Legends of Richard the Lionheart

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For the past 800 years, we've been telling ourselves stories about Richard the Lionheart. We've put King Arthur's sword Excalibur into his hands, whispered that he was the son of the devil, invented elaborate fantasies about him eating his enemy's flesh, immortalized him in novels and films. and most recently made him a video game character in Assassin's Creed.

These stories have persisted. They've been told and retold, elaborated and embellished until they've become more famous than the truth. And that's precisely what makes Richard the Lionheart so fascinating. Today, we're going to investigate the wildest legends about him and ask the even more intriguing questions. Like why those legends persisted, who kept telling them, and

What they reveal about us rather than about Richard himself. I'm joined by Heather Blurton, lecturer at the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Department of English at the University of York. She's the author of a new book, Richard the Lionheart in Life and Legend. Together, we'll investigate the most famous legends surrounding Richard and ask: what does this legend tell us about how myths are made? How they persist? and how they shape history.

Because the truth is, Richard the Lionheart isn't really about Richard anymore. He's become something else entirely. A screen onto which each era projects its own fantasies and anxieties. He's a symbol and a reminder that history isn't simply a record of what happened.

Eleanor, there's some stories about um when she went on crusade with her first husband that she was having an affair with one of her uncles and later legends suggested that she might have even been having an affair with Saladin. So I think, you know, just as someone who is a really powerful woman in her own time, she got a lot of rumor and gossip sort of started accruing to her character.

a real explosion in history writing, particularly in England. So they sort of fell into this moment of um I guess what we would now call of like kind of a new media landscape where there were all these sorts of evolving literary and and artistic forms that w were were looking for subjects really and The Anjamin family provided a lot of that for them. So and and of course there was also the era of crusading, which also tended to spawn legends and myths and songs and and art.

And cross cultural interactions. So it it's hard to say w w you know, which is the chicken and which is the egg, but certainly it seems like the perfect storm for the Angevins. Yeah.

And but at the same time one wants to say that certainly they were taking advantage of this and curating their own myths um in real time in certain ways. So certainly both Henry, Eleanor and Richard all patronized authors who were writing about them, about their reigns, who were writing romance, who are creating this sort of courtly culture in which they themselves were participating. We see Richard the Lionheart certainly using literature as a sort of

Soft politics, um, exchanging poems with troubadours, patronizing troubadours. Certainly they they were uh participating, you know, in this literary culture. It's hard to say in hindsight to what extent they themselves were. aware of I mean obviously, you know, no one's ever aware of of what their myth is gonna become in the future. But but certainly I think everyone in the second half of the the twelfth century was aware that something new and interesting was happening.

Um, the young king was was also in his own lifetime like a real magnet for stories and poetry. He was just kind of generally recognized to be the most chivalric, most wonderful. warrior type. And Richard was more expected to inherit his mother's Duchy of Aquitaine in the south of France. So he spent a lot of the years before he became the heir apparent, really sort of in the south of France.

recruiting a mercenary army, besieging castles, taking captives, turning against his former allies, so on and so forth. Um, and it was during those campaigns in the south of France that Richard really established his reputation as as a great warrior, as a great strategist like his father, um, but also something of a a despotic ruler, someone who was prone to anger. But yeah, he's also described as very handsome. Um and it was in those years that the nickname Lionheart started first appear.

Absolutely. He was well on his way to establishing himself as a as a as a with a reputation. Before his brother, Henry, died young and left Richard sort of the heir apparent to his father.

poems about war um and political issues as they were about love. So you see this sort of ecosystem of war poetry kind of developing where poets are sometimes praising a a a a ruler or an aristocrat or a knight who's done something they like, but just as often throwing insults around at their at their peers or at their vassals or at their overlords. So It it is a very much a a poetry of love and war and sort of the playing the the reputation game rather than the territory game in that way.

these people like Richard who are fighting and trying to gain territory and also using literature as part of that struggle. And and then on the other hand you have these poets who are creating this imaginary court of King Arthur and his knights were doing the exact same thing, um maybe in a in a slightly more elevated way. So It's an interesting sort of intersection.

Richard, they take a variety of approaches. So you have, you know, what I think is a really interesting contrast, you have this one plus century monk, um, whose name is Richard of Devises, who writes a chronicle that's

just about Richard's reign, but not even his entire reign. It begins with his coronation and it ends with his failure to take Jerusalem. So it's really the story of Richard's early kingship of England and It's funny, it's gossipy, it's satirical, it engages in rumor mongering, it praises Richard in this very over-the-top way, but so over the top that one has to imagine that, you know, it's it's actually just poking fun at the man.

Um so it's a really lively, sort of fun, gossipy, like tabloid account of Richard's reign almost. And then in contrast you have a French language history by uh a guy who named Ambrose, we don't know that much about, but his history is called the History of the Holy War and it's about Richard's crusade. And he really

All similarly praises Richard, but he m casts Richard as a hero of epic, as a hero of chanson de gest, the sort of old French epic stories about people like Charlemagne and Roland. So he's g giving a very different

twist to the story and these are both histories. They both are sources that contemporary historians use to find out what was going on in the twelfth century. But at the same time they're Very particular and very much written by people who have their own I don't know whether to say story to tell or axe to grind, but somewhere in between probably.

Was it viewed that way at the time, or did people see the idea that he's going off on Crusade as as, you know, worth it? You should be selling everything to go on crusade?

such as crusadings, such as, you know, building castles in France and these sorts of things. Um and I think that story of Richard's contemporary or modern reception tells us much more about modern nationalisms than it does about Richard's own lifetime. Certainly in his own lifetime, when you know Jerusalem had been had been captured during the course of the first crusade and created as a crusader kingdom, and when it actually fell to the forces of Saladin toward the end of the twelfth century.

lo loads and loads of Europeans aristocracy took the cross, pledged themselves to go on crusade, pledge themselves to go recapture Jerusalem and Um Richard was among the the very first to do so, but you know, the King of France, the Holy Roman Empire, like absolutely everyone was doing this. So it was really a a a cultural movement and not something that people would thought was odd or un unusual for a king to do.

I also don't think anyone would have thought it was particularly unusual for King to use the resources of his kingdom however he wanted to. And, you know, we have some stories about the the sort of m taxation that that Richard was uh was putting upon England and there are chroniclers who are somewhat cranky about it.

But, you know, you can be and then as now you can be unhappy with being taxed while at the same time, you know, fully supporting your government's foreign wars. So I I don't I I think it's it's a very sort of modern situation in that way. But the the the idea that Richard was a bad king because he he didn't pay enough attention to England. He probably didn't even speak English is one of the the things that historians very often say. Um and he spent almost all his reign out of England.

That's not really a medieval view of kingship. That's more of our modern desire, what we want from from you know, sort of great national heroes.

We tend to look at back at it now, thinking, Well, this is just Richard, you know, expressing a complete lack of interest in the the lands and the kingdom that he's just acquired and and looking to just go on crusade as fast as he can. We as they say we've got a very different attitude to it now.

you know, obviously we recognize that the Crusades is extremely problematic to say the least. I mean, certainly f well through the nineteen forties, nineteen fifties, you know, school children were being given stories about crusaders as just It's you know, normal reading material like to to think about the the conquests and crusading is heroic and there are all sorts of, you know, stories about young boys who sneak off to go on crusade with y so it's it was still until very recently.

considered a a decent space to explore ideas of heroism and individualism and God and country.

But certainly people were writing poems about Richard and we see Richard himself, of course, also writing poetry and one of the great myths about Richard the Lionheart is when he comes back from Crusade, he's traveling back from Jerusalem, King of France is really turned against him. So he's struggling to get from the Mediterranean back to England without getting in the way of the King of France. He gets captured, he's imprisoned for over a year.

And there's this great story about the minstrel Blondell who is trying to find his King Richard and he goes from castle to castle singing this song that he and Richard composed together.

um, until he finally hears Richard singing back to him and that's how they discover where Richard is and they're able to ransom him and save him. And of course it's not a true story, but it's been an incredibly popular one and it's come down through the ages and I think it although it's not a true story, you know, we can think of it as being emblematic of the way in which Richard is imagined to be a sort of um patron of the arts and someone who himself is an artist.

as well as a as well as a warrior. So sort of he's he's someone who's got everything.

So it is a sort of clever play on the conceit of being a a priv prisoner of love, of the like the metaphoric language of being a prisoner of love that we see him using. And it's actually survived in a lot of copies, which is pretty unusual for a medieval poem. So W we know that it was popular, probably because of its connection to him, rather than because of its intrinsic literary worth, but it's still still a really wonderful sort of relic to have of of Richard.

accepted as truth, even though maybe it w it was talking more about Richard's reputation and, you know, how do we get this great king back, this this warrior who is also a hero of romance, who's been on crusades and everything else. And it it almost becomes a a device to tell that story. But then people manage to accept it as as perhaps being truth. But it's interesting that those things are are able to be attached to Richard because of his own involvement in those things during his lifetime.

we know his name at all, that Richard the Lionheart has revived into the twenty first century in a way that none of these other figures really have. So th there's something about being in the right place at the right time for Richard the Lionheart, I think, that's really sort of extraordinary that You know, that that that his name is still known, that he's still in the movies, that we're still playing his character in video games and and this sort of thing.

And that's what really takes him out of the Middle Ages into modernity. And m most of the time when we interface with Richard the Lionheart today, it's because of the Robin Hood legend. So There's something about the connection of those two characters that is really um you know, given Richard this sort of staying power that I think he might not have had otherwise.

historians as I described, you know, which would have devises. He's definitely writing a t the tabloid version of history, which we still do today. We still have that today, right? But also you have different kind of historians who were almost creating what we now embrace as our own protocols of history. So for example, one of the great historians of the twelfth century, um, Roger of Howden

from whom we get most of our picture of the twelfth century was someone who was an administrator. He was a bureaucrat. He was a royal administrator. He traveled with the the royal entourage. He did the king's business. So he has an eyewitness perspective, which makes him, you know, from our point of view, quite trustworthy. But he was also someone who just really loved to cite his sources, which is also one of our main, you know

understandings of history. So he'll copy whole charters into his history. He'll copy letters. He copied several letters of Richard the Lineheart, so we still have them, which is sort of um fun to have Richard's own voice in that way. So there's a sense in which through this copying of charters, including of letters, that Roger's history gives us sort of a direct access to the perspective of the people who were involved in the events he's describing.

So I don't think it's, you know, certainly medieval historians had a different approach to history than contemporary historians do, but I I don't necessarily think it's fair to say that they're somehow less historical than contemporary historians and Given that we now live in the era of fake news, they possibly might be more trustworthy from certain points of view. So

a pressing discipline because writers and thinkers needed to come to some sort of way to bring the the past together with their new future. But at the same time, the second half of the twelfth century throughout Europe is is the the beginning of a lot of things that we now recognize as modern. You have the birth of the university, um, you have the development of what historians talk of as sort of more administrative kingship. So rather than a sort of kind of

charismatic kingship where the king would just have to travel around and make himself known. And now all of a sudden we have, you know, a bureaucracy with a um, you know, an exchequer and lawyers and um the sort of uh bureaucratic administrative government that we understand today, um, you know, the kind of government that can extract taxes in an efficient way. And this also, you know, provokes a a sort of history writing in terms of increased record keeping.

sense of of chronicling the present. And then of course the the fact of the crusades were also compelling a lot of history writing throughout Europe because on the one hand the need to or the desire to celebrate the great deeds of the the crusading knights, but On the other hand, just an an increased awareness of of the world, of the of the Mediterranean world, of the global world, increased, you know, travel in that regard, also, you know, provoked history writing and provoked people to

record what they were finding interesting about their own time period. So England I think is maybe known for having some really great history writers, but the second half of the twelfth century was a period where There there's a lot of change going on. Historians used to refer to it as the twelfth century Renaissance in a sense of all of a sudden people started looking back to classical models, sort of dusting themselves off from the dark ages and, you know, forging

add into modernity and of course we no longer think of it that way, but certainly the second half of the twelfth century was a period of great change in and literature and and history writing and theology and philosophy was was a part of that.

It's a bananas sort of story. It's a a rollicking good time. It tells an entirely fictionalized version of Richard's life, it in which his mother is not Eleanor of Aquitaine, but in many versions she's this eastern princess called Cassiodorian. who, when compelled to stay in church to witness the Mass and the the raising of the Eucharist, she can't bear it and so she grabs two of her children and flies out through the roof of the church.

Richard goes on crusade, um, and the this famous episode where he goes on crusade um and he gets sick and he's homesick and he doesn't feel well and so he he wants a dish of pork to to make himself feel better, remind himself of home and of course pork as a sort of loaded um ideanist context because it's, you know, a food that that is not eaten either by Muslims or by Jews. So it becomes this marker of of Christianity. It's also probably very difficult to to farm pigs.

um in the desert, but in the event his chef is unable to find a pig So he does the next best thing and serves instead um Richard the flesh of his Muslim enemies. And Richard eats it and he thinks it's the tastiest thing he's ever seen. And he's so delighted with his chef.

that he asks to bring he asks his chef to bring the the pig's head in so he can see, you know, the head of this delicious animal he's just tasted and Of course the chef is frantic, doesn't know what to do and decides there's nothing to it but to bring in the head of this poor man that Richard's just eaten and and you get this you know frizzle of terror'cause you think of course this is gonna go awfully for the cook, but no

Richard laughs, he thinks it's hilarious and he says, you know, this is great because as long as we can just eat our way through our enemies, we're never gonna starve in this foreign country and this is how we're gonna And so it's like, you know, it's this crazy story. It's obviously completely fictional, but it does articulate a sort of sense of imperialism and colonization and sort of a consumption con metaphors of consumption and like taking over a foreign land by just like absolutely

you know, going through it. And so yeah, the the Richard Curleon romance, as far as we can tell, was was really quite popular in the Middle Ages. It we see it um in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, and um that it goes into print and early print w in the sixteenth century w with Winkinder Word and um and then it goes into chap books. So it continues as a popular story in different variations, like well onto the eighteenth century.

And then in fact it w the novelist Sir Walter Scott got a copy of a manuscript that had one of the earliest versions of the Richard Curleone romance in it. And so it's through Walter Scott that some of those stories and tropes like come into the novel tradition. So it was enormously popular. Um it's enormously fun. I highly recommend it.

with maybe the exception of Sean Connery and Prince of Thieves, I don't know. But he's not very often actually physically in the stories. He's kind of this looming presence that is out there rather than being a character. And yet he is so s closely associated with the story of Robin Hood. Almost like Robin Hood is his kind of representative in England when he can't be there.

What does that attachment to the Robin Hood myth do for Richard, you know, over the centuries? Obviously it maintains him high in the public mind, I guess.

it really from the sixteenth century when Robin Hood first begins to be associated with Richard's reign, as you say, like Richard becomes this sort of model of absent kingship that the d frame of these stories is almost always that Richard is away on crusade. when the cat's away, the mice will play, and there's trouble in England and this is it's Richard's absence that's letting various people, either Prince John or the Sheriff of Nottingham,

cause trouble to the the the regular people, the normal people. And then Robin Hood emerges sort of as the champion of the people. And then at the end of the story, the frame closes and Richard returns, bringing sort of justice with him.

So Richard kind of comes into the Robin Hood tradition and is used as this figure of good governance really, but at the same time a sort of ambiguous sense that good governance is somehow always just out of reach. It's never right where you need it, when you need it.

Um Robin Hood Prince of Thieves that you mentioned. Um there's a a Robin Hood movie from twenty ten directed by Ridley Scott that they they're they're really more interested in problematizing the idea of crusade. so that the idea of Richard's crusade now becomes problematic. And so on the one hand, g he's a good king whose absence is causing trouble at home.

But on the other hand, the fact of his crusading comes a bit on more under fire and comes to be critiqued so that the figure of Richard is able to sort of function in two ways, both as an image of good kickship, but also as a mode through which we can critique crusade, crusading culture, and then also implicitly, you know, from the nineteen nineties, critique sort of contemporary wars in the Middle East as damaging, you know, fundamentally damaging to the home front.

crusading, he's off crusading with Richard, then he comes home to his family. But what Ivanhoe does historically is it sort of does this weird time lapse where it's set

during at the end of the twelfth century, it acts as if it's in the middle of the Norman conquest. So the main antagonism in the to in Ivanhoe is between the Anglo Saxons and the Norman French. And Ivanhoe becomes a figure who's going to sort of negotiate between these these two sides and bring out the best in both of them so we can become English.

And in this regard, Richard the Lionheart is an interesting figure because he comes back from Crusade. He comes back in disguise because he's not entirely sure of his welcome. Ivanhoe supports him. And so i in Ivanhoe we see this process of um Englishing Richard the Lionheart, where he becomes less of a Norman king and more of an English king, who's sort of actually, you know, bringing bringing these two sides together. And then Robin Hood also appears in Ivanhoe.

as the y sort of get this like plucky gang of outsiders like Robin Hood and Ivan Ho and Richard in disguise that are gonna, you know, save the day as it were. But it's this sense of Richard and Robin Hood as unifying figures culturally who are gonna bridge the gap between like an Anglo Saxon past and a Norman French present that really comes through also in the Robin Hood tradition. So

you get often in Robin Hood movies this sort of antagonism between Saxons and Normans. And the most famous is probably um Errol Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood from nineteen thirty eight where Robin Hood is representative of of the downtrodden Anglo-Saxons who are the true English.

Um and made Mary in Robin Hood's love interest who comes into the tradition rather late, but she becomes like this Norman princess and other gonna get together and their, you know, love story, their marriage is then this metaphor for the coming together of these two cultures of England.

And but you see the sort of antagonism between two cultures built into the Robin Hood tradition all the way and so that's another way in which Richard's a lionheart sort of performs this sort of kingship function, this like unifying function. But you know, it's true that in some of the the Robin Hood movies, Richard doesn't come back at the end and often when he doesn't come back at the end

justice also doesn't come back at the end. So we have some sort of to be continued sort of sort of narrative.

examples of imperialism and military power, but also cultural importance as well. So the the idea that they want to claim him as English I think is really interesting at that point.

even though in in order to make R Richard into this great hero you have to perform like a a seminal act of forgetting, which is that he didn't win the crusade. He gave up and came home. Um but that's most often glossed over in the tradition. Yeah.

And for me this is this is a man who would absolutely not recognise I mean, parliament didn't exist when he was king anyway. So he wouldn't recognise parliament, but he wouldn't recognise the idea that something would be there, an institution would be there that would shackle the powers of a king. And yet he becomes so closely associated.

with it that th that we've put a statue of him outside. It's a weird kind of juxtaposition that I think is almost an ideal, a perfect representation of the way that people think about Richard because he's such a dichotomy, he's such a a an impossible circle to square off, isn't he?

in the nineteenth century to look medieval, to have that that folk gothic architecture. So you get this real doubling down on medievalism, um, of of this choosing this m one moment of England's past as being the key moment of England's past, right? And the sort of the medieval period as this core

sense of of what Englishness is. But I think you're absolutely right that Richard the Lionheart himself would have been I'm sure pleased, right, to have this beautiful statue of himself around. But but I think bemused by the by the ideologies behind it.

That story quite often seems to to re-emerge or become reinvigorated or reinvented around times of of innovation, so from the printing press to moving pictures, and we're living in a you know a new digital age now. What do you think it is about Richard that makes him a a good kind of evergreen vessel for that? Why does innovation seek out or need someone like Richard?

Maybe this is due to the the way in which he functions in the Robin Hood legend, but he has become something of an empty vessel. Like people know Richard the Lionheart, but they don't all know that much else, right? There's not probably people couldn't really describe what was so special about him. So perhaps it's that sense of um his importance coupled with that kind of sense of

uncertainty about what exactly was important about him that that enables the continuation. But I don't know. But I mean I think certainly it also has something to say about the persistence of the idea of the medieval in our culture that we we come back to sort of this moment of the twelfth century again and again and it seems to be able to perform really multivalently, you know, people who are interested in

crusading, people who are interested in aristocracy, people who are interested in power, but also people who are interested in in love and romance, right? And people who are interested in folk culture and peasant culture. people who want to turn away from like the modern and, you know, go more analog. So I it it seems to be a sort of vision that that can function in a lot of different ways. It's got a real flexibility and maybe that's why it it sort of keeps coming back.

why are we so fixated on the medieval? What is it about that period that we really desire? Is it a sense of getting away from, you know, the troubles of modern life? Or is it a sense of getting back to a purer time? The whole sort of crusading culture question, which is, you know, once again becoming a sort of onto the world stage with Western wars in in the Middle East.

we have this sort of like way to look to the past for I don't want to say lessons because I don't think history particularly offers very many lessons, but for ideas. Um that this this is a place where we can sort of play through the sort of things that have happened in the past to think about.

you know, possible analogies to think about how we might do things differently, to think about what it is that we're seeing in the past and what it is that perhaps we're not seeing. So I know that's not a very good answer for which I apologize, but I don't I don't really have a good answer to the question.

So he he represents something that we can look back on and and kind of transplant the way that we're feeling about the world changing around us onto stories that rotate around Richard, who who existed in it.

series, there is a real interest in um getting things right, getting the h history right, getting archaeology right, getting those cityscapes right, getting those battle instruments, you know, getting the um your siege weaponry correct, um, that I think is really interesting and I do think I am I I'm not a gamer, I don't I don't play these things, but I'm really fascinated by the way in which

Um, they offer these immersive worldscapes and story worlds that are very often based on medieval or medievalisti, medievally typey landscapes. And so I think that, you know, as a professor, one thing I'm aware of is that my students have this very different access to the medieval world than I've ever had and they have this

um, sort of embodied, immersive ability to almost walk through medieval landscapes that that means that they're interacting with these past stories now, you know, and only really for the past ten years in entirely different ways than generations of historians. have, which which I think is truly fascinating and I have no doubt that You know, the character of Richard will will change with this new sort of way of of perceiving the past and way of interacting with it.

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