On July 11 Henry returned to Normandy with an armed force of English and Welshmen, and at once summoned the Norman host to a muster at Alençon.[292] Richard meanwhile had abandoned his attack on the lesser foe to march against the greater one, and was advancing northward with fresh forces towards Berry. Philip, probably fearing to be caught between two fires, hereupon retired into France, leaving Châteauroux in the custody of William des Barres.[293] Richard, “by way of doing something,”[294] began to devise schemes for regaining the place. One day some of its garrison who had been out on a foraging expedition found on their return the gate blocked by him and his troops. They, however, cut their way through and stirred up their comrades within the castle to make a sally in force. The Poitevins, taken by surprise, were repulsed with heavy loss; the count himself was in such danger that he fled for his life. Thrown from his horse, he was rescued by a sturdy butcher,[295] and with the remnant of his troops rejoined his father, seemingly somewhere in Touraine. The defence of Henry’s frontiers was clearly the matter most in need of attention now; father and son accordingly led their combined forces back to the Norman border. At Trou, in the south-eastern corner of Maine, they were all but overtaken by Philip “with a great host”; they escaped, however, and the loss of forty knights and the burning of Trou (which Philip fired because he could not take it[296]) were compensated by Richard’s capture of a neighbouring fortress, Les Roches, with its garrison of twenty-five knights and forty men-at-arms. This place was in the dominions of Count Burchard of Vendôme, who was an adherent of the king of France.[297] Philip dropped the pursuit, and on August 16 met Henry in conference at Gisors, but they came to no agreement.[298] Among other proposals there seems to have been one for a settlement of the disputes between the two kings by a combat of four champions on either side. Four names on the English (or Angevin) side were suggested to Henry by William the Marshal; Richard was offended because his own name was not among them. “You have done me grievous wrong; of all the men of my father’s lands I was deemed one of the best to defend him; but you give him to understand otherwise.” The Marshal protested that Richard misinterpreted his motive: “You are our lord the king’s most direct heir; it would be an outrage and crime to risk your life in such a business.” “It is true, Richard,” interposed Henry, “what he has said is but right”; and therewith it seems the whole project fell to the ground.[299] At the end of the month Richard, hearing that Philip was at Mantes, proposed to attack that place. The expedition, however, resulted merely in a skirmish between Richard himself, Earl William de Mandeville, and some of Henry’s followers on the one side and a few French knights on the other, in which William des Barres, who had