Yes, that King Richard, of Merrie Olde England, Robin Hood, sturdy yeomany and all the rest of it! Richard was also known as Couer de Lion, The Lion Hearted. There is no reason to doubt his courage. He was second to none in slaughtering Saracen foot soldiers, and executing infidel captives. What Englishman, suffering under the yoke of his snaveling younger brother Prince John, didn't yearn for the rightful king's return?

Well, amost all of them probably didn't give a damn. For all the Lion Heart's glorious feats in the Holy Land, he was a plain lousy king of England. For one thing, where do you think all that tax money John collected went? It went to Richard's crusade, and then to paying Richard's ransom while in captivity. Richard was king for ten or eleven years, but is known to have set foot on the British Isles but twice, for short periods that probably didn't add up to one entire year. His main interest lay in his French estates, which earned more money than the Kingdom of England and were closer to the center of Christendom and civilization as Richard saw it. In any case, he couldn't speak or understand Enlgish. Had somebody offered him enough money for the kingdom its conceivable he might have sold it, but he would have ceased being a king if he had, and lost status, so he was stuck with the English whether he liked it or not.

It was also an open secret at the time that Richard was homosexual. While this hardly matters in this day and age, in his time it mattered! What everyone simply knew was of little importance, so long as it could be ignored. But had it become public knowledge that people talked about outside of carefully guarded circles, Richard would likely have ended up on the stake.

We needne't go into his cruelty, ambition, duplicity, and violent temper.

And people complain about Charlies?

This is the only coin struck by Richard with his own name on it. Predictably it was struck in France. His English coins continued to bear the name and likeness of his father Henry III all his life.

The name "denier" obviously derives from the Roman denarius. But while the denier of medieval times is usually abut the same size as a denarius, they are all thinner and lighter, and often as little as half silver. While etymologically related to the denarius, the coin is actually a descendent of the silver penny, introduced in England hundreds of years earlier by Anglo Saxons, Danes, and other Germanic speaking peoples. (In modern German the word is "pfennig".)