ford near Dangu, surprised and captured two neighbouring castles with their garrisons and contents, and [Sidenote: _Sept. 28_] returned at night by the same way. Next day he learned that Philip, having heard of this inroad, was setting out from Mantes with some five or six hundred men. Richard at once went forth with a few attendants, but left the main body of his troops on the river-bank, thinking the French would cross the ford and encounter them on the other side. Philip, however, turned towards Gisors. Before he could reach it he was almost surrounded by the troops of Richard and Mercadier. They chased him so hotly and pressed him so closely that the bridge at Gisors broke down under the weight of horses and men crowding upon it. The French king himself was reported to have “swallowed some water,” as his rival jestingly expressed it; he escaped, however, unharmed, but twenty of his knights were drowned; three were prostrated by Richard’s own lance, a hundred captured by his men, and a hundred others fell into the hands of Mercadier and his Brabantines; there were countless prisoners of lower rank, and the captured destriers numbered two hundred, “of which one hundred were covered with iron.”[1251] This affair was one of Richard’s most daring personal adventures; he himself acknowledged that he had “staked his own head and his kingdom to boot, overriding the advice of all his counsellors”—“but,” he added, “it was not we who thus defeated the king of France, but God and our right did so by our means.”[1252] These words and the action on which they are a comment are alike characteristic of the Lion-heart. Amid all the overwhelming political, diplomatic, and financial cares of his latter years, he was still knight-errant enough to glory in a wholly [Sidenote: =1197-8=] unnecessary adventure which might have cost him his life, and which had, after all, failed of its practical object, the capture of Philip. It may, however, have been partly prompted by another motive than the spirit of mere knightly daring. Richard was literally at his wits’ end for money; and without money the league which he had been forming against Philip was certain to break up ere long. His alliances with Flanders and the other feudataries of the Empire and with some of the French king’s own subjects rested on a basis of subsidies, revenues, or substantial rewards of some kind, promised to the nobles in consideration of their pledge to assist him against Philip. To none of them had he as yet been able to fulfil his plighted word in this respect. Château-Gaillard was well worth the cost of its building, but the cost was great. “You know there is not a penny at Chinon” (where the Angevin treasure was kept), he wrote in a _sirventes_ addressed to the brother-counts of Auvergne some time in the years 1197-9.[1253] His means were, in fact, insufficient for the payment of even the troops absolutely necessary to guard the Norman frontier.