Like the knights of romance, he revelled in gorgeousness and splendour, and his court resounded with the minstrel's lay. One of the Provençal poets followed him into Palestine: nor did he entirely want the minds of others to soften into grace his martial spirit; for often his own fancy played with poetical images. In the history of chivalric amusements, Richard is an important character. All his predecessors in sovereignty had forbidden jousts and tournaments; and their absurd regulations had only been violated in the time of Stephen. When Richard was in the Holy Land, he observed the inferiority of the English chivalry to that of the French: his own knights were rude soldiers, with none of the dexterity and skill of their crusading brethren, which could only be acquired in tournaments, the schools of war. Richard broke through the jealousy of adopting foreign customs, and, like a politic monarch, he allowed and encouraged his soldiers to practise martial exercises.[392] These circumstances and the various other events of his chivalric life, which I have described at length in another work complete the authentic character of our lion-hearted King, for I dare not invest the severe simplicity of history with those golden fictions, which romance has delighted to throw over the story of his Eastern atchievements. [Sidenote: John and Henry III.] There was nothing chivalric in the character and conduct of his brother and successor King John, or he would not have suffered the foreign possessions of England's crown to be wrested from it. In the reign of Henry III. the flame of chivalry was kept alive by some English knights, who assisted the Emperor in his Milanese wars, and whose prowess was the most distinguished of the day. The crusades to the Holy Land were not altogether forgotten; but the page of our history is marked with the peculiar disgrace that English knights assisted the French in their inhuman war on the Albigenses. [Sidenote: Edward I.] [Sidenote: His gallantry at a tournament.]