Meanwhile Falkes de Bréauté had taken Lynn.[242] On 23rd June the sheriffs were ordered to publish the Charter in their shires and see that it was put in execution.[243] The King and his council then withdrew to Gloucester;[244] and it was probably during their temporary absence from the neighbourhood of London that Louis sent the Viscount of Melun and Eustace de Neville on a plundering raid into East Anglia, whence they returned laden with the spoils of the famous abbey of S. Edmund.[245] This raid was evidently a desperate expedient for obtaining supplies. Cooped up in London, Louis and his men were in need of everything; and Philip Augustus shewed no inclination to send them help of any kind.[246] Months before, if we may believe the Marshal’s biographer, the French King, when he heard that John was dead, his son crowned, and the Marshal in charge of the realm, had declared that further effort was useless. “We shall take nothing in England now; that brave man’s good sense will defend the land--Louis has lost it. Mark my words! When the Marshal takes the matter in hand, we are undone.”[247] As Philip had from the outset refused to countenance his son’s enterprise openly, so now he connived at, rather than assisted, the efforts of his daughter-in-law, Blanche of Castille, to collect money and troops for Louis.[248] Blanche scoured the country in her husband’s behalf, pleading his cause so energetically that a contemporary says, “if those whom she enlisted had all gone to England in arms, they might have conquered the whole kingdom.”[249] The force which her efforts finally brought together at Calais numbered, however, only about a hundred--or at the utmost three hundred--knights.[250] Several times, while they lay encamped on the shore, some English ships sailed up to the harbour and discharged arrows at them; and once, at least, a great fight took place, in which the English were signally worsted. Another night the French actually crossed the Channel and anchored off Dover, intending to sail thence round to the mouth of the Thames; but in the morning, as they were about to set forth, a storm overtook them and drove them back panic-stricken to the coast of Flanders.[251]