THE BATTLE OF SLUYS PART THREE

THE BATTLE OF SLUYS 1340 – PART THREE

If Edward was to take not only cash to repay loans but a sizeable army back to France, he would need ships to do it, but England was not a naval power and it would be several centuries before Britannia would rule the waves. Although English kings had long proudly proclaimed themselves to be ‘Lords of the English Seas’, with Admirals of the North and the South reporting to them, by Edward III’s time this was empty bombast. The admirals were either soldiers, who might know quite a lot about fighting on land but little or nothing about naval warfare, or great lords who knew little or nothing about any kind of fighting, while the Royal Navy was a handful of cogs in harbour with masters but no crews. English naval policy was concentrated on protecting wine convoys from Bordeaux and even these were subject to piracy from Calais or raids by French ships. For anything more ambitious ever since the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042 – 1066) the Royal Navy was supposed to be augmented from the Cinque Ports (Sandwich, Dover, Romney, Hythe and Hastings with Rye and Winchelsea) in exchange for various customs and taxation exemptions. The trouble was that since the Confessor’s time some of these ports had silted up and with the exception of Dover were no longer of much importance as centres of maritime trade, Yarmouth and Southampton having long eclipsed them. Apart from that, many of the ships which were supposed to be earmarked for the Royal Navy were in fact fishing boats or cargo vessels, unsuited for battles at sea. Edward now sent his commissioners around the country requisitioning ships and ordering them to south coast harbours to be fitted out for war. Most of these were cogs, with a wide beam and a shallow draught, built of oak and of anything from ten to 200 tons displacement with a single mast and a square sail. They were not particularly manoeuvrable in a contrary wind, but they could stand rough seas, albeit producing very uncomfortable conditions for the occupants, and could get up rivers and into small harbours that ships of deeper draught could not. In the River Thames were the nine ships of the so-called Royal Navy, while the Cinque Ports reluctantly mustered twenty-one ships at Winchelsea and Edward’s commissioners collected more to be concentrated at Portsmouth. Most were merchant ships about sixty feet long and twenty wide.

Turning English ships originally designed to carry freight into warships entailed erecting ‘castles’ front and rear, that is wooden towers from which archers would shoot at enemy crews, and crows’ nests, platforms near the top of the mast which would hold two or three archers and a lookout. Stalls for horses had to be made and accommodation for the crew (usually around twenty sailors) and the soldiers provided. All over England forests were being cut down to modify the existing sequestered ships and to build more, while at the same time crews were being impressed and soldiers assembled.

By now everyone in an English army was paid, from the earls downwards. Archers were either contracted to the king directly or under a commander who contracted either to the king or to one of the nobility. A vintenar commanded twenty archers, the equivalent of a modern platoon commander, and a centenar, today’s company commander, had five vintenars and their men under his command. Men-at-arms, the infantry, were members of a retinue, that is employed directly by the king or more usually by a lord or a knight, and the size of retinues varied from a dozen to several hundred. Eventually Edward was able to assemble an army of around 5000 men, in the proportion of three archers to two men-at-arms, accompanied by the usual administrative officials, clerks, farriers, grooms and surgeons. Later in the war all archers would be mounted, but at this stage not all were, and those without horses attracted a lower rate of pay than those with. Archers were not only cheaper than men-at-arms but cost less to equip, needing only a helmet and a leather jerkin, rather than expensive armour. Once they had expended their arrows they could be used as light infantry and mounted archers could be used in a scouting and reconnaissance role. A hurried visit to Yarmouth managed to procure some more ships, making a grand total of around 160 ships to carry the army and its horses and stores.

If England was not a maritime power, France most definitely was, with her major shipyards at Rouen on the River Seine and ships designed for fighting and others designed to carry troops. French warships were mainly galleys, little changed from classical times and powered by oars with a lateen sail which would be used when cruising. A lateen sail was triangular and allowed a ship to sail into the wind. A typical galley was long and narrow, propelled by thirty oars on each side, each oar manned by three marines. The ship had a ram at the front and the tactic was to ram an enemy ship and then board, the boarding party being two men from each oar, leaving one man per oar to provide some steerage. These galleys were highly manoeuvrable, regardless of the wind direction, and could turn in their own length. It has been calculated that they could maintain a steady speed of around seven knots, with ramming speed, which could only be kept up for a short time, of ten knots. Not all galleys were French, for a number were contracted from the Republic of Genoa and had been moved up from the Mediterranean. The number of galleys the French could muster was slightly reduced when a spy reported that eighteen were beached at Boulogne, preparatory to being moved up to Flanders, and an English raiding party landed and burned them. Nevertheless, those they did have were far more manoeuvrable and suitable for fighting at sea than the clumsy English cogs.

French troopships, for transporting the army, were either modified merchant ships reliant on sail alone, or clinker-built Norman barges with oars and a square sail, this latter only allowing sailing with the wind behind them but still more easily manoeuvred than anything in the English fleet. The converted merchant ships had castles fore and aft from which crossbowmen could shoot at the crews of enemy ships. As the French had never taken to archery – the idea of armed and disciplined bodies of Frenchmen from the lower classes of society would be seen as a threat to the established order – they employed large numbers of Italian mercenaries armed with crossbows. This weapon discharged a metal or wooden bolt, known as a quarrel, to about the same range as the longbow when shot in a flat trajectory but unlike the longbow it was ineffective in the indirect role when shot at high angle. Unlike the longbow it could be used by almost anybody, and at short range its penetrative power against plate armour was probably better than the longbow’s arrow. It was, however, more expensive to produce than the bow and, due to the time needed to reload, had a much reduced shooting rate – perhaps two quarrels a minute compared the ten arrows a minute that the longbowman could loose.

Phillip of France had originally assembled a fleet to take an army to Scotland, but that had been scuppered by Edwards forays against the likely landing areas. Now that fleet would be augmented to invade England directly and the expedition would be launched from Sluys, a port that is now silted up but was then at the mouth of the Rivers Zwin and Honde and was the main port for Bruges, at the mouth of the River Scheldt downriver from Antwerp. Ships were moved from Boulogne and other French ports to create what Phillip called The Great Army of the Sea and consisted of six galleys, twenty-two oared barges, seven sailing ships specifically built as warships, 167 merchantmen modified as troopships and a number of other vessels from the Mediterranean, augmented by Castilian battleships, great towering three-masted monsters with castles that overlooked any English ship. Manning the fleet were around 20,000 men, soldiers and sailors, but this is less imposing than might appear, for of the army only 150 men-at-arms were experienced soldiers, who acted as the officers, and there were but 500 hired crossbowmen. The remainder of the army was made up of militia, partly trained and ill equipped, and recently impressed recruits, hardly trained at all. The nobility, regarding sea battles as beneath them, were conspicuously absent. Once the invasion force had landed in England the feudal array would follow and take the glory.

TO BE CONTINUED