The Reign of Richard Lionheart

Ruler of The Angevin Empire, 1189-1199

Ralph V Turner, Richard Heiser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317890416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This ground-breaking and substantive new history considers Richard's reign from a perspective that is as much French as English. Viewing the king himself as a great military commander, it also shows him as a more competent administrator than previously acknowledged. Modern revisionist work allows the authors to correct many misconceptions about Richard's French possessions, and recent scholarship on his rival, Philip Augustus, permits examination of the formidable threat that the resurgent Capetian monarchy represented.

CHAPTER ONE

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The historians’ balance-sheet

King Richard I (1189–99), son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, is the best known of all the medieval kings of England. Still a leading character in novels, films and television series, he is presented in the media today much as he has been for centuries: a model of kingly virtues because of his military exploits, chivalric courtesy and crusading ardour. Indeed, the periodisation of his reign reflects the dominance of war: first, his preparations for the Third Crusade, from the spring of 1189 to summer 1190; then the crusading expedition, 1190–92; followed by his capture on the return journey and imprisonment in Germany throughout 1193; and finally, following his release early in 1194 until his death in April 1199, five years of warfare protecting his French possessions from Philip Augustus, king of France.

Although popular histories have consistently admired Richard Lionheart, the same is not true of serious historians. Richard’s historiographical ups and downs are a useful example of how historians’ judgments of leaders are periodically revised according to different ages’ priorities. Any examination of the reign of Richard Lionheart presents the dilemma of the sharply differing standards applied by medieval chroniclers, later historians and today’s scholars in assessing leaders’ achievements. The definition of a model ruler today is hardly the same one that Richard’s contemporaries, living in an era of religious fervor and warrior ethos, applied to their monarch. Because medieval and modern writers have such dramatic differences of methodology, purpose and perspective regarding Richard I and because of contributions to historical understanding made by specialists in recent years, it is important to look again at the reign of this remarkable medieval English king.

A sketch of historical opinion on Richard Lionheart demonstrates the shifting values and priorities that biased authors. First to express opinions about Richard I were his contemporaries in their chronicles. The late twelfth century was ‘a golden age of historiography in England’,¹ and it would be unwise to reject the chroniclers’ findings simply because their aims and procedures differed from modern historical method. Although all chroniclers writing during Richard’s reign were in clerical0020orders, only four were monks; three others – Roger of Howden, Ralph of Diss and Gerald of Wales – were secular clerks with close ties to the royal court. Indeed, the chronicle composed by Roger of Howden, a royal clerk, is considered a ‘quasi-official record of the central government’.² He did not, nor did Ralph of Diss, dean of St Paul’s, share the anti-government bias of most monastic writers, notorious among the thirteenth-century St Albans chroniclers.

As churchmen, the historians who were Richard Lionheart’s contemporaries held liberation of the Christian holy places from the Muslims as the highest priority, indeed the highest goal of the chivalric lord.³ Thus, medieval chroniclers saw the Third Crusade as the central event in Richard’s life, and they painted their portraits of him accordingly. Richard of Devizes’ account of the Lionheart’s crusade, for example, sketches ‘a heroic portrait consciously drawn to inspire unreserved admiration and to justify military failures’; other writers also depicted the crusading monarch as a hero akin to the heroes of chivalric romances, hailing him as a perfect knight and model king because of his courtesy and military prowess.⁴ Admiration of the Lionheart led some ecclesiastics to tolerate behaviour for which they would not have forgiven his father or his brother. Gerald of Wales and Roger of Howden both saw Henry IPs rejection of the 1185 plea for military assistance by the patriarch of Jerusalem as the turning point in the king’s life. Peter of Blois, another courtier, joined them in interpreting Henry’s tragic end in 1189 as God’s judgment on his indifference to the fate of the holy places.⁵

Not all writers in Richard’s day were clerics learned in Latin; vernacular poetry composed for aristocratic audiences reflects the violent warrior ethos embedded in the cult of chivalry. With its definition of the perfect knight’s qualities of prowess, loyalty, largess and courtesy, chivalry profoundly influenced thinking about kingship by the late twelfth century. For noble listeners to troubadours or trouvères, a successful king was a mighty warrior, exhibiting qualities of the chivalrous knight. Richard’s martial skills and generous spirit won him the admiration of his contemporaries, who found embodied in him all the chivalric virtues.⁶ A verse history of the Third Crusade described Richard: ‘His deeds of chivalry so great / And such fair prowess as to stun / and to bewilder everyone’; and an Aquitanian lament composed on Richard’s death said similarly, ‘Never was there a king so faithful, so valiant, so fearless, so generous.’⁷

Not even in the Middle Ages did all writers evaluate monarchs solely according to their success as generals. An old principle of kingship that professed the ruler’s responsibility for his people’s well-being, equating the ruler-subject relationship with a father’s care for his minor children, was familiar to the learned in the twelfth century. The Dialogus de Scaccario, c. 1177–79, explained that God had entrusted the monarch with ‘the special care of his subjects’. A letter written for Richard’s justiciar by Peter of Blois about 1195 employs such terms as ‘the welfare of all’ and ‘the public business of the king’.⁸ Some writers who lived under Richard’s rule found him guilty of neglecting the general responsibility for his subjects’ care that constituted good kingship. For example, William of Newburgh condemned as irresponsible a number of the new king’s actions on taking power in 1189; and Ralph of Goggeshall, who praised Richard extravagantly at the beginning of his reign, later saw the unworthy manner of his death as divine punishment for the financial extortions of his last years.⁹

Historians since the seventeenth century have measured Richard by yardsticks adapted to their own ages’ preconceptions about kingly duties. By the end of the nineteenth century, scholars, having become preoccupied with ‘nation-building’ and ‘administrative kingship’, had demoted Richard Lionheart to the category of bad rulers. Bishop William Stubbs, writing in late nineteenth-century Oxford, was not impressed with Richard, and his comments represent a Victorian verdict on rulers which was ‘essentially a moral judgment upon an individual sinner’.¹⁰ Stubbs set the pattern for accounts of the Lionheart with his denunciation of him as ‘an unscrupulous and impetuous soldier’, whose cardinal trait was ‘the love of warfare’. He judged him a failure as a statesman, with an ‘utter want of political common sense’ and with ‘none of the tact of a wise prince’.¹¹ Stubbs has continued to exercise powerful influence upon our views of medieval England, for generations of British students were brought up on his Constitutional History, and scholars still depend on his editions of medieval chronicles.

Scholars since Stubbs have continued to disparage the Lionheart’s preoccupation with war. Absorbed with law and administration, they neither know nor care about medieval warfare, which they dismiss as a series of aimless raids punctuated by pointless sieges of castles, led by undisciplined knights fighting for personal glory – in short, a mêlée little different from urban gang activity. They refuse to accept that such warriors were capable of any larger plan worthy of the term ‘strategy’. Typical is the contemptuous comment by H.G. Richardson and G.O. Sayles, two iconoclastic British scholars, that medieval warfare ‘called for little strategy, for little military science’.¹² Such writers with their secular outlook and historical hindsight dismiss Richard’s crusade as a futile venture, and they are no more capable of grasping its significance than medieval chroniclers would understand America’s 1960s quest to land a man on the moon.

The early twentieth century saw the beginnings of the welfare state, and historians no longer feared ‘big government’, but favoured bureaucrats as those who actually made government work for the public good. As a result, they shifted their studies from individual statesmen to institutions and administrative agencies. In addition, Marxist doctrines emphasising impersonal socio-economic forces discredited the ‘great man’ theory of history. The disasters of the twentieth century – deficient military leadership in the First World War and politicians’ failures in solving post-war problems or preventing the Second World War – caused many British scholars to disavow heroes in history.¹³ Any notion that a leader could merit glory and admiration as a result of military exploits was also numbered among the casualties. Negative assessments of Richard became common, and they gained currency through repetition in popular texts on the Middle Ages, as seen in one current textbook’s dismissal: ‘Richard was an attractive man and a thoroughly bad monarch.… War was his one delight, and his only interest in England was as a source of funds for his crusade and his bitter war with Philip Augustus.’¹⁴

In recent years scholars employing different criteria have undertaken a re-evaluation of Richard by seeking to place him in his proper late twelfth-century context and to judge him by the standards of his own age. Among the battlefields on which they have waged war for Richard’s reputation are his preoccupation with war, his apparent disregard for the governing enterprise and his financial demands. Taking the lead are John Gillingham, J.C. Holt andJ.O. Prestwich. Signposts of the revision are three collections of papers: Riccardo Cuor di Leone...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Medieval World
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editor’s Preface
• Authors’ Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 The historians’ balance-sheet
• 2 The character of the Angevin ‘empire’
• 3 The problem of Philip Augustus and growing French royal power
• 4 Richard’s apprenticeship: count of Poitou 1172–89
• 5 Richard’s accession and preparations for the Third Crusade
• 6 Richard’s governance of England prior to departure on crusade
• 7 The government of England during the Third Crusade and German captivity
• 8 The government of England under Hubert Walter and Geoffrey fitz Peter
• 9 The duchy of Normandy
• 10 Greater Anjou
• 11 The duchy of Aquitaine
• 12 Richard’s warfare following the crusade, 1193–99
• 13 Richard in retrospect
• Maps I. The Angevin Empire
• II. England, Scotland and Wales
• III. The Duchy of Normandy
• IV. Greater Anjou
• V. The Duchy of Aquitaine
• VI. Angevin and Capetian Dominions and Theatres of War
• Genealogical Table: The Angevin Dynasty
• Bibliography
• Index