Ship Routes

and Uses

General⁽¹⁾:

• Voyages for medieval ships would have had longer routes between the same ports that ships use now, since medieval ships had to hug the coast.
• Generally we can estimate ships went at a speed of around 1 knot (1.16 mph), but it is hard to tell from shipping records, since we do not have the number of days they spent entirely sailing. There are some that seem to have gone at three or four knots, but that would have mostly been during battle.
• The basic route from London to Bordeaux was around 90-150 days.

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Ships for Trade⁽¹⁾:

• In England most of the ships used for trade in the 1400s were foreign ships from Holland and Flanders. They helped with the major trade from England, which was wool.
• Major import was wine from Gascony. Royal records show 900 shipping movements of wine from Bordeaux between June 1303 and June 1403. In the mid 1350s the shipping slowed to between 154 and 245 trips a years because of the Hundred Years War.
• In the 15^th century an average of 9,000-10,000 tons of wine were imported into England a year.
• Other smaller things traded in the norther were coal, salt, flour, horses (with their own stables and slings built into ships to hold them) and pilgrims. The pilgrims were going mostly from England to northern Spain, averaging 40-60 passengers on a ship, but sometimes up to 200, which would have been a packed passage, but it only took 3-5 days to get there.

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Ships for War⁽¹⁾:

• There were many different types of naval fights in the middle ages, ranging from full royal naval battles to smaller skirmishes and piracy. One of the major problems was coastal raiding. None of the major wars of the Middle Ages were determined by naval battles, although some during the Hundred Years War helped each side get the upper hand.
• The basic tactic of naval battles was to get the ship close enough to ram the other ship and then board her and fight the rest of the battle on the deck. There were no major long range weapons that could be helpful except longbows and crossbows. Cannons were not powerful enough until the 16th century.
• One of the first calls for an English navy was in 897 by King Alfred. The next time was not until 1204 by King John, who then built 20 galleys from the years 1209 to 1212. The most famous English king with naval power was Henry V.
• Galleys were the main warship of northern Europe in the Middle Ages until the 14^th century. They were more often called ballingers in England and ranged from 20-100 oared ships. They were very fast and maneuverable and often used by pirates. In the 15^th century they were called barks and then again in the 16^th century galleys.
• The switch from oared fighting ships to sailing ones probably happended because while England was still using galleys, their enemies were using sailing cogs. Cogs rode much higher in the water, and therefore had an automatic advantage in a battle which made it hard for the English too board the ship. Castles may have come about when each side tried to develop a new height advantage.
• The weapons used at sea were the same as those used on land mostly - bows, axes, swords, spears, darts, grapnels for scaling hulls, and rudimentary cannons.
• The same types of weapons were used from the time of Henry V to Henry VII except for the increasingly large number of cannons.
• The first mention of a cannon on a ship was in 1337. Henry V's ships during the Hundred Years War only included fifteen gun ships, out of thirty total, and each only had three to seven guns. By the 1480s there were five to ten times as many on each ship.
• Gun ports (niches cut into the hull so the gun could be held on a lower deck and therefore not unbalance it) were first added in 1501.

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Sources:

• ⁽¹⁾Friel, Ian. The Good Ship. John Hopkins University Press, Maryland: 1995. VM17.F75