In James White's Earl Strongbow (1789), a tourist at Chepstow Castle finds a manuscript which tells of a confrontation between a prisoner of Charles II and the ghost of a former Lord of Chepstow, Earl Strongbow, intent on narrating the story of his life. Like The Castle of Otranto, Earl Strongbow seems to resort to the costume of the distant past for its absurd and amusing ‘detail’, as its title character relates a series of anecdotes which culminate in an account of him hurling his squire from the castle battlements during a fit of rage. In The Adventures of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and The Adventures of King Richard Coeur de Lion, both written in 1791, White similarly catered for a knowing and leisured audience, expressing gratitude (in the latter's preface) to the fashionable readers who were ‘gothically given’ enough to divert themselves with his chronicles, and resolving to ‘explore the remote doings of antiquity, – and evince that our forefathers were as foolish as we are ourselves’.