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the early commentators – and what still impedes our appreciation of the poem – is the conviction that these ‘monstrous’ incidents, so blatantly fabulous, ‘disfigure’ or (as Finlayson puts it) ‘contaminate’ the historical record of Richard’s chivalric career. ‘True history’, Finlayson asserts, is ‘at the base of this work’; fictitious accretion has turned the ‘rigorously heroic’ into a mere romance, ‘impenetrable’ (as Barron insists) ‘to the discriminations of historians’.15 Richard’s reputation as a composite romance, mingling fact and fiction, leaves scholars