Robin Hood: The King is Dead

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Edward I, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II, Henry III, King John, King Stephen, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Robin Hood, William Rufus, William the Conqueror

Fairly early in Robin Hood (2010, dir. Ridley Scott), King Richard the Lionhearted (Danny Huston) gets killed by a crossbow bolt during a siege. When Robin (Russell Crowe) tells a royal official about this, the man replies, “The king is dead; long live the king.” The same thing happens when Robin later tells the Queen Mother Eleanor (Eileen Atkins, doing a not too bad Katherine Hepburn impersonation). The sentence gets said, and Eleanor immediately moves to put Richard’s crown on her son John’s head.

“The king is dead; long live the king” is the sort of thing that people say in historical movies occasionally, but no one ever explains what it actually means. The now-standard wording was first used in 1422 in France, but the concept itself dates back further. The phrase encapsulates the legal principle, expressed in French, of le mort saisis le vif, which means “the dead seizes the living”. In this phrase, ‘seizes’ does not refer to grabbing something but rather to seisin, the legal right to possess landed property. The phrase means that the legal title to a property passes from the deceased to the deceased’s living heir at the moment of death. The instant the father dies, his son gains title to his property; there is no period where the property is left legally ownerless.

When applied to a king, the concept of le mort saisis le vif means that the crown and kingdom pass from the dead king to his heir at the moment of death, so that there is never a moment when the kingdom has no king. So the saying is really expressing that “the (old) king is dead; long live the (new) king.”

However, the concept of “the king is dead; long live the king” had not yet been articulated in England in 1199. It was first expressed as a principle in 1272, when Henry III died while his son and heir Edward was out of the country on the 8th Crusade. Fearing a civil war, when Henry died, the Royal Council declared “The throne shall never be empty; the country shall never be without a monarch.”

Henry III of England

To understand why the Council did this, you only have to look at the previous two centuries of royal successions. In 1066, William the Conqueror took the throne of England by conquest, claiming that he had inherited it from his distant cousin Edward the Confessor and that Harold Godwinson had usurped it. In 1087, William was succeed by his son William II Rufus, even though William had an older son, Robert Curthose. Rufus’ claim, as we’ll see, was based on the fact that William I had not been king of England when Robert was born. The fact that Rufus had Robert in captivity at the time also helped the claim. When Rufus died in a hunting accident (or was it?) in 1100, he was succeeded by his younger brother Henry I.

Henry I’s only legitimate son William Adelin died in a shipwreck in 1120, and Henry spent the last 15 years of his life trying to orchestrate the succession of his daughter Matilda. But when Henry died in 1135, his nephew Stephen of Blois seized the throne and spent the next two decades fighting first Matilda and then her son Henry. Stephen finally reached a peace deal with Henry that allowed Stephen to stay king on the condition that he disinherit his son in favor of Henry. In 1154, Stephen died and Henry promptly became king as Henry II.

When Henry died in 1189, his son Richard took the throne. When Richard died, his brother John became king. When John died in the middle of a rebellion, his infant son Henry III was crowned, but it was a close thing because so much of the English nobility was hostile to John. So in 1272, when Henry died, in the previous two centuries there had only been one entirely stable father-to-son transmission of the crown (Henry II to Richard I). The Council articulated the principle of le mort saisis le vif to try to clarify the rules around the crown. Edward didn’t have to wait until his coronation to become king, because that event would be months in the future; rather, Edward was already king without knowing it.

Another Problem
Modern Americans tend to assume that monarchy always follows the rule of primogeniture, that the oldest son inherits the crown. But that’s not necessarily true. Many cultures have used other systems to determine who inherits the crown. The ancient Egyptians had no clear rule at all about which son would become pharaoh. Early Germanic society used a rather loose system in which descent from the previous king was only one of several important factors. It was just as important that the new king be a strong military leader, which means that if the old king’s son was a child he would be passed over for some other relative. Perhaps in a few decades he might assert a claim to the throne, but he wasn’t qualified yet because he was simply too young. In early medieval France, there was a strong tendency for a king’s surviving sons to split the kingdom up, so that each one became a king. As a result, the kingdom would fracture into several temporary kingdoms until one branch of the royal family managed to reunify France by conquest.

In the 11th century, French nobility began to embrace the system of primogeniture as a way to prevent the breaking up of family property between multiple sons (which tended to drive the family into poverty over a few generations). The kingdom came to be seen as something that couldn’t be divided, so it should pass to the oldest son. But what about a case like England in 1087? William the Conqueror was king of England, but his oldest son Robert wasn’t heir to the kingdom when he was born because William acquired the kingdom after Robert’s birth. So it made sense to William I that he should divide his property between Robert, who inherited William’s French territories, and Rufus, who got England.

An even messier issue occurred when Henry II died. Henry had four legitimate sons who had survived to adulthood: Henry, Richard, Geoffrey, and John. Henry declared his eldest son his heir and had him undergo a coronation ceremony; for that reason the son is often called Henry the Young King. But the Young King died in 1183, while his father was still alive. The system of primogeniture was not yet fully in place. As long as the Young King was alive, there was no disputing that he ought to inherit everything. But now that he was dead, did everything have to pass to Richard, or was there room for Henry to make other arrangements? Ultimately Richard’s political strength compelled Henry to accept Richard as his heir.

But when Richard died, things were murkier. Under normal circumstances, Richard’s heir should have been his younger brother Geoffrey. But Geoffrey had died in 1186, leaving a young son Arthur. Under strict primogeniture, Arthur ought to have inherited from Richard. But Arthur was two generations removed from Henry II, while John was only one generation removed, and the rule of primogeniture was not yet so solidly in place as to exclude John’s claim by proximity to Henry II. Furthermore, Arthur was only twelve years old, while John was an adult.

In 1190, Richard had designated Arthur was his heir, but as he was dying in 1199, Richard declared John his heir, acknowledging that the boy would not be able to stop John from claiming the throne. The idea that the king had to be a strong military leader still mattered and Arthur clearly wasn’t. But Arthur (or perhaps his mother Constance) wasn’t happy with this. Arthur sought support from King Philip II of France, who played Arthur off against John.

In 1202, when Arthur laid siege to Eleanor, Richard and John’s mother, John caught Arthur’s forces by surprise and took him prisoner. In 1203, Arthur died in captivity under mysterious circumstances. There are various stories of what happened to him. Various stories have him stabbed to death by John and thrown into the river or being starved to death. Either way, John’s claim on the English throne was secure.
So when Robin gives Eleanor Richard’s crown and she promptly puts it on John’s head, Ridley Scott is glossing over a whole lot of details and putting an anachronism in her mouth.

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood  is available on Amazon.

If you want to know more about some of the kings mentioned here, David Douglas’ study of William the Conqueror is as old as I am, but still a very good biography, while Frank Barlow has written a nice work on William Rufus. W.L. Warren has written excellent books on Henry II (English Monarchs) and King John (English Monarchs). For Richard, you might look at John Gillingham’s study of Richard I. 

Becket: Why Context Matters

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Becket, Becket or the Honour of God, Henry II, Jean Anouilh, Medieval England, Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton, Thomas Becket

Becket (1964, dir. Peter Glenville, based on Jean Anouilh’s play Becket or the Honour of God) tells the story of Thomas Becket (Richard Burton), the Chancellor of England who was made Archbishop of Canterbury by Henry II (Peter O’Toole). Henry and Becket were friends and drinking buddies and Becket helped Henry control the English Church while he was chancellor, but when Henry made him archbishop, he underwent a startling conversion and became a staunch proponent of the rights of the Church, fighting Henry’s attempts to impose royal power more thoroughly over the English clergy. Ultimately, in 1171, in a fit of rage, Henry declared that he wished someone would “rid me of this meddlesome priest”, which four of his household knights took as a sign that they should ride to Canterbury and murder Becket in the cathedral there. The ensuing scandal saw Becket elevated to sainthood in just over two years’ time and Henry eventually agreed to submit to being whipped at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral as penance for his role in Becket’s death.

Becket’s story is a famous one. He was a major saint in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, and Canterbury became one of the most important centers of pilgrimage as a result of Becket’s cult. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is set on such a pilgrimage. Becket’s life and death has been a popular subject for playwrights, including Alfred Lord Tennyson, T.S. Eliot, Paul Webb, and, as noted above, the French author Jean Anouilh, who wrote his play in 1959.

According to Anouilh, he bought an old book that had a chapter on Thomas Becket, and after reading it, his wife encouraged him to write a play on Becket. After he wrote the first portion of the play, he learned that the book was wrong on one major facet of Becket’s life, namely his ancestry. But because he had worked Becket’s ancestry into the play as a major theme, he decided to keep the historical error in the play.

There is absolutely no historical doubt about Becket’s ancestry. Both his parents had French names, and ‘Becket’ means either ‘brook’ or ‘beak-nose’ (in which case it was probably a nickname his father acquired). The medieval biographies of Becket offer more than one idea about where in Normandy the family came from, but they are clear that the family was Norman. The best biography of Thomas Becket, by Frank Barlow, doesn’t even bother considering the idea that he might have been Anglo-Saxon.

Becket being murdered

Normans and Anglo-Saxons

In 1066, the French nobleman William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, conquered Anglo-Saxon England, defeating the last Saxon king of England, Harold Godwinson. As a result, all subsequent English monarchs have been descended from William. As a result of the Norman Conquest of England, French culture was dominant for several centuries. In the 12^th century, the overwhelming majority of English nobles were of French ancestry and many maintained tight family alliances with Norman relatives. French was the language of the cultural elites in England, and the Saxon population was to a considerable extent reduced to a subject peasantry, with English being the language of the lower classes and taking several centuries to filter back up the hierarchy to eventually displace French. (This is why, for example, the English words for livestock, such as cow, pig, and sheep, are of Anglo-Saxon origin, while the words for the meat these animals produce, such as beef, pork, and mutton, are French.)

So when Anouilh read, incorrectly, that Thomas Becket was of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, he immediately saw a story about a man of an oppressed ethnic group rising to triumph over his own oppressors. Having himself lived through the Nazi occupation of France, this must have been a powerfully resonant idea for him, and thus his telling of Becket’s story is one in which Becket’s supposed Anglo-Saxon ethnicity and Henry II’s Norman ancestry are front and center.

Jean Anouilh

This accounts for the film’s somewhat curious approach how it depicts Anglo-Saxons and Normans. The Anglo-Saxons are depicted as poor peasants living in dirty hovels and being silently (and sometimes violently) resentful of the Normans. On two separate occasions, Anglo-Saxons attempt to murder Becket (a peasant mistakes him for a Norman while a Saxon monk sees him as a collaborator). Early in the film, Becket says that the Normans represent comfort and civilization, and so he embraces them and looks down on his fellow Saxons.

However, despite this, the film depicts the Normans (up to and including King Henry) as vulgar barbarians while Becket becomes the representative of a more civilized way of life. The film incorrectly has Becket introduce forks to Norman England, while Henry can’t understand why he shouldn’t just use his fingers, and the first time forks are presented at a feast, one Norman baron uses his fork to stab another man. The feast scene highlights the crudeness and violence of the Normans, who constantly throw food at each other, much to Henry’s amusement.

Henry is a libertine who goes through women with no regard for them as human beings; in one scene he repeatedly refers to a frightened Norman peasant girl as “it” and orders her brought to his castle so he can sleep with her. Later, he forces Becket to give him a woman whom Becket evidently has feelings for. In another scene, he treats a French peasant woman as a piece of furniture and is surprised when she protests. In contrast, Becket facilitates Henry’s romantic escapades but does not participate.

Henry, treating a peasant woman as a piece of livestock

When Becket negotiates the surrender of a French town, Henry’s barons are angry that they won’t get to sack it, and Becket has to explain why sacking the town will discourage other towns from surrendering, as if Becket was the first man to realize this, when in reality it was a recognized principle in warfare to not sack towns if they surrendered quickly. The message here is clear; Becket is the man with true sensibility and the Normans are little better than wild animals.

Becket, as the film structures events, begins his rise to power as a collaborator, working with the Normans, particularly Henry II, and having only an uneasy sense of allegiance to his Saxon kin. But once he becomes archbishop, he begins to resist Henry II and to champion a clergy that the film (falsely) presents as representing the Anglo-Saxons. So the struggle between Henry and the English Church becomes a struggle between the Normans and the Saxons as expressed through Henry and Becket. Henry briefly triumphs when Becket is murdered, but as he remarks when he is speaking to the dead Becket while awaiting his flogging, the Saxons get to have their victory because the monks who flog him are Saxons.

Anouilh’s Subtext

I’ve mentioned before that historical films and plays are always about the period they are made in, and Anouilh’s play demonstrates this, because the subtext here is the Nazi occupation of France, with the Normans standing in for the Germans and the Anglo-Saxons being the conquered French. Becket goes from being a collaborator to a resistance fighter; his death and subsequent vindication mirrors the fate of many French resistance fighters during the war.

The issue of collaboration was (and to some extent, still is) a painful subject in post-war France. The Vichy government collaborated during the war, actively assisting the Nazis with the deportation of Jews and the arrest of resistance fighters. After the war, some collaborators, such as Marshall Petain, were tried for treason (Petain was convicted and sentenced to death, but had his sentence commuted to life in prison), while others, such as Maurice Papon, who oversaw the deportation of more than 1,500 French Jews and participated in the torture of French insurgents, continued to serve in government until 1965.

Because the Germans defeated the French so rapidly in World War II (in contrast with World War I), the French were actively seeking ways to salvage their pride. Resistance fighters were celebrated, and their role in undermining the Nazi war effort was in many cases exaggerated. One of the greatest medieval historians of the 20^th century, Marc Bloch, was a resistance member who was executed by the Nazis shortly before the end of the war, and subsequently became something of a secular saint for French intellectuals. So in the 1950s, the issue of collaboration and resistance would have been a theme that spoke powerfully to many French people. Anouilh’s Antigone, first produced in 1944, explored the issue of resistance to a tyrannical government, and his 1952 play about Joan of Arc, L’Alouette (The Lark) is another study of resistance to an occupying power.

This also accounts for the film’s uncertainty about who truly represents civilization. Becket explicitly says that the Normans are more civilized than the Saxons, and yet he is clearly the most civilized person in the film. This doesn’t make a lot of sense until you consider that Becket is a stand-in for the French under the yoke of Nazi brutality. He represents 20^th century French civilization.

Unfortunately, while all of this makes for a good movie, it’s bad history. Becket was not Anglo-Saxon, but Norman. His struggle with Henry was about the deeply controversial question of how Church and State were supposed to relate, an issue that caused considerable turbulence in many parts of Western Europe in the late 11^th and 12^th centuries; it was not a struggle of oppressed Anglo-Saxons against brutal Normans.

O’Toole and Burton

By all means, give Becket a viewing. Its two leads were giants of the screen in their day, and both men were at the height of their careers when this film was made. O’Toole would, of course, portray a much older Henry II just three years later when he made The Lion in Winter, but in both films he captures Henry’s deep well of energy. The Lion in Winter is, for me at least, the better film, and I think it holds together today a little better than Becket does, perhaps because the earnestness of Burton’s performance feels a little old-fashioned. But if you can look past the Anglo-Saxons vs Normans theme, which admittedly is a huge part of the film, what remains is a reasonable telling of the story of Henry and Becket’s falling out and Becket’s death.

Want to Know More?

Becket is available on Amazon.

Thomas Becket is a fascinating figure, and one definitely worth reading more about. I’m partial to Frank Barlow’s Thomas Becket, but there are new books on Becket produced every year or two. If you want to delve into the primary sources on Becket, The lives of Thomas Becket (Manchester Medieval Sources MUP)offers a good collection of the materials.

T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral is a very different look at Becket’s death.

The Lion in Winter: The Reason I Became a Medievalist

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Anthony Harvey, France, Henry II, Homosexuality, Interesting Women, Katherine Hepburn, King John, Medieval Europe, Movies I Love, Peter O'Toole, Richard the Lion-Hearted, The Lion in Winter

When I was 12, my mother and I developed a sort of ritual on Thursday nights. We would lie on my bed and watch PBS, which was mostly running British comedies like To the Manor Born. But one week, I think after the shows that we were watching, they ran The Lion in Winter (1968, dir. Anthony Harvey). My mom remembered having seen it, and so we watched it. I fell in love with it before it was done, and in some ways it is the thing that sparked my life-long fascination with the Middle Ages. It planted a seed that grew when I was in college and began studying history. It’s my all-time favorite movie, for reasons that are too numerous to count.

If you haven’t seen it, you should. It’s wonderful. The cast is great. Katherine Hepburn won an Oscar for her performance as the faded beauty Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, while Peter O’Toole chews the scenery something fierce as the aging King Henry II of England. (Four years previously, O’Toole had played a much younger Henry II in Becket.) A young Anthony Hopkins plays his son Richard the Lion-hearted, while an equally-young Timothy Dalton makes his film debut as King Philip II of France. It’s based on a Broadway play of the same name by James Goldman, who adapted it for the screen.

Eleanor and Henry’s tombs. She was smart to bring a good book.

What It’s About

While the performances are solid, the real strength of the movie is in the script. The plot is complex, but it develops entirely out of the actual political situation in 1183. Henry II is king of England, but he’s also the ruler of territories technically within the kingdom of France. He inherited the Duchy of Normandy (as well as England) from his mother and the Counties of Anjou, and Maine from his father. His wife Eleanor is by her own right the Duchess of Aquitaine, a territory that compromised close to a quarter of all of France. As a result, they control close to half of all of France, a much larger chunk of territory than the king of France controls. Their oldest son, the ‘Young King’ Henry, has just died, and the couple have gathered for Christmas at the French castle of Chinon along with their three surviving sons, in part to decide how the Young King’s death will affect the inheritance rights of their other sons.

In the 12^th century, the system of primogeniture (the oldest son inherits almost everything) has not fully taken hold yet. With the oldest son being dead, the possibility is open that any of the sons might receive the lion’s share (if you will) of Henry’s vast domain. Eleanor favors the rights of Richard, her second son and undeniably the best soldier of the three, while Henry favors his youngest son, John (Nigel Terry) but worries that John cannot keep Richard from usurping the kingdom after their father has died. The middle son, Geoffrey (John Castle), resents his parents for ignoring him and schemes to manipulate everyone around him. And into the middle of this family quarrel comes the young French king, Philip, who is determined to take advantage of this political rift to break up Henry’s holdings. Philip’s half-sister Alais (Jane Merrow) is engaged to be married to Richard, and has in fact been raised by Eleanor almost as a daughter, but Henry has taken Alais as his mistress, because he and Eleanor do not get along. And to complicate things further, Eleanor is the ex-wife of Philip and Alais’ late father King Louis VII of France.

The movie follows the shifting plots and alliances that emerge between the characters, as Henry and Eleanor try trick after trick to get the upper hand over each other. They manipulate their rebellious children and their children manipulate them right back. Philip drops a bombshell to Henry that he and Richard were once lovers. Geoffrey betrays both brothers and both parents as the opportunity arises, and Eleanor and Alais struggle to maintain their love for each other in the face of their rivalry over Henry. And through all this, the movie is still a love story about Henry and Eleanor.

The Facts

What is so remarkable about all this tangled mess is that it is basically true to the facts. In 1183, the political situation between France and England and within Henry’s domain really was this complex. What Goldman did was to take the complex political situation and then interpret the people involved as a 20^th century dysfunctional family, in the vein of Eugene O’Neill or Arthur Miller. By projecting modern notions of family tensions back on Henry and Eleanor’s brood, he was able to explore how these real people might have felt about their actual family relationships if they had been more like 20^th century men and women emotionally. So the movie has to be watched with an awareness that much of construction of the characters is hypothetical. We don’t know how Henry and Eleanor felt about each other personally; all we know is that very soon after Eleanor was divorced by the king of France, she very quickly married the man who was to become her ex-husband’s main rival; later on, she rebelled against him, and he had her kept under house arrest for several years while he took concubines. We don’t know what the relationship between Eleanor and Alais was like, but we can imagine that Eleanor’s feelings toward the girl she raised would have become very complex once that girl had displaced her in Henry’s affections (which is not a provable fact, but only a rumor from the period). So while the personal relationships are largely fictitious, they certainly feel plausible and they fit with many of the known facts, and the well-written characters are brilliantly realized by the impressive cast.

What makes the movie even stronger is that Goldman understood a good deal about how politics worked in this period. Whereas current films about the Middle Ages often anachronistically depict politics as being about abstract ideologies such as ‘freedom” and show kings having to justify their rule to their subjects like modern politicians, The Lion in Winter places the medieval politics right where it belongs, at the intersection of land-ownership, marriage, and noble titles. Henry has inherited much of his position and short of open warfare, there is little those around him to do to stop him. Henry’s marriage to Eleanor has created a political situation in which he rules much more of France than Philip does, but Philip is still the king of Henry’s French territories, which gives him an advantage that Henry can’t completely counter. And while Henry technically rules the Aquitaine, he doesn’t actually own it; it belongs to Eleanor but is currently held by Richard. The nobles in that region are more likely to support Eleanor and Richard than Henry, just as Henry is unlikely to support his lord Philip. Henry could try to remove Richard from his position, but that would create an opportunity for Richard and Eleanor to ally themselves with Philip who would support their claim over Henry’s.

Alais’ dowry is a strategically important chunk of land that puts Henry’s troops a day’s march from Paris, so he doesn’t want to give it up, and he doesn’t want to give up Alais for more personal reasons. But Alais is betrothed to Richard, and Philip is pressuring Henry to either go ahead with the marriage or return both Alais and her dowry (which would put Philip’s troops about a day’s march from Rouen, Henry’s continental capital). What the characters are arguing over is who is going to marry Alais, who is going to inherit key pieces of land and Henry’s titles, and how these developments will affect them militarily. What they actually fighting about is whether they love each other. In doing all of this, the characters are being far more true to actual medieval politics than Mel Gibson or Orlando Bloom ever managed in their ventures into the Middle Ages, and at the same time the characters are still deeply modern.

The script even manages to include the role of medieval religion. Eleanor has been on crusade with Louis. Henry contemplates asking the pope to annul his marriage to Eleanor (which would bastardize all his children and allow him to start over with Alais), and his marriage to Eleanor was based on the annulment of her marriage to Louis. The characters generally treat religion very cynically, but even that has at least some basis in medieval realities.

The film does take a few liberties with the facts. It is set at Christmas 1183, by which time Henry had already met with his surviving sons and settled, at least for the time being, the question of their inheritances, and Henry met with Philip on St. Nicholas’ Day, Dec 6^th, to sign a new treaty dealing with Alais’ marriage and wedding. So none of the main events of the film actually happened. The film takes as a fact Henry’s relationship with Alais, which was only a rumor that circulated to explain Henry’s reluctance to marry off Alais; his desire to keep her dowry is more probably the reason for his hesitance. In one scene, the film depicts Hugh de Puiset, the Bishop of Durham, as a doddering old man when in fact he was a sharp politician and regional power in his own right. But when set against a script that feels true to the period if not to all the facts, it’s easy to overlook the film’s inventions. If film-makers have to ignore certain historical facts to tell their story, I’d much rather they did it this way than the way 300 does it.

The castle of Chinon

If the movie has a weakness, it’s Prince John. In the film he’s portrayed as generally being a miserable human being. He’s selfish, petulant, greedy, cowardly, and incompetent, even though the film acknowledges that he’s quite well-educated and intelligent, and it’s not particularly clear why Henry loves this little turd so much. Goldman’s depiction of the future King John has much in common with traditional views of him. But in recent decades, historians have reappraised John and generally acknowledge that he was intelligent, a good administrator (far better than Richard was) and even quite skilled militarily. His servants were deeply loyal to him, and he possessed much of his father’s restless energy. His great problem was that he was not good at building relationships with his nobility, and that caused him a great deal of difficulty toward the end of his reign. Personally, I like the historical John a good deal more than Richard, but it’s hard to find anything likeable about Nigel Terry’s John. (Terry later went on to play a far more likable English king, King Arthur, in John Boorman’s Excalibur.)

The Lion in Winter is, for my money, the best movie ever made about the Middle Ages, not because it gets all the facts right, which it sometimes doesn’t, but because it gets enough of them right, and gets the important bits right. If Goldman’s treatment of Richard is little too philosophical for my sense of Richard and John is unlikable, O’Toole certainly captures Henry’s boundless energy and fiery temper, and Hepburn’s Eleanor is such a believable character that I suspect most medievalists secretly imagine that the real Eleanor looked and acted a lot like Katherine Hepburn. And I’m probably not the only medieval scholar this movie helped produce.

 

Want to Know More?

The Lion in Winter (1968) is available through Amazon. There’s also an, in my opinion, inferior 2004 remake starring Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close, The Lion in Winter. The performances are all good, but they simply can’t compete with the originals.

If you’re looking to learn more about the principle characters in the film, you have a lot of choices so I’ll stick to just one for each character. W.L. Warren’s Henry II (English Monarchs)is an excellent study of the king and his administration, although it’s quite long and not for the casual reader.

There are a lot of not-very-good popular biographies of Eleanor of Aquitaine, such as Alison Weir’s book. These biographies tend to romanticize Eleanor and make a lot of assumptions about what we can actually know about this intriguing woman. Skip that and get Ralph V. Turner’s Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France, Queen of Englandinstead. If you insist on something more popular, Amy Kelly’s Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings (Harvard Paperbacks) is your best option; it does an excellent job of putting Eleanor in her 12th century context. (Ok, I lied. I just had to give you two books on Eleanor, whom I’m secretly in love with.)

John Gillingham’s study of Richard Iis less a conventional biography than an examination of Richard’s reputation and the many myths that have sprung up around him.

W.L. Warren’s King John (English Monarchs)is getting a little old now, but I still like it for its even-handed treatment of this much-maligned ruler.

There aren’t a lot of works in English on Philip II of France (also called Philip Augustus), which is unfortunate, because he’s one of the most important French monarchs. Jim Bradbury’s Philip Augustus: King of France 1180-1223 (The Medieval World) is probably your best option if you want a biography.