to “assault the city all round by land and by sea.”[528] He himself began by driving out the assailants from the camp. With scarce twenty men at his back, he made for the quarters of Hugh the Brown; the Lombards turned and fled from him “like sheep from a wolf,” says one who saw the scene, and he drove them “as oxen are driven under the yoke” all the way to “the postern gate which is towards Palermo,” the west gate of the city.[529] Meanwhile the whole English host was in motion. The fleet could do nothing, because Philip, who had returned to the palace under a promise from the governor that he should not be molested, intercepted the galleys as they approached and forbade them to proceed.[530] The land attack met with a fierce resistance; part of the host endeavoured to storm the walls and the gates; Richard himself led a small party up a hill “so high and steep that no one would have thought they could by any means climb it,” drove down in headlong flight the Sicilians who occupied its summit,[531] and rejoined his main force in time to be one of the first to enter the city. “A good ten thousand went in after him,” says one of the number.[532] The suddenness and rapidity with which the city was captured, and the contemporary French form of its name, “Messines,” or in the Norman dialect “Meschines,” appear to have suggested to some Norman or Angevin rimester in the host a jingle which from the camp has found its way into history: “Our king and his men have taken Messines More quickly than priest can say his matines.”[533]