His force was an extremely small and a very mobile one; 3500 men-at-arms--that is, fully armoured gentlemen--were the nucleus of it; 2500 archers accompanied them, and it is remarkable that these archers he _mounted_. Besides these 6000 riding men, he took with him 1000 lightly armed foot-soldiers, and thus, with a little band of no more than 7000 combatants all told, he began the adventure. He had no intention of risking action. It was his desire to take booty, to harry, to compel the French king to come south in his pursuit, and when that enemy should be close upon him, at whatever stage this might be in his own northern progress, to turn and ride back south as rapidly as he had ridden north. Thus he would draw the French feudal levies after him, and render what he had been told was the forthcoming English expedition to Normandy an easy matter, free from opposition. As things turned out, he was able to ride north as far as the Loire before his enemy was upon him, and it gives one an idea of the scale on which this great raid was planned, that from the point on the Dordogne whence he started, to the point on the Loire where he turned southward, was in a straight line no less than a hundred and fifty miles. As a fact, his raid northward came to much more, for he went round to the east in a great bend before he came to the neighbourhood of the French forces, and his total advance covered more than two hundred miles of road. Of the 7000 who marched with him, perhaps the greater part, and certainly half, were Gascon gentlemen from the south who were in sympathy with the English occupation of Aquitaine, or, having no sentiment one way or the other, joined in the expedition for the sake of wealth and of adventure. Of these were much the most of the men-at-arms. But the archers were for the most part English. Raid though it was, the Black Prince's advance was not hurried. He proposed no more than to summon southward the French king by his efforts, and it was a matter of some indifference to him how far northward he might have proceeded before he would be compelled by the neighbourhood of the enemy's forces to return. His high proportion of mounted men and the lightness of his few foot-soldiers were for local mobility rather than for perpetual speed; nor did the Black Prince intend to make a race of it until the pursuit should begin. Whenever that might be, he felt secure (though in the event his judgment proved to be wrong) in his power to outmarch any body the King of France might bring against him. He must further have thought that his chance of a rapid and successful retreat, and his power to outmarch any possible pursuers, would increase in proportion to the size of the force that might be sent after him.