The count of Nevers was immediately sent off again to escort the Scot king safely homeward as far as Cambridge.[1279] Thence Alexander made his way towards Lincoln, which Gilbert de Gant, with a few followers, had continued to occupy after the other barons had abandoned the siege of the castle.[1280] John meanwhile had gone from Stamford to Rockingham; thence, on September 21,[1281] he set out to begin the work for which he had come from the west. The story of that day and the next, as told by Matthew Paris--how the king went first to Oundle and thence to the other manors of the abbey of Peterborough, burning the houses and barns; how he passed on to Crowland and bade Savaric de Mauléon fire the abbey church and the village while he himself stood at a distance to watch the blaze; how Savaric yielded to the monks’ prayer for mercy, and accepted from them, as the price of their escape, a sum of money which he brought back to John, and how the furious king, after overwhelming his too placable lieutenant with abuse, helped with his own hands to fire the harvest-fields, running up and down amid the smoke and the flames till the whole territory of S. Guthlac was a blackened desert[1282]--whether its details be literally exact or not, pictures vividly the mood of the tyrant. It is little wonder that when the tidings of his advance reached Lincoln {Sept. 22}, Gilbert and his men “fled before his face, dreading his presence like lightning.”[1283] They probably fled into the Isle of Axholme, for from Lincoln John went by way of Barton[1284] and Scotter to Stowe, where he stayed three days {Sept. 26–28}, and whence he appears to have sent his mercenaries across the Trent to ravage the Isle with fire and sword. He returned to Lincoln on the 28th, to find that Alexander had spent two or three days there in his absence,[1285] and had slipped past him into Yorkshire. John, however, was less eager for the capture of “the little sandy fox” than for vengeance upon the English rebels. From Lincoln northward to Grimsby, and thence south again to Spalding, the Lincolnshire fields--now, at the beginning of October, all white to harvest[1286]--were given to the flames, and the houses and farm-buildings sacked and destroyed by the terrible host with the king at its head.[1287] On October 9 he appeared before Lynn;[1288] here the townsfolk, like most of their class throughout England, were on his side, and they gave him not only a joyous welcome, but a substantial contribution in money.[1289] He committed the custody of the town and the duty of fortifying it to Savaric de Mauléon,[1290] whom on September 30 he had sent back to Crowland to “seek out and capture the knights and men-at-arms, enemies of the king, who were hiding in secret places” among the fens around the monastery. Savaric had “failed to find those whom he sought”; but he had dragged some fugitives out of sanctuary in the abbey, and brought back a valuable spoil of flocks and