SLUYS
1340
The gold "nobles" of the coinage of King Edward III show in conventional
fashion the King standing in the waist of a ship with a high bow and poop,
the red-cross banner of St. George at the stern and the lions of England
and the lilies of France emblazoned on his shield. The device typifies his
claim to the sovereignty of the narrow seas between England and the
Continent, the prize won for him by the fleet that conquered at Sluys.
Sluys is often spoken of as the sea-fight that inaugurated the long
victorious career of the British Navy. It would be more correct to say that
it was the battle which, by giving King Edward the command of the Channel,
made his successful invasion of France possible, and secured for England
the possession of Calais. Holding both Dover and Calais the English for two
centuries were masters of the narrow sea-gate through which all the trade
between northern Europe and the rest of the world had to pass. They had the
power of bringing severe pressure to bear upon the German cities of the
Hansa League, the traders of the Low Countries, the merchants of Spain,
Genoa, and Venice, by their control of this all-important waterway. Hence
the claim upheld till the seventeenth century that the King of England was
"Sovereign of the Seas," and that in the Channel and the North Sea every
foreign ship had to lower her sails and salute any English "King's ship"
that she met.
Sluys, which had such far-reaching consequences, was not the first of
English naval victories. Alfred the Great maintained in the latter part of
his reign a fleet of small ships to guard the coasts against the Norse and
Danish pirates, and this won him the name of founder of the British Navy.
But for centuries after there was no attempt at forming or keeping up a
regular naval establishment. Alfred's navy must have been dispersed under
his weaker successors, for the Northmen never found any serious obstacles
to their raids. Harold had no navy, and the result was that in a single
twelvemonth England was twice invaded, first by Harold Hadrada and Tostig,
who were beaten at Stamford Bridge, and then by William the Norman, who
conquered at Hastings. But even the Conqueror had no fighting fleet. His
ships were used merely to ferry his army across the Channel, and he made no
attempt to use them against the Northmen who harried the east coast. The
record of victory begins with the reign of King John, when in 1213 William
Longsword, his half-brother, with a fleet gathered from the shipping of
Dover and the south-eastern ports, destroyed a French fleet that had
assembled on the coast of the Netherlands to transport an invading army to
England. Damme (i.e. "the dams or embankments to keep out the sea") was
then a fortified port. It is now a Dutch village, some miles from the
coast, in the midst of green meadows won from the sea, with roads shaded by
avenues of trees, and only the traffic of its canal to remind it that it
once had a harbour.
Four years later Hubert de Burgh, Governor of Dover Castle, defeated
another attempted raid on England by improvising a fleet and attacking the
French squadron in the Straits. De Burgh got to windward of the French,
then sailed down on them, grappled and boarded them. There was an incident
which happily we do not hear of again in naval warfare. As the English
scrambled on board of the French ships they threw quicklime in the eyes of
their opponents. It was, no doubt, an ugly trick of piratical fighting, for
in those days when there was no police of the seas there was a certain
amount of piracy and smuggling carried on by the men of Dover and the
Cinque Ports. Just as for lack of police protection highway robbery was a
danger of travel by road, so till organized naval power developed there was
a good deal of piracy in the European seas, and peaceful traders sailed in
large fleets for mutual protection, just as travellers on land took care to
have companions for a journey. The Channel was also enlivened by occasional
fights for fishing-grounds between fleets of fishing-craft, and the
quicklime trick of Hubert de Burgh's battle was probably one of the methods
of this irregular warfare.
Edward I had a navy which did useful service by coasting northward, as his
armies marched into Scotland, and securing for them regular supplies and
reinforcements by sea. Under his weak successor the sea was neglected, and
it was the third Edward who used the navy effectually to secure that his
quarrel with France should be fought out, not on English ground, but on the
Continent, and thus became the founder of the sea power of England.
There was no Royal Navy in the modern sense of the term. When the King went
to war his fleet was recruited from three different sources. The warship
was a merchantman, on board of which a number of fighting-men, knights,
men-at-arms, archers and billmen were embarked. These were more numerous
than the crew of sailors which navigated the ship, for the largest vessels
of the time were not of more than two to three hundred tons, and as oars
were not used in the rough seas of the Channel and there was only one mast
with a single square sail, and perhaps a jib-foresail, the necessary hands
for sailing her were few. There was a dual command, the knight or noble who
led the fighting-men being no sailor, and having a pilot under him who
commanded the sailors and navigated the ship. This dual arrangement (which
we have seen at work in the fleets of more ancient days) left its traces in
our Navy up to the middle of the nineteenth century, when ships of the
Royal Navy still had, besides the captain, a "sailing master" among their
officers.
The King owned a small number of ships, which he maintained just as he kept
a number of knights in his pay to form his personal retinue on land. During
peace he hired these ships out to merchants, and when he called them back
for war service he took the crews that navigated them into his pay, and
sent his fighting-men on board. But the King's ships were the least
numerous element in the war fleet. Merchantmen were impressed for service
from London and the other maritime towns and cities, the feudal levy
providing the fighting complement. A third element in the fleet was
obtained from the Cinque Ports. There were really seven, not five, of
them--Dover, Hythe, Hastings, Winchelsea, Rye, Romney, and Sandwich. Under
their charter they enjoyed valuable privileges, in return for which they
were bound to provide, when the King called upon them, fifty-seven ships
and twelve hundred men and boys for fifteen days at their own expense, and
as long after as the King paid the necessary charges. The naming of so
short a term of service shows that maritime operations were expected not to
last long. It was, indeed, a difficult matter to keep a medieval fleet at
sea, and the conditions that produced this state of things lasted far into
the modern period. Small ships crowded with fighting-men had no room for
any large store of provisions and water. When the first scanty supply was
exhausted, unless they were in close touch with a friendly port, they had
to be accompanied by a crowd of storeships, and as the best merchantmen
would naturally have been impressed for the actual fighting, these would be
small, inferior, and less seaworthy ships, and the fleet would have to pay
as much attention to guarding its convoy as to operating against an enemy.
No wonder that as a rule the most that could be attempted was a short
voyage and a single stroke.
It was in 1340 that King Edward III challenged the title of Philip of
Valois to the crown of France, and by claiming it for himself began "the
Hundred Years' War." Both sides to the quarrel began to collect fleets and
armies, and both realized that the first struggle would be on the sea. It
would be thus decided whether the war was to be fought out on French or on
English ground.
The French King collected ships from his ports and strengthened his fleet
by hiring a number of large warships from Genoa, then one of the great
maritime republics of the Mediterranean. The Genoese sailors knew the
northern seas, for there were always some of their ships in the great
trading fleet that passed up the Channel each spring, bringing the produce
of the Mediterranean countries and the East to the northern ports of
Europe, and returned in the late summer laden with the merchandise of the
Hansa traders.
Early in the year King Philip had assembled a hundred and ninety ships,
large and small, French and Genoese, off the little town of Sluys on the
coast of Flanders. The fleet lay in the estuary of the river Eede. Like
Damme, Sluys has now become an inland village. Its name means "the sluice,"
and, like Damme, reminds us how the people of the Netherlands have for
centuries been winning their land from the sea by their great system of
dams to keep the sea-water back, and sluices to carry the river-water to
the sea. The estuary of the Eede where the French fleet anchored is now
pasture land traversed by a canal, and the embankments that keep the sea
from the meadow lands lie some miles to the westward of the place where
King Edward won his great naval victory.
Had the French acted at once, there was nothing to prevent them from
opening the war by invading England. Perhaps they did not know how slowly
the English fleet was assembling.
In the late spring when the French armament was nearly complete, King
Edward had only forty ships ready. They lay in the estuaries of the Orwell
and the Stour, inside Harwich, long a place of importance for English
naval wars in the North Sea. Gradually, week after week, other ships came
in from the Thames, and the northern seaports, from Southampton and the
Cinque Ports, and even from Bristol, creeping slowly along the coasts from
harbour to harbour. All this time the French might have swept the seas and
destroyed the English in detail; but they waited for more ships and more
men, and the time of opportunity went by.
At last in the beginning of June the English King had two hundred ships
assembled, from decked vessels down to open sailing-boats. An army crowded
on board of them, knights and nobles in shining armour, burghers and
peasants in steel caps and leather jerkins, armed with the long-bow or the
combined pike and long battle-axe known as the "bill." The King's ship flew
the newly adopted royal standard in which the golden lions on a red field,
the arms of England, were quartered with the golden lilies of France on a
field of blue, and another banner displaying the device that is still the
flag of the Royal Navy, the Red Cross of St. George on a field of white,
the banner adopted by Richard Coeur de Lion in his Crusade. The other ships
flew the banners of the barons and knights who commanded them, and on the
royal ship and those of the chief commanders there were trumpeters whose
martial notes were to give the signal for battle. As a knight of the Middle
Ages despised the idea of fighting on foot, and there might be a landing in
Flanders, some of the barons had provided for all eventualities by taking
with them their heavy war horses, uncomfortably stabled in the holds of the
larger ships.
The fleet sailed southward along the coast, keeping the land in sight. The
two hundred ships of varying rates of speed and handiness could not move in
the ordered lines of a modern naval armament, but streamed along in an
irregular procession, closing up when they anchored for the night. From the
North Foreland, with a favourable wind behind them, they put out into the
open sea, and steering eastward were out of sight of land for a few hours,
a more venturous voyage for these coasting craft than the crossing of the
Atlantic is for us to-day. It must have been a trying experience for knight
and yeoman, and they must have felt that a great peril was past when the
tops of church towers and windmills showed above the horizon, and then the
low shore fringed with sandhills and the green dykes came in sight.
Coasting along the shore north-eastwards, the fleet reached a point to the
north-west of Bruges, not far from where the watering-place of Blankenberg
now stands. It had been ascertained from fishermen and coast-folk that the
French fleet was still at Sluys, and it was decided to proceed no further
without reconnoitring the enemy. The larger ships anchored, the smaller
were beached. The fighting-men landed and camped on the shore to recover
from the distresses of their voyage, during which they would have been
cramped up in narrow quarters.
Instead of, like a modern admiral, sending some of his lighter and swifter
ships to take a look at the enemy, King Edward arranged a cavalry
reconnaissance, a simpler matter for his knightly following. Some of the
horses were got ashore, and a party of knights mounted and rode over the
sandhills towards Sluys. They reached a point where, without being observed
by the enemy, they could get a good view of the hostile fleet, and they
brought back news that made the King decide to attack next day.
The French fleet was commanded by two knights, the Sieur de Kiriet and the
Sieur de Bahuchet. Kiriet's name suggests that he came of the Breton race
that has given so many good sailors and naval officers to France, so
perhaps he knew something of the sea. Associated with the two French
commanders there was an experienced fighting admiral, a veteran of the wars
of the Mediterranean, Barbavera, who commanded the Genoese ships. Though
they had a slight superiority of numbers and more large ships than the
English, Kiriet and Bahuchet were, as one might expect from their prolonged
inactivity, very wanting in enterprise now that the crisis had come. They
were preparing to fight on the defensive. It was in vain that the
experienced commander Barbavera urged that they should weigh anchor and
fight the English in the open sea, where numbers and weight would give them
an advantage that would be lost in the narrow waters of the Eede estuary.
They persisted in awaiting the attack.
The French fleet was anchored along the south shore of the river-mouth,
sterns to the land, its left towards the river-mouth, its right towards the
town of Sluys. The vessel on the extreme left was an English ship of large
size, the "Great Cristopher," captured in the Channel in the first days of
the war. The ships were grouped in three divisions--left, centre, and
right. Kiriet and Bahuchet adopted the same plan of battle that King Olaf
had used at Svold. The ships in each of the three divisions were lashed
together side by side, so that they could only be boarded by the high
narrow bows, and there was an addition to the Norse plan, for inboard
across the bows barricades had been erected formed of oars, spars, and
planking, fastened across the forecastle decks. Behind these barriers
archers and Genoese cross-bowmen were posted. There was a second line of
archers in the fighting-tops, for since the times of Norse warfare the
masts had become heavier, and now supported above the crossyard a kind of
crow's nest where two or three bowmen could be stationed, with shields hung
round them as a parapet.
The fleet thus was converted into a series of three long, narrow floating
forts. It was an intelligible plan of defence for a weak fleet against a
strong one, but a hopeless plan for an armament strong enough to have met
its opponents on the open sea, ship to ship. At Svold, Erik Jarl had shown
that such an array could be destroyed piecemeal if assailed on an exposed
flank, and at Sluys the left, where the "Great Cristopher" lay to seaward,
positively invited such an attack.
King Edward saw his advantage as soon as his knights came back from their
adventurous ride and told him what they had seen, and he arranged his plans
accordingly. His great ships were to lead the attack, and concentrate their
efforts on the left of the French line. The rest were to pass inside them
and engage the enemy in front, on the left, and centre. The enemy had by
tying up his ships made it impossible to come to the rescue of the left,
even if the narrow waters of the estuary would have allowed him to deploy
his force into line. The English would have, and could not fail to keep, a
local superiority from the very outset on the left of the enemy, and once
it came to close quarters they would clear the French and Genoese decks
from end to end of the line, taking ship after ship. While the attack
developed the English archers would prepare the way for it by thinning the
ranks of their enemies on the ships in the centre and then on the right.
At dawn on 24 June--the day of battle--the wind was blowing fair into the
mouth of the Eede, but the tide was ebbing, and the attack could not be
driven home till it turned, and gave deep water everywhere between the
banks of the inlet. King Edward used the interval to array his fleet and
get it into position for the dash into the river. His ships stood out to
sea on the starboard tack, a brave sight with the midsummer sun shining on
the white sails, the hundreds of banners glowing with red, blue, white, and
gold, the painted shields hanging on poop and bulwark. On the raised bows
and sterns of the larger ships barons and knights and men-at-arms stood
arrayed in complete armour. The archers were ranged along the bulwarks, or
looked out from the crow's-nest-tops over the swelling sails.
Old Barbavera must have longed to cut lashings, slip cables, drift out on
the tide, and meet the English in the open, but he was in a minority of one
against two. And now the tide was dead slack and began to turn, and King
Edward's trumpets gave the expected signal for action. As their notes rang
over the sea the shouting sailors squared the yards and the fleet began to
scud before the wind for the river-mouth, where beyond the green dykes that
kept the entrance free a forest of masts bristled along the bank towards
Sluys.
The English came in with wind and tide helping them, several ships abreast,
the rest following each as quickly as she might, like a great flock of
sea-birds streaming towards the shore. There could be no long ranging fire
to prelude the close attack. At some sixty yards, when men could see each
other's faces across the gap, the English archers drew their bows, and the
cloth-yard arrows began to fly, their first target the "Great Cristopher"
on the flank of the line. Bolts from cross-bows came whizzing back in
reply. But, as at Crecy soon after, the long-bow with its rapid discharge
of arrows proved its superiority over the slower mechanical weapon of the
Genoese cross-bowmen.
But no time was lost in mere shooting. Two English ships crashed into the
bows and the port side of the "Cristopher," and with the cry of "St. George
for England!" a score of knights vied with each other for the honour of
being first on board of the enemy. The other ships of the English van swung
round bow to bow with the next of the French line, grappled and fought to
board them. King Edward himself climbed over the bows of a French ship,
risking his life as freely as the youngest of his esquires. Then for a
while on the French left it was a question of which could best handle the
long, heavy swords, made not for deft fencing work, but for sheer hard
hacking at helmet and breastplate.
Behind this fight on the flank, ship after ship slipped into the river, but
at first attacked only the left division closely, those that had pushed
furthest in opening with arrow fire on the centre and leaving the right to
look helplessly on. The English archers soon cleared the enemy's tops of
their bowmen, and then from the English masts shot coolly into the throng
on the hostile decks, their comrades at the bulwarks shooting over the
heads of those engaged in the bows. The English arrows inflicted severe
loss on the enemy, but the real business was done by the close attack of
the boarding-parties, that cleared ship after ship from the left inwards,
each ship attacked in turn having to meet the knights and men-at-arms from
several of the English vessels.
But the French fought with determined courage, and hour after hour went by
as the attack slowly worked its way along the line. The slaughter was
terrible, for in a sea-fight, as in the storming of a city wall, no quarter
was asked or given. The crews of the captured ships were cut down as they
fought, or driven over the stern into the water, where, for the most part,
their heavy armour drowned them.
It was past noon, and the tide was turning when the left and centre, the
squadrons of Kiriet and Bahuchet, were all captured. Then the attack raged
round the nearest vessels on the right, tall ships of the Genoese. Most of
these, too, were taken, but as the tide ran out King Edward feared his
large ships would ground in the upper waters of the estuary, and the signal
was given to break off the attack, an order welcome even to the weary
victors.
Barbavera, with a few ships, got clear of the beaten right wing and lay up
near Sluys, while the English plundered and burned some of their prizes and
took the best of them out to sea on the ebbing tide. In the night the
Genoese admiral slipped out to sea, and got safely away. The French fleet
had been utterly destroyed, and the Genoese sailors had no intention of
further risking themselves in King Philip's quarrel. They thought only of
returning as soon as might be to the Mediterranean.
King Edward went on to Ghent, after landing his fighting-men, and sending
his fleet to bring further forces from England. Henceforth for many a long
year he might regard the Channel as a safe highway for men and supplies for
the war in France.
The victory of the English had cost them a relatively trifling loss. The
French losses are said to have been nearly 30,000 men. Strange to say,
among the English dead were four ladies who had embarked on the King's ship
to join the Queen's Court at Ghent. How they were killed is not stated.
Probably they were courageous dames whose curiosity led them to watch the
fight from the tall poop of the flagship as they would have watched a
tournament from the galleries of the lists, and there the cross-bow bolts
of the Genoese found them.
There is an old story that men feared to tell King Philip the news of the
disaster, and the Court jester broke the tidings with a casual remark that
the French must be braver than the English, for they jumped into the sea by
scores, while the islanders stuck to their ships. The defeat at sea
prepared the way for other defeats by land, and in these campaigns there
appeared a new weapon of war--rudely fashioned cannon of short range and
slow, inaccurate fire--the precursors of heavier artillery that was to
change the whole character of naval warfare.
It was the coming of the cannon that inaugurated the modern period. But
before telling of battles in which artillery played the chief part, we must
tell of a decisive battle that was a link between old and new. Lepanto--the
battle that broke the Turkish power in the Mediterranean--saw, like the
sea-fights of later days, artillery in action, and at the same time
oar-driven galleys fighting with the tactics that had been employed at
Salamis and Actium, and knights in armour storming the enemy's ships like
Erik Jarl at Svold and King Edward at Sluys.
[Illustration: A GALLEY
_From an engraving by J. P. le Bas_]
[Illustration: A CARRACK OR FRIGATE
_From an engraving by Tomkins_
MEDITERRANEAN CRAFT OF THE 16TH CENTURY]