WHAT HAPPENED TO EXCALIBUR?

Also: Mary Tudor's lunch party... and Thomas Becket's real name

The second season of my podcast This Is History officially launches next week, and we’ve been having a lot of fun in the studio getting the episodes into shape.

The story carries on from where we broke off at the end of season one. As you may recall, the way we left things before Christmas, it was high summer in 1189 and Henry II was on his deathbed. In fact, no he wasn’t: he was done with his deathbed and had been carted off for burial at Fontevraud abbey.

That left Richard the Lionheart as his heir to the kingdom of England, as well as the other Plantagenet territories in France: Normandy, Anjou, Aquitaine and (sort of) Brittany.

Richard’s reign was one of the most action-packed and interesting of any medieval monarch’s. And I hope you’ll enjoy the way I’ve brought it to life in audio format, in a tale that ranges from England and France, to Sicily, Crete, Cyprus and the kingdom of Jerusalem on the Third Crusade, to prison cells in Austria and Germany, then back to England and France again.

Richard the Lionheart at sea, from a fourteenth-century manuscript illustration. (Getty Images)

The challenge with telling the story has not so much been getting it into a coherent narrative shape. (That was much more of an issue with season one.)

It’s been containing my excitement at just how wild the whole thing is.

When I started work on the scripts for the show, I thought that since I’d written about Richard the Lionheart’s reign at length before there wouldn’t be much new to learn. But in fact, another of the joys of making this season has been digging into the subplots of Richard’s story.

Here’s just one of them.

On his way out to the Third Crusade in 1190, Richard overwintered in the kingdom Sicily. This was fairly common practice - Sicily was a big place, conveniently located in the middle of the Mediterranean, and its history was so tightly woven into the crusades that one Islamic chronicler believed it was where the idea of crusading per se had been invented.

But Richard had another motive for going there, too. His youngest sister Joan had become queen of Sicily in her teens, and was recently widowed. She was getting some static from the would-be new king of Sicily, Tancred of Lecce, whose enemies nicknamed him ‘the monkey king.’

Meaning to teach Tancred a lesson, Richard allowed his crusading army to storm Messina. He then berated Tancred, and bullied him into releasing Joan and that portion of her inheritance she was owed from the late king.

So far so good. But here’s where it gets really interesting.

It was said that when Richard travelled to Sicily he brought with him a sword he claimed was Excalibur. Yes, that Excalibur. The legendary sword of the Arthurian tales, tossed out into the world by the Lady of the Lake, thence to return on Arthur’s death.

If you think about the timing, this checks out pretty well. Generally speaking, the late twelfth century was an age of Arthurmania, thanks to writers like Chrétien de Troyes and Geoffrey of Monmouth.

But the 1180s was especially Arthurmaniacal, thanks to the fire that destroyed Glastonbury abbey in 1184. The enterprising monks at Glastonbury raised public awareness and funds for their restoration programme by tying the project tightly to the legends of Arthur, even claiming that the bodies of Arthur and Guinevere had been found in the ruins of the old abbey.

So for Richard to have Excalibur in his possession was not crazy. And what he did with it on Sicily was a stroke of genius.

Once Richard had finished humiliating Tancred of Sicily, he came to diplomatic terms with him. And one of his peacemaking overtures was to give Tancred his sword i.e. Excalibur.

Which seems on the surface of things to be extraordinarily generous. After all, other swords are available… right?

But hold on.

The point of giving him Excalibur was this.

Richard and Tancred made a tentative agreement that to continue the Plantagenet-Sicilian alliance into a new generation, after the Third Crusade they would marry one of Tancred’s daughters to Richard’s only nephew, whom Richard also named as heir to his Plantagenet crown.

That nephew was the three-year old son of Richard’s late brother Geoffrey duke of Brittany. And his name was…. [drum roll]

Arthur!

So the plan seems to have been that Richard gave Tancred Excalibur, on the understanding that when Arthur hit marriageable age, Tancred would knight him with the same sword and - presumably - hand it over to him.

Thus would the Arthurian legend literally come back to life.

Neat, huh?

In the end, of course, it came to nothing, as Tancred was kicked off the throne of Sicily by Henry VI of Germany in 1194. But it must have been enormously fun while it lasted.

If you like that sort of thing, there’s plenty more in the new season of the podcast, and doubly so if you sign up to get the bonus episodes. (Click here to do that.) Let me know what you make of it all.

Meanwhile, for subscribers to this Substack, here are a few more medieval things that have caught my eye this week, including the menu for Mary Tudor’s lunch and a new theory on how Thomas Becket came to have an erroneous middle initial (à).