Like you, I love reading about English history — although my obsession is the Tudor dynasty.

Actually, Richard I did make it home to England after the Third Crusade and did die during a siege in France from a peasant’s crossbow bolt. His death came later, though, not during the Crusade. He was trying to secure lands in French territories for his Angevin Empire and happened to be a genius at cracking castles. They were like rubix cubes to him.

This particular castle was in Limousine, and purported to have some kind of treasure hidden there (it had none, in fact). The garrison had only about 15 soldiers and were REALLY poorly armed. At one point they even offered to give up if the English would spare their lives, but Richard said no because he wanted to take the castle and hang them all. He rode up to take a closer look in his careless cavalier way. A man who was using a frying pan as a shield got in an easy shot with his crossbow and hit the king in his left shoulder near the neck. Richard was furious and ordered the attack anyway, the garrison fell, and all were hanged except the crossbowman with the frying pan shield. He was hunted down and killed later, even though Richard pardoned him as he died slowly over a few days with gangrene.

The rest of the movie was about as accurate as Hollywood is ever going to get, since there was no Sir Geoffrey the French Spy and nobody ever landed a French army on English soil during the reign of King John. And the Charter of Liberties was in the day of his grandfather Henry I; why they didn’t just call it the Magna Carta that John actually did sign in 1215 is a mystery to me. And anyway, both documents were less like the bill of rights that they made it out to be and more like a business contract between some barons and the king, which came about fifteen years after the Lionheart’s death because John was an idiot about trying to win back lands in France. They did a great job with showing what an arrogant idiot John was, but frankly that wasn’t so tricky.

For what it’s worth, I am an archer and a young amateur historian and I loved the movie. I just had to speak up about Richard’s death, because I thought it was cool that they tried to include some of situation, if not all the particulars.