Balinger: During the 14th–16th centuries, a class of clinker-built, oared ship, with a single mast and sail. Originating in the Basque whaling industry, its design migrated to England where balingers were used in war and trade, displacing English galleys from local waters during the 14th century.
Hawley and Mixtow were the forerunners of a new class of
pirates, new men, who surfaced in the records from 1430 onwards (and it is
remarkable that their appearance coincided exactly with the initial downturn of
events in France). These were men who had never been employed by the Crown, as
Eustace and John Crabbe had been. Nor were they, with one very short-term
exception, sanctioned by the Crown as privateers, like the great John Hawley.
They were not even, like the Alards or, again, John Hawley, leaders in society
who would have ploughed some of their profits back into their communities. In
contrast, they showed little or no allegiance to their roots. They were, to put
it simply, full-time professional plunderers, whose sole objective was personal
profit. The majority came from Devon and Cornwall, where they were well
supported by men in high positions who in their turn stood to gain from their
investment in the ships and the necessary victuals. But there were also others,
from further east, who were playing the same game. Overall, these men were
numerous, and particularly since their cases were very complex, it is only
possible here to offer an insight into what was happening through the
activities of a small representative sample.
They were as mobile as any of their forerunners, appearing
wherever the prizes appealed. In the years up to 1436 their principal targets
were the Breton ships sailing up the southern side of the Channel to Rouen and
Dieppe, bringing the basic necessities to the English occupants of Normandy,
and also to the Channel Islands. These amounted principally to food and wine
from La Rochelle, salt from the Bay, and linen cloth and cords from Brittany,
together with some commodities which had evidently come from further south,
such as iron, and resin for caulking their vessels. The individual claims for
compensation for goods lost to them were noticeably small in comparison to
those of the previous century, which reflected the size of the ships they were
using. They were relatively small barges and balingers, which had the advantage
over the great long-distance ocean-going Italian ships, in that they were able
to work out from, and carry their prizes into, the smaller harbours like
Penzance and Teignmouth. But at the same time they were apparently able to work
long distances. They appeared in the Bay of Biscay, and they also sold their
goods at places all along the coast between Cornwall and Portsmouth, including
the Isle of Wight, which seems to have been an important emporium, centred on
Newport.
Some details illustrate how they received back-up support,
and the nature of the problems this caused. In the spring of 1432 two Breton
merchants complained specifically ‘to show the chancellor how well protected
the wrong-doers on the sea-coasts of Devonshire were’. They said that those
captors were bribing the admiral’s deputy to empanel juries made up for the
most part of their own relatives and friends, together with the victuallers and
owners of the ship concerned. Those juries could be relied upon to give false verdicts,
for example stating that goods which had actually been stolen from the king’s
friends had belonged instead to the king’s enemies. And, in return for a bribe
of half the goods, the deputy could be relied on to enrol that verdict, which
rendered the king’s commission ineffective. The Bretons emphasised that as long
as the deputy was in league with the pirates, he was their guarantee that
matters would be settled in their favour. Importantly, a second commission
dealing with the same event exposed a complaint of extortion against John
Baron, a merchant of Exeter, who was one of the members of that commission. The
results of an inquiry into this case, which were enrolled four years later,
revealed the extent of Baron’s extortion. In this case he had helped himself to
a pipe of bastard wine which belonged to the Bretons. As well as that, on the
pretext of the commission, he had taken one or two packs of cloth from every
man in the neighbourhood to whom he bore ill will. He had the stamp of an
exceptionally disagreeable and grasping individual. The upshot was that nobody
dared trade without first paying him a cut. The king thus lost his customs and
many people were wronged. In addition, it has emerged from more recent research
that Baron had a history of warrants out for his arrest. These included one for
stealing a ship which was under safe conduct direct from a Breton harbour,
possibly the St Nunne, which is described below.
William Kydd was one of this new class of pirate. He rose
from documentary obscurity in 1430 and subsequently flourished, travelling far
and wide without much reference to his port of origin, Exmouth, at least before
1453. In October 1430 he was master of a balinger, La Trinité of Exmouth, which
he had packed with other malefactors. They seized a ship as it was nearing
Guernsey from Brittany with a cargo of food. The terms of the subsequent
commission to the sheriff of Devon and others make it clear that the
authorities were aware that the owners and victuallers of the ship were supporting
the pirates because in the last resort, their goods and chattels were to be
arrested. But, unfortunately for those merchants of Guernsey and for numerous
others, this was a period when innumerable commissions were issued and very few
indeed were acted upon. In other words, there was already unlimited immunity
for the pirates.
The following year, Kydd was among a group who, sailing with
a flotilla of four barges ‘armed and arraigned in the manner of war’, captured
four food ships on their way towards Rouen, took them back to Dartmouth, Fowey
and Kingsbridge (on the Salcombe estuary) and sold the goods locally. Similar
piracy continued intensively, and built up until, on 31 March 1436, Kydd led
the large group of pirates who descended in a flotilla of eight barges and
balingers on the harbour of St Paul de Lyon, south-east of Roscoff, and carried
off the Saint Nunne, a ship sheltering in that harbour while waiting for a
favourable wind to cross to England. They escorted that ship back to Plymouth,
where she still lay in October six months later, together with goods worth 100l
which included white wine of La Rochelle, two types of cloth, and 24 flychys of
bacon which belonged to Thomas Horewood of Wells.
In 1435, in order to respond to the crisis which was rapidly
unfolding on the opposite shore of the Channel, the government had an acute
need for ships. Some men concerned must have looked back regretfully to the
time of Henry V, when royal or loyal hired vessels would have been used to
cruise the Channel through the long summer season for the combined purposes of
guarding against French ships leaving port, protecting English commerce and, if
necessary, defending the south coast of England. But that was no longer an
option. Even before Henry V died, those ships had become redundant and had
started to decay. Back in 1423–24, the authorities, finding they were further
decayed and maintenance would have been unjustifiable, and especially since
there was then no pressing need for them, had sold off the ships which remained.
Therefore, when crisis was looming in February 1436 the
government took the only course open to it, and issued short-term (four-month)
licences to certain individual shipowners to equip certain named ships at their
own expense ‘with a master, mariners, men at arms, archers, and other
hibiliments of war, and victuals, to resist the king’s enemies on the sea’.
They were not to be paid, but all captured goods were to belong to the captors,
except for the certain ‘share’ reserved for the admiral. Of the greatest
significance, a proviso was included to exonerate those who made most of this
piracy possible. It was stated that if any offence should be committed against
the king’s friends, the offender alone should answer for it: no responsibility
was to fall on the owner or the victualler of the ship.
These commissions were mostly issued to men of east coast
ports, but included one in the south-west, Thomas Gylle of Dartmouth. He was
another of those who first appears in the records after 1430, although he was
notable as a shipowner and merchant of some substance. He was six times MP for
the town between 1433 and 1455, and one of the collectors of customs in Exeter
and Dartmouth in 1439 and in 1453. Between 1431 and 1435 he had frequently
served on commissions to arrest men, ships and goods brought into West Country
ports. Now, in 1436, he was licensed to equip and arm two of his ships,
l’Antony and Le Katerine, both of Dartmouth, together with two supporting
balingers or barges. For this short time, at least, he was a fully accredited
privateer.
Gylle was heard of again in January 1440, in less dignified
circumstances. His ship the Christopher of Dartmouth, 320 tons, was sailing
home north to Dartmouth when, already in the lee of Start Point, she turned
and, with full sail, a favourable wind and three well-harnessed men in the
topcastle, rammed a much smaller ship which had been following some 3 miles
behind her. She ‘sliced in two’ the George of Welles, 120 tons, and sank her.
In his complaint to the chancellor, the owner, an Englishman born at Lancaster
but then living in Drogheda, Ireland, prayed consideration for his great
poverty, loss and delays and he took the opportunity to point out that while he
was ignorant of Dartmouth, Gylle had ‘great authority and power in that
district’.
Snapshots of the life of Hankyn Seelander illustrate the
mobility, in more than one respect, of one of this new class of pirates. Both
his address and even his name seem to have been readily adjustable. He is
described variously as being of either Falmouth or Fowey, and it is also
evident that he had valuable connections on the Isle of Wight.
In December 1433, as Hanquin Seland, he was accused of
taking certain goods at sea from a ship of Bayonne. In 1439, a group of pirates
in a balinger belonging to John Selander captured a Breton ship, the Saint
Fiacre, sailing towards La Rochelle laden with goods belonging to John Loven.
After Loven’s letters of safe conduct had been thrown overboard, he was robbed
of both the ship and the cargo. In the early summer of 1441 one Hankyn Hood,
presumably the same man, was sailing as master of the Marie with John Fresshow
of Falmouth, a frequent companion, somewhere south of Brittany. In company with
several other Cornish vessels they captured a ship of Vannes, southern
Brittany, which they took to sell her cargo in one of the ports in the Gironde.
And so he went on, being especially active and confident in
1443–44. Around midsummer 1443 Alphonso Mendes, a merchant of Portugal, sailing
in a ship of Tavira (on the south coast of Portugal) lost certain goods,
principally fruit and bastard wine, to pirates who were named as John Selander
and Hankyn Loo, both of Fowey. Unfortunately the location of this piracy was
not disclosed, but one wonders whether these two names stood for one and the
same man. That September, he had stolen wine and other merchandise from another
Breton ship, of which John Rous was master.
On the Sunday before Christmas 1443, a group of pirates in a
barge named Le Palmer of Fowey owned by Hankyn Selander captured another
English ship, Le Mighell of Dartmouth, as she was preparing to enter Plymouth
harbour at the end of her voyage from Brittany. She was carrying 21 tuns of
wine and 17 pieces of linen cloth for a joint group of English merchants from
the Plymouth area operating in partnership, it seems, with two named men from
Le Conquet, Brittany. The pirates diverted the ship with its cargo to Newport,
Isle of Wight, where they ‘did their will therof’. Although the goods may
already have been sold, the commission which followed included the usual empty,
unrealistic threat. He was to return the ship and the goods – or be committed
to prison.
Clays Stephen of Portsmouth was another similar individual.
In the autumn of 1445 he joined Robert Wenyngton of Dartmouth and others who
came from Kingswear, and captured a ship which had been sent by the Queen of
France to bring a consignment of wine, iron and other merchandise to England.
In spite of the ship having letters of safe conduct from the king and there
being a truce between England and France, they brought it into Fowey. They
disposed of the goods easily, and the merchants were severely beaten up and
some were killed.
In about March 1448 Clays Stephen had travelled further in
the opposite direction and was in the Thames estuary, where he was joined by
William Kydd, who had come from even further west. They combined with others to
attack a ship bringing goods for some London merchants from Arnemuiden near
Middleburg in Zeeland to Queenborough near Sheerness. They took that ship first
to Portsmouth and then disposed of the goods on the Isle of Wight.
That summer Clays Stephen, one of two pirates said to be
staying at Sandwich, was busy in a flotilla out at sea ‘between Dover and
Calais’, which encountered a small convoy on its way from La Rochelle to Sluys.
He was the master of a balinger which took a similar ship, the Saint Piere de
Lavyon, and relieved it of 39 tuns of wine belonging to a merchant of La
Rochelle. At the same time another merchant lost 27 tuns of white wine from a
second ship, the Noel de Arninton.
In the autumn of 1450 another small flotilla of English
pirates captured a hulk (an old-fashioned term for a vessel which was probably
a successor of the cog) named the St George of Bruges, which belonged to a
group of merchants of that city and was on voyage home from Portugal. Clays
Stephen was master of one of the pirate ships, Le Carvell of Portsmouth: others
came from Southampton and Winchelsea.
These are just a few examples of the culture of concentrated
piracy which existed in the 1430s and 1440s. Numerous men were involved, and
between Portugal and the North Sea no mariner can have felt safe from them.
In 1449 England was in a high state of uncertainty and
insecurity, with the threat of French raids renewed because France had control
of the opposing Channel ports. Then there was also a stream of refugees
arriving from Normandy, many of them destitute, retreating after the collapse
of Henry V’s ‘permanent’ settlement. In April, the government appointed three
senior officers to ‘keep the seas’, to cruise the Channel looking for trouble.
Those officers included Robert Wenyngton of Dartmouth, where he had already
served as bailiff in 1446 and as mayor two years later. A month after his
appointment the government found itself with somewhat more than it had
bargained for, the largest prize of the century.
On 23 May, when Wenyngton was cruising with his ‘fellowship’
in a small flotilla of small vessels, in the general area of mid-Channel
between Guernsey and Portland, he came upon the entire Bay fleet, some 110
larger vessels, which were carrying to Flanders and the Baltic not only salt
but also some more valuable commodities, cloth and wine. Since Wenyngton had
somehow become separated from the other two senior officers, one wonders if
this encounter was entirely accidental. However, in a show of bravado, and with
the advantage of a following wind, after a short altercation in which their
admiral rebuffed his challenge, rather than risk the damage which might result
from a mid-Channel gunfight, the whole fleet surrendered to him and was ushered
into Southampton Water. Dutch and Flemish ships were soon released, but
enormous bills were presented to the English government by the Hanse on behalf
of its merchants.
In the penultimate month of our period, November 1453,
Thomas Gylle of Dartmouth, merchant of substance who had a long history of
apparent probity as an officer of the Crown, and who was the controller of
customs in Exmouth that year seems, at last, to have been drawn into the web of
corruption. He was working in collusion with William Kydd, the long-established
pirate, in connection with a captured ship belonging to the Bishop of St
Andrews which they brought into Exmouth. The ensuing documents stand out as
being extraordinarily complicated and contorted, even by the standards of this
period. Suffice it to say that they involved impersonation of the bishop’s
brother; obtaining a commission under false pretences; impounding another ship
in Scotland by way of reprisal; death-threats to officers of the Crown who
approached the ship when in Sandwich; and the eventual escape of the ship,
after her name had been changed, for the second time, to the Antony of
Dartmouth. By March 1456 she was carrying thirty pilgrims on their way south to
the shrine of St James at Compostela in Galicia.
All this time, piracy flourished, not only because of the
usual reasons. The Crown was indeed weak, and deep-seated dynastic power
struggles were taking place between excessively rich magnates. Law and order
had certainly broken down in all levels of society. And, with the progressive
loss of Normandy, the Channel became, once again, a dangerous frontier zone. In
addition, and pervading all that, was corruption which reflected the underlying
loss of the checks and balances which had previously been provided by the
feudal system.
The degree of corruption was such that administrators in the
ports, wealthy landowners inland and high-level legal officers were all involved.
Widespread plunder was being carried out by the men of the sea with the strong
support, encouragement and participation of the whole establishment,
particularly in Cornwall and Devon.
By way of an epilogue, it is a nice irony that when, after
several years of civil war and political manoeuvring, the time came, on 26 June
1460, for the Earls of Warwick and Salisbury to escort the Duke of York and his
teenage son Edward across the Channel from Calais to Sandwich, they did so in a
ship recently stolen from the French. Within nine more tumultuous months Edward
had taken over the throne as Edward IV.
