real interest centred in the hard fighting which at once broke out at sea between the rival seamen of England and Normandy.  At first the advantage was with the Normans.  Not only were many English ships captured, but repeated destructive forays were made on the coasts of the south-eastern counties.  Portsmouth was burnt; the Channel Islands were ravaged; and so alarming were the French corsairs that, in July, 1338, the dwellers on the south coast were ordered to take refuge in fortresses, or withdraw their goods to a distance of four leagues from the sea.

At last the army and fleet were ready.  On July 12, 1338, Edward appointed his son, the eight-year-old Duke of Cornwall, warden of England, and a few days later sailed from Orwell on a great ship named the Christopher.  A favourable wind quickly bore the royal fleet to the mouth of the Scheldt.  Thence the king and his army sailed up the river to Antwerp, the chief port of Brabant, where they landed on July 16.  There, on July 22, Edward revoked all commissions addressed to the King of France, and withheld from his agents all power to prejudice his own pretensions to the throne of the Valois.  He passed more than a month at Antwerp, holding frequent conferences with his imperial allies, and thence proceeded through Brabant and Juelich to Cologne.  From that city he went up the Rhine to Coblenz, where on September 5 he held an interview with his queen’s imperial brother-in-law.  Their meeting was celebrated with all the pomp and stateliness of the heyday of chivalry.  Edward was accompanied by the highest nobles of his land, the emperor by all the electors, save King John of Bohemia, who, as a Luxemburger, was a convinced partisan of the French.  Louis received his ally clothed in a purple dalmatic, with crown on head and with sceptre and orb in hand, surrounded by the electors and the higher dignitaries of the empire, and seated on a lofty throne erected in the Castorplatz, hard by the Romanesque basilica that watches over the junction of the Moselle with the Rhine.  Another throne, somewhat lower in height, was occupied by the King of England, clothed in a robe of scarlet embroidered with gold, and surrounded by three hundred knights.  Then, before the assembled crowd, Louis declared that Philip of France had forfeited the fiefs which he held of the empire.  He put into Edward’s hands a rod of gold and a charter of investiture, by which symbols he appointed him as “Vicar-general of the Empire in all the Germanies and in all the Almaines”.  Next day the allies heard a mass celebrated by the Archbishop of Cologne in the church of St. Castor.  After the service the emperor swore to aid Edward against the King of France for seven years, while the barons of the empire took oaths to obey the imperial vicar and to march against his enemies.  Thereupon the English king took farewell of the emperor, and returned to Brabant.