Richard the Lion Hearted Richard Plantagenet, who reigned from 1189

The most recent Robin Hood movie unaccountably left Richard the LionHearted out of its plot, but it is unlikely after eight hundred years that his legend will fade into lasting eclipse. There is every likelyhood that he will return in future retellings to once again save England from the depradations of Prince John, the Sheriff of Nottingham, and the rest of their villainous lot.

The great irony of Richard's enduring popularity as a figure of historical legend is that it has very little to do with his actual character and career, both of which are known in considerable detail. This is not the case with other wellremembered monarchs. Henry VIII

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h he made public penance for his sins, which evidently included sodomy. The other is that he became as a young man so intimate a friend of his future rival Philip Augustus of France that they ate from the same plate and evidently shared a bed as well.14 As negative evidence for the same proposition is the lack of either recorded mistresses or any sign of warmth towards Alice of France, to whom he was long betrothed, or to Berengaria of Navarre, who became his wife and queen. These facts, combined with his position as his mother's favorite, easily feeds into modern stereotypes about homosexuals whose mothers or other relatives (Richard was reportedly close to his sister Joan) are the only significant women in their lives. It is important, however, to see Richard's sexual attitudes and conduct in the terms of his own age. The Middle Ages evidently lacked our contemporary assumption that men are predominantly either heterosexual or homosexual. Rather, the medieval assumption was that a course of sexual excess would begin with heterosexual promiscuity, and proceed to include sodomy and other sinful practices, including even bestiality. During Richard's early wars in Aquitaine, nobles were said to have sought to hide thei
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Approximate Pages = 36 (250 words per page)