transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] 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. 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 of the devil, invented elaborate fantasies about him eating his enemy's 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 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 legend 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. History is the story that we tell ourselves, and the stories we choose to tell matter far more than we realise. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Heather. It's great to have you join us for this episode.
Speaker 2:
[03:03] Hi, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1:
[03:04] I'm 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?
Speaker 2:
[03:25] 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, and later legends suggested that she might even been having an affair with Saladin. So I think, you know, just as someone who was a really powerful woman in her own time, she got a lot of rumour and gossip sort of started accruing to her character.
Speaker 1:
[04:06] And do we see the Angevin's 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 out of it?
Speaker 2:
[04:21] I think all of it. I think it was really the perfect storm for the Angevin's. 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, and the Angevin family provided a lot of that for them. So and of course, it 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 which is the chicken and which is the egg, but certainly it seems like the perfect storm for the Angevins.
Speaker 1:
[05:19] Yeah. And what are the ways in which those stories are allowed 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 set them up as kind of a real anchor point for a dynasty?
Speaker 2:
[05:36] Well, certainly. I think within their lifetimes, people seem to recognize 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 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. We see Richard the Lionheart certainly using literature as a sort of soft politics, exchanging poems with troubadours, patronizing troubadours. Certainly they were participating 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 what their myth is going to become in the future. But certainly, I think everyone in the second half of the 12th century was aware that something new and interesting was happening.
Speaker 1:
[06:48] 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?
Speaker 2:
[07:01] Yeah, absolutely. And Richard was never expected to become king. He was actually the third son of Henry and Eleanor, and there was 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 differentiates him from his father, the older king. The Young King 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 of parents, 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 started first appears.
Speaker 1:
[08:19] Sounds like the classic bad boy.
Speaker 2:
[08:21] 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 heir apparent to his father.
Speaker 1:
[08:31] 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?
Speaker 2:
[08:51] 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 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 it is very much a poetry of love and war and sort of playing the reputation game rather than the territory game in that way.
Speaker 1:
[09:56] 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.
Speaker 2:
[10:06] Yeah, absolutely. You also have 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 II 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.
Speaker 1:
[10:42] 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 talk about what they think their leaders should be rather than what they actually are. Is Richard what they're writing about or are they writing about what they hope Richard will be?
Speaker 2:
[11:08] 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 political moment then as now. But particularly, you know, when we see contemporary historians, that is 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 England, and it's funny, it's gossipy, it's satirical, it engages in rumour-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 Chanson 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.
Speaker 1:
[13:03] Yeah, there's an agenda going on alongside what they're doing. One of the things that Richard is famous for is 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. 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 worth it? You should be selling everything to go on crusade.
Speaker 2:
[13:34] 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 building castles in France and these sorts of things. 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. 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 king to use the resources of his kingdom however he wanted to. And, you know, we have some stories about the sort of taxation that Richard was putting upon England and there are chroniclers who are somewhat cranky about it, but, you know, you can be, 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 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 our modern desire, what we want from great national heroes.
Speaker 1:
[15:46] 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.
Speaker 2:
[16:24] 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 re-evaluated 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 crusade is extremely problematic to say the least. I mean, certainly well through the 1940s, 1950s, you know, school children were being given stories about crusaders as just, you know, normal reading material to think about 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. So it was still until very recently considered a decent space to explore ideas of heroism and individualism and God and country.
Speaker 1:
[17:22] 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.
Speaker 2:
[17:39] Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really right.
Speaker 1:
[17:40] And how do you think Richard, as a patron of troubadours, connects him to his mother's family? Because we've said 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?
Speaker 2:
[18:02] 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. The 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 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 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 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.
Speaker 1:
[19:31] He's ticking all the boxes.
Speaker 2:
[19:32] He's taking all the boxes. That's right. And he 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.
Speaker 1:
[19:49] You would if Richard was here asking you.
Speaker 2:
[19:51] 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 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 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 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.
Speaker 1:
[20:35] I suppose the existence of things like that and the idea that he was interested in that side of things as well as being a great warrior helps ideas like that Blondel 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.
Speaker 2:
[21:15] 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 patronise literature. 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. There's something about being in the right place at the right time for Richard the Lionheart. I think that's really extraordinary that his name is still known. He's still in the movies, that we're still playing his character in video games and this sort of thing.
Speaker 1:
[21:52] Yeah, absolutely. The book obviously deals an awful lot with those later perceptions of Richard as well. I wonder before we get on to some of those later perceptions, how do you think the writers during his lifetime influence Richard's legacy? Are they focusing on things that build Richard up into something almost unobtainable, something that he isn't? Do they create this myth during his lifetime or is it something that develops later?
Speaker 2:
[22:17] I think it's a question of both and. Certainly during his own lifetime, people were fascinated with the phenomenon that was Richard the first. He was within his own time, you see writers struggling to grapple with him and his legacy. But I think the other thing that happened, which 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. 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 has really given Richard the sort of staying power that I think he might not have had otherwise.
Speaker 1:
[23:07] Yeah, interesting. 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 non-fiction as we might write it today.
Speaker 2:
[23:18] 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 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, Richard of Devizes, who's definitely writing the tabloid version of history, which we still do today. We still have that today, right? 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 Howden, from whom we get most of our picture of the 12th century, was someone who was an administrator, he was 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, 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 understandings of history. So he'll copy whole charters into his history, he'll copy letters. He copied several letters of Richard the Lionheart, so we still have them, which is 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 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, 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 there's 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.
Speaker 1:
[25:23] So they might be shocked at some of the things they'd read about history that's written today, I guess.
Speaker 2:
[25:28] Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:
[25:29] 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?
Speaker 2:
[25:42] 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 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 a pressing 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. 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 kind 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. 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 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, provoked people to record what they were finding interesting about their own time period. 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. The sense of all of a sudden, people started looking back to classical models, dusting themselves off from the dark ages and forging ahead into modernity. 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.
Speaker 1:
[28:10] You say we never talk about it that way, but whenever I'm talking to my lovely co-host, Eleanor Janega, I love to talk about the dark ages and how terrible it is and everything else because it drives us slightly back, I think, so it's always good fun. I wondered then if we could work our way through some of the milestones in Richard's reputation in literature as he moves forward, because the book charts these moments. One of the early ones seems to be the emergence of the romance story, Richard Coeur d'Ion, which picks Richard as its hero. I wondered if you could just talk us through when does that emerge, what does it do for Richard and why Richard?
Speaker 2:
[28:44] There's this wonderful set of romances that together are known as Richard Coeur d'Ion, or the Richard the Lionheart romance. It's in Middle English, so it emerges in the 14th and very popular in the 15th century as this vernacular English romantic epoch of Richard's crusade. 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 Cassiadorian who when compelled to stay in church to witness the mass and 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 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 and remind himself of home and of course, pork is a sort of loaded idea in this context because it's 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 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 his chef to bring the pig's head in so he can see 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 frizzle 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 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 Courlion romance, of course, we can tell was really quite popular in the Middle Ages. We see it in the 14th and 15th century and that it goes into print and early print in the 16th century with Winkender Word. And, and then it goes into chat books. So it continues as a popular story in different variations, like well onto the 18th century. And then in fact, the novelist or Walter Scott got a copy of a manuscript that had one of the earliest versions of the Richard Courlion romance in it. And so it's through Walter Scott that some of those stories and tropes that come into the novel tradition. So it was enormously popular. It's enormously fun. I highly recommend it.
Speaker 1:
[31:43] And we've already mentioned his kind of attachment to the Robin Hood myth, which can only 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 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 over the centuries? Obviously it maintains him high in the public mind, I guess.
Speaker 2:
[32:26] 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 John 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 Richard's absence that's letting various people, either Prince John 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.
Speaker 1:
[33:38] But it's also that Richard has somehow become, as you say, the representative of that good governance and the idea that you just need to fight and hold on till that returns. And the fact that that is kind of wrapped in the person of Richard, gives him a whole new dimension to his mythical status almost, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:
[33:55] Yeah, it does. And it really strips Richard's story of, I think a lot of it's depth and interest in a way, because Richard simply becomes a model 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'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. 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 kick ship, 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.
Speaker 1:
[35:05] And you mentioned that Sir Walter Scott comes into possession of a copy of the Richard Curdillion romance stories. How do we see that influencing him and the books that he will write 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?
Speaker 2:
[35:28] 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's 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 Ramanhood plot in that it follows a knight in disguise who goes on Crusade and is trying to hide his true identity from Richard. But it's Ivanhoe that really sets Richard the Lionheart, I think, into 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 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. The main antagonism in Ivanhoe is between the Anglo-Saxons and the Norman French, and Ivanhoe becomes a figure who's going to negotiate between these two sides and bring out the bust, and both of them, so we can become English. 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. In Ivanhoe, we see this process of English-ing Richard the Lionheart, where he becomes less of a Norman king and more of an English king, who's actually bringing these two sides together. Then Robin Hood also appears in Ivanhoe, as you get this plucky gang of outsiders, like Robin Hood and Ivanhoe and Richard in disguise that are going to save the day, as it were. But it's this sense of Richard and Robin Hood as unifying figures culturally, who were going to bridge the gap between an Anglo-Saxon past and a Norman French present, that really comes through also in the Robin Hood tradition. You get often in Robin Hood movies, this antagonism between Saxons and Normans. The most famous is probably Errol Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood from 1938, where Robin Hood is representative of the downtrodden Anglo-Saxons who were the true English, and made Marion 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 love story, their marriage is then this metaphor for the coming together of these two cultures of England. But you see this antagonism between two cultures built into the Robin Hood tradition all the way, and so that's another way in which Richard the Lionheart performs this kingship function, this unifying function. But it's true that in some of 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 to be sort of to be continued sort of narratives.
Speaker 1:
[38:49] It's really interesting that 19th century desire to anglicise him, to stop him being in 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 trying to paint this idea that Britain was relentlessly marching towards the empire that they were living in. And people like Richard are good examples of imperialism and military power, but also cultural importance as well. So the idea that they want to claim him as English, I think, is really interesting at that point.
Speaker 2:
[39:19] 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 gonna come back, or he's not gonna 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 end in your demise, whereas Richard tells the 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.
Speaker 1:
[40:00] 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 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, such an impossible circle to square off, isn't he?
Speaker 2:
[40:44] Yeah, I mean, it's a brilliant image, that statue. And evidently, the story goes 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 fun to raise enough money to have one for themselves. And of course, this place outside 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? And 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 to have this beautiful statue of himself around, but I think bemused by the ideologies behind it, absolutely.
Speaker 1:
[41:46] I think if you explain 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. You mentioned 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?
Speaker 2:
[42:20] 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. 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. Like, people know Richard the Lionheart, but they don't 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 his importance coupled with a kind of sense of uncertainty about what exactly was important about him 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 come back to sort of this moment of the 12th century again and again, and it seems to be able to perform really multivalently, you know, people who are interested in the crusading, people who are interested in aristocracy, people who are interested in power, but also people who are interested 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 analogs. It seems to be a sort of vision that can function in a lot of different ways. It's kind of real flexibility. And maybe that's why it sort of keeps coming back.
Speaker 1:
[43:54] Yeah. I think he's such a fascinating inclusion in all of that because he's almost like a folklore figure except that he's real. He sits alongside King Arthur and Robin Hood, except that he is a real historical figure.
Speaker 2:
[44:06] Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1:
[44:07] So he's able to be absorbed by all of that use of fiction and myth and legend, but rapid 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.
Speaker 2:
[44:30] Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. I mean, 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.
Speaker 1:
[44:43] And just to finish on, do you think it matters or how much does it matter to his literary reputation? Who Richard actually ever was? He seems to have morphed and been transformed by the idea of what he was or who he was or what he represents. 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 used to represent than what he actually did.
Speaker 2:
[45:08] I like the idea of him becoming irrelevant to his own story. I mean, I think that's right.
Speaker 1:
[45:13] I don't think he would.
Speaker 2:
[45:14] No, I don't think he would either.
Speaker 1:
[45:15] He'd stop laughing at the statue if we told him that.
Speaker 2:
[45:18] 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 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 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 once again becoming sort of onto the world stage with Western wars and in the Middle East. We have this sort of 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 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 really have a good answer to the question.
Speaker 1:
[46:45] 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 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 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.
Speaker 2:
[47:27] 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 is this element of an interest in sort of, certainly in the 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 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 medievalist-y, medieval-y, type-y 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 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 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.
Speaker 1:
[49:06] 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. This has been absolutely fascinating. 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.
Speaker 2:
[49:29] Thank you for having me. It's been fun.
Speaker 1:
[49:33] 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 Crusade series that we recently did. There are new installments 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 better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.