business was
conducted in the first three weeks of August may be judged by the fact
that, measured along the roads the Black Prince followed, he covered
between Bergerac and Argenton just on a hundred and eighty miles, and he
did it in just under eighteen marching days. In other words, he kept to a
fairly regular ten miles a day, and slowly rolled up an increasing loot
without fatiguing his horses or his men.

From Argenton, which he thus reached quite unweakened on the 21st of
August, he made Chateauroux (rather more than eighteen miles off, but not
nineteen by the great road) in two days, reaching it on the 23rd. Thence
he turned still more to the eastward, and passed by Issoudun towards
Bourges. This last excursion or "elbow" in the road was less strategically
motiveless than most of the march; for the Prince had had news that some
French force under the son of the French king was lying at Bourges, and to
draw off such a force southward was part of the very vague plan which he
was following. Unlike that string of open towns which the mounted band had
sacked upon their way, Bourges was impregnable to them, for it was walled
and properly defended. They turned back from it, therefore, down the River
Yevre towards the Cher Valley again, and upon the 28th of August reached
Vierzon, having marched in the five days from Chateauroux the regulation
ten miles a day; for they covered fifty miles or a little more.

This point, Vierzon, is an important one to note in the march. The town
lies just to the south of a curious district very little known to English
travellers, or, for that matter, to the French themselves. It is a
district called the "Sologne," that is, the "Solitarium" or "Desert." For
a space of something like forty miles by sixty a great isolated area of
wild, almost uncultivatable, land intervenes between the valley of the
Cher and that of the Loire. Only one road of importance traverses it, that
coming from Paris and Orleans, and making across the waste for Vierzon to
the south. No town of any size is discoverable in this desolate region of
stagnant pools, scrub, low forest, and hunters.

It was such a situation on the outer edge of the Sologne which made
Vierzon the outpost of Aquitaine, and having reached Vierzon, the Prince,
in so far as he was concerned with emphasising the Plantagenet claim over
Aquitaine, had reached his northern term. But his raid had, as we know,
another object: that of drawing the French