“When History drops her drums and trumpets and learns to tell the story of Englishmen, it will find the significance of Richard not in his Crusade or in his weary wars along the Norman border, but in his lavish recognition of municipal life.” It may well seem strange to begin by quoting these words of the master who inspired my earliest venture—and thereby, indirectly at least, all my later ventures also—into the field of history, the preface to a book on Richard the First in which that sovereign’s island realm figures scarcely more than in the background, and the life of its people not at all. Certainly England and the English people ought to have stood in the forefront and to have been treated in the fullest detail, if this book were intended for a history of Richard’s reign; but it has been written with no such intention. It is merely an attempt to sketch, from materials of which some of the most valuable and interesting have become accessible to students only within a comparatively recent period, the life-story of a prince who reigned less than ten years and lived less than forty-two, yet whose personal character, peculiar circumstances, and adventurous career have given him—whether deservedly or not—a conspicuous place in mediæval history, and made him a hero of romance in every country from England to Palestine.
