Unlike war on land, war at sea was not an occupation for which the nobility was trained. Indeed, the author of Le débat des hérauts d’armes could state that the French nobility did not regard fighting at sea as being a noble activity: it is perhaps for this reason that naval warfare did not feature in the chronicles in the way that war on land did. Nor did it seem apparent to all that the war fought at sea, the damage which might be inflicted upon enemy vessels and morale, and the consequences which victory at sea could have for those who lived in areas close to coasts, were all part of a wider war which could not be restricted to the fighting on land.
So it was that when the Hundred Years War began, although both the French and the English kingdoms had particular naval objectives which they needed to further for military reasons, neither could be said to have possessed a proper navy. Up to that time the maritime needs of the two countries had not been very demanding. Philip IV was the first French king to try to pursue an active naval war against England. Before his time no king had needed many ships, least of all ships on demand; the great expense both of building and of maintaining them, procedures which required special and costly facilities, had deterred kings from shipbuilding on a large scale. Furthermore, the organisation associated with the wide use of a major arm was lacking. It was to the credit of Philip IV that he laid the foundations for a dockyard at Rouen, while only a few years later in England, Edward II, whose father had built some galleys, was to possess a small squadron of ‘royal’ ships. Looking back, we may say that the years around 1300 were to attain some significance in this domain. But to argue that such developments marked anything more than a beginning would be to over-estimate the significance of what was done.
When required for use in war, large numbers of merchant vessels were impressed ad hoc. The procedures were simple enough. Royal officers, under the charge of admirals, were despatched to the ports with instructions to impress or requisition vessels for the king’s use, whether this was to transport men, animals, or equipment across the sea. The exercise of this right, whose origins went back many centuries, could not always be easily achieved. As in the matter of purveyance (which, in a sense, the requisitioning of ships was) protests and opposition were frequently met, for this kind of procedure disrupted trade and fishing, the two occupations which created a permanent need for ships. Payment was never made for a vessel taken from its owner for royal service; nor was compensation for loss of a ship, or even damage to its equipment, normally given. In brief, requisitioning was unpopular, not least since it was often carried out in the period between spring and autumn when trading and fishing conditions might normally be expected to be better than at other times of the year.
Nor was that all. Once requisitioned, vessels originally built for commercial purposes had to be adapted for military ones. A ship which was to be used mainly for conveying animals abroad needed work done to its hold: special hurdles, for instance, were required to accommodate horses. If a ship was intended for patrolling the sea, it had to be equipped to take part in action against the enemy: the building of castles, fore and aft, and, in the fifteenth century, the possible installation of cannon on the deck (guns were placed below decks, to fire out of ‘ports’, only in the very first years of the sixteenth century) had to be carried out. The frequent complaint that ships, once requisitioned, were not actually used for several months, thereby denying their owners the use of them in between times, was not always the fault of the wind or weather. Shortages of cash to pay soldiers and sailors, insufficiency of crews, and the slow assembly of retinues to be shipped across the sea often combined to delay ships assembled at ports of concentration.
The kind of ships needed on the two sides of the Channel differed a little. For the English, the main need was initially that of transporting men, horses and weapons to and from the European mainland. The vessels best equipped for this were ‘cogs’, ships of high sides well suited for commercial traffic from which, indeed, most of them were taken. On the French side, with its needs which did not, generally speaking, include the transportation of armies or invasion troops, a different kind of vessel was more suitable: the galley. This, a fast, flat-bottomed vessel propelled by oars or sail, or both, which could, because of its lack of keel, come very close into land, was essentially a vessel of interception, intended to catch attackers off the coast.17 But it did serve another purpose. It could cross the open sea, and land on the enemy coast small groups of men who, in raids lasting perhaps a few hours or, at most, a day or two, could do much damage to both enemy property and morale. The inhabitants of the southern coastal counties of England suffered considerably in this respect, in particular in the late 1370s, when several places on the south coast experienced attacks and, in the case of Winchelsea in 1380, virtual destruction.
The French, therefore, set about building galleys, their principal repair yard being the Clos des Galées at Rouen, which came to be developed in the course of the fourteenth century, and which saw its heyday during the successful wars waged by Charles V in the 1370s.18 By contrast, the English seem to have had fewer ships at this period, although Edward III had some royal ships, and vessels were built for largely defensive purposes. But for the English the system of requisitioning, together with a few ships which might be built in both inland and seaside ports, and those constructed at Bayonne, were sufficient to meet most of their needs. The list of some forty ports which provided 146 vessels, crewed by 2,350 mariners and some 294 boys, to convey Henry of Lancaster and his army from England to Bordeaux in 1347, is impressive.19 But it does not suggest that any basic change in the traditional means of taking large numbers of soldiers to the continent was yet being considered.
The beginning of the fifteenth century, however, was to see changes in attitudes and practices. Although these had seen their origin in the reign of Henry IV, it was to be in his son’s brief reign that something of a revolution (whose effects, however, were not to last) took place. Henry V needed to achieve two things. He had to take action against pirates and sailors who used the port of Harfleur as their main base, and who were encouraged by the French king to carry out raids upon English shipping in the Channel and the English coast. He also needed ships to patrol the Channel and to transport his armies to France. The first he achieved through military means: Harfleur was captured in September 1415 and later successfully defended by the naval victory won by the duke of Bedford in August 1416. The second was achieved by the creation of the first significant royal fleet, an improvement on that of Edward III, which, based in Southampton under the control of a clerk of the king’s ships, and enjoying easy access to the Channel, came to number thirty-five vessels, some bought, some captured, others still specially built.20 With justice Henry V is credited not only with having understood, better than did any of his contemporaries, what were the naval problems which faced England in the early fifteenth century, but also with having done much towards the creation of a fleet of ships, some of them very large, almost ‘prestige-type’ vessels, which would make it possible for the English to take to sea quickly and thus try to wrest the initiative from any enemy who might be coming against them.
Unfortunately, when Henry V died in 1422, his fleet was already less useful than its royal founder had hoped. In the years which followed, some of his ships (which belonged to the king personally) were sold to repay his debts; others were left so long that they eventually rotted. Yet, writing half a century later, Sir John Fortescue recognised that Henry V had been right: ‘though we have not alwey werre uppon the see, yet it shalbe nescessarie that the kynge [Edward IV] have alway some ffloute apon the see, ffor the repressynge off rovers, savynge off owre marchauntes, owre ffishers, and the dwellers uppon owre costes; and that the kynge kepe alway some grete and myghty vessels, ffor the brekynge off an armye when any shall be made ayen hym apon the see; ffor thanne it shall be to late to do make such vessailles’.21 Fortescue saw what the problem was: the defence of English interests both on land and at sea, which needed to be acted upon with a speed which only the existence of some form of permanent naval force would allow. In so saying, Fortescue had all but admitted that Henry V had been ahead of his time.
1 On this concept, see Palmer, ‘War aims’, p. 53.
2 A. J. Pollard, John Talbot and the war in France, 1427–1453 (London, 1983).
3 M. G. A. Vale, War and chivalry. Warfare and aristocratic culture in England, France and Burgundy at the end of the Middle Ages (London, 1981), ch. 4 (I).
4 J. E. Morris, ‘Mounted infantry in mediaeval warfare’, T. R. Hist. S., third series, 8 (1914), 78.
5 M. Prestwich, ‘English armies in the early stages of the Hundred Years War: a scheme of 1341’, B.I.H.R, 56 (1983). 110.
6 P. Contamine, ‘The French nobility and the War’, The Hundred Years War, ed. Fowler, p. 151.
7 The Brut, II, 454.
8 See J. B. Henneman, ‘The military class and the French monarchy in the late Middle Ages’, A.H.R., 83 (1978), 946–65.
9 See Hale, Renaissance war studies, chs. 8–10.
10 N. A. R. Wright, ‘French peasants in the Hundred Years War’, H.T., 33 (June 1983), 38–42.
11 The Brut, II, 382.
12 C. Platt, Medieval Southampton. The port and trading community A.D. 1000–1600 (London: Boston, Mass., 1973), p. 130.
13 Hale, Renaissance war studies, chs. 1–6; H. L. Turner, Town defences in England and Wales (London, 1971); J. H. Harvey, Henry Yevele (London, 1944)
14 Ordonnances des rois de France de la troisième race, XIII (1782), 459–61.
15 See Hewitt, The organization of war under Edward III, ch. 1; J. R. Alban, ‘English coastal defence: some fourteenth-century modifications within the system’, Patronage, the crown, and the provinces in later medieval England, ed. R. A. Griffiths (Gloucester, 1981), pp. 57–78.
16 J. W. Sherborne, ‘The Hundred Years’ War. The English navy: shipping and manpower, 1369–1389’, P&P., 37 (1967), 163–75.
17 B. Waites, ‘The fighting galley’, H.T., 18 (1968), 337–43.
18 A. Merlin-Chazelas (ed.), Documents relatifs au clos des galées de Rouen et aux armées de mer du roi de France de 1293 à 1418 (2 vols., Paris, 1977–8).
19 Calculated from Hewitt, Organization of war, app. II.
20 S. Rose (ed.), The navy of the Lancastrian kings: accounts and inventories of William Soper, keeper of the king’s ships, 1422–1427 (London, 1982), pp. 28–56.
21 Sir John Fortescue, The governance of England, ed. C. Plummer (Oxford, 1885), p. 123. On the impact of coastal attacks upon the lives of civilian populations, see Paston letters and papers of the fifteenth century, ed. N. Davis, I (Oxford, 1971), nos. 20 and 136.