Before Christmas Richard’s growing sense of the weightiness of his enterprise showed itself in another step in his preparations. One day he called together in the chapel of the house where he was lodging all the bishops in his host, came before them as a penitent, with three scourges in his hands, fell at their feet and openly confessed to them a vice in which he had lived and which he now solemnly abjured; he received his penance at their hands, “and thenceforth returned to his iniquity no more.”[561] At Christmas he entertained Philip and the French nobles at a great feast in Mategriffon.[562] The festivities were disturbed by a quarrel between the Genoese and Pisan sailors and some of the men belonging to Richard’s galleys, and not till some lives were lost did the two kings in person succeed in quelling [Sidenote: 1191 _Feb. 2_] the strife.[563] An incident on Candlemas Day (1191) throws a curious side-light on one phase of Richard’s character of which there is little trace elsewhere, and also on his relations with the other crusading chiefs during this dreary time of waiting. He and some English and French knights, on their way back from a ride, met a countryman with a load of reeds or bulrushes and bought some for a game such as boys played, tilting with the rushes for spears. The king challenged William des Barres, with whom he had had at least two encounters in real warfare, and who (according to one account) on the second of these occasions,[564] being made prisoner, had committed a breach of the rules of chivalry which Richard was not a man to condone easily: he had regained his liberty by breaking his parole. When William’s first thrust broke the head of Richard’s bulrush, Richard was seized with one of those fits of unaccountable, irrational fury before which all persons accustomed to associate with the Angevin counts quailed as before a direct manifestation of the powers of darkness whence the house of Anjou was said to have sprung. He set his horse furiously at his opponent; the shock of the encounter failed to unseat William, but caused Richard’s own saddle to slip; he leapt from it, mounted another horse, and renewed the attack, but with no better success; nor did his angry threats disturb the coolness of the Frenchman. The Earl of Leicester, trying to intervene, was roughly bidden by his sovereign, “Leave me to deal with him alone!” and finally, after a long struggle and much bandying of words, the king burst out to William, “Get thee hence, and take heed that I see thee no more, for henceforth I will be an enemy to thee and thine for ever.” William, now thoroughly alarmed, went and besought counsel and help of his own sovereign. Philip in person interceded for his unlucky vassal; some of the highest nobles of France actually went down on their knees to Richard for the same purpose; but Richard would hear none of them; and on the third day William des Barres had to leave Messina “because the king of France