enth-century hand, upon long sheets of parchment,
and are now luckily preserved for our inspection at the Record Office.

With every day's halt the place where victuals were bought for the King,
that is, where the King's household lay, has its name marked upon these
accounts; but unfortunately the abbreviations used in the MS., coupled
with the difficulty of distinguishing the short strokes [_e.g._ _m_ from
_ni_, _n_ from _u_, etc.] upon parchment which time has faded, and on the
top of that the indifference of the scribe to the foreign names
themselves, do not render the task particularly easy. The MS. has not, I
believe, ever been published. I have spent a good deal of time over it,
and I will give my conclusions as best I can.

The main army stayed at St Vaast, as I have said, for six days, that is,
until Tuesday, July 18th, 1346. This was presumably done to recruit the
horses and the men. Foraging parties went out in the interval, but the
bulk of the force did not move.

On that Tuesday it struck inland for Valognes, a march of 10-1/2 miles. No
proper coast-road existed even as late as the eighteenth century, let
alone in the Middle Ages, and an army making for Paris or for the crossing
of the Seine could not choose but to go thus slightly out of its way.

From Valognes there is a two days' march to Carentan, which town was the
lowest crossing-place of the River Douves. We may naturally expect the
halt between the two to have been about midway, and this would give us a
town called Ste Mere l'Eglise, but the Clerk of the Kitchen puts down St
Come du Mont. We conclude, therefore, that the King's staff did not follow
the great road which had existed from Roman times, but went by bypaths to
the east of it where St Come du Mont lies. It was a long day's march of
over fourteen miles, but the next day's march, that of Thursday the 20th,
to Carentan was a short one of not more than eight or nine (allowing in
both cases for the windings of the side-road). On Friday the 21st the King
lay at Pont Hebert. This is another example of something very like a long
march followed by a short one upon the morrow. St Lo was the halting-place
of the Saturday, and Pont Hebert is but four miles from St Lo. Of a total,
therefore, of nearly seventeen miles, over thirteen are covered upon one
day, and but four upon the next.

At this point it is worth noticing the character of all the advance with
which we are dealing. Edward had been blame