A man took a gang of friends around to his ex-girlfriend's house and then tried to set dogs on her, a court heard yesterday.

David Holmes, 29, of Arnold's Way, Cumnor, is also accused of being armed with a knife and threatening ex-girlfriend Kirsty Bradbury in a dispute about seeing their daughter Kayla.

Holmes denies three charges of putting a person in fear of violence or harassment, one of affray and one of possessing an offensive weapon.

Jonathan Coode, prosecuting, said Holmes sent threatening messages to his ex-partner and her family because he was upset he was unable to see Kayla, then aged two.

Miss Bradbury's mother Dawn Thompson told the court Holmes and his friends had chased her in a car last September after seeing Kirsty inside her Volkswagen Bora.

She said: "He sped and tried to come around to either run me off the road or block my pathway.

"I put my foot down on the accelerator."

But during cross-examination, she said she could not be sure Holmes was driving the vehicle.

Toyah Smith, Miss Bradbury's sister-in-law, said she was putting her children to bed when she heard a knock on the door at the house in Buttercup Square, Greater Leys, Oxford.

She said: "He said, 'I'm going to count to five and if you do not open the door I'm going to kick it down'."

She said the lock to the door was broken and Holmes came into the house.

She said he had a knife. She denied an assertion by Graham Bennett, defending, that it was a pen.

Mr Coode said: "What David Holmes had done was gather up a posse, two car-loads of mainly men, two or three dogs — an Alsatian, pit bull and maybe a Staffordshire bull terrier — and a knife which he was wielding.

"At one point the dogs were let off the leads and instructed to attack. Fortunately for all those in the house they did not."

The trial continues.