Anecdotes

At the beginning, Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe is looking for King Richard I by singing until he finds the King. This is historically accurate, with the exception that the singer was a minstrel called Blondel. When Leopold of Austria captured King Richard I, Blondel went around to all of the castles singing King Richard's favorite song. (One story had it that King Richard actually co-wrote the song.) When he heard King Richard join in the chorus, he went home and told the Normans where King Richard was.

One of the archers shooting from the walls of Warwick Castle is Mad Jack Churchill, a World War II veteran who was an expert archer and carried a sword and longbow into battle. On one raid on a German position in 1940, he notched an arrow onto his longbow, fired at a German soldier and killed him, making him the last British soldier on record to have done so.

Although King Richard the Lionheart was a beloved King of England, he was actually French and spoke almost no English at all. Of a ten year reign as King, Richard spent only six months in England. The rest of the time was spent at war, most notably the Third Crusade.

Stuntman Paddy Ryan's fall from the battlements of a castle into the moat below became the stuff of legend amongst his peers because it was so spectacular.

Robert Taylor made two other movies with director Richard Thorpe along similar lines, Les chevaliers de la table ronde (1953) and Les aventures de Quentin Durward (1955). Taylor called these his "iron jockstrap movies".