to harbour. All this time the French might have swept the seas and
destroyed the English in detail; but they waited for more ships and more
men, and the time of opportunity went by.

At last in the beginning of June the English King had two hundred ships
assembled, from decked vessels down to open sailing-boats. An army crowded
on board of them, knights and nobles in shining armour, burghers and
peasants in steel caps and leather jerkins, armed with the long-bow or the
combined pike and long battle-axe known as the "bill." The King's ship flew
the newly adopted royal standard in which the golden lions on a red field,
the arms of England, were quartered with the golden lilies of France on a
field of blue, and another banner displaying the device that is still the
flag of the Royal Navy, the Red Cross of St. George on a field of white,
the banner adopted by Richard Coeur de Lion in his Crusade. The other ships
flew the banners of the barons and knights who commanded them, and on the
royal ship and those of the chief commanders there were trumpeters whose
martial notes were to give the signal for battle. As a knight of the Middle
Ages despised the idea of fighting on foot, and there might be a landing in
Flanders, some of the barons had provided for all eventualities by taking
with them their heavy war horses, uncomfortably stabled in the holds of the
larger ships.

The fleet sailed southward along the coast, keeping the land in sight. The
two hundred ships of varying rates of speed and handiness could not move in
the ordered lines of a modern naval armament, but streamed along in an
irregular procession, closing up when they anchored for the night. From the
North Foreland, with a favourable wind behind them, they put out into the
open sea, and steering eastward were out of sight of land for a few hours,
a more venturous voyage for these coasting craft than the crossing of the
Atlantic is for us to-day. It must have been a trying experience for knight
and yeoman, and they must have felt that a great peril was past when the
tops of church towers and windmills showed above the horizon, and then the
low shore fringed with sandhills and the green dykes came in sight.

Coasting along the shore north-eastwards, the fleet reached a point to the
north-west of Bruges, not far from where the watering-place of Blankenberg
now stands. It had been ascertained from fishermen and coast-folk that the
French fleet was still at Sluys, and i