king in person that unless he made restitution and paid compensation within three days, he must expect the ecclesiastical penalties due to sacrilege. The warning was ignored; so Walter fulfilled his threat by laying Normandy under Interdict and setting out for Rome.[1217] Thither he was followed by envoys from Richard who were charged to appeal to the Pope and endeavour to compose the dispute. Meanwhile the king pushed on his work without intermission. In a few months there arose on the Isle of Andely a tall octagonal tower encircled by a ditch and rampart, on the western side of the island a bridge giving access to the left bank of the Seine, and on the eastern side another bridge linking the tower with the “New” or “Lesser” Andely whose walls, standing four-square within the natural moat formed by the surrounding waters, were likewise accessible from the mainland only by two bridges, one at their northern corner and one on their south-eastern side. The southern corner of the new town directly faced the great “Rock of Andely”; and for that rock Richard was designing a crown such as no other western architect had ever yet dreamed of. His first act on the site, however, was of evil omen. It seems that to protect his workmen at the New Andely against attack from the French troops he had brought over a host of wild [Sidenote: 1196-7] Welshmen who harried the French border in a fashion scarcely equalled by the worst ravages of the Brabantines; at last a large body of them were intercepted by the French at the opening of the Vale of Andely, surrounded, and slaughtered, to the number, it is said, of three thousand four hundred. Richard was then at Andely, and had there eighteen French prisoners in a dungeon. In his fury he had three of them dragged to the top of the rock[1218] and flung down to be dashed to pieces at its foot; the fifteen others he caused to be blinded, and sent under the guidance of a one-eyed man to Philip, who, “lest he should be thought inferior to the English king in power or spirit, or to be afraid of him,” retaliated by causing three English prisoners to be thrown down from a rock in like manner, and blinding and sending back to Richard fifteen others, the wife of one of them acting as guide.[1219] [Sidenote: =1196-7=]