by Douglas Boyd
6. Quoted in J. Bradbury, The Medieval Siege (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998), p. 123.
7. Hyland, The Medieval Warhorse, p. 163.
8. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 143.
9. Bradbury, Medieval Siege, p. 124, quoting Baha al-Din.
10. Hyland, The Medieval Warhorse, pp. 48, 168.
11. Quoted in Maalouf, The Crusades, p. 208.
12. Count Henry’s mother was a daughter of Queen Eleanor by her first husband Louis VII.
13. Quoted in Bradbury, Medieval Siege, p. 124.
14. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, p. 33.
15. Roger of Howden, Chronica, pars posterior, p. 69.
16. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 145.
12
Of Cogs and Cargo
Richard’s decision to make the greater part of the journey to Outremer by sea was possibly influenced by Eleanor, who had not only suffered much privation on the overland route to the Second Crusade with her first husband Louis VII, travelling via the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary and Byzantium, but also seen half the French army wiped out by Turkish hit-and-run tactics in the mountains of Anatolia before ever reaching the Holy Land. It is possible, too, that unconfirmed rumours had reached Richard’s ears of a secret pact made with Saladin by the Byzantine emperor Isaac II Angelos to delay the crusading army of Holy Roman Emperor Frederik Barbarossa on the fatal overland route through his territory in 1189.
Although British schoolchildren used to be taught that the Royal Navy could trace its history back to King Alfred (849–99), this is not true. Most of Alfred’s military activity was on land, although he used ships to intercept Viking raiders at sea. In 875 he put to sea against seven invading vessels, captured one and drove the others off. In 855 his ships intercepted and captured sixteen Danish ships off the coast of Essex, but were then defeated by a larger force of Danes.1
Alfred’s was not the first royal fleet in the British Isles, then divided into several kingdoms. In fact, defensive fleets of these islands dated back to the Roman establishment of the Saxon Shore forts, ports and fleets in the third century. We know from the tenth-century Senchus Fer n-Alban – or History of the Men of Scotland – that taxation in the seventh-century Irish/Scottish kingdom of Dalriada included a ship-levy which theoretically provided a fleet of 177 small ships, each manned by fourteen men. However, the only deployment reported seems to be in the year 719, not defending Dalriada against foreign invaders, but in a civil war!2 Alfred’s son Edward and his warrior daughter Athelflaed continued to fight the Danes, using ships apparently modelled on the Viking longship and built with taxes levied by the ship-soke. They could, on occasion, raise 100 vessels to defend Wessex although, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, by 1001 Ethelred the Unwise was desperately ordering the construction of more and more ships but could not assemble enough to keep the invaders at bay. There was thus no continuing policy of an established navy; rather, each king tried with inadequate tax resources to cope with the complex of current problems confronting him.
The Norman Conquest saw a comprehensive feudal taxation system imposed on the English but this provided no permanent fleet, although a royal transportation system did exist between south coast ports and Normandy so that the king’s household and messengers on official business could travel across the Channel conveniently. Richard’s father Henry II is reckoned to have crossed the Channel nearly thirty times in his reign – usually in his esnecca3 or ‘snake-ship’ because it was swift and thin compared with contemporary merchant vessels – but had no fleet to outflank the Welsh when first invading their country, and failing to conquer them. In 1165 he had to hire a Viking squadron from Dublin to harass the coast of Gwynedd. So, inheriting no Anglo-Norman fleet that could transport his army for the crusade when he came to the throne, Richard was faced with a problem. In order to avoid paying the extortionate rates demanded by the ship owners of Pisa and Genoa, who possessed the two great Christian fleets in the Mediterranean, he decided to raise a fleet by purchasing vessels in English ports and his continental possessions. As maritime historian Professor John Pryor has observed:
Most historians have written about medieval campaigns as though they took place in a geographic, meteorological and oceanographic vacuum. In most books, military forces move from one place to another without the slightest difficulty … naval forces are given even less consideration. They leave the West and arrive in the Holy Land as though their commanders had merely engaged the engines on their cruise ships and set course by the shortest possible route for the Holy Land … For the First Crusade the only crusader fleet to attempt to make the passage to the East in one passage was a Genoese flotilla of twelve galleys and a transport ship. The fleets of Pisa and Venice … wintered over in the Ionian islands and on Rhodes respectively. And even the Genoese took four months to make the voyage.4
The intention here is to examine more closely the problems and dangers of Richard’s decision to assemble a large fleet for the expedition and send it twice as far as the Genoese on the First Crusade. The twelfth century had seen a number of fleets travel successfully between Europe’s Mediterranean coastline and Outremer and some smaller fleets had also reached the Holy Land from Germany and the Baltic, but Richard’s plan was a major undertaking, with which he charged Robert of Turnham, or Thornham. Henry of Cornhill, the trustworthy sheriff of London, Kent and Surrey, was comptroller of the expedition’s budget and recorded that most of the English vessels acquired in harbours from Hull to Portsmouth and assembled in Dartmouth were square-rigged cogs modelled on the flat-bottomed riverine Koggen developed in Frisia.
By the time of the Third Crusade, the cog had a heavy bottom of edge-joined strakes using pegged mortise-and-tenon joints above which the clinker-built sides were of sawn boards nailed to the frames. It had a high freeboard braced by stout through-beams spanning the mid-ships in the area still called ‘the beam’, enabling increased width and therefore more cargo- or passenger-carrying capacity. With a length of around 60ft and a beam of thirteen or so feet, the cog was an all-purpose transport. Some were equipped with steer-boards, which were wide oars manipulated by the boatswain at the right side rear of the ship – hence the term ‘starboard’ – but some may also have had the more efficient central rudder hinged on the sternpost. The heavy bottom construction gave the stability for fore- and after-castles and also top-castles to be added, giving an advantage over lower-freeboard galleys in ship-to-ship combat. The cogs cost between £50 and £66 each, paid two-thirds in cash and the rest by remission of taxes due by their owners or the ports where they lay. At least forty-four ships were purchased in this way5 – thirty-three of them from the Cinque Ports alone.
The vessels had to be purchased, rather than leased, since it was considered impossible for square-rigged vessels to return through the straits of Gibraltar, due to the strong prevailing westerly winds. Although lateen-rigged Mediterranean craft could progress against the wind and sometimes moored in the ports of Gascony and further north on the French Atlantic coast, the mixed force of 167 English, Norman, Flemish and German vessels that had sailed south in 1147 to help wrest Lisbon from the Almohad Moors in the Iberian Reconquista represented the furthest a northern fleet might travel and return to base.6 Richard’s fleet therefore had to be written off and scrapped in the Mediterranean at the end of its crusade service.
Depending on the vessel’s size, crew numbers varied from twenty-five to sixty plus the steersman/boatswain aboard the flagship, which was Henry II’s esnecca, and could be rowed as a galley or proceed under sail with a favourable wind. Whether there were other esneccas in the fleet is unknown. The 1,100 crewmen were not volunteer crusaders, but paid a year in advance at the rate of 2 pence per day, with the boatswain/skippers receiving only twice that amount.7 Frequently overlooked is the enormous logistics operation required to provision these ships. Large quantities of hardtack known as ‘biskits of muslin’8 were prepared from a gritty stone-ground mixtur
e of barley and rye grains with bean flour made into a dough without leavening or shortening, rather like modern water biscuits or matzos. Baked four times instead of the usual twice for domestic biscuits, they were thought hard enough to defy the teeth of ship-borne rats, if not also the weevils, and the absence of fat stopped them going rotten.9
The biscuits had to be softened in some liquid before they could be eaten. Tasting this unpalatable food for the first time, any landlubbers who had been enticed aboard by the wages paid up front could have had little idea that the time would come when just one such hardtack would be manna for a starving man in the Holy Land. Salted meat and fish, hard cheeses and dried beans and peas made up the balance of the crews’ diets while at sea, although a number of live animals and fowls were carried for slaughter and butchery on the voyage; maritime historian Benjamin Z. Kedar records 14,000 cured pig carcases among the victuals loaded.10 Writing some 300 years later, when little of shipboard life had changed, Felix Fabri wrote:
Everything that is on board becomes putrid and foul and mouldy; the water begins to stink, the wine becomes undrinkable; meat, even when dried and smoked, becomes full of maggots and all of a sudden there spring into life innumerable flies, gnats, fleas, lice, worms, mice and rats … I have seen few men die on board during storms, but many have I seen sicken and die [from these causes].11
A considerable quantity of freight had to be stowed in the open holds and lashed securely down. This included the heavy heart-of-oak baulks of dismantled siege engines and thousands of bows and arrows – the English longbows would suffer from the dryness of the Holy Land climate and become brittle – as well as the more robust crossbows with their quarrels, plus swords and side-arms, body armour and helmets and 60,000 horse shoes with the nails to fix them, all hand-forged in the Forest of Dean. These were not easily obtainable in Outremer for European destriers and palfreys, larger and heavier than the nimble local breeds, which were bred for speed and their ability to survive on less water, and were also broken and trained differently. To the Muslim eye, European or afrendji horses were too fat, meaning too slow, and lacking in endurance, especially in hot, dry conditions. Therefore complete sets of farriers’ tools and armourers’ workshops had also to be transported, to re-shoe horses and effect the necessary repairs to arms and armour.
Some horses were doubtless carried aboard, for use during landfalls made on the voyage, but the main body of palfreys and destriers required by the army is more likely to have travelled the first leg of the long journey by the overland route to southern France before being embarked for the Mediterranean stages. It might seem that medieval logistics were simple compared with the long-distance transportation of a modern mechanised army, with its requirements for spare parts, fuel and mechanics, but the complications of shipping horses were legion. Being unable to vomit, they make poor sailors and, since they had to be closely confined in stalls and supported by slings to avoid them injuring themselves due to the ship’s motion – these vessels rolled abominably in even a light sea – would be sick and useless for several days after a long voyage. Their diet was also a problem. Many horses waste hay and will not eat trampled fodder. Most horses drink about 18 litres of water a day under normal conditions. With twenty confined in humid conditions below deck in one ship the weekly requirement was at least 2,500 litres, or 2.5 tonnes, of water. A shipboard diet of hay and oats or dried barley increased water requirement, to avoid impaction of the gut, and too much grain during the voyage would have caused many horses to suffer the muscle disorder azoturia on disembarkation.12 Known colloquially as ‘Monday morning sickness’, this can be painful and crippling for horses kept in stalls, instead of loose boxes, over a weekend, let alone for horses confined on ships for several weeks.
There was also a considerable amount of personal equipment to be prepared and we have to thank the chronicler Gerald of Wales for an insight into this. Required to accompany Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury on a recruiting tour of Wales in 1188, he recorded how the archbishop insisted on his entourage dismounting and walking up and down Welsh mountains to toughen them up for the crusade. Baldwin also had special tents made and erected on his newly purchased estate at Lambeth to test their suitability and give his servants practice in erecting them and striking camp.13 Baldwin was known as a pessimist, so it is possible that more optimistic religious and lay leaders put less effort into the preparations.
Any vassal who had doubted that Richard the warrior could turn into Richard the monarch could have said I-told-you-so on seeing the keen attention he devoted to all the preparations for the coming campaign and his heedlessness of the consequences of his actions in leaving an unstable realm behind him when he crossed the Channel on 11 December 1189. All but five sheriffs in the land were new to the post and inexperienced; dissident barons were building castles that Henry would have razed to the ground immediately; Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury and Hubert Walter, newly appointed bishop of Salisbury by Richard, travelled to Outremer ahead of the main crusading party, which left William Longchamp with no ecclesiastical superior to keep him in order. Prince John was flexing his political muscles as the ruler of a virtually autonomous principality. Also, the Welsh were mounting incursions in the marches, in no small part because Rhys ap Gruffyd, the most important ruler of southern Wales, had come to Oxford under Prince John’s protection to meet Richard, who had sent word that he was too busy to meet him. The Welsh prince had taken this as a personal snub. It was unlike John to get involved in diplomacy, but his reason was simple: a Welsh invasion would immediately threaten the lands he had acquired by marrying Isabel of Gloucester.
The absence from England of Hubert Walter, a nephew of Ranulf de Glanville who had been trained in the governance of England by his uncle, was to be a sad lack for the country. Described by the monks of Canterbury as ‘tall of stature, subtle of wit although not of speech’, his rise to political eminence had been slow but steady. In 1185 he was a baron of the Exchequer; in the same year Henry II used him as one of several envoys negotiating with the chapter of Canterbury Cathedral over the election of a new primate; in 1186 he was made a dean of York and nominated for the post of bishop, although not approved by Henry; in April of the fateful year 1189 he was a justice of the curia regis at Westminster and later Henry’s assistant chancellor in Maine. There, or previously, he must have impressed Richard because his appointment to the see of Salisbury was one of Richard’s first acts after coming to England.
The death of William de Mandeville in December prompted Richard to add to Longchamp’s other responsibilities the duties of a justiciar. To avoid conflicts with Hugh of Durham, that prelate was told in February 1190 to confine his activities to England north of the River Humber, leaving Longchamp as justiciar for the southern half of the country. In addition, Pope Clement III was said to have received 1,500 marks to confer the post of papal legate on Longchamp. This concentrated far too much power in one pair of hands – or rather, three pairs of hands, because Bishop William brought to England two of his brothers to share in his good fortune. Mandeville’s widow Hadwisa was given by Richard to his favourite William de Fors. She was described by Richard of Devizes as ‘a woman almost a man, lacking nothing virile except the virile parts’. True to her character, she refused the match until Richard seized her estates in Yorkshire and started selling off her livestock, at which point she submitted to the king’s will, if not necessarily that of her new husband.14
Crossing to Calais from Dover on 11 December, Richard saw in the harbour a part at least of the fleet of 100-plus vessels he was assembling to transport his army from Marseille to the Holy Land.15 At his Christmas court held in the castle of Bures in Lower Normandy the new king of England was so gung-ho and patently delighted to have shaken the dust of that country off his boots that his continental vassals speculated that he would hand England to John and content himself with the continental possessions on his return from crusade. Although he never went that far, it is true that he paid only one m
ore brief visit to his island kingdom – and that was again to squeeze every last penny from his subjects north of the Channel.
Richard’s attention was concentrated on continuing preparations, including the acquisition of more ships in his ports on the Gulf of Gascony, mainly the stout clinker-built baleniers used for whale fishing in the Bay of Biscay. Meanwhile, his English fleet was being assembled at Dartmouth, ready to sail southward down the Atlantic coast and through the straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. Roger of Howden’s account of the voyage is unclear, but it seems that the English ships left Dartmouth with the tide on 25 March. In 1147 a crusading fleet of 167 vessels had left Dartmouth and arrived in Oporto after twenty-four days’ sailing, including one or more stopovers in Spanish Biscayan ports.16 However, on 6 May Richard’s ships ran into a storm in the Bay of Biscay that separated the vessels and was so frightening that three Londoners in one ship claimed to have seen a vision of St Thomas Becket telling them not to fear because he and two other saints were looking after them. Having rounded Cape Finisterre, they certainly made landfall at Lisbon, and maybe Oporto, to obtain fresh supplies and, more importantly, clean water for men and horses.
While the English flotilla was moored in the estuary of the Tagus awaiting the arrival of the squadron from Richard’s continental possessions commanded by Guillaume d’Oléron, there occurred a shameful episode that foreshadowed the sacking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade. Welcomed at first by King Sancho, grateful for the armed assistance of the London crusaders at Silves in the previous year, some of the crews volunteered to assist Sancho’s army to repel another attack under the king of Morocco. After his death and the subsequent withdrawal of the Moors, the crusaders ran amok back in Lisbon, burning down houses, fighting among themselves and with the townsfolk, stealing property and raping women. Sancho put a stop to this by closing the gates of Lisbon and throwing into prison 700 rioters trapped within the walls.17 The episode was whitewashed in many contemporary and later accounts by the pretence that the fleet was delayed by these men heroically capturing Silves from the Moors.