hundred and
fifty miles. As a fact, his raid northward came to much more, for he went
round to the east in a great bend before he came to the neighbourhood of
the French forces, and his total advance covered more than two hundred
miles of road.

Of the 7000 who marched with him, perhaps the greater part, and certainly
half, were Gascon gentlemen from the south who were in sympathy with the
English occupation of Aquitaine, or, having no sentiment one way or the
other, joined in the expedition for the sake of wealth and of adventure.
Of these were much the most of the men-at-arms. But the archers were for
the most part English.

Raid though it was, the Black Prince's advance was not hurried. He
proposed no more than to summon southward the French king by his efforts,
and it was a matter of some indifference to him how far northward he might
have proceeded before he would be compelled by the neighbourhood of the
enemy's forces to return. His high proportion of mounted men and the
lightness of his few foot-soldiers were for local mobility rather than for
perpetual speed; nor did the Black Prince intend to make a race of it
until the pursuit should begin. Whenever that might be, he felt secure
(though in the event his judgment proved to be wrong) in his power to
outmarch any body the King of France might bring against him. He must
further have thought that his chance of a rapid and successful retreat,
and his power to outmarch any possible pursuers, would increase in
proportion to the size of the force that might be sent after him.

The raid into the north began and was continued in a fashion not exactly
leisurely, but methodically slow. It made at first through Perigueux to
Brantome. Thence up through the country of the watershed to Bellac. It
turned off north-westward as far as Lussac, and thence broke back, but a
little north of east, to Argenton.

It will be evident from the trace of such a route that it had no definite
strategic purpose. It was a mere raid: a harrying of the land with the
object of relieving the pressure upon the north. It vaguely held, perhaps,
a further object of impressing the towns of Aquitaine with the presence of
a Plantagenet force. But this last feature we must not exaggerate. The
Black Prince did not treat the towns he visited as territory ultimately to
be governed by himself or his father. He treated them as objects for
plunder.

The pace and method with which all this early part of the