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 had received the title of Prince of Wales in 1301, and who, at the time of his accession, was twenty-three years of age, succeeded his father in 1307. He was a weak, despicable, and altogether unworthy monarch—the slave of his parasites, and the shuttlecock of his powerful nobles; and although his stormy reign was in several respects important from a naval point of view, it can hardly be contended that he personally ever did anything for the honour and greatness of England.

There is no doubt that in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries piracy was always very prevalent in the Narrow Seas; yet strong kings invariably kept it in some sort of check, and managed to curb, if not to repress, the freebooting tendencies of the most formidable of the English sea robbers, who had their headquarters in those strongholds of privilege and disorder, the Cinque Ports. But under a weak sovereign there was little or no effectual restraint upon the outrages of these rovers, nor upon those of the piratical inhabitants of the opposite coasts. In the reign, therefore, of Edward II. a recrudescence of piracy is distinctly noticeable. Looking to the proportions which it reached it is almost surprising that it was possible to maintain even the semblance of peace between England and her neighbours; nor would such a thing have been practicable at all had not there been a custom of permitting and encouraging aggrieved parties, on both sides of the Channel, to settle for themselves disputes which would, in later days, have been treated as international questions.

In March, 1308, there was a complaint by three merchants of Great Yarmouth that a ship laden by them at Rouen with cloth, woollens, canvas, cables, and gold and silver to the value of £40 had been attacked at night by French pirates and carried off. Soon afterwards there was a complaint by merchants of Winchester that a ship of theirs had been plundered off Gravelines by Flamands. About 1314 William de Huntingdon's ship was carried out of the port of Dublin by pirates headed by John le Lung of Bristol, and subsequently burnt. In the same year the Paternoster, of Yarmouth, chartered by William de Forbernard, a Gascon merchant, was plundered off the Foreland by Gervase Alard of Winchelsea, Peter Bert of Sandwich, and Robert Cleves of Greenwich, who were all in the king's service; and as Alard was either the very individual, or nearly related to the individual, who a few years