Richard I.(Review)

Richard I. By John Gillingham. (Yale English Monarchs.) Pp. xi + 378 incl. 5 maps + 18 ills. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1999. [pound]20. 0 300 07912 5

Richard I completes the process of rehabilitation that the reputation of its subject has been undergoing for nearly thirty years in the loving and meticulous care of its author. For a king so acutely aware during his life of the need to manage his image, Richard would, I am sure, by now have rewarded his modern biographer with an heiress at least on a par with Isabel de Clare, William the Marshal's meal-ticket-cum-pension-fund. Not that Richard would have solicited such mollycoddling for the sake of his …