The English king’s subjects who had reached Messina before him on the fleet had been refused admittance into the city; they were obliged to encamp on the shore, and suffered much annoyance and persecution from a section of the townsfolk whom one of them describes as “a parcel of Griffons and low fellows of Saracen extraction.” These people not only insulted the Crusaders in the vilest ways, but even killed some of them and outraged the corpses.[515] All “Ultramontanes,” or men from beyond the Alps, were hated by the two races with which Sicily was mainly peopled—the “Griffons” or Greek-speaking folk, and the Italian-speaking whom the western writers call Lombards. In the minds of the last-named especially the memory of the Norman conquest of Sicily and Apulia still rankled; “they always had a grudge against us,” says the Norman poet-historian of Richard’s Crusade, “because their fathers had told them that our ancestors had conquered them; so they could not love us.”[516] It seems not unlikely that Tancred had gained the support of both Griffons and Lombards by posing as the champion of a sort of national government in opposition to the representatives of the foreign royal line, and that they looked with suspicion upon the crusading host as possibly designed to be the instrument of a new Norman conquest; more especially when they discovered, as they very soon did, that although it had nominally two crowned leaders, its real and sole commander-in-chief was the Anglo-Norman king. On the morrow of his arrival Richard set up outside the camp a gallows for thieves and robbers. “His judges delegate spared neither sex nor age; and there was one punishment for a stranger and for one born in the land.” The French king took no notice of any ill-doing on the part of his own men, nor of any evil done to them; but Richard cared not whose subject the criminal might be; “considering every man as his own,” he left no wrong unpunished; “wherefore the Griffons called him the Lion and Philip the Lamb.”[517]