Next, a great council met at Bristol, revised Magna Charta, and made
Lord Pembroke Regent or Protector of England, as the King was too young
to reign alone. The next thing to be done, was to get rid of Prince
Louis of France, and to win over those English Barons who were still
ranged under his banner. He was strong in many parts of England, and in
London itself; and he held, among other places, a certain Castle called
the Castle of Mount Sorel, in Leicestershire. To this fortress, after
some skirmishing and truce-making, Lord Pembroke laid siege. Louis
despatched an army of six hundred knights and twenty thousand soldiers
to relieve it. Lord Pembroke, who was not strong enough for such a
force, retired with all his men. The army of the French Prince, which
had marched there with fire and plunder, marched away with fire and
plunder, and came, in a boastful swaggering manner, to Lincoln. The
town submitted; but the Castle in the town, held by a brave widow lady,
named Nichola de Camville (whose property it was), made such a sturdy
resistance, that the French Count in command of the army of the French
Prince found it necessary to besiege this Castle. While he was thus
engaged, word was brought to him that Lord Pembroke, with four hundred
knights, two hundred and fifty men with cross-bows, and a stout force
both of horse and foot, was marching towards him. ‘What care I?’ said
the French Count. ‘The Englishman is not so mad as to attack me and my
great army in a walled town!’ But the Englishman did it for all that,
and did it—not so madly but so wisely, that he decoyed the great army
into the narrow, ill-paved lanes and byways of Lincoln, where its
horse-soldiers could not ride in any strong body; and there he made
such havoc with them, that the whole force surrendered themselves
prisoners, except the Count; who said that he would never yield to any
English traitor alive, and accordingly got killed. The end of this
victory, which the English called, for a joke, the Fair of Lincoln, was
the usual one in those times—the common men were slain without any
mercy, and the knights and gentlemen paid ransom and went home.
The wife of Louis, the fair Blanche of Castile, dutifully equipped a
fleet of eighty good ships, and sent it over from France to her
husband’s aid. An English fleet of forty ships, some good and some bad,
gallantly met them near the mouth of the Thames, and took or sunk
sixty-five in one fight. This great loss put an end to the French
Prince’s hopes. A treaty was made at Lambeth, in virtue of which the
English Barons who had remained attached to his cause returned to their
allegiance, and it was engaged on both sides that the Prince and all
his troops should retire peacefully to France. It was time to go; for
war had made him so poor that he was obliged to borrow money from the
citizens of London to pay his expenses home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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