This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Heather Blurton gives us two books in one: a biography of Richard I and an account of his legend, tracing its retellings from Gerald of Wales to Assassin’s Creed. Medieval tales of Richard’s life are colourful; we read that he dined on Saracens and left the king of Cyprus in silver manacles, honouring a lawyerly promise not to clap him in irons if he surrendered.
Blurton captures the duality of the historical Richard: valiant hero of Romance but also a perfidious, self-serving lord who once quipped he would sell London if only he could find a buyer. Although there is plenty that can be learned from this work, the book’s greatest weakness lies in its chronological breadth.
Cantering through 800 years of reception history in less than 170 pages is a bold move, especially for one of England’s best-known kings. Stranger still, after a detailed study of the 12th and 13th centuries, the author briskly closes most of this chronological ground in the book’s final chapter, leaving us with a sense she has overpromised and underdelivered.
A helpful introduction sketches the uncontentious facts of the historical Richard’s life, after which Blurton moves to the strongest part of her book. Her opening two chapters carefully consider Richard’s legend in chronicles and verse. In the first, Blurton concentrates on three major chroniclers: Richard of Devizes, Roger of Howden and Ambroise, giving a flavour of their concerns and the texture of their writing.
Devizes is aggressively satirical and casts Richard’s dynasty as “the troubled house of Oedipus”. Howden, a less opinionated writer, remarkably reproduces contemporary documents such as letters and charters in his own chronicle. Ambroise writes for a courtly audience, employing tropes from the chanson de geste tradition, “casting history in the mode of epic”, as Blurton puts it.
She soon delves deeper into Richard’s place in a Francophone literary tradition by moving to the world of the troubadours and trouvères. We learn that Richard appears in a variety of Old French and Occitan poems as Duke of Aquitaine and even penned some himself. Equally enjoyable is Blurton’s account of Richard’s fate in crusading Romance.
Here, she explores stories of Richard cannibalising his enemies, enacting the metaphor of conquest in extremis by assimilating the foe. These crusading Romances were central to Richard’s reputation in his own time: as propaganda they held at bay accusations that he was rarely present in the realm (perhaps for only six months) and drained the public purse by marauding in France and the Levant.
In the final part of the book, Blurton tries to trace Richard’s legacy beyond the Middle Ages. Oddly, she identifies the Robin Hood tradition as the main vehicle for Richard’s myth in the Early Modern period, but seems strangely unconcerned that Richard’s role in the tradition is marked by his absence. Blurton isolates a few intriguing stories where Richard does materialise, but as Sherwood Forest begins to eclipse Westminster in the final chapter, it feels as though the book has lost its way.
That wandering focus worsens as the book approaches the contemporary world to give a potted history of Robin Hood on screen. This quickly devolves into the author’s unsolicited reflections on “orientalism” and the foreign policy of George W. Bush:
In these films, however, Azeem and Little John remain sidekicks. We have yet, after all, to see a Black Robin Hood. The tolerance they preach is at odds with the continued Western military presence in the Middle East and with continued structural racism in the United States and elsewhere.
These asides are irritating and do little to illuminate the legacy of King Richard. More helpful are discussions of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and The Talisman, novels which draw out the Victorian incorporation of Richard into notions of Englishness, whilst complicating his story by centring post-settlement tensions between Saxons and Normans. Their anarchic kingdom is inflected by the rediscovery of primary sources by Victorian historians in Scott’s circle which challenged Ricardian nostalgia.
Despite its foibles, there is much to be praised in Richard the Lionheart. As an outline of Richard’s medieval reception it succeeds, but the farther Blurton strays from her period of specialism, the weaker her engagement with sources and the more Richard himself retreats into the wings. The book would benefit from tighter framing and more engagement with the ways that Richard’s Plantagenet successors used and abused his legacy in the Middle Ages.
