A Great and Glorious Adventure Read Online Free

instant communications
and mass media, medieval kings had to be seen and had to move around their lands to enforce the law and keep over-mighty subjects in check. In the thirty-five years of his reign, Henry spent
twenty-one of them in his continental possessions, for it was there that he was threatened, rather than in a united England which was now mainly a source of revenue. A mere twenty years later,
nearly all of Henry’s empire would be lost, and it was the memory of that empire that would provide one of the provocations for the Hundred Years War.
    Henry II’s intention was that his eldest son, also Henry, would become king of England, while his second surviving son, Richard, would inherit his mother’s lands and titles in
Aquitaine and Poitiers. When Prince Henry died in 1183, the king assumed that, as Richard was now the heir apparent, Aquitaine would pass to his third son, John. But Richard, having learnt his
trade as a soldier subduing rebellious barons there, had no intention of giving up Aquitaine, and family quarrels, culminating in an invasion of England by Richard supported by the French king,
Philip II, in 1189, forced Henry to make a humiliating peace shortly before he died, to be succeeded as king by the thirty-two-year-old Richard.
    Every little boy playing with his wooden sword storming imaginary castles sees himself as Richard the Lionheart, the great warrior king of England and chivalrous knight par excellence. His
slaughter of prisoners taken at Acre in 1191 did not detract from the contemporary view of him as the epitome of knightly conduct – after all, the prisoners were not Christians. Certainly,
Richard was personally brave and a competent general, well educated by the standards of the time, a patron of the arts and especially of musicians, and a reasonable composer and singer of songs
himself. He spent little time in England, however, concentrating on putting down rebellion – including that of his brother John – and embarking on a crusade which, while it failed to
capture Jerusalem, did take the wholeof the coastal strip from Tyre in Lebanon to Jaffa (in modern Israel) and captured Cyprus, which was to prove very useful as a mounting
base for military operations both then and since. 8 Coming back from his crusade, he was captured by Duke Leopold of Austria, sold on to the Holy Roman
Emperor, and held prisoner for a year while a ‘king’s ransom’ of 100,000 marks was raised to free him. A mark was eight ounces of silver, so the ransom was roughly equivalent to
around £2.6 million today (using the silver standard), raised in the main by a 25 per cent tax on all rents and on the value of all moveable property, both in England and in Normandy –
and that from a total population of around three million.
    Richard showed little interest in the administration of his empire, but was fortunate in his choice of men to run it for him, particularly in Hubert Walter, King’s Justiciar and archbishop
of Canterbury, who was not only a thorough and highly competent administrator but, unusually for the time, no more than moderately corrupt. Walter had accompanied the crusading army to Acre when
bishop of Salisbury and found conditions in the camp of the army execrable, with a complete lack of sanitation and a breakdown in the commissariat leading to soldiers and officers dying of disease
or starvation. He swiftly got a grip of the situation, organized a proper administrative machinery to provide rations and clean water, and insisted on such measures as dug latrines and the
prevention of the pollution of wells, paying for sentries on water sources out of his own pocket. When King Richard arrived at Acre, the morale and efficiency of the army had improved markedly, and
Walter was marked out in the king’s eyes as a man who could get things done.
    During Richard’s absence on crusade and then in prison, the French had made considerable inroads into the English domains on the