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thinks?’
    The prince’s horse pounded across a waterlogged meadow towards a stand of willows where a mass of mailed men looked dark in the day’s gloom. The river was just beyond them, its wide surface made turbulent by the incessant rain. To the prince’s left, closest to the feeble defences of the
bourg
, but separated from them by a wide stretch of half-flooded marsh, were archers. They were wading north towards the town, but the prince noted none of them was drawing bows and loosing arrows. ‘Sir Bartholomew!’ he called as he ducked under a willow branch.
    ‘Bloody strings are wet,’ Sir Bartholomew Burghersh said without looking at him. He was a stocky, dark-faced man a little older than the prince, and a man noted for his violent hatred of all things French, except possibly for their wine, gold, and women. ‘Bloody strings are sopping wet. Might as well spit at the bastards rather than loose arrows. Let’s go!’
    The mass of mailed men-at-arms trudged north behind the archers, who, because their bowstrings were soaked, could not shoot at anything near to their usual range. ‘Why are the bowmen out there?’ the prince called.
    ‘A fellow slipped into our lines and said the bastards had pulled back into the Cité,’ Burghersh said. His men-at-arms, all on foot and carrying shields, swords and axes, were struggling through the soggy ground and into the face of the rain-drenched gale. The wind was so strong that it was making waves on the flood water; there were even whitecaps. The prince spurred behind the men-at-arms, staring into the tempest and wondering if it could be true that the enemy had abandoned the
bourg
. He hoped so. His army was bivouacked on what higher ground they could find. A few lucky men had cottages or hovels for shelter, a handful possessed tents, but most had to put together a shelter from branches, leaves, and turf. The
bourg
could shelter all his men till this wretched weather relented.
    Sir Bartholomew, mounted on a fine destrier, rode alongside the prince. ‘Some of the bows will shoot, sire,’ he said, somewhat nervously.
    ‘Are you sure of your fellow? The one who said the bastards had fled?’
    ‘He seemed very certain, sire. He claimed the Count of Poitou ordered every defender into the Cité.’
    ‘So the puppy Charles is here, is he?’ the prince said. Charles was the eighteen-year-old dauphin, heir to King Jean of France. ‘The boy made a quick march from Bourges, didn’t he? And he’s just going to let us take the town?’ The prince peered through the rain. ‘His banners are still on the wall,’ he added dubiously. The feeble defences of the
bourg
were hung with banners, though it was hard to distinguish what they displayed because the rain had smeared the dyes in the cloth, but there were saints and fleurs-de-lys, and the presence of the flags suggested the defenders were still behind their palisade.
    ‘They want us to think they’re still in the
bourg
, sire,’ Burghersh said.
    ‘And I want this town,’ the prince said.
    He had led six thousand men out of Gascony, and they had burned towns, captured castles, razed farms, and slaughtered livestock. They had captured noble prisoners whose ransoms would defray half the cost of the war, indeed they had taken so much plunder that the men could not carry all they had stolen. From the treasury at Saint-Benoît-du-Sault alone they had taken no less than fourteen thousand golden écus, each worth three English silver shillings. Over two thousand pounds in good French gold! They had met almost no resistance. The great castle at Romorantin had held out for a couple of days, but when the fire arrows of the prince’s archers had succeeded in setting fire to the roof of the great keep, the garrison had stumbled out, escaping the falling rafters that were collapsing in spectacular gouts of flame. A priest in the prince’s household reckoned the army had covered two hundred and fifty miles so far, and it had been two hundred and fifty miles of plunder and destruction and pillage and killing, two hundred and fifty miles of impoverishing the French and showing that England could march with impunity throughout the enemy’s land.
    Yet the prince knew his army was small. He had led six thousand men for two hundred and fifty miles, and now he was in the very centre of France, and France could assemble thousands of men to oppose him. Rumour said the King of France was gathering an army, but where, and how large,