ouch, mercyless as someone who has read a lot about the crusades and has visited some of the places involved by hapenstance, it does seem to me that the practice of learning the hard won leasons of history has as pointed out, been turned into something else entirely reading the only first hand descriptions of King Richard as written by the daughter of the King of Constantinopal does give the whole mad affair a bit of perspective, we also have some other descriptions of what constituted the living conditions of Kind Richard and his knights while on crusade, and the notion of "living rough" does it no justice, but from middle easter sources we do have glowing accounts of how much they coveted the crusaders horses, and how time and time again, a night was spared any direct attack as it might injure the horse he was riding, the deduction I get from that is: horses were valued by everyone so highly at the time that all in all, it was better to be a horse. And as I somehow ended up having a destrier myself, I can empythise.