It is not wonderful that, the country being such as it was--so fruitful, so productive, so pleasant, and so picturesque--the King of England was eager to retain what had been saved, and to regain what had been lost, of the bright and beautiful territory which came to his ancestor, the second Henry, with the hand of Eleanor of Guienne. But, in truth, it was not merely because the land was bright and beautiful, ever blossoming and ever perfumed, with a sunny sky and a genial climate, and shady groves and gay vineyards, appearing in the eyes of strangers a terrestrial paradise, that it haunted the imagination and stirred the ambition of our Plantagenets. Far, indeed, and quite free were these politic princes from the weakness of allowing fancy to lead them captive, when dealing with the interests of the nation with whose history all their great triumphs in war and peace were associated in the mind of Europe. Policy, not fancy, prompted their efforts to retain and recover; for rich and fertile was the region watered by the Garonne and the Adour, and of mighty importance to their island home was the trade carried on between Bordeaux and the ports of England. It was of commerce, and the wealth which commerce creates, that our English kings thought; and it was because they deemed the possession of Guienne, with that old city on the left bank of the Garonne as its capital, essential to the prosperity of the country over which they reigned, that the Plantagenets clung tenaciously to the fragment of that empire which, in the days of their ancestor, the son of Geoffrey of Anjou and the Empress Maude, had extended from the Channel to the Pyrenees.
When I reached Bordeaux, to draw my sword, under the banner of England's heir, for the right of England's king to the territory which Philip Augustus had wrested from King John, the Prince of Wales was lodged in the abbey of St. Andrew, and his people were quartered within the city. Accordingly, I rode through the streets to the abbey, and, meeting Liulph, the archer, the companion of my struggle with the wild bull in Windsor Forest, I informed him of my desire to see the prince. Forthwith Liulph communicated my desire to a squire named Bernard, who was not without influence, and, at my request, conducted me to the presence of the young hero whose brows were, ere long, to be decked with trophies still prouder than the feather which he had won when its former owner, the blind King of Bohemia, fell in his memorable charge at Cressy.