THE SAFEGUARD OF THE SEA

N. A. M. Rodger is Professor of Naval History at Exeter University and formerly Anderson Senior Research Fellow, National Maritime Museum. He is the author of The Wooden World, The Insatiable Earl: A life of John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich and The Admiralty. The second volume of his naval history of Britain, The Command of the Ocean, is also published by Penguin.

N.A.M. RODGER

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As for naval skills, they [the Spartans] will not find them easy to acquire. You yourselves have scarcely mastered them, having worked at them ever since the Persian war… Seamanship is an art like any other; it is not something which can be picked up in one's spare time, indeed, it leaves no leisure for anything else.

Pericles addresses the Athenians
Thucydides, History of the War between Athens and Sparta I, 142.

4 Fall of the House of Anjou
(Operations 1204–1266; Administration 1204–1216)

26 A Diamond in his Crown
(Operations and Administration 1630–1639; Ships 1603–1639)

MAPS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Unless marked otherwise all illustrations are held in copyright by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

3 Disembarking horses in 1967 photographed by Ole Crumlin-Pedersen (© Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde)

7 A modern replica of the Bremen cog (© Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum, Bremerhaven)

10 The fourteenth-century lighthouse of St Catherine's, Isle of Wight (© Isle of Wight Council, Guildhall, Newport)

11 A carved pew-end of about 1415 showing an early two-master (© Victoria & Albert Museum, London)

12 Early fifteenth-century two-masted Mediterranean carracks (© Museu Nacional d Art de Catalunya, Barcelona)

14 & 15 Two views of a four-masted ship from the ‘Warwick Roll' (© British Library, London)

23 The rowbarge Flower de Luce, from the Anthony Roll (© Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepys MS)

24 An English ‘Mediterranean-style' galley, the Galley Subtle of 1543 (© British Library, London)

25 The galleass Tiger, as originally built, from the Anthony Roll (© British Library, London)

26 The Jesus of Lubeck, from the Anthony Roll (© Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepys MS)

27 Edward Fiennes, Lord Clinton, as Lord Admiral of England by Hans Eworth (© Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

28 One of the new galleons with their characteristic crescent profile (© Bodleian Library, Oxford)

29 A merchant ship of about 1560 from the elder P. Breughel's The Fall of Icarus (© A.C.L., Brussels)

30 A galleon bow, from Matthew Baker's notebook (© Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepys MS)

31 An English shipwright at work in his drawing-office (© Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepys MS)

32 The sheer and rigging plan of a galleon (© Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepys MS)

33 A large pinnace or small galleon, from Baker's notebook (© Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepys MS)

34 Sir William Winter's squadron at Smerwick in 1580 (Public Record Office, London)

35 The Black Pinnace bringing home the body of Sir Philip Sidney in 1586 (© Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepys MS)

36 A chart of the Thames and Medway about 1580 (Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House)

37 The Queen's ships at their moorings in the Medway (© British Library, London)

40 Sir Francis Drake by Nicholas Hilliard, 1581 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

41 Drake's forces attack Santiago, Cape Verde Islands, in 1585 (© British Library, London)

42 William Borough's plan of the raid on Cadiz, 1587 (Public Record Office, London)

44 Another of Ryther's charts, showing the action off the Isle of Wight on 23 July

46 Vroom's painting of the battle of Gravelines (Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck)

52 The Prince Royal arriving at Flushing in 1613 by Hendrik Vroom (© Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem)

FOREWORD

We have it on weighty authority that ‘great abilities are not requisite for an historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any high degree; only about as much as is used in the lower kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and colouring will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.’¹ For that, as Dr Johnson well knew, even the least talented writer needs a patron. This book is the first fruit of a generous act of joint patronage by the National Maritime Museum, the Society for Nautical Research and the Navy Records Society, which together decided to apply a legacy from that eminent maritime historian, the late Dr R. C. Anderson, to support the writing of a new naval history of Britain. To the Councils of the two Societies and to the Trustees of the Museum, which also named me as its Anderson Fellow for the duration of the project, I am profoundly grateful. Without them I could not have undertaken the work, and whatever usefulness it may prove to possess, is owing to their support. I owe an especial debt of gratitude to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Lewin, formerly Chairman of the Trustees of the Museum, and to Dr R. J. B. Knight, its Deputy Director, who played a large part in setting up the arrangement. I must also thank the numerous colleagues in the Library and elsewhere in the Museum who supported the project in various ways.

I owe an additional debt of gratitude to the Museum, and to Mr Christopher Grey in particular, for obtaining the illustrations. The maps were prepared with the help of grants from the British Academy, the Marc Fitch Fund and the Scouloudi Foundation, to all of which I express my sincere thanks. Many others, friends, colleagues and strangers, have helped me. For references, advice, copies of manuscripts, help with translation and sundry offices of friendship I thank Dr Alex Hildred and Mr C. T. C. Dobbs of the Mary Rose Trust, Mr Richard Barker, Dr Martin Brett, Dr Jan Glete, Dr Poul Holm, Dr Gillian Hutchinson, Captain Niels Probst, Mr David Proctor, Dr H. M. Scott, and my brothers Messrs A. D. A. and J. H. S. Rodger. Dr Anne Crawford, Dr Julia Crick, Professor John Gillingham, Dr Elizabeth Hallam, Professor P. D. A. Harvey, Professor David Loades, Dr Susan Rose and Dr Andrew Thrush were generous enough to read parts of the manuscript and give me their comments. Professor Geoffrey Parker undertook the heroic labour of reading the whole, at high speed and short notice, putting me under an additional obligation to add to the many I already owe him. The authors of the numerous unpublished theses listed in the bibliography (or in some cases the respective university libraries) kindly gave me leave to cite them.

Above all I owe more than I can express in words to my wife, to whom the book is dedicated, who bore so much of the load of the writing, and the writer.

A NOTE ON CONVENTIONS

DATES

For most of the period covered by this book, the countries of Europe kept a common calendar, but took the start of the year from a great variety of different dates in different circumstances. The English civil calendar dated the New Year from Lady Day (25 March). By the sixteenth century the Julian calendar had drifted away from astronomical reality, and in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII promulgated a reformed calendar, which eliminated ten days (5–14 October 1582), and took the New Year as 1 January. England, Scotland and some other non-Catholic countries refused to adopt it, and thereafter English ‘Old Style’ dates were always ten days (eleven days from 1700) behind continental ‘New Style‘, until Britain finally accepted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. Over the same period British dates between 1 January and 24 March in each year were nominally one year behind those on the Continent. In this book all dates after 1582 are Old Style unless otherwise indicated, but the year is taken to begin on 1 January throughout.

NAMES

Established surnames were not common in England until late in the Middle Ages, nor in much of Wales, Scotland and Ireland until much later. In a polyglot age names were freely translated from one language to another. In all cases spelling only became more or less settled in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I have used the standard modern forms of identifiable medieval surnames and place names, giving the Christian names in English for English people, and likewise for other nations.

I have treated ship names the same way, using modern English forms for English ships, and so on. I have however left in French some names – notably the ever-popular Grace Dieu – which were seldom or never translated. Note that some Elizabethan warship names circulated in two forms: Lion/Golden Lion, Bear/White Bear, Elizabeth Bonaventure/Bonventure; Elizabeth Jonas/ Elizabeth; Garland/Guardland; Merlin/Merlion; Convertine/Convertive; Repulse/Due Repulse: I have used the first of each of these pairs.

TONNAGE

The ‘tonnage' of ships is a reflection of the dominant position of the wine trade in Western Europe, and of the cask as a container in many other trades. It was originally a measure of the ship's cargo capacity in tuns; that is, in actual casks each containing (according to the modern standards) 252 gallons wine measure. By the fifteenth century tonnage was already being arrived at ‘by estimation’, and in the sixteenth, rules were developed for calculating tonnage or ‘burthen' by multiplying the ship's principal internal dimensions. More than one rule existed, there were many variations between countries, and many figures were clearly reached by rough estimate or guesswork, so tonnage figures are not to be taken as exact. The essential point for the reader to understand is that all ship's tonnage measures used in the period covered by this book were (and most of those used today still are) measures of internal capacity or volume, not weights. Indeed the avoirdupois ton weight was used in early modern England for only two articles in common circulation: bells and guns. In other contexts references to ‘tons' are generally either to ship tonnage, or to the tun cask.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Englishmen shipping dry cargoes (not packed in cask) expressed the ‘tons and tonnage' or ‘deadweight' stowage of the ship by adding a proportion (normally one-third) to her burthen to allow for the ‘dead' space which could not be filled by a cargo shipped in cask. The resulting figure notionally represented a carrying capacity in tons weight, but since it was still derived from a volume calculation, and the actual weight of a given volume of any particular cargo varied greatly across the range of commodities which might be shipped by sea, it is most realistic to regard deadweight as a measure of capacity, like the tonnage burthen from which it derived. True deadweight tonnage, taken from the actual weight of the cargo as loaded, was not then used, and is a useful measure only in the context of ships which trade in a single commodity (oil tankers being the obvious modern example).

The only system of ship tonnage which directly expresses the weight of the ship is displacement tonnage, which calls for mathematical techniques not widely used before the nineteenth century. It calculates the weight of water displaced by the underwater body of the ship, and hence (by Archimedes' rule) the weight of the ship herself. It is only useful for warships (with no weight of cargo to distort the calculation), and only then if their state of loading is exactly defined, but it is the most precise measure for technical purposes and is sometimes calculated retrospectively for the study of warships of the past. As a guide, the displacement (in long tons) of an Elizabethan or Jacobean warship, fully stored for a cruise, might be at least double her burthen. Note that any attempt to calculate the proportion of a ship's ‘weight' taken up by, say, her armament, is only meaningful if the weight of guns is compared with the displacement (i.e. weight) of the ship; using burthen (i.e. volume) is seriously misleading.

In this book ships' tonnage is given in tons burthen unless otherwise indicated, and the spelling ‘tun' is used for the cask.

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

Unless otherwise indicated, the weights, measures and currencies in this book are the current or recent British standards. The following may be unfamiliar:

bolt (of canvas): a length variously given as 32–35 yards.

cable: a length, usually of 120 fathoms.

ell (usually of cloth): a length of 3ft 9ins (the English ell), or 2ft 3ins (the Flemish ell, also widely used in England).

fathom: a length of 6ft.

hide: an Anglo-Saxon land measure, the area of land sufficient to support one family.

knot: a measure of speed, one nautical mile an hour.

last: a measure; the English Ordnance Board last of powder was 24 barrels each of 100lbs net.

league: a distance, three miles. The mile itself varied from country to country; at sea the league was reckoned as one-twentieth of a degree of longitude, the value of which was disputed in the 16th – 17th centuries.

livre [tournois]: the principal money of account in France. Like the pound sterling it was divided into twenty shillings (sous) each of twelve pence (deniers). Its value varied, but was always considerably less than sterling.

mark: An English money of account, 13s 4d.

quarter: 1. A dry measure, eight bushels or 64 gallons. 2. A weight, a quarter hundred, equal to two stone or 28lbs avoirdupois.

quintal: A weight, a short hundredweight of five score pounds, in English usually referring to foreign (e.g. French or Spanish) weights.

tun: A cask containing two butts or pipes, four hogsheads or eight barrels.

The capacity of the barrel varied from time to time and liquid to liquid; the beer barrel contained 36 gallons.

Note that these definitions apply to the contexts occurring in this book; most of these have many other possible values for other commodities in other circumstances or periods.

QUOTATIONS

English quotations in the text are given modern English spelling, capitalization, and if necessary punctuation. Unambiguous abbreviations and contractions have been silently expanded. English and Scots from the fifteenth century onward have been treated as modern English, with difficult words glossed as necessary, but Anglo-Saxon is taken as a foreign language. Editorial omissions are indicated thus…, additions [thus] and the original wording [thus]; other words in italic are emphasized in the original. Quotations from other languages are translated in the text (by the author unless otherwise indicated), with the original wording given in the note. Where no original wording is given, the quotation has been taken already translated from the source cited.

INTRODUCTION

In the dark days towards the end of the century, men looked back with longing to their grandfathers' time, to a lost age of imperial and naval greatness sixty years before, ‘when no fleet was ever heard of except of our own people who held this land’.¹ The phrase, and the sentiment, has perhaps a certain modern resonance, but it is not quite a modern author from which it comes. It is in fact from the Life of St Swithin by Ælfric of Eynsham, a book written approximately a thousand years ago. Looking back on the reign of King Edgar, as the clouds gathered over Æthelred II, it must have seemed sadly obvious that England's brief period as a great naval power was past beyond recall, as another, greater, empire rose to dominate the northern world.

Ælfric was probably not the first, and certainly not the last English historian to look back with nostalgia, and forward with melancholy satisfaction to a future of inevitable national decline. He was not to know that the impressive but brief dominance of Æthelstan and Edgar was only the first of a series of overseas empires. It was followed by a similar growth of sea power in the following century, cut short by the Norman Conquest and replaced by a series of continental military empires. The transatlantic colonies lost in a fit of absence of mind in the 1770s may have been the ‘First British Empire’, as historians call them, but they were the third or fourth English empire.

These things would be better known if they had been more often studied. It is now a century since the first and last complete History of the Royal Navy was published by Sir William Laird Clowes; ² and perhaps if a subject is of any importance in national history, it deserves to be looked at at least once in every hundred years. We now know many things which were not known in the 1890s, and we have questions to ask which were not then thought important, or not thought of at all. Laird Clowes and his contemporaries, who included the great figures who founded the serious study of naval history and still largely dominate it today – Sir Julian Corbett, Sir John Laughton, Rear-Admiral Alfred T. Mahan – were practical men writing history in the service of policy. Their object was to understand the past in order to guide the future of the Royal Navy (or in Mahan's case, the United States Navy). Implicitly, their naval history was the history of sea power and empire, for in their day it was empire which made nations great, and navies which made empires. Explicitly, naval history was the history of navies; of the Royal Navy, for these English-speaking historians. The Service of their own day was the sum and epitome of sea power, and they neither wanted nor needed to distinguish the institution from the function, the Navy from naval warfare.

This gave rise to a paradox, for Laird Clowes, capable historian as he was, well knew and made perfectly clear that the Royal Navy, as an organization, could not be traced back before the sixteenth century. Yet his History of the Royal Navy begins before the Roman Conquest of Britain. What is avowedly the history of a national institution, the Royal Navy, begins nearly two thousand years before the Navy formally existed, and a good thousand before the country (leaving aside for the moment the question of what country he meant). This was not just an oddity of that period and that author, for the latest history of the Royal Navy³ does much the same on a more modest scale, beginning in the eighth century AD. The editor feels no need to explain or excuse the discrepancy of eight centuries between his title and his contents. This must be because the word ‘navy' is being used in more than one sense. At times it means, as it commonly means in modern English, the fighting service with which we are familiar, but at other times it is used much more loosely, to embrace all and every means of making war at sea.⁴ If the word has such a breadth of meaning, we may fairly say that wherever and whenever men used the sea for warfare, the Navy or a navy must necessarily have been their instrument – even if it did not yet exist. But it is surely unhelpful to stretch the meaning of words so far. The common sense of the word as we use it today refers in this context to a permanent fighting service made up of ships designed for war, manned by professionals and supported by an administrative and technical infrastructure.

A navy in this sense is only one possible method of making war at sea, and by some way the most difficult and the most recent. There have in the past been, and to some extent still are, many other ways of generating sea power. Without exhausting the possibilities, we may distinguish seven well-known methods. Simplest and least effective of all was to have no warships and no permanent organization, but to requisition merchant shipping as necessary. This was the method of most medieval kings of England, but even then it was obsolete and ineffectual. Pre-Conquest England, like the Scandinavian countries, raised a national fleet by laying an obligation on every district to build and man a warship. These ‘ship-muster' systems mobilized fleets of hundreds of warships for limited periods of service, at no direct cost to the government and with no central organization. Warships could equally be furnished by feudal obligation, as was done in Norman Sicily and the Highlands of Scotland. In the Mediterranean for much of the Middle Ages, warships were mainly built and operated by entrepreneurs who chartered their private squadrons to whomever could pay for them, or contracted to build and operate squadrons to order. The Genoese and Ragusans were noted specialists in this business, and the fleets of sixteenth-century Spain were mainly built up of such squadrons, provided to order by both Spanish and foreign contractors. Another system was to create fleets supported by local or particular tax revenue, so that the ‘navies' protected particular areas or constituencies rather than serving national purposes. Such local navies formed an important part of Spanish sea power, and raised the Dutch to be the leading naval power of the world. Finally we have to consider private naval warfare, conducted for personal rather than national advantage within a legal context (‘reprisals' or privateering) and outside it (piracy).

All these methods of making war at sea demanded less of the wealth and organization of the state than a modern standing national navy, and it is not surprising that only one medieval state, Venice, long possessed anything clearly identifiable as a navy in this sense. We shall see that no state in the British Isles attained this level of sophistication before the sixteenth century, and no history of the Royal Navy, in any exact sense of the words, could legitimately begin much before then. This book, which does, is not an institutional history of the Royal Navy, but a history of naval warfare as an aspect of national history. All and any methods of fighting at sea, or using the sea for warlike purposes, are its concern. It is interested in all connections between national and naval history, and seeks to make each known to the other. As has been well said:

The object of this book is to cut the naval slice of national history. Its subject is the slow and erratic process by which-the peoples of the British Isles learnt – and then for long periods forgot – about the ‘Safeguard of the Sea’, as the fifteenth-century phrase had it, meaning the use of the sea for national defence, and the defence of those who used the sea.

What this means in practice is that the book is conceived as consisting of four main ‘layers’: policy, strategy and naval operations; finance, administration and logistics, including all sorts of technical and industrial support; social history; and the material elements of sea power, ships and weapons. Chapters or parts of chapters are devoted to each of these in turn, and it would be possible to read only those parts of the book describing, say, actual operations at sea. But this would be a mistake, and not only because the book would have to be many times its size to deal with operations in any detail. Here there is a summary of the most important naval campaigns and operations, but for detailed narratives the reader must look elsewhere. Appendix I gives a chronology of war at sea which can be used as a means of reference supporting the main text, but the aim of the book as a whole is to give an overview of naval history as part of national history, to supply the background as well as the foreground of naval warfare. Its object is not to divide but to unite, to write a history whose parts can only be understood in the context of the whole. Part of its underlying argument is that national and naval history need one another. Many naval historians much more talented than the present author have failed their readers by isolating their subject, and many national historians have distorted their studies by failing to appreciate the influence of sea power on their history. If this book persuades others to make connections, it will have served one of its most important purposes.

‘National' history, of course, is an ambiguous term, and a ‘Naval History of Britain' which begins in the seventh century has to explain what it means by Britain. My meaning is simply the British Isles as a whole, but not any particular nation or state of our own day. English-speaking historians have quite rightly become more sensitive than they used to be to the existence of Scottish, Welsh and Irish national histories running parallel to English history and interacting with it. ‘Britain' is not a perfect word for this purpose, but ‘Britain and Ireland' would be both cumbersome and misleading, implying an equality of treatment which is not possible. Ireland and the Irish figure often in this book, but Irish naval history, in the sense of the history of Irish fleets, is largely a history of what might have been rather than what actually happened. What is really needed is a word to express a history covering the whole British Isles in which the principal actors are English and Scots. This is a ‘British' naval history not with reference to the modern state of Great Britain, nor to the Welsh imperialism of Queen Elizabeth's magician Dr John Dee (who coined the phrase ‘British Empire’), but because it tries to give due weight to sea power as an element of the history of every part of the British Isles. It begins with the sea power of Dalriada, not of England, and it argues that in the Middle Ages at least, it was Scotland as much as England whose national destiny was shaped by war at sea. War at sea lost England her independence and gained Scotland hers. As the largest and wealthiest state in the British Isles, England inevitably came to dominate this most expensive and demanding of all warlike activities, and from the mid-sixteenth century this is increasingly a naval history of England, but it tries not to be a crudely anglocentric history.

In any case it is in the nature of the history of the sea that it links many nations, and there is no true naval or maritime history which is not an international history. Whether in peaceful trade or warlike attack, the sea unites more than it divides. Even if it were possible to treat England, or the British Isles, as a single, homogenous, united nation, it would still be impossible to write its naval history without reference to the histories of the other nations, near and far, with which the sea has connected it. This is not a comparative history in the formal sense of one giving equal weight to the histories of two or more countries, but it is a history which attempts to make international comparisons, to illuminate the naval history of these islands by reference to the naval history of other countries.

All this is largely based on printed sources, as it must be in a work on this scale. As far as time and opportunity allowed, I have tried to fill some of the most obvious gaps in our knowledge (particularly of medieval naval warfare) with a limited amount of primary research, but the book is very largely a work of synthesis, deriving its strength from the work of others. At the same time it develops some ideas which have arisen from considering a thousand years of naval history as a whole. It is not surprising that they are not the ideas, still so influential today, by which Laird Clowes and his contemporaries traced the inexorable rise of the Royal Navy. This is not a history of the Royal Navy and it is not a history of inexorable rise – indeed, it is a history of failure at least as much as of success. Looking back over a thousand years in which seaborne empires rose and fell like billows, it may perhaps inspire the reflection that history is not a one-way street, that neither success nor failure must inevitably continue, and that people who so often make mistakes may also correct them. There are few if any moments over the thousand years which this volume covers when a discerning contemporary would have had strong reason to imagine that a world empire based on sea power would one day be ruled from the British Isles. Only towards the end of our period can hindsight discern the foundations of future naval supremacy being laid. This is not the pre-history of Nelson's Navy or Victoria's Empire. Later volumes will deal with them. It is sufficient for this one to show that naval warfare profoundly affected the lives of these islands over a thousand years, and shaped their subsequent history down to this day.

The Three Seas
660–899; Ships 660–1066

The peoples and polities of the British Isles in the Dark Ages were linked not by the accident of dwelling in the same part of the world, but by the seas and rivers which provided their surest and swiftest means of travel. Kept apart by history, language and religion; sundered by moor and mountain, fen and forest; repeatedly divided by dynastic rivalry; these little nations were joined to one another, and to the world beyond, by the three seas. In the British Isles three worlds met and collided: the Christian, romanized Celtic world of the west; the Christian, romanized Germanic world of the south, and the pagan, unromanized Scandinavian world of the east. To each world belonged a sea, and a common culture, which provided the essential connection when all other connections were wanting.

In the west the Irish Sea was the highway and forum of the Celtic world, connecting the many kingdoms of the Irish of Ireland (the ‘Scots’, in the terminology of the day) with their kinsmen of Dalriada on the west coast of Scotland. In the same way, it connected the Britons of Wales and Cornwall with their emigrant sons in Brittany, and with their cousins the Britons of Strathclyde, Galloway and Cumbria. The sea opened the Celts to the advancing English where the estuaries of the Dee and the Severn brought the Irish Sea into the English Midlands. By sea the Celtic peoples carried on their extensive trade with western France, by sea their scholars and missionaries voyaged to spread the Christian faith and classical learning throughout Western Europe and beyond, and by sea their saints set sail to settle the remote isles to the north and west beyond the limits of the known world.¹ The northern English kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia, the constituent parts of what became Northumbria, were converted largely by Irish missionaries coming from the great island monastery of Iona in Dalriada, and so belonged in part to the Celtic world.

In the south the English Channel, the ‘Narrow Sea’, carried from the Franks to the English the learning and faith inherited from the late Roman Empire. By this route Saint Augustine came from Rome to convert the Kentish king to Christianity. From the south by many channels came the luxuries and the ideas of the late classical world to set before the new Christians of England the material goods, the spiritual values and the techniques of government to which they aspired. The English kingdoms which established themselves during the seventh and eighth centuries were all more or less consciously influenced by the examples of Rome and Rome's successors. The southern states of Kent, Wessex and East Anglia, which were converted mainly by missionaries from the south and adhered to the church government of the Latin world, were especially closely linked to the dominant culture.²

To the east the sea was broadest but in some ways the connections were closest of all. Across the North Sea the Angles and Saxons had come from their homelands in what are now north Germany and southern Denmark, and even after they became Christian they did not cease to look eastward to the lands of their origin, and to the peoples with whom they were so closely linked by language, culture and trade. It is easy today to forget that the English were Northmen just as much as the Vikings, sharing their gods and legends, sharing languages still near enough to be more or less mutually intelligible, sharing traditions of kingship and the ordering of society, sharing not least a common style of shipbuilding and a common maritime tradition; a world in which a warship was a natural present for a king.³

In the British Isles, and especially in England, the three worlds met, overlapped, mingled and clashed. In particular the English kingdoms of Northumbria in the north and Mercia in the Midlands, where Latin and Celtic Christianity met, faced east, west, north and south, at times at war and at times allied with Scots and Britons, with English and Vikings. The three seas which united the three worlds were the natural channels of war as well as trade; it was by sea that the representatives of the three worlds came to confront one another. What they seldom if ever did was to fight one another actually at sea. To intercept an enemy in the open sea calls for ships spread far away in a sophisticated scouting system which does not seem to have been attempted until the sixteenth century. It would in any case have been futile when no battle could be fought in the open sea. No missile weapons existed in northern waters capable of sinking a ship, nor was it possible to fit rams to the ships of the Northmen. All fighting was hand-to-hand, and naval battles could only take place where ships could come alongside one another. To attempt this in a seaway is almost a guarantee of being stove in and sunk. Most of the naval battles of which we have any

detailed knowledge, fought before the introduction of heavy guns, occurred in sheltered, inshore waters where the combatants could grapple and fight it out at close quarters. Only in coastal waters, moreover, was scouting possible and communication sufficiently easy to give any warning of the presence of the enemy.⁴

In this sense it can be said that ‘true naval warfare did not exist’, ⁵ if by ‘true' one means autonomous, unconnected with war on land. No absolute ‘command of the sea' was possible, for neither side in war could deny the use of the sea to an enemy. The sea was always a debatable space, available to whoever possessed a sea-coast and cared to use it. All naval operations were essentially combined operations. Ships were the means of transport which carried an attacking force swiftly and secretly to its target, with almost no possibility of detection or evasion. The gift of sea power was surprise, tactical and strategic. In this way ships were the natural partners of horses, for both were the means by which armies gained mobility. Both were instruments which multiplied the fighting value of even the smallest forces, allowing them to outflank and avoid, to surprise and overpower, to retreat and escape according to the requirements of the moment. This was true not only on and near the coast, but far inland. The ships of the day with their shallow draught could penetrate scores, sometimes hundreds of miles inland up even quite small rivers. The Swedish Vikings pushed up the great rivers of Russia, over the portages and down to the Black Sea to establish a lively commercial and cultural link with the Byzantine Empire, and in the process to found trading posts which grew into the original states of Russia. The early princes of Kiev and Novgorod were as much part of the Viking world as the settlers of Greenland, and the most land-locked of empires grew from the sea power of the Northmen. In Western Europe the major ports, almost all of them on rivers, were both harbours and gateways to the interior.⁶

The best answer to seaborne attack was a combination of fixed defences and ships. It was impossible to build or garrison fortresses to cover an entire coastline, but it was possible to fortify places which commanded the entrances to, and crossings of, rivers in such a way as to hinder a naval force from penetrating inland. A defending naval force could be held at a convenient location, ready to move as soon as an attack was detected, conveying men as rapidly as possible to the point under attack. Such a defensive reaction might land troops in the rear of the attackers, burning their ships and cutting off their retreat. It might intercept them moving along the coast and fight them afloat. It might blockade the mouth of a river and prevent escape. In any event it provided the defenders with the same mobility and flexibility as it offered the attackers, even though it could not deprive them of the initiative.⁷

This was the strategy adopted by the late Roman builders of the ‘Saxon Shore' forts, erected in the third century on both sides of the Straits of Dover facing eastward, towards the raids of the Saxon pirates from across the North Sea. A base at Boulogne supported the naval force which provided the essential mobility to the defence. The siting of the forts makes it clear that only in the actual Straits was it possible to patrol with any prospect of intercepting the Saxon ships.⁸ No attempt was or could have been made to meet them in the open sea.

These Saxon pirates were presumably among the ancestors of the Saxons, Angles and Jutes⁹ who crossed the North Sea in the fifth century to settle in England. We know almost nothing for certain of the circumstances of their first coming, not even if it was warlike or peaceful, and by the time we can discern something of the English fighting the Britons and pushing westwards in the sixth and seventh centuries, they had long ceased to be seaborne attackers and become settled inhabitants of the island. It is almost certain that by then all the peoples inhabiting the British Isles were familiar with the sea and the use of sail.¹⁰ We know they traded and travelled by sea, we know they often fought one another, and it would be remarkable if they never used ships in warfare when there were such great advantages to be gained by doing so. We have one isolated but remarkable piece of evidence, the document known as the Senchus Fer n-Alban, which seems to show that by the mid-seventh century Dalriada had a comprehensive ship-levy system, which obliged groups of households to provide and man a warship each; in theory 177 ships each manned by 14 men, a total of 2,478 men levied from 1,770 households. The same document gives a bare mention of the the earliest known naval battle around the British Isles, in the year 719 in the course of civil war between rival parties in Dalriada.¹¹ It is likely, however, that this was no more than an incident in what was already a long tradition of war at sea. The text refers also to no fewer than eight Dalriadan naval expeditions between 568 and 733, and we know that the Picts (the people then inhabiting the Highlands of Scotland) were also active in the same waters.¹² A people settled on both sides of the North Channel, in Antrim and the Western Isles, obviously had particular need of ships, but it would be surprising if one of the poorer and remoter kingdoms of the British Isles were the only one to have reached this level of sophistication, especially as we know that the Irish, Picts and Britons had naval traditions going back to Roman times, ¹³ and it was just at this time that missionaries from the great island monastery of Iona were spreading the fame of Dalriada throughout Western Europe. Further, it has been argued that systems of levying men and taxes on units of a hundred households, which are found from very early times among Irish, Welsh, Scots and English, are all based on Roman practice.¹⁴ If the Scots of Dalriada could use such a system for naval purposes, there is no reason why the others should not have done so as well.

It is moreover quite likely that the Senchus Fer n-Alban represents the Dalriadan reaction to English naval aggression. In the early seventh century the expanding English kingdom of Northumbria reached the Irish Sea and occupied much of Lowland Scotland. King Edwin (616–33) conquered both Anglesey and the Isle of Man, which he cannot have done without using ships.¹⁵ In 684 his successor King Ecgfrith mounted a large raid into Ireland.¹⁶ This was probably connected with his wars against the Picts and the Irish of Dalriada, in which he met his death the following year when he was defeated by the Picts at an unidentified place in Scotland called Nechtansmere. This is the last we hear of Northumbrian naval activity, and indeed of Northumbria as a great power among the English kingdoms, but it is most unlikely that nothing at all happened at sea around the British Isles in the course of the next century, though our sources tell us nothing.

We may therefore guess that what on existing evidence looks like the establishment of navies and naval organization by Anglo-Saxon kings in the eight and ninth centuries, was in fact the borrowing or reform of systems which already existed. What seems to be clear is that the organization of a navy was associated with important developments in the power and complexity of the state. His great dyke, one of the largest engineering works ever undertaken in Europe, still stands as a testimony to the power of King Offa of Mercia (757–96), and it has recently been argued that throughout his kingdom he built interlinked fortifications to provide defence in depth.¹⁷ These fortifications, and the strategy which went with them, were closely connected with the growing practice of granting land (initially to religious houses, later to secular landowners) in perpetuity by written charters modelled on Roman law. This ‘bookland' was charged with what came to be called the trimoda necessitas, the ‘threefold obligation' to provide men to serve in the army, to build and maintain fortifications, and to build and maintain bridges.¹⁸ At the same time Offa was issuing an extremely sophisticated coinage, which fostered the economy of his kingdom and helped him to tax it.¹⁹ The effect was to increase his wealth and power, and to strengthen and codify his right to call on his people's service.

Offa's defences were directed primarily against the Welsh, but his rule reached to the North Sea at a time when Danish raids were already beginning, and it is quite possible that he had ships as part of his defensive system.²⁰ Offa's Dyke itself, whose two ends rest on the sea, would have been vulnerable without ships on either flank.²¹ We know that Mercia took part in extensive seaborne trade. Offa must have been familiar with ships, it would be odd if he never perceived their military potential, and it is at least possible that in his reign naval duties were already included in military service. When the ‘threefold obligation' was laid on church lands in his sub-kingdom of Kent in 792 it was specifically to resist attacks from the sea; ²² and in 851, only fifty years after Offa's death (by which time Kent was ruled by Wessex), a Kentish naval force won a sea battle at Sandwich.²³

THE SAFEGUARD OF THE SEA

N.A.M. RODGER

CONTENTS

MAPS

ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

A NOTE ON CONVENTIONS

INTRODUCTION

The Three Seas
660–899; Ships 660–1066

THE SAFEGUARD OF THE SEA

N.A.M. RODGER

CONTENTS

MAPS

ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

A NOTE ON CONVENTIONS

INTRODUCTION

The Three Seas660–899; Ships 660–1066

The Three Seas
660–899; Ships 660–1066