emies as amongst your friends, and
so be lost.' Late in the evening, at nightfall, King Philip left the
field with a heavy heart--and for good cause; he had just five barons
with him, and no more! He rode, quite broken-hearted, to the castle of
Broye. When he came to the gate, he found it shut and the bridge drawn
up, for it was fully night, and was very dark and thick. The king had
the castellan summoned, who came forward on the battlements and cried
aloud, 'Who's there? who knocks at such an hour?' 'Open, castellan,'
said Philip; 'it is the unhappy King of France.' The castellan went out
as soon as he recognized the voice of the King of France; and he well
knew already that they had been discomfited, from some fugitives who had
passed at the foot of the castle. He let down the bridge and opened the
gate. Then the king, with his following, went in, and remained there up
to midnight, for the king did not care to stay and shut himself up
therein. He drank a draught, and so did they who were with him; then
they mounted to horse, took guides to conduct them, and rode in such wise
that at break of day they entered the good city of Amiens. There the
king halted, took up his quarters in an abbey, and said that he would go
no farther until he knew the truth about his men, which of them were left
on the field and which had escaped."

Whilst Philip, with all speed, was on the road back to Paris with his
army as disheartened as its king, and more disorderly in retreat than it
had been in battle, Edward was hastening, with ardor and intelligence, to
reap the fruits of his victory. In the difficult war of conquest he had
undertaken, what was clearly of most importance to him was to possess on
the coast of France, as near as possible to England, a place which he
might make, in his operations by land and sea, a point of arrival and
departure, of occupancy, of provisioning, and of secure refuge. Calais
exactly fulfilled these conditions. It was a natural harbor, protected,
for many centuries past, by two huge towers, of which one, it is said,
was built by the Emperor Caligula and the other by Charlemagne; it had
been deepened and improved, at the end of the tenth century, by Baldwin
IV., Count of Flanders, and in the thirteenth by Philip of France, called
Toughskin (Hurepel), Count of Boulogne; and, in the fourteenth, it had
become an important city, surrounded by a strong wall of circumvallation,
and having erected in its