Welcome to the new group.

I hope many of you join and find the forum interesting. To start (hopefully) a conversations off, my favorite all time personality of this period is John Talbot, leader extrodinare of the English during the latter part of the Hundred Years War. Yours?

Despite all his flaws Richard the Lionheart for me. This is all Sir Walter Scott's fault, whose fiction was far removed from reality. I think I read Ivanhoe five times my freshman year in high school, many moons ago and never got over it. William the Conquerer and poor King Harold have always had a lot of fascination for me too.

You need a picture for your group. How about some sort of siege weapon?

I had read in at least one book that Richard was gay. Is that common knowledge or can we chalk that up to crappy revisionist history.

It's news to me. He had a wife, but of course that would have been arranged, and no children that I've heard of. It could explain the devoted minstrel under his window when he was captive in Austria though.

Intresting, I can't remember exactly what book I read that in. It might have been Dungeon, Fire, and Sword. I will check the index tonight and find the reference to him in it and relate to you tommorrow if it's in there.

Hi, I justed popped over from the SS-Thread in the military history forum.
I too have read a number of times about Richard Coeur de Lion being bisexual. David Carpenter's The Struggle for Mastery and Simon Schama's The History of Britain both quote instances in which he allegedly raped many thousands of women and men. Altogether he does not seem to have been a very nice person at all.

He had some pretty big "you know whats" though. No pun intended. He wasn't lacking in bravery.

Another favorite person of mine is John Hawkwood. Before he embarked into the HYW as an archer, he had actually trained as a tailor. He is the epitome of the self-made man.

I was trolling through your library and noted the John Hawkwood book. I'll have to keep an eye open for it.

I still prefer the romanticized King Richard to the not so good reality.

You know what, I do too. I read this stuff 1, because it is fascinating to me, 2 to learn what happened, 3 but I think the main reason is to get a picture (however romanticized) of the personalities. Don't read any of that demi-new-genre "Fictional History" though. Just doesn't appeal.

Richard must have had a quite impressive PR-machine running, how else can you explain that an extremely cruel mass murderer, mass raper and war-monger of a Frenchman who visited England twice in his life became such an English hero?

Well, to bring it up again, that was the accepted way you waged war back then. I've always found it funny that he had not spent hardly any time in England as well. If you think about it, it is odd that French was the language of English court forever. That never really seemed to dampen the fire Brits have for their monarchs.

Richard the Lion Hearted was a brilliant general and good crossbowman. Most of the bad stories were put out by the court historian of Philip Augustus of France and not to be believed. While he was King of England, he was also Duke of Normandy, Count of the Aquitaine, Count of Anjou, and for a while King of Cyprus. England was not the most important part of his empire.