Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/142

140 were the property of the king; the royal navy was still, as it had heretofore been, chiefly composed of vessels belonging to private merchants which were pressed for the public service. The names of the following king's ships are mentioned in an Issue Roll of the ninth of Edward II.:—the Peter, the Bernard, the Marion, the Mary, and the Catherine; all of Westminster. In the reign of Edward III. we find many ships belonging to Yarmouth, Bristol, Lynne, Hull, Ravensere, and other ports, distinguished as ships of war; but this designation does not seem to imply that they were royal or public property.

The dominion of the four seas appears to have been first distinctly claimed by Edward III. At this time the Cinque Ports were bound by their charter to have fifty-seven ships in readiness at all times for the king's service; and Edward also retained in his pay a fleet of galleys, supplied, according to contract, by the Genoese. By far the greater number, however, of the vessels employed in every considerable naval expedition of those times consisted, as we have said, of the private merchant-men. The English mercantile navy was now very considerable. When Henry III., in 1253, ordered all the vessels in the country to be seized and employed in an expedition against the rebel barons of Gascony, the number of them, Matthew Paris tells us, was found to be above a thousand, of which three hundred were large ships. The foreign as well as the English vessels, howver, are included in this enumeration; the former as well as the latter were subject to be thus pressed. According to an account given in one of the Cotton manuscripts of the fleet employed by Edward III. at the siege of Calais in 1346, it consisted of 25 ships belonging to the king, which carried 419 mariners; of 37 foreign ships (from Bayonne, Spain, Flanders, and Guelderland), manned by 780 mariners; of one vessel from Ireland, carrying 25 men; and of 710 vessels belonging to