But even Mudie sees some use in the Hard, though a questionable one, as he adds, “But as such scenes are inseparable from places where sailors resort in great numbers, it is probably better to have it thus concentrated than if it were dispersed all over the town.” It was not, however, until the reign of King John that the town appears to have attained any great prominence as a shipbuilding port; but during the reign of that monarch, and ever afterwards, there are frequent mentions of it, as such, in the Records. About the same time as the commencement of shipbuilding at Portsmouth we find an account of the assembly by Henry III in 1229 of a great army for his French war in Poitou, undertaken in order that he might recover the possessions which John had lost. The naval preparations for the campaign, however, seem to have been inadequate, as we find the “assemblage of men so great that they were with but difficulty numbered,” but they had to be disbanded for lack of both stores and transport across seas. Here, too (or, to be exact, upon what is known as Southsea Common, nowadays the resort of ogling nursemaids and children when not used for drill), Edward III in the summer of 1346 gathered together the army of knights and fighting men, and good bowmen, upwards of 30,000 strong, which shortly afterwards won for him the stricken field of Crecy against the French army of four times the number. Amongst the 30,000 French who lost their lives was the King of Bohemia, whose crest and motto--three ostrich plumes and _Ich Dien_--the Prince of Wales afterwards adopted. At Portsmouth, too, in somewhat later times were assembled the armies of John of Gaunt and of Edward IV, both bound for the interminable French wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Afterwards Henry VIII in 1545 used the ground as the site of the huge depôt needed for the victualling and fitting out of the hundred high-sterned, cumbersome ships with which he intended to sail and attack the French coast. The French, however, were already at sea, burning for revenge on account of the English having taken and destroyed part of Boulogne, and suddenly, in the July of 1545, with a boldness which it is not easy for us to understand, the French sailed across Channel with a fleet of considerable strength and lay to just off Brading for lack of wind. King Henry VIII, who was at Portsmouth at the time, and had dined aboard the _Mary Rose_ ere she set out with the rest of the fleet to meet the enemy, was on Southsea Common an interested, if not alarmed, spectator of the Frenchmen’s audacity.