the Arthurian romances continued to exert a firm grip on the medieval upper-class imagination. When Richard the Lionheart left England in the 1190s for his crusade to the Holy Land, he carried with him a sword that he identified as Arthur’s Excalibur. In the 1230s, Henry III of England’s younger brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, took over Tintagel Island, a peninsula on the north Cornish coast, and built a castle that he actively promoted as marking the spot where King Arthur had been conceived.
