It was on the morning after the fall of Torquilstone, that a confused report began to spread abroad in the city of York , that De Bracy and Bois-Guilbert, with their confederate Front-de-Boeuf, had been taken or slain. Waldemar brought the rumour to Prince John, announcing that he feared its truth the more that they had set out with a small attendance, for the purpose of committing an assault on the Saxon Cedric and his attendants. At another time the Prince would have treated this deed of violence as a good jest; but now, that it interfered with and impeded his own plans, he exclaimed against the perpetrators, and spoke of the broken laws, and the infringement of public order and of private property, in a tone which might have become King Alfred.

“The unprincipled marauders,” he said⁠—“were I ever to become monarch of England , I would hang such transgressors over the drawbridges of their own castles.”