Fowey Harbour in peacetime
Pirates in the English Channel? Surely not!
Think again. For as long as men have sailed the seas with goods in their ships, pirates have flourished, seizing all opportunities to steal either goods or entire ships. In fact and fiction, we have heard a lot about them in the Caribbean, in Tudor and later times. But Medieval Pirates is the first account to describe pirates on our own shores at a much earlier date.
Nine, eight, even seven hundred years ago, commercial and political conditions combined to provide ideal opportunities for pirates in the English Channel. Two great industrial centres, Flanders and Florence, led the world, importing raw materials and exporting finished goods. As for English trade, she exported two essentials – wool from northern sheep pastures and tin from the south-west. In the fourteenth-century wool manufacture began in the Cotswold valleys, but still the dyes and alum had to be imported. She imported vast quantities of French wine, mainly from Gascony; salt from Brittany; iron from Castile; and spices and other luxuries, which came through Venice but started out much further east. Countless ships laden with this trade, sailing near the coast, proved ideal targets for pirates.
Politically, the world was volatile, reacting to the whim of leaders. England and France were always hostile and often at war. The English Channel was a wide, lawless, unstable frontier zone between them, and so the ports were vital frontier towns. Local merchants, supported by landowners, not only sailed the ships but also managed the ports. The merchants grabbed the opportunity to exploit that situation, so piracy went hand in hand with official trade.
With no royal navy, the king had to rely on the goodwill and support of those men, to carry his trade, his messengers, his household and on occasions, to transport his armies across the Channel. In effect, the merchants, alias the pirates, usually had the upper hand, and often chose to disregard instructions from the king
In the thirteenth-century the Cinque Ports (Sandwich, Dover, Hythe, Romney, Hastings together with Winchelsea and Rye) controlled the shortest Channel crossing. In order for royal armies to cross, the Ports repeatedly struck bargains with Henry III and Edward I. In exchange for supplying transport the ports received a series of privileges which they still remember in ceremonies today. It was, in effect, a form of blackmail. The kings were also unable to stop a long-term petty war which the Cinque Ports waged with (Great) Yarmouth over the annual Herring Fair, herrings being a vital source of food.
In the fourteenth-century, England repeatedly sent armies to make forays across Normandy. They are memorable for the capture of Calais and certain spectacular victories, but achieved no other lasting gain. Retaliation by the French, raids on the south coast of England, was much more effective. The raid on Southampton, the leading port, on 4 October 1338 was typically terrifying. When fifty French, Scottish and Castilian galleys sailed up Southampton Water, the port’s defenders fled, leaving the enemy to seize great quantities of wool and wine from quays, warehouses and the castle before burning the town and abandoning it destitute. By 1390 French raiders had crippled the ports and with them, the English economy.
Henry IV therefore lacked finance, and with the eastern ports shattered, he turned to those in the south-west, notably Dartmouth, Plymouth, Fowey and Bristol. Another kind of piracy, state-sponsored privateering, came to the fore. Henry ordered them to attack French cargoes, with the provision that they could keep some or all of the loot. John Hawley of Dartmouth (c.1340-1408), a leading privateer, was a benevolent man who ploughed part of his fortune back into his town and port. But by 1335, a rougher class of men emerged, and, after England lost Gascony, her last French possession except Calais in 1453, chaos prevailed at sea ...
Jill Eddison is the author of Medieval Pirates: Pirates, Raiders And Privateers 1204-1453. Breaking new ground, on a subject that remains topical today, this book explores medieval piracy as it waxed and waned, setting dramatic life stories against the better-known landmarks of history.