[Artemisia] Richard the Lionheart

Mon May 7 13:43:33 CDT 2007

Greetings Your Majesty and everyone,

I am so glad I asked for help with this question. One of the issues we 
are struggling with is the problem of how Richard was viewed by his 
English subjects during his reign vs. the myth that grew around him in 
the following centuries. Everyone's comments have been very helpful.

One aspect of this question that I had not considered, is the fears and 
hopes surrounding succession to the throne. As I looked at the dates 
again, I noticed that King Stephen's tumultuous reign ended in 1154. 
King Henry the First followed. Then, after a few skirmishes, Richard was 
crowned in 1189. I had not considered that it would have been with-in 
living memory, that a disputed succession  could be a nightmare  for  
everyone, nobles and populace alike.

One of the reasons that I kept glitching on Richard's hero status was 
that it seemed that many of the English populace, and even the nobles, 
wouldn't have cared about Richard's exploits far away in the Holy Land.

One message that we get out of the Robin Hood stories is that there is a 
sense of malaise in England while Richard is gone. It didn't seem to 
make them feel much better that the Church considered him to be a war hero.

However, perhaps even an absentee king was better than a civil war? And 
did people who were contemporary to Prince John during his regency 
really dislike him?

For those of us who are keeping score: one daughter thinks Richard is a 
hunky hero, one daughter thinks he is a blood thirsty barbarian, and I 
am in favor of a cooperative collective:-).

YIS,
Tamar

TClayton wrote:
> I can actually chime in on this subject...
>    Richard's Popularity is strictly a later invention by English 
> writers during England's "religious Enlightenment" and again during 
> its Victorian era. He lead a Crusade (never mind that he lost it, 
> retreated from Jerusalem when he saw the walls around the city, or 
> massacred 3,000 women and children in Acre), and he fought and beat 
> those dastardly Catholic Frenchmen! (Never mind that England was also 
> Catholic and French at the time...)
>    English writers of the 18th and 19th centuries were looking to 
> re-write England's history to validate English Imperialism and 
> Imperial Conquests around the globe. Richard became a hero and was 
> used as an icon of English Manhood, Duty and Nobility during this time.
>    In the period, Richard was as reviled as he was feared. Fear, by 
> far and large, was more valuable to a King in the Middle Ages, than 
> love was. Even the Muslim accounts of the Third Crusade speak of how 
> the "Franks" feared the Lion heart   so much, they fled their own 
> castles before he arrived.
>    As to Richard being gay... there is no evidence of this at all. 
> Quite the contrary. His death is attributed to the fact that he was 
> told to rest from his wounds after the battle of Chalus. Instead, he 
> called for the Royal "concubines". His womanizing was notorious... as 
> evidenced by his many bastards.
> -----Ralph, Rex Artemisia
> -------------------------------------------------------
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tamar Black Sea" 
> <tamar at coteduciel.org>
> To: "Kingdom of Artemisia mailing list" <artemisia at lists.gallowglass.org>
> Sent: Monday, May 07, 2007 11:21 AM
> Subject: Re: [Artemisia] Richard the Lionheart
>
>
> The accountant in me is sputtering in frustration, "but, but, but didn't
> they get tired of having to pay several king's ransoms to bail Richard
> out of jail?"
>
> Didn't they notice that he could win a battle but never a war?
>
> Doesn't somebody want the king to be around to actually
> do the job once in a while?
>
> My modern sensibilities are reeling :-)
>
> Oh...and one last thought. I would guess that the medieval concept of
> "gay" and "straight" might have been very different from our modern
> notion. Wouldn't that have at least partly explained why the fact that
> Richard was gay was ignored. Additionally, he would hardly have been the
> only king who didn't know, didn't like, and didn't spend much time with
> his wife.
>
> Thank you Morgan for your very well informed response. One of my
> daughters is cheering.
>
> YIS,
> Tamar
>
> morgan wolf wrote:
>> I believe (and I should say that this time frame and the particular 
>> "title" I'm about to bring up were my areas of focus during my 
>> pursuit of a history degree) that Richard was so incredibly popular 
>> because he was considered "the Greatest Soldier in Christendom", a 
>> quasi-title that was, in a way, passed on for several generations, 
>> usually to the man who utterly defeated the previous "Greatest 
>> Soldier".  Richard was considered fearless in battle, demonstrated a 
>> mastery of both strategy and tactics, and in a time when martial 
>> prowess basically defined a man, stated and proved again and again 
>> that he would rather be at war than at peace.  A large part of his 
>> popularity with the English nobility was his absenteeism- he was only 
>> in England about 4 times during his entire life (he hated the 
>> island).  An equally large part, if not larger, of the reason that 
>> John was so unpopular with the nobles was his presence in, and desire 
>> to actually rule, England.
>>
>> Richard was such a feared and respected military figure that the fact 
>> that he was gay was completely ignored, except for the matter of the 
>> succession.
>>
>>
>> Morgan, sometime military and medieval history scholar
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: Tamar Black Sea <tamar at coteduciel.org>
>> To: Kingdom of Artemisia mailing list <artemisia at lists.gallowglass.org>
>> Sent: Monday, May 7, 2007 10:36:23 AM
>> Subject: [Artemisia] Richard the Lionheart
>>
>>
>> Greetings Everyone,
>>
>> My two daughters are homeschooled and are doing a unit on the 
>> Crusades and Richard the Lionheart. There is an essay portion with-in 
>> each unit and one of the questions was a deceptively simple little 
>> question about Richard the Lionheart's legacy in English history. I 
>> thought we could whip out an answer in 10 minutes. I was wrong. Days 
>> later, we find ourselves still discussing the question.
>>
>> I would love to hear in-put from anyone out there who has an interest 
>> in this subject. The question was:
>>
>> "Why do you think Richard the Lionheart has always been so popular 
>> when he accomplished so little?"
>>
>> Any thoughts?
>>
>> YIS,
>> Tamar
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