Pod Insights Gone Medieval Legends of Richard the Lionheart About this episode Was Richard the Lionheart really England’s greatest medieval hero? Or is he one of history’s most successful myths, more heroic in legend than in life?
Over eight centuries, Richard has handled Excalibur, been celebrated in medieval romance, reinvented in novels and films, and even transformed into a character in Assassin’s Creed.
Matt Lewis is joined by Dr. Heather Blurton to dig into the myths of Richard the Lionheart and ask why they endured and what they reveal about the societies that needed Richard to be larger than life.
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Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producers are Joseph Knight and Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.
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1:15 Speaker 02 In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glennie, and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.
1:31 Speaker 03 It's one of the first times, really, that you consistently see someone painting teeth. I know that sounds bonkers. If I was going to define mathematics, I would say it's the study of structure.
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1:50 Matt Lewis? Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.
2:28 Matt Lewis? Richard the Lionheart was so famous that his statue was placed outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. A monument to English greatness, to chivalry, to the flower of medieval heroism. Now get this, that same Richard spent less than six months of his ten-year reign actually in England. He probably didn't even speak English. And one of his greatest military adventures, the crusade that made him a legend, was, in all honesty, a bit of a failure. 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
3:08 Matt Lewis? of the devil, invented elaborate fantasies about him eating his enemies' flesh, immortalised 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
3:50 Matt Lewis? 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.
4:31 Matt Lewis? He's a symbol and a reminder that history isn't simply a record of what happened. History is the story that we tell ourselves, and the stories we choose to tell matter far more than we realise.
4:48 Matt Lewis? Welcome to Gone Medieval, Heather. It's great to have you join us for this episode.
4:52 Speaker 04 Hi, thanks so much for having me.
4:54 Matt Lewis? Very much looking forward to maybe having a different angle, a different conversation about Richard the Lionheart than the one we might normally have. You mention in your book that Richard is kind of born into a family that seems destined for legend. His whole sort of family is surrounded by myths and stories. Can you give us a sense of how that manifested itself before Richard takes centre stage?
5:15 Speaker 04 Well, this is absolutely true. Richard was born into sort of an extraordinary family. His father was Henry II, King of England, and his mother was Eleanor of Aquitaine. So between the two of them, they ruled over most of what is now the United Kingdom and France, and legends and myths always accrued to them. And particularly Eleanor, there are some stories about when she went on crusade with her first husband, that she was having an affair with one of her uncles. 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 rumour and gossip sort of started accruing to her character.
5:55 Matt Lewis? And do we see the Angevins in these early years as they're establishing themselves on the European stage? Do we see them kind of curating that image or is it applied to them? Or are they quite good at seizing unlikely opportunities and creating good PR activity?
6:10 Speaker 04 I think all of it. I think it was really the perfect storm for the Angevins. I mean, they were a huge dynasty. They were very powerful. But they ruled throughout the 12th century and, you know, Richard Lionheart's reign in the second half of the 12th century was also the moment where we see the birth and development of vernacular literature, the birth of romance as a genre, the rise of troubadour poetry, a real explosion in history writing, particularly in England. So they sort of fell into this moment of, I guess, what we would now call a kind of a new media landscape, where there were all these sorts of evolving literary and artistic forms that were looking for subjects really.
6:50 Speaker 04 And the Angevin family provided a lot of that for them. So, and of course, there was also the era of crusading. Which also tended to spawn legends and myths and songs and art and cross-cultural interactions. So it's hard to say, you know, which is the chicken and which is the egg, but certainly it seems like the perfect storm for the Angevins.
7:09 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And what are the ways in which those stories are allowed to to take hold and develop over time? Tell us about the early Plantagenets. Do people see them as something special? Are they later looking to to set them up as kind of a real anchor point for a dynasty?
7:25 Speaker 04 Well, certainly, I think within their lifetimes, people seem to have recognized that this was something interesting going on. So we see particularly Richard the Lionheart and Eleanor of Aquitaine during their lifetimes becoming already the subject of of history writing, of poetry writing, of art also. And but at the same time, one wants to say that certainly they were taking advantage of this and curating their own myths 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 were creating this sort of courtly culture in which they themselves were participating.
8:08 Speaker 04 We see Richard the Lionheart certainly using literature as a sort of soft politics, exchanging poems with troubadours, patronizing troubadours. Certainly, they they were 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 going to become in the future. But certainly, I think everyone in the second half of the the 12th century was aware that something new and interesting was happening.
8:37 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And to what extent do you think Richard's time before he becomes king sort of prepares him for this? How much is he going into his kingship already the subject of some of these myths? Because the Lionheart name is already attached to him before he becomes king, isn't it?
8:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely. And Richard was never expected to become king. He was actually the third son of Henry and Eleanor. And there was a an eldest child who died in childhood. But then Richard's older brother, who was named Henry after his father and is known as the young king, Henry, to differentiate him from his father, the older king. 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, 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,
9:34 Speaker 04 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. And it was during those campaigns in the south of France that Richard really established his reputation as a great warrior, as a great strategist like his father, but also something of a despotic ruler, someone who was prone to anger. He's also described as very handsome. And it was in those years that the nickname Lionheart first appears.
10:09 Matt Lewis? Sounds like the classic bad boy.
10:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely. He was well on his way to establishing himself with a reputation. Before his brother, Henry, died young and left Richard, sort of the heir apparent to his father.
10:20 Matt Lewis? And do we see Richard during this period, because of his attachment to Aquitaine, potentially, and the troubadour history there, do we see him kind of picking up these techniques to manage his own reputation? Do we see him in any way driving perceptions of himself? Or is this a sort of genuine, I don't know, is it admiration or fear of those around him?
10:40 Speaker 04 I think it's hard to say. I'm not sure how to answer that. Certainly, he was the topic of a lot of troubadour poetry. He seems to have particularly inspired, particularly poets such as Bertrand de Bourne. And I think when we think now of troubadour poetry, we think of love, right? And love lyrics and loving the woman you can never have, or loving a married woman. But a lot of troubadour poetry was actually really political, and poets were writing just as many poems about war and political issues as they were about love. So you see this sort of ecosystem of war poetry kind of developing, where poets
11:20 Speaker 04 are sometimes praising a ruler, or an aristocrat, or a knight who's done something they like, but just is often throwing insults around at their peers, or at their vassals, or at their overlords. So.
11:35 Speaker 04 It is very much a poetry of love and war and sort of the playing the reputation game rather than the territory game in that way.
11:45 Matt Lewis? And I suppose in Richard, if you've got this handsome eligible bachelor who's turning out to be an incredible soldier, he's really fitting the mold that poets and writers are looking for at the moment.
11:55 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And you also have, you know, at this time, the birth of the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and you have the court of Henry the Second and Eleanor of Aquitaine patronizing some of that literature. So there's definitely, on the one hand, these people like Richard who are fighting and trying to gain territory and also using literature as part of that struggle. And then, on the other hand, you have these poets who are creating this imaginary court of King Arthur and his knights who are doing the exact same thing, maybe in a slightly more elevated way. So it's an interesting sort of intersection.
12:31 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And how much of what is written about Richard, particularly during his lifetime, do you think we ought to think of as as accurate history as we might write it today? And how much of this is writers kind of pulling on these emerging chivalric ideals of romance, literature and all of that kind of thing to to talk about what they think their leader should be rather than what they actually are? You know, is Richard what they're writing about? Or are they writing about what they hope Richard will be?
12:57 Speaker 04 Well, I think it's a question of both and, you know, and even today, when we write histories, we're not always as neutral as perhaps we like to think we are, right? History is often designed to take a stand in a in a political moment than as now. Particularly, you know, when we see contemporary historians, that is a contemporary to the 12th century historians, writing about 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, whose name is Richard of Devizes, 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
13:42 Speaker 04 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 actually just poking fun at the man. 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 a guy 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 similarly praises Richard, but he casts Richard as a hero of epic, as a hero of chasseurs
14:25 Speaker 04 de jazz, the sort of old French epic stories about people like Charlemagne and Roland. So he's 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 12th 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.
14:52 Matt Lewis? Yeah, yeah, there is an agenda going on alongside what they're doing. One of the things that Richard is famous for is, you know, immediately after his coronation, selling everything that he possibly can, making a joke about selling London if he possibly could find a buyer for it and things like that. And that's often viewed as him expressing a lack of interest in or care for England in particular amongst all of his lands. Was it viewed that way at the time? Or did people see the idea that he's going off on crusade as, you know, worth it? You should be selling everything to go on crusade?
15:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, certainly since the 19th century, the question of Richard's reputation as a king of England has risen and fallen based on the assessment of how much attention he paid to England and whether he was a genuinely good king or whether he was simply using England as a piggyback to fund his extracurricular activities, such as crusading, such as, you know, building castles in France and these sorts of things. And I think that story of Richard's contemporary or modern reception tells us much more about modern nationalism than it does about Richard's own lifetime.
16:02 Speaker 04 Certainly in his own lifetime, when Jerusalem 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 12th century, loads and loads of Europeans aristocracy took the cross, pledged themselves to go on crusade, pledged themselves to go recapture Jerusalem. And Richard was among the very first to do so, but the King of France, the Holy Roman Empire, absolutely everyone was doing this. So it was really a cultural movement and not something that people would have thought was odd or unusual for a king to do. I also don't think anyone would have thought it was particularly unusual for a
16:46 Speaker 04 king to use the resources of his kingdom however he wanted to. And we have some stories about the taxation that Richard was putting upon England. And there are chroniclers who are somewhat cranky about it, but you can be, event is now, you can be unhappy with being taxed while at the same time fully supporting your government's foreign wars. So I think it's a very sort of modern situation in that way. But the idea that Richard was a bad king because he didn't pay enough attention to England, he probably didn't even speak English, is one of the things that historians very often say, and he spent almost all his reign out of England. That's not really a medieval view of kingship. That's more of
17:30 Speaker 04 our modern desire, what we want from great national heroes.
17:35 Matt Lewis? Yeah, because I mean, he ends up being the first king of England to actually go on crusade, which you imagine his subjects might have thought was quite a prestigious thing. French kings have been on crusade. The French king is going on this crusade. Holy Roman emperors, kings of Germany have been on these crusades. Why hasn't an English king been? And you can almost imagine that they might have felt this was a real moment for England. This is a prestigious thing. Whereas we tend to look back at it now, thinking, well, this is just Richard expressing a complete lack of interest in the lands and the kingdom that he's just acquired and looking to just go on crusade as fast as he can. As you say, we've got a very different attitude to it now.
18:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's right. And certainly, our attitudes toward crusade have also changed a lot, not just toward kingship. So I think, as historians have reevaluated the crusading movement and what that meant to Europe. As the idea of crusading's reputation has sort of fallen, then it takes the crusaders down with them. But, you know, I will say that, even though today, you know, obviously we recognize that the Crusades is extremely problematic, to say the least. I mean, certainly well through the 1940s, 1950s, you know, schoolchildren were being given stories about Crusaders as just, you know, normal reading material, like to think about the conquests and crusading as heroic. And there are all sorts of, you know, stories about young
18:59 Speaker 04 boys who sneak off to go on crusade with. So it was still, until very recently, considered a decent space to explore ideas of heroism and individualism and God and country.
19:12 Matt Lewis? And presumably, as you mentioned, the emerging kind of media landscape that Richard is existing in will particularly appreciate the fact that he's a crusader. And that builds him up as an even more suitable subject for romance and literature and to enter kind of myth and legend as well.
19:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really right.
19:30 Matt Lewis? And how do you think Richard, as a patron of troubadours, connects him to his mother's family? Because we've said, you know, Eleanor is the center of lots of scandal and myth and stories. Is Richard kind of actively promoting the idea that people are writing songs and poetry about him? Is he immersed in that? Or is it something that's going on around him?
19:52 Speaker 04 It's sort of hard to say. I mean, of course, Eleanor's great maternal, great-grandfather is famous as being the very first troubadour. So, I mean, Richard had these family ties. It's not particularly known if he thought of himself in that way, as if, you know, I don't know if this is a time period in which being descended from great troubadours was something you'd put on your resume, as it were. 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 has really turned against him, so he's Struggling to get from the Mediterranean back to England without getting in the way
20:35 Speaker 04 of the King of France, he gets captured, he's in prison for over a year. And there's this great story about the minstrel Blondel, who is trying to find his King Richard, and he goes from castle to castle, singing this song that he and Richard composed together, until he finally hears Richard singing back to him. And that's how they discover where Richard is and are 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 patron of the arts and someone who himself is an artist, as well as a warrior. So sort of, he's someone who's got everything.
21:20 Matt Lewis? Yeah, he's ticking all the boxes.
21:21 Speaker 04 He's ticking all the boxes, that's right. And also, we know he wrote, we have two poems that he himself wrote, one of which, from his captivity, and it's actually a really sort of interesting poem, I don't think anyone would, you know, put it in the top ranks of the canons of literature, but...
21:38 Matt Lewis? You would if Richard was here asking you.
21:40 Speaker 04 Oh, absolutely, I would if he was in the room, for sure. But he writes about being imprisoned, and you think at first that the song is about being a prisoner of love, but then it turns out, no, he's actually literally a prisoner. And instead of complaining about, you know, his lover not giving him the time of day, he's complaining about his vassals not getting his ransom together quickly enough. So it is a sort of clever play on the conceit of being a prisoner of love, of the metaphorical 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 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 a really wonderful sort of relic to have of Richard.
22:24 Matt Lewis? I suppose the existence of things like that and the idea that he was interested in in that side of things as well as being a great warrior helps ideas like that Blondell story to really take hold and people can imagine that that could have been true and then it becomes accepted as truth even though maybe it was talking more about Richard's reputation and you know, how do we get this great king back, this warrior who is also a hero of romance who's been on crusades and everything else. And it almost becomes a device to tell that story, but then people manage to accept it as perhaps being truth. But it's interesting that those things are able to be attached to Richard because of his own involvement in those things during his lifetime.
23:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's right. I mean, the thing about Richard is it's truly extraordinary. I mean, obviously, Richard wasn't the only king, 12th century king to go on crusade. He wasn't the only king to have poems written for and about him. He wasn't the only king to patronize literature. And I think it's really astonishing that we know his name at all, that Richard the Lionheart has survived into the 21st century in a way that none of these other figures really have. So 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 his name is still known, that he's still in the movies, that we're still playing his character in video games and this sort of thing.
23:42 Matt Lewis? Yeah, absolutely. And the book obviously deals an awful lot with those later perceptions of Richard as well. And I wonder, before we get on to some of those later perceptions, how do you think the writers during his lifetime influenced Richard's legacy? Are they focusing on things that build Richard up into something kind of almost unobtainable, that something that he isn't? Do they create this myth during his lifetime or is it something that develops later?
24:07 Speaker 04 I think it's a question of both and, like, certainly during his own lifetime, people were fascinated with the phenomenon that was Richard the First. He was, within his own time, you see sort of writers struggling to grapple with him and his legacy. But I think the other thing that happened, which is not, does not happen during the Middle Ages, but by the very end of the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, Richard the Lionheart becomes associated with a Robin Hood legend. And that's what really takes him out of the Middle Ages into modernity. And 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.
24:52 Speaker 04 You know, given Richard the sort of staying power that I think he might not have had otherwise.
24:56 Matt Lewis? Yeah, interesting. And how cautious do we need to be when we think about Richard's story about precisely what history was in the medieval period? When people wrote history, they weren't writing kind of nonfiction as we might write it today.
25:07 Speaker 04 That's right. Well, I mean, I'm a literary scholar, so I don't think we need to be cautious about it at all. I think that, in fact, is the fun part. Certainly medieval historians had certain different protocols than we do now. They tended to use past models to describe their current history. So biblical models, classical models. There's more sort of what we might characterize as the miraculous or the marvelous in histories. But that's not always the case. I mean, there are historians, as I described, you know, Richard De Vizes, who's definitely writing the tabloid version of history, which we still do today. We still have that today, right?
25:45 Speaker 04 But also, you have different kinds 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 12th century, Roger of Houdon, from whom we get most of our picture of the 12th century, was someone who was an administrator, who's a bureaucrat. He was a royal administrator. He traveled with 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.
26:30 Speaker 04 He copied several letters of Richard of Leinhard, so we still have them, which is sort of 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 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.
27:29 Speaker 01 Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.
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28:56 Matt Lewis? They might be shocked at some of the things they'd read about history that's written today, I guess.
29:00 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely.
29:01 Matt Lewis? And to what extent do you think? You talk a little bit in the book about how writing English history has developed over this period, too. Is there anything that makes English telling of history at this period kind of unique? Is it fitting with European models? Or is it a bit of an outlier?
29:14 Speaker 04 I think both. I know, I keep saying both and. I think both and. One way of looking at English history writing in the 12th century is from the point of view of the Norman conquest and that Britain had, in the not-so-distant past, suffered this sort of major historical dislocation where an entire ruling elite was replaced with a whole different ruling elite. And so there's a way in which in the early 12th century, one might imagine that history became... Oppressing discipline because writers and thinkers needed to come to some sort of way to bring the past together with their new future. But at the same time, the second half of the 12th century throughout Europe is the beginning of a lot of things that we now recognize as modern.
29:59 Speaker 04 You have the birth of the university. You have the development of what historians talk of as sort of more administrative kingship. So rather than a sort of charismatic kingship, where the king would just have to travel around and make himself known, now all of a sudden we have a bureaucracy with an exchequer and lawyers and the sort of bureaucratic administrative government that we understand today, the kind of government that can extract taxes in an efficient way. And this also provokes a sort of history writing in terms of increased record-keeping, sense of chronicling the present. And then, of course, the fact of the Crusades were also compelling a lot of history writing
30:43 Speaker 04 throughout Europe because, on the one hand, the need to or the desire to celebrate the great deeds of the crusading knights, but on the other hand, just an increased awareness of the world, of the Mediterranean world, of the global world, increased travel in that regard, and also 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 12th century was a period where there's a lot of change going on. Historians used to refer to it as the 12th century Renaissance, a sense of all of a sudden, people started looking back to classical models, sort of dusting themselves off from
31:27 Speaker 04 the Dark Ages and forging ahead into modernity. And of course, we no longer think of it that way, but certainly, the second half of the 12th century was a period of great change in literature and history writing and theology and philosophy was a part of that.
31:42 Matt Lewis? I mean, you say we never talk about it that way, but whenever I'm talking to my lovely co-host, Eleanor Yarago, I love to talk about the Dark Ages and how terrible it is and everything else because it drives her slightly mad, I think, so. It's always good fun. And I wondered then if we could work our way through kind of some of the milestones in Richard's reputation in literature as he moves forward, because the book kind of charts these moments. And one of the early ones seems to be the emergence of the romance story Richard Cudillon, which picks Richard as its hero. And I wondered if you could just talk us through, kind of, when does that emerge? What does it do for Richard? And why Richard?
32:16 Speaker 04 There's this wonderful sort of set of romances that together are known as Richard Cudillon, the Richard the Lionheart romance. It's in Middle English, so it sort of emerges in the 14th and very popular in 15th century as this vernacular English romantic epic of Richard's crusade. And it's a bananas sort of story. It's a rollicking good time. It tells an entirely fictionalized version of Richard's life, 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 raising of the Eucharist,
32:58 Speaker 04 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 in this famous episode where he goes on crusade, and he gets sick, and he's homesick, and he doesn't feel well. And so he wants a dish of pork to make himself feel better, remind himself of home. And of course, pork is a sort of loaded idea in this context, because it's, you know, a food that is not eaten either by Muslims or by Jews. So it becomes this marker of Christianity. It's also probably very difficult to farm pigs 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 Richard the flesh of his Muslim
33:42 Speaker 04 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 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 you get this, you know, frisson of terror because you think, of course, this is going to 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 going to starve in this foreign country. And this is how we're going to. 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
34:27 Speaker 04 and sort of a consumption, 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 Corleone romance, so far as we can tell, was, was really quite popular in the Middle Ages. We see it in the 14th and 15th century and that it goes into print, an early print in 16th century with Winkinder Word. And then it goes into chapbooks. So it continues as a popular story in different variations, like well into the 18th century. And then, in fact, the novelist Walter Scott got a copy of a manuscript that had one of the earliest versions of the Richard Corleone 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.
35:12 Speaker 04 It's enormously fun. I highly recommend it.
35:15 Matt Lewis? And we've already mentioned his kind of attachment to the Robin Hood myth, which can only, you know, help to build his legend as well. And I always find that quite interesting because he's so often an absent hero. Everyone is desperate to have him back. He's, he's not very often, with maybe the exception of Sean Connery in 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 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.
35:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, now if we see Richard the Lionheart, or chances are we're going to see him in a Robin Hood movie. And in fact, you know, there's just now, there's a new TV series with, Robin Hood TV series with Sean Bean as the Sheriff of Nottingham. But really from the 16th 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 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
36:39 Speaker 04 or the Sheriff of Nottingham, cause trouble to 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.
37:09 Matt Lewis? But it's also that Richard has somehow become, as you say, the representative of that good governance and the idea that you, you just need to fight and hold on till that returns. And, and the fact that that is, is kind of wrapped in the person of Richard gives him a whole new dimension to, to his mythical status almost, doesn't it?
37:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, it does. And it really, you know, strips Richard's story of, I think a lot of its depth and interest in a way, because Richard simply becomes a model of, of absent kingship. And you see sort of in more contemporary movies, the figure being used in a sort of more critical way. So particularly more contemporary movies like Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves that you mentioned, there's a Robin Hood movie from 2010, 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, he's a good king whose absence is causing trouble at home.
38:11 Speaker 04 But on the other hand, the fact of his crusading comes a bit unmoored or 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 kingship, but also as a mode through which we can critique crusade, crusading culture, and then also implicitly, you know, from the 1990s critiques or contemporary wars in the Middle East as damaging, you know, fundamentally damaging to the home front.
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40:23 Matt Lewis? And you mentioned that Sir Walter Scott comes into possession of a copy of the Richard Curdley on romance stories. How do we see that influencing him and the books that he will write that that kind of revitalize Richard for the 19th century? Does Richard then become a reflection of 19th century interest and concerns about imperialism and things like that?
40:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think, I mean, absolutely. So Walter Scott got a hold of this manuscript. It's called the Auchinleck Manuscript, and it's one of the earliest collections of Middle English romances. And so he borrowed from lots of them, but he seems to particularly enjoy the Richard the Lionheart one. And he puts little story elements from the medieval romance throughout his novels. But it certainly it's Ivanhoe and then The Talisman that are his two big Richard, Richard the Lionheart novels. And The Talisman is pretty straightforward. It's the story of Richard on crusade. It's got kind of a Robin Hood plot in that it follows a knight in disguise who goes on crusade and is trying to hide his, his true identity from Richard. But it's Ivanhoe that really sets Richard the Lionheart, I think, into
41:31 Speaker 04 the, the English imagination, because Ivanhoe, although it's not actually about Richard, it's got the story of Ivanhoe, of course, was a 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 sets during, at the end of the 12th century, it acts as if it's in the middle of the Norman conquest. So the main antagonism in the, 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 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
42:16 Speaker 04 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 in Ivanhoe, we see this process of Englishing Richard the Lionheart, where he becomes less of a Norman king and more of an English king, who sort of actually, you know, bringing, bringing these two sides together. And then Robin Hood also appears in Ivanhoe, as you sort of get this like plucky gang of outsiders, like Robin Hood and Ivanhoe 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 going to bridge the gap between like an Anglo Saxon past and a Norman French.
43:00 Speaker 04 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 Errol Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood from 1938, where Robin Hood is representative of the downtrodden English Saxons with a true English and maid Marian, Robin Hood's love interest, who comes into the tradition rather late, but she becomes like this Norman princess and they're going to get together in 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 this sort of antagonism between two cultures built into the Robin Hood tradition all the way.
43:42 Speaker 04 And so that's another way in which Richard the 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 it's to be continued sort of sort of narratives.
44:07 Matt Lewis? Yeah, it's really interesting, that 19th century desire to anglicize him, to stop him being this Frenchman who didn't speak any English and to actually almost claim him as part of the, I mean, by the 19th century, you know, they're they're trying to paint this idea that that Britain was relentlessly marching towards the empire that they were living in. And people like Richard are are good 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.
44:38 Speaker 04 I agree, and I think he makes a nice companion to King Arthur, who also comes enormously popular again during the 19th century, precisely as this avatar of Englishness and English kingship. But of course, Arthur dies at the end, right? Or maybe he does, he's going to come back, he's not going to come back. But so Arthur's is a sort of tragic story in a way of fall and how the wrong sort of relationships will will end in your demise, whereas Richard tells a sort of the opposite story, even though. In order to make Richard into this great hero, you have to perform like a seminal act of forgetting, which is that he didn't win the crusade, he gave up and came home. But that's most often glossed over in the tradition.
45:19 Matt Lewis? Yeah, shh, we won't talk about that. And I know it's not quite his literary culture, but I'm always completely bemused by if you ever walk around London and walk past the Houses of Parliament, that you see a statue of Richard, you know, on his horse with his sword in the air. And for me, 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 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 an impossible circle to square off, isn't he?
46:03 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, it's a brilliant image, that statue. And I have an elderly story go, something like Queen Victoria and Prince Albert saw it in one of the great expositions, it's an Italian sculptor, and they saw this sculpture of Richard the Lionheart, and they loved it so much that they started this fund to raise enough money to have one for themselves. And of course, this place outside, you know, the Houses of Parliament, which themselves were rebuilt in the 19th century to look medieval, to have that folk Gothic architecture. So you get this real doubling down on medievalism of this, choosing this one moment of England's past as being the key moment of England's past, right?
46:47 Speaker 04 And the sort of, the medieval period has this core sense 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 I think bemused by the ideologies behind it, absolutely.
47:05 Matt Lewis? I think if you explained to him where it was and why it was there, he'd probably just laugh his head off. It's like, fine, have a statue of me, but that's ridiculous. And you mention in the book that Richard's story quite often seems to reemerge or become reinvigorated or reinvented around times of innovation. So from the printing press to moving pictures, and we're living in a new digital age now. What do you think it is about Richard that makes him a good evergreen vessel for that? Why does innovation seek out or need someone like Richard?
47:39 Speaker 04 This is a question that I know I myself pose, and it's a question I'm fascinated by, but it's a question that I generally don't have an answer to. And I think, again, you could place King Arthur alongside Richard the Lionheart as one of these figures who often reemerges in these moments. I think one thing you could say about Richard the Lionheart is that maybe this is due to the way in which he functions in the Robin Hood legend, but he has become something of an empty vessel. People know Richard the Lionheart, but they don't know that much else, right? Probably people couldn't really describe what was so special about him. So perhaps it's that sense of his importance, coupled with
48:22 Speaker 04 that kind of sense of uncertainty about what exactly was important about him that enables the continuation. But I don't know. But I think certainly it also has something to say about the persistence of the idea of the medieval in our culture, that we come back to this moment of the 12th century again and again, and it seems to be able to perform really multivalently. 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 love and romance, and people who are interested in folk culture and peasant culture.
48:59 Speaker 04 People who want to turn away from like the modern and you know, go more analogs. 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.
49:13 Matt Lewis? Yeah, I think he's such a fascinating inclusion in all of that because he's he's almost like a folklore figure, except that he's real. He sits alongside King Arthur and Robin Hood, except that he is
49:23 Speaker 04 Real.
49:24 Matt Lewis? A real historical figure.
49:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's right.
49:26 Matt Lewis? So he's he's able to be absorbed by all of that use of fiction and myth and legend, but wrap it around a real person, which I guess makes him, I don't know that he's unique in that, but he stands out as lining up alongside King Arthur and Robin Hood, as we've said, but also being a real person, which I think makes him fairly unique.
49:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, I would agree. I would agree.
49:53 Speaker 04 I mean, there, you know, when you, when one thinks of other great warriors from that period, you have to go to like Genghis Khan or someone who was non-Western, I think, Saladin.
50:02 Matt Lewis? And just to finish on, you know, do you think it matters or how much does it matter to his literary reputation? Who Richard actually ever was? He seems to have have morphed and been transformed by the idea of what he was or who he was or what he represents. But it almost feels like he's in danger of becoming irrelevant to his own story. And what we know about Richard is more about what he's used to represent than what he actually did.
50:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, I like the idea of him becoming irrelevant to his own story. I mean, I think that's right.
50:32 Matt Lewis? I don't think he would.
50:33 Speaker 04 No, I don't think he would either.
50:34 Matt Lewis? He'd stop laughing at the statue if we told him that.
50:37 Speaker 04 I mean, it's really hard to say, right? I think that certainly one could say there's an opportunity here that to use this figure as a way to both think about what drives the persistent popularity of the figure, but also to try to bring some of that historicity back. So, you know, for example, we might use Richard the Lionheart to think about, well, 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,
51:18 Speaker 04 becoming sort of onto the world stage with Western wars in the Middle East.
51:25 Speaker 04 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. 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.
52:02 Matt Lewis? I know. I don't know. There is a very good answer. It just strikes me that Richard kind of sits there at this nexus point in history where he's, he's, he exists in a changing world, where literature and ideas are changing, where notions of nationhood and empire are changing, and relations with the Near East and the Holy Land are changing. And so he exists in a changing world. So when the world changes around us, he's a figure that we can look back at. And obviously, he's medieval, and all the best things in the world are medieval. So 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 existed in a changing world.
52:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, and that's very true. And I also think, you know, maybe I'm being a little unfair to say that he serves sort of as an empty signifier. I'm thinking of his appearance in the Assassin's Creed video game, which is quite brilliant, because he is not a character you can play, but you speak to him, and when you speak to him, he speaks with a French accent. So there's this, there is this element of an interest in sort of, certainly in Assassin's Creed series, there is a real interest in getting things right, getting the history right, getting archaeology right, getting those cityscapes right, getting those battle instruments, you know, getting the...
53:27 Speaker 04 Your siege weaponry, correct, that I think is really interesting. And I do think, I'm not a gamer. I don't play these things, but I'm really fascinated by the way in which they offer these immersive worldscapes and story worlds that are very often based on medieval or medievalisty, medievally type D 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 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 10 years in entirely different ways than
54:11 Speaker 04 generations of historians have, which I think is truly fascinating. And I have no doubt that, you know, the character of Richard will change with this new sort of way of perceiving the past and way of interacting with the past.
54:24 Matt Lewis? Yeah, I mean, we'll have to try and convince you to come on to the Echoes of History podcast and talk about Assassin's Creed a bit more because I'm always up for that.
54:32 Matt Lewis? This has been absolutely fascinating. It's been, it's been really interesting to think about who Richard was and who he's become and what he's meant to various people and how he's kind of morphed and changed and what he's meant and what he might be today. They're absolutely fascinating to talk to you about all of this, Heather. Thank you so much for joining us.
54:48 Speaker 04 Thank you for having me. It's been fun.
54:52 Matt Lewis? You can listen to an episode all about Richard the First's life that Eleanor hosted a little while ago in our back catalogue. He also appears in our Lioness Heart episode about his sister Joan, and Richard crops up in the Crusades series that we recently did. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com/subscribe. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis,
55:37 Matt Lewis? and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.
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