Early in the year King Philip had assembled a hundred and ninety ships, large and small, French and Genoese, off the little town of Sluys on the coast of Flanders. The fleet lay in the estuary of the river Eede. Like Damme, Sluys has now become an inland village. Its name means "the sluice," and, like Damme, reminds us how the people of the Netherlands have for centuries been winning their land from the sea by their great system of dams to keep the sea-water back, and sluices to carry the river-water to the sea. The estuary of the Eede where the French fleet anchored is now pasture land traversed by a canal, and the embankments that keep the sea from the meadow lands lie some miles to the westward of the place where King Edward won his great naval victory. Had the French acted at once, there was nothing to prevent them from opening the war by invading England. Perhaps they did not know how slowly the English fleet was assembling. In the late spring when the French armament was nearly complete, King Edward had only forty ships ready. They lay in the estuaries of the Orwell and the Stour, inside Harwich, long a place of importance for English naval wars in the North Sea. Gradually, week after week, other ships came in from the Thames, and the northern seaports, from Southampton and the Cinque Ports, and even from Bristol, creeping slowly along the coasts from harbour 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.