Henry V's Navy E-Book

Ian Friel

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 298

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Without Henry V's Navy, the Battle of Agincourt would never have happened. Henry's fleet played a major – if often unrecognised – part in enabling the king to come within reach of final victory in the Hundred Years War against France. Henry's navy was multinational, and comprised his own royal fleet, English merchantmen and many foreign vessels from the Netherlands, the Baltic and Venice. It was one of the most successful fleets deployed by England before the time of Elizabeth I. The royal fleet was transformed in Henry's short reign from a few dilapidated craft into a powerful weapon of war, with over thirty fighting vessels, up-to-date technology and four of the biggest ships in Europe. With new insights derived from extensive research into documentary, pictorial and archaeological sources, Henry V's Navy is about the men, ships and operations of Henry's sea war. Ian Friel explores everything from shipboard food to how crews and their ships sailed and fought, and takes an in-depth look at the royal ships. He also tells the dramatic and bloody story of the naval conflict, which at times came close to humiliating defeat for the English.

Leseprobe

For Colin Richmond

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to offer my grateful thanks to: Serena Cant at Historic England; Gillian Hutchinson for allowing me to reproduce her drawing of the plankingof the Grace Dieu; Mrs Gill Neal and the archivist, at Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, for their help in providing images of the ‘Holigost letter’; Anooshka Rawden, Collections Manager, the Society of Antiquaries of London; the staff of The National Archives, Kew; the staff of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London; Sarah Williams of the Museum of London, for her help with images of the Museum’s amazing ship’s trumpet; John Barlow (Tidal Analyst) and Susan Juggins (Customer Services Analyst) of the UK Hydrographic Office for supplying the invaluable historic tidal data for the eastern end of the Bay of the Seine on three key dates in the years 1415 and 1416.

Anyone writing about Henry V’s fleet owes a debt to the work of Dr Susan Rose, who has written extensively about the naval history of Henry’s time and of the Middle Ages in general. Susan also produced a valuable edition of the accounts of William Soper for the period 1422–27, translated into English, which will be of great interest for any non-Latinists who wish to see what the sources actually say.

Professor Wendy Childs kindly gave me copies of her transcripts of the Bordeaux customs accounts, an invaluable source for English shipping in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Any conclusions drawn from this data are my own responsibility, however.

My daughter Helen Friel (www.helenfriel.com) has redrawn my map and diagram drafts in this book – not as interesting a job as her usual work in papercuts and illustration, but a huge task and one for which I am very grateful!

My son, David Friel, has given me a great deal of IT help, including the provision of a laptop when my own went down for the third and last time.

My wife Lynne has supported me during the work on this book in all sorts of ways, including the production of some images. At times it must seem to her that I have been writing this book since the days when Henry V was headline news …

The dedication of this book acknowledges an old debt to a teacher, mentor and friend – and a leading historian of fifteenth-century England.

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Image Credits

Notes

Abbreviations in Tables and Appendices

Introduction: A Thoroughly English Ship

1    Kings, Ships and the Long War

2    The Navy of England

3    Shipmen and Soldiers

4    Ships of the Wood Age

5    Machines of War

6    The Sea-Road to Agincourt and Beyond, 1413–15

7    The Bloody Sea-Road to Conquest, 1416–18

8    Fear and Victory, 1418–22

9    After Henry

Appendix 1 Henry V’s Shipmasters

Appendix 2 Henry V’s Ships

Appendix 3 The Royal Ships 1413–16

Appendix 4 Major Types of Weapons

Abbreviations in Sources

Documentary Sources

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

IMAGE CREDITS

I gratefully acknowledge the following institutions for kindly giving me permission to use the following images: the Trustees of the British Museum: 7; Historic England: 83; Museum of London: 14c; The Society of Antiquaries of London: 1c; The National Archives, Kew (TNA): 20, 23, 5c, 25 and 77; Victoria and Albert Museum: 16c; WSA (Wiltshire & Swindon Archives): 17c and 18c.

Unless otherwise specified, all maps, line drawings and photographs are my own copyright.

NOTES

1  To avoid filling the text with amounts like £166 6s 8d, sums of money are generally rounded up or down to the nearest pound.

2  Late medieval England used the Bordeaux wine tun of 252 gallons as the unit for measuring the carrying capacity of a ship. This was not the same as modern measures of ship tonnage, nor many of those used between the sixteenth century and the present day. Strictly speaking, this text should use the words ‘tun’ and ‘tunnage’ rather than ‘ton’ and ‘tonnage’. For the sake of (I hope) greater accessibility, I have opted to use the latter spellings. For those interested in the subject of tonnage measurement, the 1964 paper by F.C. Lane offers a good starting point.1

3  Unless otherwise stated, definitions of obscure words are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary, via www.oed.com.

4  Dates of birth and death given in the text are taken from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (via www.oxforddnb.com), unless otherwise stated.

5  Basic data about Henry V’s shipmasters and his ships is provided in Appendices 1 and 2, respectively.

6  For information on the careers of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English soldiers, visit the fascinating database of The Soldier in Later Medieval England research project at www.medievalsoldier.org.

7  References to images in the text are given as: (1)and colour plates(1c).

Note

1      Lane, 1964.

ABBREVIATIONSIN TABLESAND APPENDICES

GS

great ship

S

ship

CA

carrack

BG

barge

BL

balinger

nk

not known

INTRODUCTION

A Thoroughly English Ship

A flock of swans paddled its way among the ships as they cleared the Isle of Wight. A welcome omen, perhaps. Three ships had gone up in smoke just as the force set sail, and maybe the swans drove away the bad luck those pyres portended. A sense of uncertainty and danger must have pervaded the fleet that August day, for Henry V’s armada was on its way to invade France.

War creates myths. Whether the swans or the fires were real or just technicolour details added by contemporary chroniclers, we don’t know. Swans do swim in the sea, but significantly, a swan also featured on Henry’s personal badge. If the swan story sounds a little too convenient, the loss of several ships by fire is easier to believe. With its timber hull, hempen rigging and flammable coating of pitch and tar, a medieval ship was a bonfire awaiting a spark.

The king boarded his ‘great ship’ Trinity Royal on Wednesday 7 August 1415. He had stayed at Portchester Castle on Portsmouth Harbour, and was rowed out to join the huge vessel at its anchorage in the Solent between Portsmouth and Southampton. The Trinity Royal was the first of four great ships, each one larger than its predecessor. They were built to impress as well as fight. This duality has been a feature of big warships throughout history, a combination of tactical, strategic and technical requirements and what might crudely be called ‘willy waving’ by the powerful, once one gets past all the ceremony and symbolism.

The Trinity Royal had symbolism aplenty – although not intentionally of the phallic kind, so far as we know – and must have been a stunning sight. The ship’s records contain a rich and poetic list of paints and other ingredients used to decorate the Trinity Royal, including white lead, red lead, vermilion, copperas, verdigris, varnish, gold, cinnabar, indigo, ochre and tinfoil. This embellishment also extended to the ship’s huge canvas sail, which had an embroidered worsted cover bearing the king’s arms. The vessel’s eighteen flags were heavy with religious symbolism, which reflected Henry’s personal devotion to the Holy Trinity, the Virgin and the English saints, St Edward and St George.

The Trinity Royal’s adornment also featured sculpture. A gilded copper crown sat on an iron spindle in the topcastle, and another golden copper crown rested on the head of a wooden leopard elsewhere on the ship, where the leopard perhaps served as a figurehead. Even the capstan, a utilitarian piece of heavy gear used to raise the anchor, sported a gilded copper sceptre, worked in the form of three fleurs-de-lis. The Trinity Royal was a thoroughly royal, thoroughly English ship, appropriate for a king who promoted the English language and English patriotism. The three fleurs-de-lis on the capstan also featured on the English royal standard, though they were a symbol of French kingship. Their presence on the flags and the Trinity Royal represented the claim of English kings to the throne of France. The English fleet was sailing that day to start enforcing Henry’s claim.

1 The fifteenth-century English Channel from an English viewpoint.

The 1415 invasion led to the capture of the French port of Harfleur, followed by a victory against the odds at Agincourt. That, as things were to prove, was the ‘easy bit’. A great deal of blood had already been spilt by the time Henry returned in triumph to London in the autumn of 1415. Much more was to flow in the next seven years, some of it at sea. The king invaded France again in 1417 and went on to conquer Normandy. In 1420, he forced the French ruler to recognise him as his heir, but Henry did not have long to enjoy his success. He died in 1422, and it was his son who would reign briefly as king of an Anglo-French dual monarchy.

Though Henry V’s most famous victories were won on land, they were made possible by sea power, by his ‘navy’. That navy was made up of the men and ships of the royal fleet and the English merchant marine, as well as many foreign vessels and their crews. This book tells their story.2

Note

2      Taylor and Roskell, 1975, pp.20–3; Allmand, 1992, chs 4–8; Rodger, 1997, pp.117–30; The National Archives (TNA), Exchequer, Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer, Foreign Accounts E364/54 and E364/59, passim; Friel, 1993; Trinity Royal: TNA E364/54, H m 1v; Lambert, 2011, p.139; Dyer, 1991, pp.13–14; Curry, 1994, p.45; horses: Allmand 1992, p.215; royal ships in 1415 fleet: TNA E364/54, E m 1v–F.

1

KINGS, SHIPSANDTHELONG WAR

Henry V and the Hundred Years War

Henry was a complex man, genuinely pious, able, clever, brave, but also utterly ruthless when he had to be. We should judge Henry by the standards of his time, by which measure he was a heroic leader and great soldier. But it should also be remembered that a great many people lost their families, their homes and their lives as a direct result of Henry’s march to victory, and for the most part we don’t have their perspectives on the king.

Many of Henry’s people respected and even idolised him, as far as can be judged. Shakespeare’s Henry V, although it portrayed a better human being than the real one, caught something of the sense of adoration that Henry inspired in others. As numerous historians have observed, however, Henry V died at just the right time in order to preserve his status as a hero. In the thirty or so years after his death, England lost most of its possessions in France and began a slide towards civil war between aristocratic factions.

So, if Henry’s story is ultimately one of failure, why bother to investigate his navy? The first and most important reason is that Henry’s fleets made it possible for England to successfully invade France and appear to ‘win’ the Hundred Years War – however incomplete and temporary that victory proved to be.

The second reason for studying Henry’s navy is that it represented something new, in terms of its organisation, strategy and technology. Henry was the first English king to try to keep his experienced royal shipmasters together as a single body – not quite a naval officer corps, but something different from earlier royal fleets. As regards strategy, the seakeeping patrols organised by the Crown were not novel, but their regularity and intensity pointed to a new determination to exert control over the English Channel and English waters. In technological terms, the royal ships were at the proverbial cutting edge, with four of the biggest ships ever seen in England, the rapid adoption of the two-masted rig and England’s first ever force of carracks. Fortunately, the royal fleet was well documented, and its records also give us vital information about European ships, cutting-edge or otherwise, that is simply not available elsewhere, even from archaeology.

Finally the dramatic story of Henry’s sea war, and of the people who fought it, deserves to be better known. The conflict at sea was fraught with danger for the English, the French and their allies. It is a tale of violence, brutality and folly, as well as one of skill, tenacity and courage.

Henry V’s short nine-year reign saw decades’ worth of change in politics, war, technology and the ways in which things were done. Love him or hate him, there is a lot to be learned from studying this man and his times.

Henry was born in Monmouth, close to the Welsh border with England, in 1386 or 1387. He was a member of the house of Lancaster, the son of Henry Bolingbroke and great-grandson of Edward III, famous for his spectacular victories over the French. Despite this lineage, Henry might have lived to be no more than a senior aristocrat, but in 1399 his father deposed the king, Richard II (r. 1377–99), and made himself ruler as Henry IV. The young Henry became Prince of Wales soon after.

Henry IV’s reign was marked by rebellion in both England and Wales.3 The prince’s early military experience was mainly acquired in the fight against these rebels, particularly in Wales. These conflicts may well have taught the young Henry several hard lessons about the use of the sea in war. The limited application of sea power enabled the resupply of besieged English castles on the Welsh coast but, at the same time, foreign sea power and English naval weakness enabled the French and others to raid the country and land troops in Wales. The use of privateering by both sides also led to rampant piracy, which hit trade and humiliated the monarchy. It is no coincidence that when Henry V dominated the royal council in 1410–11, he made efforts to revive the king’s ships as a force.

Henry became king in 1413. He was a man with a deep religious faith, whose devotion to the Holy Trinity was later made manifest in the names and decoration of his four great ships. To Henry and many of his subjects, his victories were proof that God was on his side. The king was also much influenced by history, particularly the example of Edward III. The opening speech at the 1416 English Parliament, which set out the king’s thinking, made an explicit link between Edward’s victories at Sluys and Poitiers and the recent battle of Agincourt. It was claimed that all three were divine judgements against the French and for the English.4

Medieval English government relied on the person of the monarch. He was supported by his royal council and the small-scale machinery of royal administration and justice, but the royal will was what truly mattered. Henry took the business of kingship very seriously; after all, aside from maintaining his earthly reputation and position, in his view, the fate of his immortal soul depended on doing what he saw as the right thing. He tried to ensure stability and peace at home through the law; he aimed to do the same thing in English waters both through legal means and through the exercise of sea power; he did his best to crush threats to the Church, such as Lollardy, and helped to end the Great Schism which had split Roman Catholic Christianity for decades.

In my own opinion, though, people should be careful about hero-worshipping Henry V. It can be easy, when writing military or naval history, to get carried away with the brilliance or ingenuity of leaders, and to forget the people who suffered as a result of these ‘geniuses’. There is absolutely no doubt of Henry’s personal bravery and skills as a military man, and he was also a capable tactician and strategist. However, this decisive soldier was also a ruthless one. Notoriously, when French reinforcements turned up after the battle of Agincourt had begun, Henry ordered the killing of the French prisoners, to avoid being overwhelmed. Even by the brutal standards of medieval warfare, this was an outrageous thing to do. An even worse act followed during the English siege of Rouen in the winter of 1418–19. In an effort to eke out their dwindling food supplies, the French garrison ejected the poor and those unable to fight. Henry refused to let these refugees through his siege lines, so an unknown number of children, women and men starved to death or died of exposure. John Page, an Englishman who was at the siege, had no doubt of the righteousness of his king’s cause, but all the same was haunted by the terrible things he saw: an orphaned toddler begging for bread, a woman cradling a dead child and much more, as all the while death silently took the innocent victims of a ‘complex’ man.5

The Hundred Years War and the English Fleet

At the time, no one thought of it as ‘the Hundred Years War’. The phrase was invented in the nineteenth century to link together a series of Anglo-French conflicts that were fought between 1337 and 1453. England’s long association with the land mass that is modern France dated back to the Norman Conquest. Although the English Crown lost Normandy to the French in 1204, it retained the duchy of Aquitaine (essentially Gascony) in south-western France until 1453.

Edward III (r. 1327–77) was the first English king to try to make himself king of France. He had a dynastic claim to the French throne, and though the Anglo-French war that broke out in 1337 was not at first ostensibly about this, from 1340 Edward included ‘King of France’ among his titles. Most of the actual military combat in the different phases of the Hundred Years War took place in France, Gascony or Flanders. The English inflicted extraordinary levels of death and destruction on France, and won famous victories at the naval battle of Sluys (1340) and the land battles of Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356). In 1347, Edward III was able to capture Calais, a valuable gateway to the Continent which the English held until 1558. The fighting only touched English soil directly when the French and their allies raided the English coast, or when they intervened via Scotland or Wales.

The war was far from continuous, and between 1369 and 1415, things went pretty much the way of the French. However, the English claim to the throne occupied by the Valois family remained a potentially powerful casus belli for any king who wanted to use it. Henry V was that man: the intermittent madness of the French Valois king, Charles VI, and vicious infighting among the French aristocracy, gave him his opportunity (see plates 2 and 3).

Henry’s victories in France led to the 1420 Treaty of Troyes that saw him and his descendants recognised as the heirs of Charles VI. Henry’s young son Henry VI was later crowned king of a dual Anglo-French monarchy, but as an adult he proved to be a failure as a ruler. The war in France continued. Eventually, the English were driven out of Normandy in 1450, and three years later they lost Gascony.

Sea power was essential to the English in the Hundred Years War. The English merchant fleet was pressed into service on innumerable occasions to fight, to carry armies and to make raids, and did so with success. Merciless coastal raiding was one of the worst aspects of the sea war, and it was perpetrated by both sides (see plates 2c and 3c). The effects and the memory of it could linger for a long time. In 1421, the town of Rottingdean in Sussex asked for a reduction in its tax assessment because of depopulation that followed flooding and a French raid. The raid had taken place forty-four years before.6

2 England, France and Burgundy 1413.

3 England, France and Burgundy 1429: seven years after Henry V’s death, most of northern France was under the control of England or Burgundy; by the end of 1453, the only part of mainland France still in English hands was Calais.

The King’s Ships 1399–1413

The reign of Henry IV is not known for its naval history, but it was not a peaceful time at sea. Between 1401 and 1406, the Glyndwr rebellion in Wales received naval support from first the Scots, then the Bretons and French, and there were attacks on ports in Devon (see plate 4). In 1405, a French invasion force landed in Milford Haven to help the Welsh rebels, and in February 1406, the French effectively blockaded the mouth of the Thames.

Despite such incidents, Henry IV, the French and others seem to have pursued a kind of proxy war through privateering, largely avoiding direct conflict. Privateering was a system whereby the Crown licensed seafarers to attack the shipping of hostile nations. The trouble was that privateering easily turned into indiscriminate piracy. Medieval English monarchs faced a real problem when it came to dealing with piracy, because they had to rely on the shipping of the kingdom to support their naval expeditions and wars, and the best sea fighters were often also the best pirates. One incident illustrates this dilemma perfectly. In 1406, the master of a Plymouth barge and his crew were arrested on a clear charge of sea robbery. However, they were let go on the grounds the barge was ‘needed at present to resist the malice of [the king’s] enemies at sea’. It was not quite a ‘get out of jail free card’, because the master was told to present himself at court at a later date, but it was not far from it.7

4 The watergate of the fourteenth-century fortification that protected Dartmouth harbour. Dartmouth was attacked by the Bretons in 1404, but they were driven off.

The king’s ships were vessels owned directly by the Crown, but they were never very numerous in Henry IV’s time. He started his reign in November 1399 with three royal ships, though within a year this had grown to six. The royal fleet remained at five or six units until 1407, when it began to decline. By November 1409, it had dwindled to just two ships, a river barge and a decrepit big ship, the Trinity, that was languishing in dock. The fleet was revived briefly in 1410–11, when Prince Henry held the reins of power in the king’s council, but declined again after he lost his influence. By the time Henry V came to the throne in March 1413, only four vessels were left, two of them non-operational.8

5 Aerial view of the Tower of London.

6 London and Greenwich in the early fifteenth century.

In the early fifteenth century, the names of English royal ships carried the suffix ‘of the Tower’, meaning the ‘of the Tower of London’, a sense akin to the later ‘HMS’. This associated them with the principal royal castle and arsenal, where their gear was stored, but probably also described their normal mooring place, close to the Tower in the Pool of London. Further downriver, there were a number of simple mud docks at Greenwich used to lay up the royal ships over the winter, to help preserve them from stormy weather (see plates 5 and 6).

The largest ship in Henry IV’s fleet was the 300-ton Trinity, built for Richard II. It was described as a ‘great ship’ in at least one source, and was quite possibly one of the biggest ships in the country. Henry IV owned a total of about seventeen or eighteen vessels during his reign – eight or nine ships, one carrack, seven balingers or barges and one galley. The galley, the Jesus Maria, was one of three due to be built in 1412. The vessels were meant to be used to convey the ailing Henry IV to the Holy Land, where, it was prophesied, he would die. Mortality overtook the project, and Henry expired in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey instead. The huge and expensive JesusMaria was completed, but ended up as a derelict on the Thames.9

The king’s ships were not a state navy in the modern sense. They were, quite literally, the personal possessions of the sovereign. This meant that while fighting was part of their ‘remit’, they were used for all sorts of other purposes. In Henry IV’s reign this included the transport of wine and VIPs: despite the desperate and dangerous events at sea in his time, the royal ships only took part in a handful of war operations. This reality – that the monarch was both the overall naval war commander and the ‘first shipowner’ in the land – would not begin to change until the Tudor period. The ‘royal navy’ of Henry IV and Henry V was not the same as the modern Royal Navy.

Late medieval England may not have had a state navy, but it did have admirals. Until 1408, English admirals were normally appointed for no more than a year, usually in nominal command of the shipping on the east coast, or the south and west coasts (see plate 7). The first Admiral of England (with national responsibilities) was created in 1408, when the Earl of Dorset (later Duke of Exeter), took up the post. He served until 1426, but the role of Admiral was as much a legal one as a military one, and the Admiral seldom functioned as a fleet commander in Henry V’s reign.10

7 Bronze seal matrix of Richard Clitherowe, Admiral of the West, 1406 (the name is also spelled Clederowe or Cliderowe). Clitherowe was a royal official, merchant and shipowner, one of two men appointed as temporary admirals at the urging of merchants, in an unsuccessful attempt to police English waters.11 Clitherowe later played a key role in hiring hundreds of Dutch ships to support Henry V’s campaigns. (British Museum)

Notes

3      Allmand, 1992, pp.36–38; this brief survey of Henry’s career is based on a range of sources, chiefly Allmand’s indispensable biography of the king, Mortimer, 2010, and the works of Wylie and Waugh, but interpretations are my own.

4      Taylor and Roskell, 1975, pp.122–5.

5      McGlynn, 2008, pp.193–4.

6      Given-Wilson et al., 2005, ‘Henry V: May 1421’, 22 and Appendix 7.

7      Rodger, 1997, pp.114–16, 454–5; CCR 1405–1409, pp.59–60, 93–4.

8      This section is based on the following accounts of the clerks of the king’s ships for Henry IV: TNA E101/42/39, E101/43/6, E101/43/7, E101/44/9, E101/44/11, E101/44/17 and E364/43 D m 2r-E m 1r.

9      Mortimer, 2010, p.19.

10    Rodger, 1997, pp.149, 504–9.

11    Nicolas, 1847, p.386.

2

THE NAVYOF ENGLAND

Use the word ‘navy’ nowadays, and most people will assume that you’re talking about a state navy of some kind, such as the British Royal Navy or the US Navy, or perhaps a mercantile marine like the Merchant Navy. Neither usage fully expresses what fifteenth-century English people meant by the ‘navy’ of their country.

The word ‘navy’ migrated from Norman French into Middle English, its meaning changing over time, and was current in English documents in the late 1300s, by which time it denoted ‘a group of ships’. The problem is, those who used the word were not always talking about the same group of ships. In October 1416, shipowners complained in Parliament that lack of tonnage payment for ships arrested by the Crown was ruining them and destroying the ‘navy’ of the realm, which they owned. In other words, they were equating the trading fleet with the ‘navy’ of England – the ‘merchant navy’, in effect. At other times, ‘navy’ referred to all the shipping of England, both the trading fleet and the royal ships, as in a call to arms made in 1419. In writing about ‘Henry V’s Navy’, I am using the term in its broadest medieval sense, to mean ‘the fleet of vessels that served the realm’ – and, therefore, also served the king. The ships deployed by Henry comprised the royal ships, the vessels of his subjects and hired foreign ships.12

England and the Sea Trade of Europe13

England and Wales are maritime nations, with large seaboards relative to their land area, and in the late Middle Ages they had at least 192 ports between them. This figure, however, does not include the many small and middling river ports that also existed and enabled sea trade to penetrate deep inland, especially in England. Unfortunately, Wales does not feature greatly in the maritime history of Henry V’s reign. Its trade was badly damaged by the long years of the Welsh revolt in the early 1400s, and even before that date, the coastal towns mostly operated within a pattern set by English trade and political control.

England’s geographical position put it astride the most important shipping routes of northern Europe. Vessels from northern and southern Europe mainly passed through the English Channel, and England lay just across the North Sea from the Low Countries, one of the industrial and commercial powerhouses of Europe. A good geographical position was not the same as having a strong trading economy, however.

8 Significant ports of medieval England and Wales.

9 The great harbour at Dartmouth.

Late medieval England was a second-rate economic power, and that may be putting it generously. In Henry V’s time, England’s major exports were all raw materials: grain, Cornish tin and wool. The cloth industry was growing, but this manufactured product would not overtake wool as an export until the 1430s. The situation was not helped by the fact that the English merchant community lacked the organisation and sophistication of major competitors like the Italians and the Hanse. As a result, some significant sectors of the country’s overseas trade were dominated by foreign merchants and their shipping.

Despite such difficulties, English vessels of the period were to be found carrying all kinds of goods, including wool to the Low Countries, salt from France and dried cod (stockfish) from Iceland. The one really important bulk trade under English control was the import of wine from Gascony. Gascony had belonged to the English Crown since the twelfth century, a link that benefitted English merchants, created a need for larger ships and familiarised English seafarers with the challenges of navigating a long and sometimes very dangerous route. For all that, the combination of the weakness of English overseas commerce and the other factors above meant that by Henry V’s time, English sea power was at a low ebb.

10 Late medieval English sea trade.

11 Town walls at the former West Hithe, Southampton. The defences of the port were improved after a devastating French raid in 1338, and here they even incorporated the remains of earlier houses.

12 The imposing Wool House, Southampton, early fifteenth century. Built as a secure store and weigh house for wool, it underlines the importance of the commodity in England’s overseas trade.

Arrested Development: The English Shipping Industry

The rather glib phrase ‘English merchant fleet’ will be used in this book as a handy catch-all term for the non-royal shipping of the kingdom. Aside from its uses in war, this fleet had four main functions: to carry cargo and passengers, to fish and to rob other people’s ships. There was nothing especially ‘English’ about this, and the description would probably fit other European shipping industries of the period just as well.

There are no available figures for the overall size of the English merchant fleet before the reign of Elizabeth I, but it is possible to identify changing trends over time. The surviving Bordeaux customs returns are a useful guide to the state of England’s merchant fleet, and they paint a rather stark picture for the early 1400s.14

English ships were measured in terms of the number of Bordeaux wine tuns or tons that they could carry. It is reasonable to assume that most ships taking on wine at Bordeaux loaded as much as they could safely transport, so the port’s records give a pretty good idea of the approximate maximum tonnages of vessels involved in the trade. The fourteenth-century Bordeaux accounts show that a century before Henry V’s time, the English merchant fleet included a much higher proportion of ships of 100-plus tons than was the case in the first decade or so of the 1400s. The surviving early fifteenth-century data is scrappy, but consistent. It all comes from roughly the same months in the extant years (October/November to February–April), and for each period the number of English and Welsh ships recorded is almost the same:

English/Welsh ships’ cargoes:

1402–03

1409–10

1412–13

0–49 tons

78

58

57

50–99 tons

65

66

56

100–149 tons

4

18

21

150–199 tons

-

2

5

Total nos

147

144

139

Total tons loaded

7199

9366

9276

Largest single cargo (tons)

125.5

189.5

185

Incomplete as it is, the information all points towards one conclusion: England was short of big ships in the early 1400s. If they had existed, they would have featured on the country’s main bulk-trade route in larger numbers. Even in the 1412–13 period, only 15 per cent of the ships calling at Bordeaux were able to load 100 tons or more, and just a handful of these could take more than 150 tons. This was not just a ‘blip’: the next set of surviving Bordeaux customs returns, from 1431, shows a fleet with not very many more big ships, though there was a recovery later, in the 1430s and 1440s.

The greatest English ports in the early 1400s were London, Bristol and Hull, though there were other significant harbours, such as Fowey, Dartmouth, Southampton, King’s Lynn and Newcastle. The ports were home to merchant communities, but perhaps because of the organisational weaknesses of English trade, there is little sign of complex shipowning partnerships in England in this period. Typically, ships belonged to just one or two people, such as shipmasters and merchants, though the aristocracy also sometimes also owned vessels. This pattern of ownership may have put serious limits on the capital available for building and operating ships.15

Just how much medieval English kings knew or cared about the state of the country’s merchant fleet is open to question, though there is good reason to think that Henry V feared that the country was short of shipping, because he hired so many foreign vessels. He certainly knew about the significance of shipping for international trade, because merchants moaned in Parliament about the threats it faced, and the king tried to deal with the piracy that damaged trade and the merchant fleet. Henry’s interest in the merchant fleet was not just economic though, because the nation’s ‘navy’ was also a resource for war.

Historian Craig Lambert has identified a number of ways in which the Crown obtained ships for war service in the fourteenth century, most of which were still used in Henry’s time. Aside from acquiring his own ships, or arresting merchantmen, the monarch could call on the limited and archaic feudal ship service provided by the Cinque Ports. The king could also offer tax breaks to private owners in return for ships; he could hire English and foreign vessels; he could acquire forfeited vessels or enemy prize ships; groups of towns could be induced to provide or build ships, and pardons could offered to masters and crews in return for sea service. Henry’s personal fleet came from a variety of sources, including construction, purchase, forfeit, capture and gift (see Appendix 2). Many of the foreign vessels he used were hired, but the vast majority of non-royal English ships in his service were conscripted or ‘arrested’.