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Another random document with
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 The Project Gutenberg eBook of A history of the
administration of the Royal Navy and of merchant
shipping in relation to the Navy from MDIX to
MDCLX, with an introduction treating of the
preceding period
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
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laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: A history of the administration of the Royal Navy and of

merchant shipping in relation to the Navy from MDIX to
MDCLX, with an introduction treating of the preceding
period

Author: M. Oppenheim

Release date: August 8, 2022 [eBook #68713]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: John Lane, 1896

Credits: MWS and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at

https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet
Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY

OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE ROYAL NAVY AND OF
MERCHANT SHIPPING IN RELATION TO THE NAVY FROM MDIX
TO MDCLX, WITH AN INTRODUCTION TREATING OF THE
PRECEDING PERIOD ***
 A HISTORY OF THE
ADMINISTRATION
OF THE ROYAL NAVY

VOLUME I
MDIX-MDCLX

A HISTORY OF THE ADMINISTRATION

OF THE ROYAL NAVY
AND OF MERCHANT SHIPPING
IN RELATION TO THE NAVY

BY M. OPPENHEIM

VOL I
MDIX-MDCLX

JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD

LONDON AND NEW YORK
MDCCCXCVI
A HISTORY OF THE ADMINISTRATION
OF THE ROYAL NAVY
AND OF MERCHANT SHIPPING
IN RELATION TO THE NAVY
FROM MDIX TO MDCLX WITH
AN INTRODUCTION TREATING
OF THE PRECEDING PERIOD

BY M. OPPENHEIM
 JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD
LONDON AND NEW YORK
MDCCCXCVI

J. MILLER AND SON, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH

 CONTENTS
PAGE
List of Illustrations viij
Preface ix
Introduction—The Navy before 1509 1
Henry VIII, 1509-1547 45
Edward VI, 1547-1553 100
Mary and Philip and Mary, 1553-1558 109
Elizabeth, 1558-1603 115
James I, 1603-1625 184
Charles I, 1625-1649, Part I—The Seamen 216
—— Part II—Royal and Merchant Shipping 251
—— Part III—The Administration 279
The Commonwealth, 1649-1660 302
Appendix A—Inventory of the Henry Grace à Dieu 372
—— B—The Mutiny of the Golden Lion 382
—— C—Sir John Hawkyns 392
—— D—A Privateer of 1592 398
Index 401
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
The Tiger (of Henry VIII). Hand-coloured in
facsimile of a portion of the original MS.
in the British Museum, (Add. MSS., 22047) Frontispiece
Wyard’s Medal, 1650. From one of the four
Remaining Medals (British Museum) Title Page
The Seal of the Navy Office xiij
An Elizabethan Man-of-War. From a
contemporary Drawing in the Bodleian
Library, Oxford, (Rawlinson MSS., A 192, 20) 130
The Medway Anchorage (temp. Elizabeth).
Hand-coloured in facsimile of a portion of
the Original MS. in the British Museum,
(Cott. MSS., Aug. I, i, 52) 150
 PREFACE
Of the following pages the Introduction and the portion dealing
with the period 1509-1558 are entirely new. The remainder originally
appeared in the English Historical Review, but the Elizabethan
section has been rewritten and much enlarged in the light of fresh
material found since it was first printed, and many additions and
alterations have been made to the other papers. Of the four
Appendices three are new.
Sixteen years ago the doyen of our English naval historians,
Professor J. K. Laughton, wrote,

‘Every one knows that according to the Act of Parliament, it

is on the Navy that “under the good providence of God, the
wealth, safety, and strength of the kingdom chiefly depend,”
but there are probably few who have realised the full meaning
of that grave sentence.’[1]

Since those words were penned, a more widely diffused interest in

naval matters has permeated all classes of society, and there is,
happily, a vastly increased perception of what the Navy means for
England and the Empire.[2] The greater interest taken in naval
progress has caused a new attention to be bestowed on the early
history of the Navy, and there is little apology required for the plan—
however much may be needed for the execution—of a work dealing
with the civil organisation under which the executive has toiled and
fought. Whole libraries have been written about fleets and
expeditions, but there has never yet been any systematic history of
the organisation that rendered action on a large scale possible, or of
the naval administration generally, and although its record does not
appear to the writer to be a matter for national pride, it has its
importance as a corollary of—and if only as a foil to—that of the
Navy proper. This work as a whole, is therefore intended to be a
history of the later Royal Navy, and of naval administration, from the
accession of Henry VIII until the close of the Napoleonic wars, in all
the details connected with the subject except those relating to actual
warfare.
The historical evolution of many of the great administrative offices
of the state, as they exist now, can be, in most cases, observed
through the centuries and the course and causes of their growth
traced with sufficient exactness. Originally a delegation of some one
or more of the functions of the monarch, they have developed from
small and obscure beginnings in the far off past and increased with
the growth of the nation. The naval administration of to-day has no
such dignity of antiquity. It will be for the readers of these volumes in
their entirety to decide whether it has earned that higher honour
which comes of loyal service performed with justice to the
subordinates dependent on it, and with honesty to the British people
who have entrusted it with such important duties.
The Board of Admiralty came into power subsequent to the period
at which this volume ends. It dates, properly from 1689, or, at the
utmost, reaches back to 1673, but its forerunner, the modern
administration which is the subject of the present volume, sprang full
grown into life in 1546 when the outgrown mediæval system ended.
The Admiralty Board is in the place, and administers the duties, of
the Lord Admiral, but that officer although the titular head of the
Navy never had any very active or continuous part in administration,
nor was the post itself a very ancient one. James, Duke of York,
afterwards James II, was the first Lord Admiral who really took actual
charge of domestic naval affairs and the Admiralty succeeded him,
and to his powers, thus overshadowing the Navy Board. Between
1546 and 1618, the Navy was governed by the Principal Officers,
controlling the various branches of naval work, who constituted the
Navy Board; between 1618 and 1689 we have a transitional period
when the Navy Officers, Commissioners of the Admiralty,
Parliamentary Committees, Lord Admiral, and the King, were all at
different times, and occasionally simultaneously, ruling and directing.
The Admiralty now more nearly represents in function and
composition the old Navy Board, abolished in ignominy in 1832, than
the Board of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries with which,
except in the power still retained by the First Lord, it has little in
common but name.
Our subject then in this volume, is the Navy Board as the
predominant authority between 1546 and 1660. Although a history of
the modern administration should in exactness, therefore, begin in
1546, an academic preciseness of date would be obtained at the
expense of historical accuracy since Henry VIII remodelled the Navy,
before he touched the administration. The year of his accession has
therefore been chosen as the starting point. But it should be borne in
mind that there is very much less difference between the great and
complex administration of to-day, and the Navy Board or—as it was
then sometimes called—the Admiralty, of 24th April 1546, than
between the Board of 24th April and what existed the day before.
Within the twenty-four hours the old system had been swept away
and replaced; its successor has altered in form but not in principle.
The sources of information are sufficiently indicated by the
references. The great majority of them being used for the first time,
subsequent inquiry may modify or alter some of the conclusions here
reached. Unless a date is given in a double form (e.g. 20th February
1558-9) it will be understood to be new or present style, so far as the
year is concerned. Few attempts have been made to give the
modern equivalents of the various sums of money mentioned during
so many periods when values were continually fluctuating. With one
exception all the MS. collections known to the writer, likely to be of
value, have been fully examined, but there are also many papers not
available for research in the possession of private owners. The one
exception referred to is the collection of Pepys MSS., at Magdalene
College, Cambridge. An application to examine these was refused
on the ground that a member of the university was working at them.
It is to be hoped that this ingenuous adaptation of the principles of
Protection to historical investigation will duly stimulate production.
There remains the pleasant duty of thanking those from whom I
have received assistance. To Mr S. R. Gardiner, and Professor J. K.
Laughton, I am obliged for various suggestions on historical and
naval questions; to Professor F. Elgar for information on the difficult
subject of tonnage measurement. I have to thank Mr F. J. Simmons
for assistance in the task of index compilation and proof-reading.
As this is the first opportunity I have had of publicly acknowledging
my indebtedness to Mr E. Salisbury of the Record Office, I am glad
to be now able to express my sincere gratitude to that gentleman for
constant and cordially given help in many ways during the five years
this book has been in preparation.
September 1896.
 INTRODUCTION
THE NAVY BEFORE 1509

The creation of the modern Royal Navy has been variously The Modern Navy.
attributed to Henry VII, to Henry VIII, and to Elizabeth.
Whichever sovereign may be considered entitled to the honour, the statement, as
applied to either monarch, really means that modification of mediæval conditions,
and adoption of improvements in construction and administration, which brought
the Navy into the form familiar to us until the introduction of steam and iron. And
in that sense no one sovereign can be accredited with its formation. The
introduction of portholes in, or perhaps before the reign of Henry VII,
differentiated the man-of-war, involved radical alterations in build and armament,
and made the future line-of-battle ship possible; the establishment of the Navy
Board by Henry VIII, made the organisation of fleets feasible and ensured a
certain, if slow, progress because henceforward cumulative and, in the long run,
independent of the energy and foresight of any one man under whom, as under
Henry V, the Navy might largely advance, to sink back at his death into decay.
Under Elizabeth the improvements in building and rigging constituted a step
longer than had yet been taken towards the modern type, the Navy Board
became an effectively working and flourishing institution, and the wars and
voyages of her reign founded the school of successful seamanship of which was
born the confidence, daring and self-reliance still prescriptive in the royal and
merchant services.
It is not the purpose of this work to deal with the history, of The origin of the
the Navy previous to the accession of Henry VIII, but no real Navy:—William I.
line of demarcation can be drawn in naval more than in other
history, and it will be necessary to briefly sketch the conditions generally existing
before 1509, and in somewhat more detail, those relating to the fifteenth century.
[3] In the widest sense the first Saxon king who possessed galleys of his own may
be said to have been the founder of the Royal Navy; in a narrower but truer
sense, the Royal Navy as an appanage of imperial power, and an entity of steady
growth, really dates from the Norman conquest. The Saxon navy although
respectable by way of number, was essentially a coast defence force, mustered
temporarily to answer momentary needs, and lacking continuity of existence and
purpose. There is but one instance of a Saxon fleet being employed out of the
four seas, that which Canute used in the conquest of Norway, and in it the
Scandinavian element was probably larger than the Saxon. With the advent of
William I, the channel, instead of remaining a boundary, became a means of
communication between the divided dominions of one monarch, and a
comparatively permanent and reliable naval force, both for military transport and
for command of the passage between the insular and continental possessions of
the Crown, became a necessity of royal policy. For nearly two centuries this duty
was mainly performed by the men of the Cinque Ports who, in return for certain
privileges and exemptions, were bound, at any moment, to place fifty-seven ships
at the service of the Crown for fifteen days free of cost, and for as much longer
time as the king required them at the customary rate of pay.[4] These claims,
practically constituting the Cinque Ports fleet a standing force, were ceaselessly
exercised by successive monarchs, and, at first sight, such demands might seem
to be destructive of that commercial progress which is the primary basis of the
growth or maintenance of shipping. But the methods of warfare in those ages
were more profitable than commerce, and the decay of the Ports was not due to
poverty caused by the calls made upon their shipping for military purposes. The
existence of the Cinque Ports service was indirectly a hindrance to the growth of
a crown navy, since it was obviously cheaper for the king to order the Ports to act
than to man and equip his own vessels; it was not until ships of larger size and
stronger build than those belonging to the Ports were required, that the royal
ships came into frequent use.
As well as mobilising the Cinque Ports fleet, the sovereign Results of the
was able to issue writs to arrest the ships of private owners Conquest:—Growth
throughout the kingdom, together with the necessary number of Trade and
Shipping.
of sailors, when rival fleets had to be fought or armies to be
transported. The Normans, descendants of the Vikings, must have been better
shipbuilders and better seamen than the Saxons, and the large number of
nautical words that can be traced back to Norman French bear witness to
improvements in rigging and handling due to them. The Crusades must have
reacted on the English marine by bringing under the observation of our seamen
the construction of ships belonging to the Mediterranean powers, then far in
advance of the North in the art of shipbuilding. And during the century which
followed the Conquest, the foreign trade, which is the nursery of shipping, was
steadily growing. Under the Angevin kings the whole coast line of France, from
Flanders to Bayonne, was, with the exception of Brittany, subject to English rule,
and the inter-coast traffic that naturally followed was the greatest stimulus to
maritime enterprise this country had yet experienced. The result was seen in the
Crusade of 1190, when the fleet of Richard I for the Mediterranean was made up
of vessels drawn from the ports of the empire, but many of them doubtless
belonging to the continental possessions of the crown; and as John certainly
possessed ships of his own, it may be inferred that Richard, and his
predecessors also had some. When a general arrest was ordered, foreign ships
were seized as well as English, and this practice continued as late as the first
years of Elizabeth. Richard I issued, in 1190, regulations for the government of
his fleet. These regulations doubtless only methodised customs already existing,
and as they dealt with offences against life and property bear the mark of their
commercial origin. Offences against discipline must have been punished by
military law and military penalties, and required no new code.
During the reign of John we meet the first sign of a naval John:—The Clerk of
administration in the official action of William of Wrotham, like the Ships.
many of his successors a cleric, and the first known ‘Keeper
of the king’s ships.’ This office, possibly in its original form of very much earlier
date and only reconstituted or enlarged in function by John, and now represented
in descent by the Secretaryship of the Admiralty, is the oldest administrative
employment in connection with the Navy. At first called ‘Keeper and Governor’ of
the king’s ships, later, ‘Clerk of the king’s ships,’ this official held, sometimes
really and sometimes nominally, the control of naval organisation until the
formation of the Navy Board in 1546. His duties included all those now performed
by a multitude of highly placed Admiralty officials. If a man of energy, experience,
and capacity, his name stands foremost in the maintenance of the royal fleets
during peace and their preparation for war; if, as frequently happened, a
merchant or subordinate official with no especial knowledge, he might become a
mere messenger riding from port to port, seeking runaway sailors, or bargaining
for small parcels of naval stores. Occasionally, under such circumstances, his
authority was further lessened by the appointment of other persons, usually such
as held minor personal offices near the king, as keepers of particular ships. This
was a method of giving a small pecuniary reward to such a one, together with the
perquisites he might be able to procure from the supply of stores and provisions
necessary for the vessel and her crew.
In the course of centuries the title changed its form. In the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries the officer is called ‘clerk of marine causes,’ and ‘clerk of the
navy;’ in the seventeenth century, ‘clerk of the acts.’ Although Pepys was not the
last clerk of the acts, the functions associated with the office, which were the
remains of the larger powers once belonging to the ‘Keeper and Governor,’ were
carried up by him to the higher post of Secretary of the Admiralty.
With the reign of Henry III we find the royal ships large Henry III.
enough to become attractive to merchants, who hired them
from the king for freight, perhaps at lower rates than could be afforded by private
owners. There is hardly a reign, down to and including that of Elizabeth, in which
men-of-war were not hired by merchants, and the earlier trading voyages to Italy
and the Levant during the last quarter of the fifteenth century were nearly all
performed by men-of-war let out for the voyage. The Navy was mainly made up
of sailing vessels even before the reign of Henry III, and by that period many of
them possessed two masts, each carrying a single sail. The conversion of a
merchantman into a fighting-ship was accomplished by fitting it with temporary
fore and after castles, which became later the permanent forecastle and poop,
the addition of a ‘top castle’ or fighting top, and the provision of proper armament.
Doubtless the king’s own ships were more strongly built, and better adapted by
internal arrangements for their work, than the hired merchantmen. The supreme
government of the Navy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was in the
hands of the King’s Council, who ordered, equally, the preparation and fitting of
ships and the action of the admirals commanding. These officers, known during
the greater part of the thirteenth century as keepers or governors of the sea, were
usually knights or nobles in command of the soldiers. While holding commission
they appear to have had jurisdiction in the matter of discipline on board their
fleets, but not of law suits or maritime causes until 1360; before that date such
causes were dealt with at common law.[5] There were usually two, one having
charge of the East, the other of the South Coast, but occasionally, an officer had
a particular section placed under his care, such as the coasts of Norfolk and
Suffolk. Their period of service was commonly short and often only for a special
employment. The maintenance of a fleet was a part of the King’s Household
expenses; in the Wardrobe Accounts for 1299-1300 are the amounts paid for
fifty-four vessels and their crews hired for the conveyance of stores for the Scotch
war.
Galleys, although frequently mentioned, were at no time a Galleys.
chief portion of our fleets. Large fleets were mainly composed
of impressed merchantmen, and galleys are expensive and useless for trading
purposes compared with sailing ships; the natural home of the galley was the
landlocked Mediterranean, and even there its utility was limited to the summer
months, so that it was still less suitable for Northern latitudes. But the great
difficulty was in manning them. Forced labour by captives taken in the continual
warfare normal amongst the states on the Mediterranean littoral solved that
problem for them, but here the cost of the free oarsman, to whom the drudgery
was in any case distasteful, was prohibitive. We shall see that, down to the close
of the sixteenth century, attempts were at various times made to form such a
service, but always unsuccessfully, and the supreme moment of the galley
service, so far as it ever existed here, was the reign of Edward I.[6] This king
steadily increased the strength of the Navy. In 1294 and 1295 galleys were built
by him at York, Southampton, Lynn, Newcastle and Ipswich, of which at least two
pulled 120 oars apiece. Perhaps the experiment was conclusive for, neither as
regards number or size do such ever occur again. Although Edward III had one or
two built, most of those he employed were temporarily hired from the Genoese or
from Aquitainean ports, and the total number bore a very small proportion to the
sailing vessels in his fleets. The records of the first years of Edward II show that
the crown possessed at least eleven vessels, all sailing ships, but the
circumstances of the reign were not conducive to the growth of a Royal Navy,
although there seem to have been ten ships in 1322.
A far-seeing statesmanship in relation to the political value Edward III:—Relative
of sea-power has been attributed to Edward III on the estimation of Army
strength of the victories of 1340 and 1350, and of two lines of and Navy.
a poem, written nearly a century later, referring to the gold noble of 1344.[7] This
view assigns to Edward a knowledge, in the modern sense, of ‘the influence of
sea-power on history’ greater than that possessed by such a statesman as
Edward I, and a policy in connection with maritime matters of which the results, at
anyrate, were directly the opposite of his intentions. The claim to be lord of the
narrow seas was not a new one, and was as much and merely a title of dignity as
any other of the sovereign’s verbal honours, not following the actual enforcement
of ownership but consequent to the fact of the channel lying between England
and Normandy.[8] And it was a title also claimed by France. There is no sign in
the policy of the early kings of any perception of the value of a navy as a militant
instrument like an army, or any sense of the importance of a real continuity in its
maintenance and use. Society was based on a military organisation, but there
was no place in that organisation for the Navy except as a subsidiary and
dependent force. Fleets were called into being to transport soldiery abroad, to
keep open communications, or to meet an enemy already at sea, but the real
work of conquest was always held to be the duty of the knights and archers they
carried from one country to another. There is no understanding shewn of the
ceaseless pressure a navy is capable of exercising, and the disbandment of all,
or the greater part, of the fleet was usually the first step which followed the
disembarkation of troops or a successful fleet action. In an age when the land
transit of goods was hampered by innumerable disadvantages, the position of
England, dominating the natural way of communication between the prosperous
cities of the north and their customers, was one of splendid command had its far-
reaching political possibilities been realised. That they did not comprehend a
function only understood many generations later cannot be made a subject of
censure, but it has a distinct bearing on the question of Edward’s superiority in
this matter to his predecessors and successors. In the same way as theirs the
methods of Edward III were directed to conquests by land, and, once the troops
were transported or an opposing fleet actually in existence was crushed, the
Channel was left as bare of protection to merchantmen, and as destitute of any
power capable of enforcing the reputed sovereignty of the narrow seas, as it
remained down to the days of the Commonwealth. Beyond the fact that in 1340
and 1350 Edward commanded in person, where his predecessors had been
represented by deputies, his action in relation to the Royal Navy differs in no
respects from theirs. The gold noble of 1344, into which so much meaning has
been read, was struck in combination with the people of Flanders for political and
trading purposes, and in connection with Edward’s intrigues to obtain their
financial and military support. It is noteworthy that in December 1339, six months
before the battle of Sluys, Flanders, Brabant, and Hainault, agreed that a
common coinage should be struck, and this, in all probability, marks the first
inception of the noble when Edward realised the purposes to which a common
coinage for England and the Low Countries might be made to work. In 1343 the
Commons petitioned for a gold coin to run equally in England and Flanders and
thus strengthened the king’s purpose. But the ship on this coin, the noble, was
obviously an afterthought since the florin, the first issue of the same year, called
in on account of its unpopularity, bore the royal leopard on the whole and half
noble and the royal crest on the quarter one; if therefore the king meant all that is
supposed to be implied by the device it occurred to him very suddenly and
subsequent to the first, and deliberately thought out, issue.[9] All that the writer of
the Libel of English Policie says is that, in 1436, the noble proves to him four
things. Further reasons, in relation to other passages of the poem, will be
adduced on a later page to show that his work is only one more instance among
the many in which individual and unofficial thinkers have been in advance of the
statesmanship of their age and whose views, ignored by their contemporaries
have become the accepted opinions of a subsequent period.
The commercial policy of Edward III was emphatically not Edward III:—
one of protection to English shipping, being a nearer Commercial policy in
approach to free trade than existed for centuries after his relation to shipping.
death. During the greater part of his reign the needs in ships for his campaigns
were supplied from the accumulations of the reigns of Edward I and Edward II,
the second of which was not necessarily disastrous to commerce. But when
these were exhausted it was found that a system which had aimed merely at
obtaining a highest possible yearly revenue for the purpose of supporting armies
had, whether or not in itself, fiscally praiseworthy resulted in the ruin of English
shipping. In 1372 and 1373, the Commons complained of the destruction of
shipping and the decay of the port towns, and it is collateral evidence of Edward’s
real lack of insight into the value of a marine—its slow creation and its easy loss
—that some of the causes to which they attributed these circumstances were
directly due to a reckless indifference to, or ignorance of, the only conditions
which could render a merchant marine, subject to conscription, possible.[10]
Vessels, they said, were pressed long before they were really wanted, and until
actually taken into the service of the crown, ships were idle and seamen had to
be paid and supported at the expense of the owners; the effect of royal
ordinances which had driven many shipowners to other occupations, and the
decrease in the number of sailors due to these and other causes, formed further
articles of remonstrance.[11]
The year which saw the decease of the ‘Lord of the Sea,’ was marked by the
sack of Rye, Lewes, Hastings, Yarmouth, Dartmouth, Plymouth, Folkestone,
Portsmouth, and the Isle of Wight, a sufficient commentary on the title, and an
adequate illustration of the system which had left absolutely no navy, royal or
mercantile, capable of protecting the coasts.
In 1378 the Commons again attributed the defenceless Payment of hired
state of the kingdom not so much to the late king’s ships.
impressment of ships as to the losses and poverty caused by
non-payment, or delay in payment for their use, and lack of compensation for
waste of fittings and stores. Every meeting of Parliament was signalised by fresh
representations, and that of 1380 obtained a promise that owners should receive
3s 4d a ‘ton-tight’ for every three months, commencing from the day of arrival at
the port of meeting; in 1385 this allowance was reduced to two shillings, and
remained at that rate, notwithstanding frequent petitions for a return to the older
amount, for at least half a century.[12] It is not known when the payment of 3s 4d
a ton was first introduced, nor on what principle it was calculated, but, in 1416,
the Commons said that it ran ‘from beyond the time of memory.’ The following
petition, undated, but probably belonging to one of the early years of Henry IV,
shows that it was older than the Edwards, and, incidentally, yields some
interesting information:

‘To the very noble and very wise lords of this present Parliament very
humbly supplicate all owners of ships in this kingdom. That whereas in
the time of the noble King Edward and his predecessors, whenever any
ship was commanded for service that the owner of such a ship took 3s
4d per ton-tight in the three months by way of reward for repair of the
ship and its gear, and the fourth part of any prize made at sea, by which
reward the shipping of this kingdom was then well maintained and ruled
so that at that time, 150 ships of the Tower were available in the
kingdom;[13] and since the decease of the noble King Edward, in the time
of Richard, late King of England, the said reward was reduced to two
shillings the ton-tight, and this very badly paid, so that the owners of such
ships show no desire to keep up and maintain their ships, but have them
lying useless; and by this cause the shipping of this kingdom is so
diminished and deteriorated that there be not in all the kingdom more
than 25 ships of the Tower.’[14]

They then beg a return to the old rates. We may gather from this document
that, at some time during the reign of Edward III there were one hundred and fifty
large fighting ships available, and there is some reason to believe that, both in
number and size, the fourteenth and fifteenth century navy has been too much
underrated when compared with that of the sixteenth century. At least one
merchantman of the time of Edward III was of three hundred tons, others were of
two hundred, and it will be shown that, in the middle of the fifteenth century, the
number and tonnage of merchant vessels will compare favourably with any
subsequent period up to, and in fact later, than the accession of Elizabeth.
While, under Richard II, the guard of the seas was The close of the xiv
maintained with chequered success by hired ships, the century:—The
French, under the able rule of Charles V, not only possessed French Navy.
a navy but had founded a dockyard at Rouen completely equipped according to
the ideas of the age.[15] Thirteen galleys and two barges are mentioned in this