Hello and welcome to the History of England episode 45 packing up.

If you're listening to this it means that I have successfully managed to move my feed.

The website thehistoryofingland.com, thanks Chris, remains the home where you can still

go and download and all that sort of thing, but the iTunes feed comes from somewhere else.

If you're not listening to this then we're into existential territory so that's far too

difficult for me to deal with. And at the end of the show we also have an announcement,

Lord Markovan and the great British coin giveaway.

But before we get to that, this week we're going to kick off the reign of Richard the Lion

Heart and after a few digressions and paragrenations get him off to Sicily.

So here we are in 1189 and Richard, he wants to go on Crusade. I mean he really wants to go on Crusade.

This is the big one, the one that shouted its name from the hilltops. They ticked all the

Lion Heart boxes, God, gold, glory and honour. The Crusade was one of the things that Richard

had been put on the earth to do and nothing was going to get in the way of him doing it.

And happily, the Crusade brought together in happy harmony, his own desires and the responsibilities

of a Christian monarch. So pretty much everything Richard does now is to get things ready

so that he could leave. But there was one other thing that I reckon was worrying him,

which oddly enough was the death of his father. I've no idea how bothered he was that his dad

wasn't around anymore, but I rather fancy that he didn't cry out for his father in his sleep.

But I think that he suffered a certain amount of guilt from his own hand in that death,

and even more how this very same hand looked to the world outside.

Richard knew that he'd done wrong in raising his hand against his father,

so soon as he could, in 1189, he asked for absolution from the Archbishop's of Roar and

...