The new king had now to make provision for his Crusade, and for the carrying on of the government of England after his departure. There was no reason to anticipate any difficulty in the latter half of his task; but the other half of it presented a very serious cause for anxiety—the want of money. The Angevin treasury was empty;[396] the ducal revenues of Normandy and Aquitaine were not large enough, at the best of times, to furnish more than a very insignificant surplus for purposes external to the two duchies. Richard’s first act on reaching Winchester had been to cause an exact account to be taken of the contents of the royal treasury.[397] We have no trustworthy statement of the result;[398] but it evidently proved quite inadequate to supply his needs. The twenty-four thousand marks due to Philip, the cost of equipping and maintaining his own followers and of fitting out a transport fleet, were only a part of those needs; there was another part which from Richard’s point of view was incalculable and almost unlimited. A great effort for the deliverance of Holy Land had been in contemplation throughout western Europe for nearly five years; the form in which it had been originally projected was that of an expedition to be led by the Angevin king of England as head of the elder branch of the royal house of Jerusalem, and composed chiefly of his subjects, although since then circumstances had so altered and the scheme had so widened out and developed that he was now only one of several monarchs who were to lead their respective contingents as portions of one great army. From 1184 onwards crowds of Englishmen of all ranks had taken the Cross; most of them—very likely including the English-born count of Poitou—without counting the cost, in any sense of that word. Theoretically, the undertaking being not a national but a personal and voluntary one, each Crusader was responsible for his own equipment and expenses and those of his tenants or other followers. The king, however, seems to have at once recognized that if the English (or Angevin) contingent was to take such a share in the Holy War as befitted its leader’s rank among the sovereigns and his kingdom’s rank among the powers of Christendom, he must carry with him a large reserve fund for the maintenance of the whole force under his command in a state of efficiency on a service of which no one could forecast the requirements, the difficulties, or the duration. As we read the after-story, indeed, we are almost led to credit him with a presentiment that his war-chest was destined to become the war-chest of the whole crusading host. At any rate, his most pressing anxiety was to fill the chest, and—since he expected to leave Europe in the spring—to fill it as quickly as possible. He might impose a special tax, or more than one; a tallage, or “donum,” or both at once. But these would take many months to collect, and would bring in, probably, scarcely enough to be worth collecting, from his point