At Agincourt, in the midst of his near miraculous victory over the French, Henry V suffered what, on the face of it, should have been a great loss. A force of local nobility and peasants appeared behind the English lines and ransacked the baggage wagons. According to the Chroniques de Ruisseauville, the men of the nearby town of Hesdin, led by the knights Ysembert d’Azincourt and Robinet de Bournouville, carried away gemstones, two crowns, a fragment of the True Cross and ‘the sword of King Arthur which was worth so much money that no one knew what to do with it…’. Anne Curry has described the losses as ‘a personal incon-venience but nothing more, since it had no effect on the outcome of the battle and was compensated for by the overwhelming nature of the victory’. Surely the loss of Excalibur, Arthur's famous sword and symbol of British kingship, should have had more significance than that?

Henry was not the first monarch to have parted company with Arthur's sword, however. In 1191, on his way to join the Third Crusade, Richard Coeur de lion landed in Sicily. He met Tancred, the island's new king, and, on securing transport for his onward journey, made him a gift of ‘the finest sword of Arthur, who was once noble king of the Britons. The Britons called the sword “Caliburn”’.

Why were these monarchs so casual with their handling of such an important and iconic sword? In Richard's case the obvious answer is that it was the sword's intrinsic value that he chose to trade on. Perhaps, as Emma Mason suggested, the sword reflected Richard's chivalric prestige. One might suggest that in giving the weapon to King Tancred, Richard was making a double statement of this position. As well as his ownership of the sword – a mark of his worthiness as an inheritor of Arthur's realm and legacy, Richard's gift was a deed of great largesse, and as such enhanced his status and reinforced his position within the chivalric community.

Christopher Berard suggests that the gift was far from a simple transactional one, but reflected a more nuanced political move, heavily imbued with Arthurian symbolism.