Hello and welcome to the history of England, episode 28 of Lion and Justice. I need to start

this week with an apology and a confession. First of all, sorry for the publisher and

the podcast on a Monday morning thing. I've been away for long weekends and so have been

able to click the button on a Sunday morning. I'm still a bit behind but hopefully normal

service will now be resumed. The confession is that I need to reveal that many

of my opinions about a large number of famous historical figures are based not on serious

historical research and knowledge, but from my memory of a series of nice simple children's

books published by Lady Bird back in the 70s. I'm not alone. In fact, I swear that one

of my friends at college based most of his degree essays entirely on them. They're

nice big colorful pictures that really captured the imagination. You're probably wondering

why I'm telling all of this and the reason is that there are two figures that stick in

my mind particularly strongly. One is Richard I with a picture of him and his full crusader

kit with a big pointy sword and a red cross. But the other was the star of this week's

show, Henry I, who in the Kings and Queen series was called the Lion of Justice and generally

seemed to fall into the good King category. Historians these days tend to be rather

more critical and Henry has seen in a slightly more critical way as yet another brutal Norman

and the Lion of History tag seems to have largely disappeared. But for me, Henry has always

been the Lion of Justice and a good thing, so I'll have to see how the next few weeks

affects my ingrained and blind prejudice. So last week we left Henry galloping over the

fields the Winchester, leaving his brother's body for Perkis to deal with. As I said

last week, I think it's remarkably unlikely that he had a hand in Riffus's death, but

it can't be any doubt that once he was gone, Henry was absolutely clear about his career

...