No. For the ancestors of the British seamen and sailors of Elizabethan and modern times I think we should rather look to the Danes, who, it must be remembered, between 870 and the Norman Conquest, were not only continually invading England, but established themselves in a great part of it, especially in the east and north, and to those of the Conqueror's followers who traced their descent directly from the Northmen or Vikings. It is their spirit which has brought us victory both by land and by sea, but more especially by sea, and not the spirit of Alfred's Saxon subjects, who had to pay others to fight for them. Again, take such pre-eminent commanders as Drake and Nelson. Is not the former name one which takes us directly back to the "Draakers", the "Dragon-ships" of the Vikings, and has not Nelson a distinctly Danish sound about it?
The ships of King Alfred "were full-nigh twice as long as the others; some had sixty oars, and some had more; they were both swifter and steadier, and also higher, than the others. They were shapen neither like the Frisian nor the Danish; but so it seemed to him that they would be most efficient."
CHAPTER III
Fighting-ships of the Middle Ages
"With grisly sound off go the great guns
And heartily they crash in all at once,
And from the top down come the great stones;
In goes the grapnel so full of crooks,
Among the ropes run the shearing hooks;
And with the pole-axe presses one the other;
Behind the mast begins one to take cover
And out again, and overboard he driveth
His foe, whose side his spear-head riveth.
He rends the sail with hooks just like a scythe;
He brings the cup, and bids his mate be blithe;
He showers hard peas to make the hatches slippery.
With pots full of lime they rush together;
And thus the live-long day in fight they spend."
Description of a mediæval sea fight, Legend of Good Women
(modernized), fifteenth century.
William the Conqueror, like Cortez, the discoverer of Mexico at a later date, dispelled any thoughts of retreat that might have been lurking in the minds of his followers by destroying the ships which had brought them over. He had come to stay. Now the Normans, though of the same blood as the seafaring Vikings, who had sailed and fought their Dragon-ships to the very ends of the known earth, had been so long settled in France that they had adopted not only the French language, but French ideas, which were not, generally speaking, of a nautical nature.
Among these was the system of feudalism and knight-service. The very word for knight—chevalier in French—signified a horseman; and the Norman and other feudal knights of the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries looked at war and politics from the point of view of a cavalier armed cap-à-pie seated in his war-saddle. As for ships and sailors, they were merely unpleasant means to necessary ends.[4] But if one wanted to go to fight and plunder and raid across Channel he had to submit himself and his followers to the cramped accommodation of a vessel of some kind, and to the care of the rough shipmaster and his crew—low but necessary persons, in the eyes of the mediæval knight, just as were the experienced "tarpawlins" in the estimate of the scented "gentleman-captains" in the days of the Restoration. So it came about that for some centuries England had no Royal Navy.
The king and his principal nobles had at times a few galleys or sailing-vessels of their own—almost, if not entirely, their personal property—and these they made use of for purposes of transportation or fighting when required; but during this period the maritime defence of the realm was carried out—on the whole inefficiently—on the hire system. The money for this purpose was forthcoming, since William revived a tax for defence purposes, called the "Heregeld", which had been not long before abolished by Edward the Confessor, on the pretext that by it "the people were manifoldly distressed". Had he not listened to the "little navyites" of his day, perhaps the Norman Invasion would not have succeeded. In addition to this, William placed the five principal ports commanding the narrowest part of the Channel on a special footing, under which, in return for certain privileges, they were to supply him or his successors with a fleet of fifty-two ships in cases of emergency. They could only be retained for fifteen days, however. These ports—Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover, and Sandwich—were then, and for ever afterwards known as the "Cinque Ports", though Dover is the only one which can still be regarded as a port at all. Rye, Winchelsea, and Pevensey also became "Cinque Ports" later on.
William's idea with regard to the Cinque Ports was probably not so much the general defence of the kingdom as the defence of his communications with Normandy. With their assistance he could be sure of always being able to move troops either way across Channel as his exigencies required. Thus, when in 1083 William, who was then in Normandy, heard rumours of the intention of the Kings of Denmark and Norway and the Count of Flanders to invade England with a great fleet, he hurried over-Channel with so great an army that "men wondered how this land could feed all that force". Without the assistance of the Cinque Ports he might have had some difficulty in doing this.
Although we really know a great deal about the ships of the Saxon and Danish periods of our history, we know comparatively little about those which were built between the Conquest and the accession of Henry VII. For, while we have had specimens of the actual Viking ships to work upon, we have for this long period, of over 400 years, little information beyond that afforded by the seals of maritime towns, the ships depicted by monkish chroniclers and romancists in their illuminated manuscripts, and in a few cases old stained-glass windows and decorative carvings.
Now, to begin with, it is obvious that in each of these cases the artist was cramped for space. He had to decide between the calls of accuracy and of decorative effect, and almost invariably he gave way to the latter.
In seals, especially, he was tempted to make the curves of the ship's hull run parallel to the circumference of the seal. In that which belonged to the master of the Sainte Catherine de Cayeux, which fought at Sluys in 1340, the exterior curve of the hull of the ship represented upon it is really concentric with the seal itself. In almost every other case—up to the fifteenth century at any rate—the hulls of the ships shown on seals of this description approximate to this shape, and, generally speaking, are of crescent form, with fighting-stages or "castles" at the bow and stern. There are a few exceptions, which are more likely to be correct, as their designers evidently made up their minds not to be led away from the truth.
In the rather fascinating pictures that appear in mediæval manuscripts, too, the monkish artists had to work in a small space, in which they wanted to put a great deal of ornamental and other detail. They probably knew little or nothing about nautical affairs into the bargain. In the result their ships present the same crescent-shaped hulls as those in the seals of the period, and give the impression of being very small affairs indeed, thanks to the large-sized nobles and men-at-arms with which they are densely packed.
An example of the impossible ship. Note how the engraver has made the keel exactly parallel to the circumference of the seal. It makes a handsome and effective seal, but can hardly be accepted as a picture of a ship of 1340.
The reason of this quaint method of representing ships and their crews or passengers is not far to seek. Who has not seen a child's first attempts to draw the human face in profile? He outlines the forehead, the nose, and chin, and puts in the back of the head easily and to his own satisfaction. Then he pauses and deliberates.