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 not on its intended scene of action, but at Calais. The longer passage could not be attempted in face of the numerous French, Spanish, and Portuguese galleys. The exhaustion of England is indicated by the fact that, but for the patriotic exertions of John Philpott, there would not have been sufficient transports, and many of the soldiers would have gone unarmed. Private effort on the part of the people of Hull and Newcastle contributed something towards the repression of piracy in the North Sea, and led to the capture of a Scots vessel worth 7000 marks.

But, so far as the Government was concerned, the coasts were almost entirely undefended. The enemy harried the English shores from Yorkshire to Cornwall, sacking Scarborough, entering the Thames and burning Gravesend, capturing Winchelsea, destroying Hastings and Portsmouth, and seizing Jersey and Guernsey. In July they attacked Kinsale; but there, with the aid of the Irish, four of their barges and a balinger were taken, twenty-four English vessels were re-captured, and numbers of the enemy were killed. When Parliament met in November, a subsidy was demanded that the king might be enabled to prevent the recurrence of these attacks; but nearly every vessel arrested was employed in the prosecution of the war in France; and in December there was a special impressment of shipping to reinforce the Earl of Buckingham, who was besieging Nantes.

The internal condition of England was not less bad than its external state. The resources of the country needed concentration; and foreign expeditions should have been abandoned pending the clearance of the foe from the Narrow Seas; yet early in 1381 a force under the Earl of Cambridge was sent to assist Portugal in her struggle with Spain A little later, when Anne of Bohemia was on her way to England to become the bride of the king, the home seas were so unsafe that the princess remained a mouth at Brussels, fearing capture by Norman pirates who were known to be cruising along the Netherlands coast; and finally, rather than risk crossing from Sluis, Ostend, or Flushing, she went overland to Calais, and thence reached Dover.