This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Richard I ruled England for very nearly ten years and was physically present in the country for perhaps six months of them. For a long stretch of English historical writing, that single fact settled the verdict on him: an absentee, a spendthrift on foreign wars, a king who saw his kingdom chiefly as a source of tax revenue for adventures that had nothing to do with it. The coronation itself gave the reign an ugly opening act neither side chose: barred from the ceremony, a delegation of Jewish leaders bearing gifts was turned away and then attacked outside Westminster, violence that spread into London and, months later, into a massacre at York, a stain on the reign that the older, more admiring biographies tended to pass over in a sentence. But the absentee king charge deserves the same scrutiny the coronation riot has only recently started to receive, because it measures a twelfth century Angevin ruler against a nineteenth century idea of what a king is for. Richard inherited a realm that was never only England: Normandy, Anjou and, through his mother, Aquitaine were his by the same right the crown was, and all three bordered a French king actively probing every frontier for weakness the moment Richard's back was turned, which is exactly what Philip II did on both of Richard's absences. Governing the Angevin Empire meant governing it in person, wherever the danger was greatest, and for most of Richard's reign that was the Continent, not England, which he had left in the hands of justiciars precisely so that it could run without him. The Third Crusade, which took him away for the reign's first three years, was not a personal indulgence either: it answered a summons from the pope that most of Christian Europe's crowned heads had already committed to, and Richard's siege of Acre and his negotiated truce with Saladin, which secured Christian pilgrim access to Jerusalem without the ruinous cost of trying to hold the city outright, were judged real achievements by the crusaders who served under him. The historian John Gillingham's case for Richard, built from the Aquitanian sources English historians had generally not read, is not that the old criticisms are lies, but that they mistake the ordinary business of a twelfth century Angevin king, defending a scattered inheritance and discharging a crusading vow half of Europe shared, for personal neglect of a country that was never, in Richard's own reckoning, the whole of what he had been crowned to rule.