The flower of the French host, as John knew, had crossed the river with its king. Those who remained in the peninsula were hampered by the presence of a crowd of unwarlike serving-men, sutlers and camp-followers, many of whom, after spending the day in drunken revelry, were lying asleep in the fields outside the camp. The night was drawing to its close—for the cock had crowed thrice—when the Marshal’s troops fell upon these sleepers and slew more than two hundred of them as they lay. The soldiers within the camp quickly caught the alarm; in their terror they rushed to the pontoon in such numbers that it broke under their weight, and they sought safety in swimming across the river to join their comrades on the opposite shore. These however had now been aroused by the tumult; the bravest of the French knights, headed by William des Barres, confronted the fugitives with indignant reproaches for their cowardice, and drove them back across the stream. By the light of torches and fires, hastily kindled, the whole host was soon got under arms, the bridge repaired, and the Marshal’s troops, surprised in their turn while groping about in the darkness of the deserted camp, were routed with heavy loss. The victors, thinking the fight was over, went back to their sleeping-quarters, but had scarcely reached them when they were roused up again, to see, in the dim light of the August sunrise, the hostile fleet bearing down upon them. In a few minutes the two river-banks and the pontoon were lined with armed Frenchmen. Still the boats held on their course till the foremost of them touched the bridge; and despite a ceaseless shower of arrows from either shore, and of stones, iron missiles, and boiling oil and pitch from the engines mounted on the wooden turrets of the bridge, the crews began to hew at the cables and stakes in a desperate effort to break it down, and kept its defenders at bay till the Seine ran red with blood. At last an enormously heavy oaken beam fell directly upon the two foremost ships and sank them. The rest, stricken with sudden terror, rowed away in disorder as fast as oars could move them. Gaubert of Mantes and three other gallant French sailors sprang each into a little boat, set off in pursuit, and succeeded in capturing two of the fugitive ships, which they brought back in tow, with their stores and all of their crews who survived.[2099] The delay in the arrival of the fleet, caused by the difficulties of navigation in the Seine,[2100] had ruined John’s plan for the relief of the Isle of Andely. The fate of its garrison was soon decided; and again the hero of the day was Gaubert of Mantes. The fort was encircled by a double palisade or rampart of wood, outside the walls. Gaubert tied a rope round his waist, took in his hand two iron vessels coated with pitch and filled with burning charcoal,[2101] swam to the easternmost point of the island, which the garrison, trusting to the proximity of Château-Gaillard on this side, had ventured to leave unguarded, and threw these missiles against the palisade. The wood instantly caught fire; the wind carried the flames all round the ramparts and into the fort itself. Some of the garrison made their escape by swimming or on rafts; some were stifled in the cellars and galleries in which they sought a refuge from the fire; the rest surrendered to the French king. Philip lost no time in repairing and garrisoning the fort and rebuilding the bridge on its western side. At the sight of his success the whole population of the Lesser Andely fled in a body to Château-Gaillard; Philip entered the town in triumph, sent for new inhabitants to fill the places of the fugitives, and intrusted its defence to two companies of mercenaries, whose strength may be estimated from the statement that the leader of one of them, Cadoc by name, received from the royal treasury a thousand pounds daily for himself and his men.[2102]

Philip’s mastery of the river was still precarious and incomplete without the reduction of Château-Gaillard. For an attack upon the Saucy Castle itself, however, his courage seems as yet to have failed; and striking north-westward by the road which leads from Les Andelys into the valley of the Andelle, on the last day of August he again sat down before Radepont. In two or three weeks it surrendered.[2103] This time John made no attempt to save it, but fled away to the depths of his own old county of Mortain,[2104] leaving Rouen to its fate. Philip however dared not advance upon Rouen with Château-Gaillard still unconquered in his rear; and at the opening of the vintage-season he moved back to Les Andelys and girded himself up for his task. A brief survey of the Rock convinced him that assault was well-nigh hopeless; his best chance was in a blockade. On the north the Lesser Andely occupied by his mercenaries, on the west the river commanded by his troops in the island-fort, sufficed to imprison the garrison. The next step was to dig out a double trench two hundred feet deep, starting from the brow of the hill over against the south-eastern extremity of the castle-rock, extending northward to the margin of the lake of Andely and westward to the bank of the Seine, and completely enclosing the two ravines which furrowed the sides of the rock. Each line of entrenchment was garnished with seven bretasches or wooden forts, placed at regular intervals, each surrounded by a ditch of its own, furnished with a wooden draw-bridge, and filled with as many soldiers as it could hold. The rest of the army took up their quarters in the trenches, where they built themselves little huts of wood and thatch for a shelter against the wet and cold of the coming winter—shelter against other foes they needed none, for they were out of bowshot from the castle[2105]—and whiled away their time in jesting and making songs in mockery of the straits to which the Saucy Castle was reduced—“So many thousands girt about with a single girdle,”—“The eyrie overcrowded with nestlings, who will have to turn out when the spring comes.”[2106] The greater part of the “nestlings” were turned out before the spring came. The blockade once formed, Roger de Lacy soon perceived the terrible blunder he had made in admitting within his walls the townsfolk of the Lesser Andely. According to one computation, the number of these non-combatants now huddled within the castle-enclosure was no less than two thousand two hundred souls; at the lowest reckoning, they seem to have amounted to fourteen hundred—all, in a military point of view, simply useless mouths, devouring in a few weeks the stores of food that should have furnished rations for a year and more to the little garrison which was amply sufficient to hold the castle for John. One day, therefore, Roger opened the castle-gate and turned out five hundred of the oldest and weakest. They were suffered to pass unmolested through the blockading lines, and were followed a few days later by five hundred more. Philip however, who meanwhile had returned to his own dominions, no sooner heard what was going on than he issued strict orders that every man, woman or child, of whatever age or condition, who might issue from the castle should be driven back again without mercy. A large number still remained of whom Roger was as eager to be rid as Philip was anxious that he should be obliged to keep them. He took account of his stores, and found that he had enough to feed the regular garrison for a whole year. Hereupon he called together all the remaining non-combatants, and sent them forth, as they thought, to rejoin their families and friends. To their horror, as soon as they approached the French lines, they were overwhelmed with a volley of arrows. They rushed back to the castle-gate, only to find it closed against them. For three months this multitude of people dragged out a wretched existence in the ravines around the fortress, with no shelter against the wet and the cold but what they might find in the clefts of the rock, and no food but the dry leaves and scant herbage which they could pick up at its foot, and the flesh of the dogs which the garrison soon let loose for the purpose of yet further economizing their rations. This last resource was exhausted, and the horrors of cannibalism were already reached, when Philip came back to see how the siege was progressing. As he was crossing the bridge to the island-fort these unhappy beings caught sight of him and lifted up their voices in agonizing appeal; the king, moved with a tardy compassion, and perhaps also by fear of the not improbable outbreak of a pestilence which might easily have spread into his own entrenchments, ordered that immediate relief should be given to all who survived. These however amounted to no more than half of the original number, which seems to have been something over four hundred; and most of them had been so long without food that their first meal proved fatal.[2107]

The last act of this tragedy must have taken place soon after Christmas. For three months the whole military power of the French Crown had been concentrated on the investment of Château-Gaillard; and in all this time John had done absolutely nothing. From his expedition to the Breton border he had indeed returned to Rouen for a few days in the beginning of October. Not a hand did he lift, however, to check the progress of the blockade which was being formed almost before his eyes. Soon he was again far away in the Bessin; thence he suddenly moved across the duchy to Verneuil, and in the second week of November he was once more at Rouen.[2108] It was probably during one of these visits to the capital that he wrote to Roger de Lacy: “We thank you for your good and faithful service, and desire that, as much as in you lies, you will persevere in the fealty and homage which you owe us, that you may receive a worthy meed of praise from God and from ourselves, and from all who know your fidelity to us. If, however, which God forbid, you should find yourselves in such straits that you can hold out no longer, then do whatsoever our trusty and well-beloved Peter of Préaux, William of Mortemer and Hugh of Howels our clerk shall bid you in our name.”[2109] Whether this letter ever found its way through the blockading lines into the castle it is scarcely worth while to inquire. If it did, it failed to shake the courage or the loyalty of the garrison, although it must have proved to them what they doubtless guessed already, that their sovereign had forsaken them, and that they were serving him for nought. Of the crowning proof of his desertion they probably remained unconscious until all was over for them. After dismantling Pont-de-l’Arche, Moulineaux and Montfort,[2110] John, on November 12, again left Rouen; for three weeks he flitted aimlessly up and down the country, from Bonneville and Caen to Domfront and Vire, and back again to Barfleur and Cherbourg;[2111] on December 6 he quitted Normandy altogether;[2112] and while the burghers of the Lesser Andely were starving and freezing to death in the valleys round Château-Gaillard, and the garrison of the castle were anxiously reckoning how much longer their provisions would enable them to hold out for his sake, he was keeping his Christmas feast at Canterbury at the expense of Archbishop Hubert.[2113]

By the end of February 1204[2114] Philip grew impatient of the blockade of Château-Gaillard, and probably also uneasy lest John should return from England with an overwhelming force for its relief. He therefore resolved to try whether it could not, after all, be taken by assault. He himself took up his station at the central point of the entrenchment, on the crest of the hill, facing the narrow neck of land by which it was joined to the castle-rock. This isthmus, the only direct approach to the castle itself, he caused to be levelled and widened till he could erect upon it a wooden gallery or covered way leading from his own lines up to the edge of the outermost ditch of the fortress. When, with considerable difficulty and loss of life, this was accomplished, he caused a beffroy or wooden tower on wheels to be carried through the gallery, set up when it reached the further end, and moved along the edge of the fosse, the cross-bowmen with whom it was filled doing deadly execution upon the soldiers on the ramparts, who however made a gallant defence. Meanwhile, the French were bringing through their covered way earth, wood, stones, turf, everything they could find to fill up the ditch. Before it was half full they lost patience and adopted a quicker method of approach. They dropped down the perpendicular counterscarp by means of their scaling-ladders, and set these up again on the sloping inner side of the ditch, under the foot of the great round tower which formed the head of the first ward. The ladders were too short for the ascent; but despite a heavy fire of stones and arrows from the tower, the storming-party scrambled up, crawling on hands and knees, or using their swords and daggers by way of Alpine-staves, till the base of the wall was reached. Then, while a shower of missiles rattled down upon the shields held over them by their comrades, the sappers dug and hewed at the foundations till the tower was undermined; the fuse was inserted and fired, and the miners had just had time to withdraw when a large portion of the wall fell crashing into the ditch. The French rushed to the breach; Roger de Lacy, seeing that the first ward was lost, ordered the wooden buildings within it to be fired; he and his men withdrew across the drawbridge into the second ward, and when the fire died down, they saw the ruined fragment of the tower crowned by the banner of Cadoc.[2115]

The French were one step nearer to the goal; but the next step looked as impracticable as ever. Between them and the besieged there yawned another ditch as wide and deep, there rose another rampart as mighty and as inaccessible as the first. In vain they prowled about the edge of the fosse seeking for a point at which they could venture upon an attack, till a young squire or man-at-arms, by name Peter, but more commonly known in the camp as “Bogis” or “Snub-nose,” caught sight of a little window just above the wall at the south-eastern corner of the rampart.[2116] This window was the sole external opening in John’s new building, which was otherwise accessible only on the inner side, by two doors, one leading into the storehouse which formed the lower story, one into the chapel above it, and both opening towards the courtyard. Bogis at once communicated his discovery to a few trusty comrades; they reconnoitred the ditch till they found a somewhat shallower place on its southern side, where it was possible to scramble down; thence they crawled along the bottom till they were directly under the window, and then clambered up the sloping side to the foot of the wall. By standing on the shoulders of a comrade Bogis managed to reach the window; he found it unbarred, unguarded, and wide enough for his body to pass through; he sprang in, let down to his companions a rope which he had brought for the purpose, and drew them up one by one till they were all safe inside the building, which proved to be the storehouse under the chapel.[2117] Finding the door locked, they began to hammer at it with the hilts of their daggers. This noise and the shouts with which they accompanied it soon alarmed the garrison. They, thinking that the French had entered the new building and occupied it in force, hastily set it on fire; unhappily, the wind caught the flames and spread them in a few minutes over the whole enclosure. The garrison fled to their sole remaining refuge, the citadel; Bogis and his companions escaped out of the blazing ruins into the casemates; the bulk of the French host, anxiously watching the scene from the opposite side of the ditch, thought they had all perished; but when the flames died down and the smoke began to clear away, Bogis himself appeared at the gate and let down the drawbridge for the army to pass over in triumph.[2118]