History of England 1-6

It would be anachronistic, at best, to condemn Richard’s passion for warfare. Kings were supposed to fight, and a warlike ruler was considered to be a good ruler. If God looked kindly upon a monarch, he would bequeath him success in battle. It was one of the essential prerogatives, or duties, of sovereignty reflecting a period in which warfare was endemic. The two least militant kings of medieval England, Richard II and Henry VI, were widely considered to be failures; both of them were deposed and murdered. So military valour was crucially important.

One of the clues to understanding Richard’s not necessarily complex character lies in the code of chivalry with its accompanying concern for ‘courtly love’. Chivalry can on one level be understood as the practice whereby the laws of honour supersede those of right or justice. Thus in warfare knights would spare the lives and privileges of other knights, while happily massacring the women and children among the local population. Elaborate laws of warfare also governed the conduct of sieges. The cult of chivalry had as little connection with real warfare as scholastic theology had to do with daily worship in the parish church.

Richard liked to participate in tournaments. These were not the stage-managed jousts of the fifteenth century; these were real conflicts, staged over a large area of ground, between trained bands of knights. They closely resembled actual battle, with the provision that a dismounted knight had to retire from the field and give horse and armour to his opponent. Nevertheless fatalities and serious injuries were not uncommon. Tournaments were in fact so dangerous, and so disruptive, that Henry II forbade them in England. But they remained very popular in Aquitaine.

In that French region, too, the cult of courtly love flourished. It was an impulse celebrated by the troubadours of Provence and Aquitaine who in song and story celebrated the love of the female as the source of all virtue and pleasure. A knight fought for his lady; his love for her rendered him stronger and more courageous. Love was appreciative rather than covetous. Like the Platonic love of an earlier civilization – then generally between male and male – it was a shadow or echo of heavenly harmony. A knight, in theory, was meant to be chaste and pious; the model of knighthood then became Sir Galahad. The two creeds of chivalry and courtly love are alike in being quite remote from the experience of life, but they did represent a pietistic attempt to place warfare and adultery in the context of a sacred world. All this directly impinged upon Richard I’s sense of himself and of his kingship. It was believed at the time that he possessed Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. And it ought to be remembered that Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur was translated from a French romance.

The crown was no sooner warm upon the young king’s head than he began to prepare himself for a crusade against Saladin and for the recapture of Jerusalem. Crusades were very much part of the spirit of chivalry, for they had of course an ostensibly religious purpose. The crusading knight would be expected to prepare himself with vigils, fasts and prayers. The forces of Christ were meant to be pilgrims as much as soldiers. There grew up cults of military saints, such as St George and St Martin, and the roles of knight and monk were combined in the religious orders of Templars and the Hospitallers. For Richard, the third crusade could not have come at a more convenient time. The holy city had fallen two years before his coronation, and Richard had immediately ‘taken the Cross’. His opportunity had now come to bear it into combat. He is in fact the only English king ever to become a crusader.

For this purpose he needed money. He was in England for three months after the coronation, and in that short period he tried to sell everything he possessed – lands, lordships, bishoprics, castles, towns and court offices. He said that he would sell London itself if he could find a purchaser for it. The country was for him only an engine for the making of money. He seized all of his father’s treasure; he exacted loans; he increased the burden of taxes. The imposition he placed upon the kingdom in fact played a large part in the rebellion that led to the Magna Carta. The great lords were not rebelling against the rule of King John alone; they were fighting against the very idea of exacting Angevin kingship, made all the worse by the growth of a strong central administration.