In his cold, cramped cell in the monastery outside Worcester, Florence the chronicler lifted his milky, dim eyes and stared out at the darkness beyond his cell window. How should he describe these times? Should he recount all that he had heard? Was it true for instance that Satan himself, the prince of darkness, had risen from the depths of hell with his horde of black-garbed legions to tempt and terrorise the human soul with visions from the pit? He had been told that an evil sea of demons, rumbling and boiling over the face of the earth, amused themselves disguised as snakes, fierce animals, monsters with crooked limbs, mangy beasts and crawling things. At midnight, so Florence had heard, the heavens rumbled with thunder and lightning flashed above a restless sea of heads, hands outstretched, eyes glassy with despair.

Another monk, a member of his community, claimed to have seen a chariot speed through the sky pulled by stallions with fiery eyes and fetid breath; inside a grinning skeleton wearing a crown of brambles.

It was a time of killing. Great Edward was in Scotland hunting down the rebel leader Wallace while in France, the silver-haired Capetian, Philip le Bel, plotted in his secret chambers beneath the Louvre Palace. He was gathering his armies, thronging the roads of Normandy with lines of men moving snakelike, cavalry, men-at-arms, archers and spearmen, pouring north to throng on France's northern borders where they waited for the order to cross into and destroy the Kingdom of Flanders.

Florence had heard such mutterings in the refectory as Father Abbot entertained royal messengers, dusty and dark-eyed, who rode from the coast. These couriers kept the King's generals in London informed of French ships in the Narrow Seas for had not Edward prophesied that when the French fleet sailed, Philip would deliver his hammer blows against Flanders and perhaps against England's southern coast?