It was scarcely conceivable that Louis would make any attempt upon England before he had secured Poitou; we should therefore naturally have supposed that the ships thus collected were required for the transport of troops to assist Savaric de Mauléon in the defence of that country. The only troops actually sent, however, consisted of about a hundred knights and an unspecified number of men-at-arms[1000] commanded by Richard de Gray and Geoffrey de Neville,[1001] and destined to reinforce the garrison of La Rochelle.[1002] This force appears to have sailed at the end of May or in the first days of June.[1003] It was despatched “by the advice of the magnates of England”[1004]--that is, of the council which had been assembled in London for the reconciliation of Hubert and his opponents. That council then dispersed under orders to meet again at Northampton,[1005] on the octave of Trinity Sunday,[1006] 16th June, “for the purpose”--so Henry himself wrote to the Pope--“of giving us (the King) counsel and rendering us aid for the defence of our land in Poitou.”[1007] The nature of the proposed “aid” cannot be determined with certainty from the King’s words; they might stand either for personal assistance in the field, or monetary aid instead of service, or for both. The question about the obligation of military service beyond sea was still unsettled; and from the expressions used by some writers of the time we should gather that the ostensible purpose for which the barons were summoned to Northampton was merely to concert measures for the preservation of the King’s transmarine dominions.[1008] It is however scarcely credible that if the King and his ministers really desired to consult further with the barons about this most urgent business, the council actually assembled in London should not have been detained there for that purpose, instead of being dismissed for seven weeks and then reassembled elsewhere in the middle of June to discuss a matter which ought in fact to have passed from the stage of consultation to that of action by the middle of May. According to Falkes, on the other hand, the summons was for a muster of the host in arms.[1009] A statement made some years later by Hubert seems to confirm this version of the story,[1010] and we shall see from the sequel that the majority, if not all, of the barons went to Northampton attended by their followers in arms. There is, however, reason to believe that, if not in the mind of the young King himself, at least in that of his chief adviser, Poitou was not the real or at any rate the first destination of the host.