OTD: A MEDIEVAL ARMADA AND 8000 TUNS OF WINE

The Battle of Margate on 24-25 March 1387 was a rare victory for the English in the middle stages of the Hundred Years War

In the early spring of 1387 the French were preparing to send an armada to invade England. This was nothing new. Since the previous summer, English spies in Flanders had been reporting a massive build-up of ships and troops in the port of Sluys, ordered by the government of the young king Charles VI.

The French invasion plans were ominous. According to intelligence reports that reached the English government of Richard II, the enemy aimed to sail hundreds of ships to the long shingle beaches of East Anglia, force a landing and erect a pre-fabricated fortress by the sea, from which an invading army could march 60 miles inland and lay siege to London.

If the plan had succeeded, it would have been the most dangerous attack on the realm since the invasion of Louis ‘the Lion’ (the future Louis VIII), who had nearly taken the English crown during the Magna Carta crisis and civil war of 1215-16. Or even the Norman Invasion of 1066. Across England urgent preparations were underway to defend the realm: rivers and harbours were blockaded and city walls reinforced. Every able-bodied man who could fight was put on standby to do so.

Yet the English were not exactly confident of standing firm. The royal government was broke. Unpaid soldiers in London and elsewhere were mutinous. Richard II, 19 years old but showing no signs of becoming a serious monarch in the mould of his grandfather and predecessor, Edward III, was surrounded by sycophants and second-rate political hacks. In the ‘Wonderful Parliament’ of October 1386 political disquiet had boiled over into full-blown crisis, and Richard had been warned by his lords and bishops that if he did not get a grip on the situation, he might end up in the same sort of hot water as his great-grandfather, Edward II, who was deposed and murdered in 1326-7. Several weeks later government was taken out of his hands and entrusted to a ‘continual council’ - as though he were a child or a halfwit.

If you had been a betting person in 1387, you would have laid money on the French taking advantage and inflicting humiliating defeat on their old foes - perhaps even claiming final victory in the wars that had been raging between the two realms since 1337. But it didn’t turn out like that. For the English scored an escape that was, in its way, as fortuitous as their much more famous deliverance from the Spanish Armada two centuries later in 1588.

A medieval sea battle during the Hundred Years War

The mistake the French made was to drag their heels. Amid the crisis of the autumn months of late 1386, it is very easy to imagine with hindsight that an invasion on the scale that Edward III had thrown in the opposite direction in 1346 (when his army ravaged Normandy and won a crushing battlefield victory at Crécy) would have toppled Richard II’s government, and possibly the king himself.

Yet throughout that autumn, the French repeatedly delayed setting out from Sluys, until the weather grew so bad that the campaign had to be abandoned until the spring of 1387. And when spring came, things had changed. In foreign affairs, an English army ravaging Castile demanded diplomatic attention. Many French ministers had also got cold feet about the potential cost of a full invasion.

So when March 1387 arrived, the French still planned to invade. But they had scaled down their ambitions dramatically. Instead of tens of thousands of troops, the government would commit only 3,000. Instead of invading from Sluys, they would attack from French ports. No noblemen would join the fight - still less Charles VI himself.

In the meantime, most of the ships assembled the previous year at Sluys would be released to form a sort of hybrid armada: loaded with commercial cargo, but with instructions to attack English ships if they came across them, and scope out the south coast for potential weak spots.

What had begun as a bold plan to strike hard and fast at a weakened adversary had dissolved into a half-assed policy of doing nothing well. As a result the French got their comeuppance.

Charles VI meets English envoys, from the Chronicles of Jean Froissart

That comeuppance was handed to them by Richard Fitzalan, 4th earl of Arundel, one of the most senior lords of the ‘continual council’. Arundel was a highly aggressive and belligerent Francophobe, and a competent soldier, who had been appointed as Admiral of England at the height of the invasion crisis of the autumn, and given a fleet and 2,500 sailors with which to protect the realm. He had his fleet at sea from February 1387 onwards. And he was waiting for his moment to strike.

It came at the end of March. Around 200 ships of the French invasion fleet had been released from port at Sluys, and had sailed nervously through the English Channel to La Rochelle, in southwest France. Arundel let them pass unmolested. The French ships put in at La Rochelle, and loaded up with commercial stock - including vast amounts of wine. Then they set off back towards Flanders, to sell it.

Which was when Arundel pounced.

The earl only had 47 ships, but they were crewed by experienced and highly motivated sailors and men-at-arms. And when the French fleet, commanded by a Flemish admiral, Jan Buuc, passed by southern England once more - the ships now groaning with wine and precious goods, and the crews not at all in the mood for a fight - Arundel threw his fleet into action.

The English chased the French along the coast and caught up with them off Margate in northern Kent on 24 March. A large Dutch and German contingent among the French fleet mutinied and either fled or switched sides. Fifty more French ships were immediately captured and taken back to English ports to be stripped of their goods. Then the English continued to pursue what remained of their enemies. They forced a second battle at Cadzand, near Sluys. They captured some of the French ships, sank others and burned more. They terrorised Sluys itself and other coastal towns and villages.

They continued their counterattack until mid-April, by which time they had taken more than 70 ships, and confiscated more than 8,000 tuns of wine. (A single tun is traditionally 252 gallons or 1145 litres.) They captured Admiral Buuc, who was carted off to the Tower of London and then Arundel’s own jail, where he died two years later, no-one having been able or willing to afford his ransom. Arundel went back to England, restocked his fleet quickly and continued raiding foreign ships in the Channel until midsummer, when he packed up and went home.

In the grand narrative of the Hundred Years War, the battle of Margate is little-known and very seldom remembered. The domestic dramas of Richard II’s court in 1386-7 take centre-stage in English political narratives of the time. John of Gaunt’s campaigns in Portugal and Castile are generally the focus of foreign accounts. But after the serious invasion scare of 1386, the naval victories of the following spring must have felt to many ordinary English people like divine deliverance. I think that makes the story worth remembering today, the 635th anniversary of a lesser-spotted Armada.

* If you want to read more about the battle of Margate, a good place to start is Divided Houses: The Hundred Years War III by Jonathan Sumption (Faber & Faber: 2009)