“No,” answered they, scornfully. “How can any confidence be placed in English tails, who are traitors to their own sovereign?”
“You must wait patiently till the kingdom is conquered,” said he, “and I will then give every man what he has a right to possess.”
Fitzwalter remonstrated, but Louis curtly refused to listen longer to the proposal; and the Anglo-Norman baron grew purple with rage. A violent quarrel ensued; and it looked as if the French prince was about to lose an adherent whose value in calm moments he could hardly fail to recognise. Fitzwalter, however, had linked himself too firmly with the Frenchman to have it in his power to break his chains, and the matter was accommodated. But the friends of the Anglo-Norman baron, exposed to frequent insults of the kind, grew sullen and discontented; and Louis began to perceive that it would not be prudent to rely too far on the fidelity of men born on English ground, and to concert measures for surrounding himself with a force of foreigners sufficient to render him independent of aid from the natives. With this view he consented to a truce with the Protector from Christmas to Easter, and resolved to employ the interval in a voyage to France, and to make a great attempt to persuade his crafty sire to furnish a force formidable enough to overawe all his enemies, and to terminate his successes as a conqueror with a crowning triumph.
Accordingly, Louis, having appointed the Lord De Coucy as his lieutenant in England, set out for the coast of Sussex to embark at Shoreham for the Continent, dreading no interruption. This time he found himself wrong in his calculations. There was a serious obstacle in the way, in the shape of a small but very formidable body of men, headed by a warrior in his teens, wearing a long white jacket, and wielding a very formidable battle-axe, who rushed to the assault with very little respect for persons--whether royal or knightly--under a white silken banner on which figured a fierce raven with open beak, and spread wings, and outstretched neck.
Immediately after his exploit at Chas-Chateil, William de Collingham, as if a great idea had been suggested to him, repaired with Oliver Icingla to an islet deep in the forests of Sussex, overgrown with willows and rushes, and surrounded by marshes which regularly in autumn overflowed with water and became a large lake, with the islet rising in the midst. This islet had at one period been inhabited, and the ruins of a fortress, of which the origin and history were lost in the obscurity of ancient days, were still visible; but now it had no inhabitant save an anchorite, who dwelt among the ruins in a rude hermitage built of timber and overgrown with moss, and who appeared to be cut off from communication with mankind, occupying himself much with the study of the stars, and enjoying the reputation of being able to predict events, as if he had been privileged to read what was written in the book of fate.