John, Duke of Lancaster, was a well-built man, tall and upright, yet his weight was not as great as his bulk might suggest. He would be about sixty years old but possessed fewer white hairs than is usual for a man of that age. In speech he was elegant and unrushed, courteous and affable. He brought with him his wife and children. In his letters and decrees he styled himself King of Castile and León and of the other places which are customarily cited in such documents. On his banners and seals he had castles and lions, though these were combined with the insignia of France and England. His wife was called Queen Constanza, and similarly his daughters were called princesses. In his letters and legal edicts the duke put the words ‘We the king’, and his wife Constanza wrote ‘The queen’.

When the duke was at La Coruña, as we said, the guard of the town was entrusted to an honourable Galician nobleman called Fernán Pérez de Andrade, who had troops at his disposal but insufficient for confronting such a force [as the duke’s]. Realising that any defence he might undertake would be of no avail, he sent a message to the duke to say that he wished to obey him and do his bidding, adding that there were no grounds for tarrying there any longer and that the duke should go at once to Santiago de Compostela, the main town in that region. Once he had captured that town, all other townships would be his, and the same would apply throughout the kingdom, for it was incapable of putting up a fight. The duke was persuaded by this line of argument and set off for Santiago, which lay 10 leagues away. However, since he had not made his way into La Coruña, nor taken possession of the town, nor left his own governor in charge of it, as is the custom, some said that he had not captured it, and attributed this to the great wisdom of Fernán Pérez and to the credulity of the duke.

The duke swiftly seized Santiago and, in the main, the whole land of Galicia, without any more fighting or attacks on towns and villages.