The fleet which awaited the army at Plymouth consisted of three hundred vessels. The expedition was detained for a long time in the port, waiting for a fair wind and good weather. At length the favorable time arrived. The army embarked, and the ships set sail in sight of a vast assemblage, formed by people of the surrounding country, who crowded the shores to witness the spectacle.
The ships of those days.
The ships of those times were not large, and, judging from some of the pictures that have come down to us, they were of very odd construction. On the adjoining page is a copy of one of these pictures, from an ancient manuscript of about this time.
These pictures, however, are evidently intended rather as symbols of ships, as it were, than literally correct representations of them. Still, we can deduce from them some general idea of the form and structure actually employed in the naval architecture of those times.
ANCIENT REPRESENTATION OF ENGLISH SHIPS.
The prince ravages the country.
Prince Edward's fleet had a prosperous voyage, and his army landed safely in Gascony. Soon after landing he commenced his march through the country to the eastward, pillaging, burning, and destroying wherever he went. The inhabitants of the country, whom the progress of his march thus overwhelmed with ruin, had nothing whatever to do with the quarrel between his father and the King of France. It made very little difference to them under whose reign they lived. It is not at all unlikely that far the greater portion of them had never even heard of the quarrel. They were quietly engaged in their various industrial pursuits, dreaming probably of no danger, until the advance of this army, coming upon them mysteriously, no one knew whither, like a plague, or a tornado, or a great conflagration, drove them from their homes, and sent them flying about the country in all directions in terror and despair. The prince enjoyed the credit and the fame of being a generous and magnanimous prince. But his generosity and magnanimity were only shown toward knights, and nobles, and princes like himself, for it was only when such as these were the objects of these virtues that he could gain credit and fame by the display of them.
In this march of devastation and destruction the prince overran all the southern part of France. One of his attendants in this campaign, a knight who served in the prince's household, in a letter which he wrote back to England from Bordeaux, gave the following summary of the results of the expedition: