Martial daring, thus fostered and promoted, broke out with fresh vigour in the reign of Richard Coeur de Lion; and England, which hitherto had but partially and occasionally engaged in the crusades, now took up those sacred and perilous enterprises with the ardour of the French. Richard was the first king of England of knightly character; for I cannot, with some writers, place William Rufus among our chivalric sovereigns. I cannot with them see any thing magnanimous in his receiving under his banners an enemy's soldier who had unhorsed him, and who had foreborne to slay him because he declared himself king of England. The conduct of the soldier merited reward; and William acted only with common selfishness in taking so good a soldier into his service. Rufus had mere brutal courage, but that quality was not the character of chivalry. His bravery was not directed either by religion or the love of fame, nor was it tempered into virtue by the charities of life. When with Robert he besieged his brother Henry in his castle, Rufus was guilty of one of the most unchivalric acts on record. Henry's supply of water was exhausted, and he solicited some from his brothers on the true knightly principle that valour should decide a triumph, and that it was unworthy of a soldier's pride to gain a victory merely by the circumstance of his antagonists being in want of the common necessaries of life. Robert, with fine chivalric generosity, supplied his brother, much to the regret of William, who ridiculed and was angry at his simplicity.[388] [Sidenote: His knightly bearing.] But in Richard the whole knightly character appeared in all its martial dignity and splendor. His courage was not the mere savage confidence in superior strength, but the fine display of chivalric exercises. Such was the might of his arm, and such the fierceness of his spirit, that he could sweep from the field whole squadrons of knights. When we see his javelin transfixing a Turk on the walls of Acre[389], the exploits of Grecian heroes appear to be no longer poetical fictions; and when he appears on the plains of Palestine, grasping his lance and riding from wing to wing of the Saracenian host without meeting an enemy who dared to encounter his career, the stories of Arthur and the Round Table seem the calm relations of truth. No one was more attentive than Richard to the regulations of chivalry. In the course of his crusade he was assailed by some rustics, against whom it was unlawful for a knight to use his sword. He beat them with the flat part of it till it broke, and he then took up stones, and drove them away.[390] Richard's mind was framed in the finest spirit of chivalric liberality. His largesses, both to his own soldiers and those of his ally, Philip Augustus, while in Sicily during their voyage to Palestine, were so magnificent, that it was acknowledged he had given more treasure in a month than his predecessors in a year.[391]