ABSTRACT
Richard Lionheart's historiographical ups and downs are a useful example of how historians' judgments of leaders are periodically revised according to different age's priorities. Historians since the seventeenth century have measured Richard by yardsticks adapted to their own age's preconceptions about kingly duties. By the end of the nineteenth century, scholars, having become preoccupied with 'nation-building' and 'administrative kingship', had demoted Richard Lionheart to the category of bad rulers. The early twentieth century saw the beginnings of the welfare state, and historians no longer feared 'big government', but favoured bureaucrats as those who made government work for the public good. Study of the Angevin monarchs financial demands is rewarding for twentieth-century historians because of the elaborate set of financial records surviving from twelfth-century England. A balanced study of the Lionheart's reign must not neglect either his role as military commander or his position as prince and feudal lord imposing obligations, law and order on his assorted subjects, English and French.
