"They can travel, too, with bag of meal and gridiron slung to their sword-belt, so that it is ill to follow them.

There are scant crops and few beeves in the borderland, where a man must reap his grain with sickle in one fist and brown bill in the other.

On the other hand, they are the sorriest archers that I have ever seen, and cannot so much as aim with the arbalest, to say nought of the long-bow.

Again, they are mostly poor folk, even the nobles among them, so that there are few who can buy as good a brigandine of chain-mail as that which I am wearing, and it is ill for them to stand up against our own knights, who carry the price of five Scotch farms upon their chest and shoulders.

Man for man, with equal weapons, they are as worthy and valiant men as could be found in the whole of Christendom." "And the French ?" asked Alleyne, to whom the archer's light gossip had all the relish that the words of the man of action have for the recluse.
"The French are also very worthy men.