Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/465

 *gineers, tent-makers, miners, armed gunners, from 10d. to 3d. per day; mariners, 4d.; whilst the Welshmen on foot had 4d. and 2d. But this roll is also valuable for what it omits to tell us. Thus if it be the record of the fleet before Calais, we cannot doubt that England then had many other vessels of naval and commercial importance, for, even at this period of English history, we find organized piracy was not extinct: thus, in November 1347, a Spanish fleet piratically seized and sunk (for the two nations were then at peace) ten English ships, on which a fleet of fifty ships was immediately sent to sea to make reprisals. In this fleet the King himself, with the Prince of Wales, and many of the nobility, embarked, and attacked off Winchelsea forty large Spanish carracks, fully manned and armed, and richly laden with cloth and other valuable commodities, capturing no less than one-half, and sinking or disabling most of the others.

Unfortunately, in 1354, France again became the scene of war, which ended in the celebrated battle of Poictiers under Edward the Black Prince. In the campaign which followed the expiration of the truce, consequent upon the capture of the French king and the most of his army on the field of Poictiers, Edward collected a fleet of no less than eleven hundred vessels, in which were embarked one hundred thousand men, by whom Paris was successfully invaded; but at the siege of La Rochelle his good fortune deserted him, and his whole fleet, then under the command of the Earl of Pembroke, became the prize of the combined squadrons of France and of Castile. Although, on pressing demands for succour, Edward was enabled