Page:Royalnavyhistory01clow.djvu/333

 machines for hurling missiles; hut after only three days, John of Gaunt wearied of the siege and withdrew, reaching Corunna on August 9th, and there landing all his troops and stores before the town, which was in possession of the French, and sending his ships back to their ports. On its return to England, the fleet appears to have made a few small prizes, and to have retaken a vessel which had previously been lost to the Spaniards.

The French preparations were on an unexampled scale. Froissart says that they had collected thirteen hundred and eighty-seven sail in and about Sluis; the writer of the 'Chronique de Saint Denis' puts the number at more than nine hundred, besides storeships and horse transports; Walsingham speaks of twelve hundred ships and six hundred thousand troops; and Otterbourne declares that there were three thousand vessels; but Froissart, who was an eye-witness, may be believed on this point, in preference to all other historians. One of the main features of the preparation was the construction of a huge but portable wooden fortress, designed to shelter the knights after their landing; but the seventy-two transports conveying it, in sections, to Sluis from Brittany were dispersed by a gale, and some of them, driven into the Thames, were taken. The captured sections, set up for public show near London, seem to have excited much ridicule.

But while France was wasting time in what may be called needless elaboration of preparation, England was beginning to recover from panic, though the recovery was rather on the part of the people than on the part of the Government. Laughton attributes the improvement to the abolition of some of the offensive privileges formerly granted to foreigners, and to the edict of 1381, which forbade the import and export of merchandise by English subjects in foreign bottoms. As for the Government, it did little until the danger was nearly over, and until the projected invasion was on the point of being again postponed. Not until September 25th, or later, does any considerable force appear to have been ordered to sea. Not, perhaps, until the beginning of l387 was