a flea-ridden descendent of a wolf. A “clever” starfish (it’s only a matter of time) is still a creature with no actual brain and a “cheap” Rolls Royce is still going to have a sextuple figure price tag. Likewise, John was pretty good for a king of the middle ages, but the fact remains that, and thus the answer to the original question “Was King John a bad king?” is, I believe, no, but the answer to “Was King John bad?” is still, by all means YES!

UPDATE (July 2025)

The YouTube channel “History Matters” has put out this video on the topic.

How the King established himself and kept England under control after the Battle of Hastings.

When William the Conqueror took control of England, he was the enemy of the nation, it didn’t help that he wasn’t at all familiar with them. He didn’t have any friends or relatives in England, he didn’t have any English currency, and he didn’t even know the kingdom’s language.

Obviously, the first step in the right direction was to seize the English realms put his mark on the many English realms. He achieved this by having castle after castle after castle constructed around the country (particularly the south east). Not only did this mean that England now had better defences (as he took over easily), it also meant that he could establish himself as king. By building so many monuments and fortresses around England, he could turn it into his own little empire.

Once he had made it clear that he was the boss, he needed to find out how much his land was worth. This called for a grand census. Sending his knights around the country to find out how rich everyone in England was might have been a bit excessive in the eyes of the peasants at the time, but it was the only way that William could kick-start his domination of England. Without the Domesday Book, he wouldn’t know his realm. If only he’d been alive to have it read to him.

However, it didn’t matter how much he tried to stay in control, there were always going to be some who rebelled. The people of the north were getting louder and louder. Pretty soon there would be a revolution against the Normans. Asking the northerners to keep it down wouldn’t be enough. If he wanted to stay in control, he had to crush, flatten, destroy and exterminate anyone who disagreed with him; otherwise he would be thrown out of England as quickly as he got in. If the northern lands were to be controlled properly, they would have to die!!

These days, if a gang gets too rebellious, people are sent round to talk to them and give them some emotional support. But the former Duke of Normandy, however, took a rather different approach. He marched his southern army up to the higher realms and set fire to them, He hacked and chopped and fired and torched until the upper end of England was no more than a pile of ash. The people of the north now had to beg for life. They had no homes, no money and no resources. Now that is how to get back in control of a new-found kingdom. William had taken England, turned it into his own, and then hammered the point home by massacring all who opposed him. That is how William the Conqueror controlled ancient England!