The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (22 page)

A similar thing can be said for coaches. In the early decades of the century it is unlikely that there are more than a dozen coaches in the kingdom. Only female members of the royal family or elderly noblewomen are likely to travel by coach. Even at the end of the century they are very expensive vehicles, costing hundreds of pounds and sometimes as much as a thousand.
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Four six-spoke, six-foot-high wheels are linked by axles directly under the body of the coach and heavily greased (they do not have any suspension). The chassis is made from huge painted oak beams. Above this is a wooden-framed, barrel-shaped roof, covered in brightly painted cloth or leather. Along the sides are brightly painted architectural carvings, making the whole thing resemble a palace on wheels. Inside are seats, beds, cushions, tapestries, and rugs. The windows have silken curtains and leather external drapes. There are even hooks for the ladies’ songbird cages and perches for their hunting birds.

Such mobile palaces are certainly the only way of traveling around the country with any certainty of staying dry, but they are very rarely seen on the road. They are not just costly to buy, they are hugely expensive to run. They are heavy and require a team of four or five horses (normally tethered all in one line) to pull them. The horses require feeding and grooming, the axles require constant greasing, the harness requires maintenance (keeping the long leather reins supple, for instance), and every jolt in the road threatens the stability of the vehicle. Just making strong-enough spoked wheels, complete with iron tires, is costly; wheelwrights of this caliber are not as commonly found as they will be in later centuries. Usually you can count on a bill of three shillings or more for repairs to the coach and its wheels after every long journey. Add the cost of oats for the horses and the wages of men tending them, and the wages of the men-at-arms safeguarding anyone so wealthy as to be seen traveling in a coach, and you can see why this mode of transport can set you back hundreds of pounds every year, far more than most barons and merchants can afford.

The last option, the litter, is the one preferred by aristocrats when they are unable to ride any longer or, in the case of women,
when pregnant. Two long poles carrying the seat are supported by two horses, one before and one after.
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The seat itself has a round, wooden-vaulted canopy, like a small version of a coach. Such litters are not without problems of stability, and thus they are not entirely comfortable. If the road is uneven the leading horse might stumble and, with the weight of both litter and occupant, might collapse. Even if it stays upright you might find the litter rocking from side to side as the horse proceeds, making the occupant travel sick. Towards the end of his life, the duke of Burgundy has the road from Brussels to Halle leveled by workmen advancing in front of his horse-drawn litter with spades and pickaxes so he can travel along it in greater comfort.
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There is a romantic notion that the sea is timeless, never changing, crashing on the shingle beaches of this world relentlessly. Global warming is just beginning perhaps to alert us to some of the shortcomings of this view, but even so we tend to think in terms of the sea being something which was
once
timeless. The truth is that the sea has always been changing, and so have the rivers. Water levels rise and fall; estuaries, rivers, and harbors silt up; and coastal erosion wears away at cliff faces. Sands shift on the seabed, making some navigable paths along estuaries trickier. Shoals of fish move, drawing fishermen farther from the shore. And the coastal defenses and harbor walls of ports crumble under the pressure of high tides and spring storms. The constant crashing of waves on the beach is practically the only thing about the sea which does not change.

All the foregoing are the results of natural phenomena. If you add social and political factors, the sea is even more subject to change. The dangers of being lost at sea diminish rapidly with the improvement of mathematical tables and astrolabes, which can be used for measuring the angles of stars as well as the sun, for the purposes of navigation. In 1300 many people find the idea of being out of sight of land psychologically disturbing: the sailors themselves do not like it, preferring to follow the coasts. Thus the Irish Sea is not for the fainthearted. Nor is the voyage around Portugal to the Mediterranean, especially when there is a risk of being caught in a storm and swept right out into the
Atlantic. But by 1400 astrolabes are common and many people know how to use them. Chaucer writes a treatise for his son on how to use one. Compasses are still not yet in general use—Chaucer’s Sea Captain knows his way by his knowledge of the moon, tides, and currents—but with solar and lunar tables and astrolabes, mariners can sail across the open sea with greater confidence.

On the political front, just think how much safer it is to go to sea in peacetime, when you can be more confident that the crew of that Castilian vessel on the horizon will not return to a hero’s welcome if they board your vessel, cut the throats of everyone they find, and fling your corpses overboard. Naval victories—like the destruction of almost the entire French fleet at Sluys in 1340 and the crushing of the Castilian fleet off the coast at Winchelsea in 1350—are hugely significant, for they mark safer trading and easier journeying for everyone.

Although it is often said that hostilities between England and France break out in 1340, in reality the two sides have been engaging in piratical activity for many years. The Flemish pirate John Crabb, for instance, goes from his native Flanders to help the Scots—allies of the French and Flemings—in their war against England in about 1319. His manner of fighting as a mercenary is what frightens people. If you take part in a pitched battle on land, and it looks as if your side is about to lose, you can run away. At sea you cannot. Often those who are not killed in the battle are murdered afterwards and thrown overboard. When you realize that Scots, French, and Flemish pirates are picking off unprotected merchant vessels, you can see that traveling by sea is not necessarily safer than traveling by land. So it is a cause of great relief and celebration when John Crabb is captured in 1332 by Sir Walter Manny. Of course, French people are equally terrified of men like the great English pirate-merchant Sir John Hawley. But France is not an island, whereas Great Britain is. Certain things have to come to England by sea—the annual wine fleet from Bordeaux, for example—and you can be certain that if such consignments are not well defended, they and their crew will never see the shores of Britain.

At the start of the century the two main sorts of ship you will see in English waters are hulks and cogs. Both varieties are clinker-built: a
method in which the strakes (the joined planks of wood which reach from one end of the hull to the other) all overlap. Both have a single large square sail hanging from a yardarm on a central mast. The main difference is that the overlapping strakes of a hulk project out of the water both fore and aft. This gives it a very spacious, curvaceous, buoyant look. The strakes of a cog are fixed to straight stem and stern posts, giving it a more directional, pointed shape and a more pronounced keel. The two varieties also differ in the way they are steered. Cogs, having a straight stern post, normally have a stern rudder in the center. Hulks, being curvaceous, have nothing rigid and vertical on which to fix a stern rudder, so they continue to be steered by side rudders (very long oars).
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In the middle decades of the century, Genoese ships from the Mediterranean start to appear in British waters. These are large vessels, called “carracks,” and sometimes they carry more than one mast, allowing use of lateen sails (irregularly shaped sails in line with the ship, not across it like the square sails hanging from the yardarm). These enhance the ship’s maneuverability. The vessels’ greater size is due to the way they are constructed: they are carvel-built rather than clinker-built. In a carvel-built ship the strakes are laid flush against each other and nailed or pegged directly onto the frame of the hull. This uses much less oak or beech and is cheaper and much lighter. Thus the ship is also faster and more maneuverable. Similar principles are used to construct large galleys (up to 130 feet long), which use both sail power and banks of oars. Obviously the latter permit a greater degree of control and maneuverability than any vessel which relies entirely on the wind, and so they are very sought after for naval defense. Northern European shipbuilders are skeptical at first; they stick with their clinker construction until the second decade of the fifteenth century.
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But the lesson in Mediterranean shipwrighting techniques encourages them to rethink and experiment further, altering existing forms to make larger and faster clinker-built vessels.

The results of English shipwrights’ rethinking—or, rather, the rethinking of their political masters who have seen the power of these Genoese ships—are largely to be seen in the changing sizes of ships. Hulks are built larger for long voyages. Very large ships cannot be steered by a side rudder, as any rudder which is long enough to do the job is unwieldy. So central rudders suspended from the stern are
developed for hulks. Some have a second mast to aid their steering.
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Cogs also become bigger, reaching nearly 130 feet in the cases of a few royal warships. In addition, the basic constructional difference between a hulk and a cog begins to break down. By 1400 some ships have the strakes out of the water at one end, like a hulk, and a stem post at the other, like a cog. Some ships have more than one sail on the mainmast, adding a small topsail or “bonnet.” Shipwrights start to produce better cabins, making the sterncastle on the cog in particular into a raised deck, with a large cabin beneath. The forecastle of a cog shrinks as the bow becomes more streamlined. The larger cogs are given more pronounced keels, allowing them to use their stern rudders more effectively.

Let us say you are at the port of Boston (Lincolnshire) in the 1370s, looking out across the quay. All sorts of ships are bobbing about in the harbor. Cogs of varying shapes and sizes: large cogs and small ones, some with masts very far forward in the boat, others with masts set back. If you look at the boats drawn up out of the water for caulking at the nearby shipwrights’ workshop, you will see that some have pronounced keels and some are shallow draught. The keel type are stronger and heavier for the open seas; the shallow draught are versatile vessels for inshore transport and rivers. There is the odd moored hulk, waiting to take a large consignment of goods across to Sweden and Denmark. Maybe there is a large Genoese galley or carrack in the harbor, about to take a load of wool over to Flanders or down to the Mediterranean.

A typical merchant’s cog is moored in front of you. It belongs to a man called Richard Toty, who uses it for shipping wine around the coast. It is about eighty-feet long and about twenty-seven feet in the beam. It has a keel and incorporates some flush-laid strakes in the carvel style, although it is predominantly clinker-built. The shipwrights have used small nails and iron bolts as well as treenails (wooden pegs) to hold it together. It has a narrow bow and elegant lines, with a spacious “castle,” or upper deck, at the stern. Here is the tiller, which controls the stern rudder. There is no forecastle. Nor is there a deck as such; there is a low planked area inside the hull where the wine barrels are stored, open to the sky in port but covered with canvas when out at sea. The only cabin space is under the raised deck at the stern. Four anchors and a rowboat with oars are stored in the hull of the vessel.
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This is not the sort of ship in which you will make a very long voyage. There is insufficient space for more than a handful of passengers, let alone enough shelter. But if you do cadge a lift across the Channel or down to Bordeaux or Spain to buy wine with Richard Toty, then you can be reasonably confident you will arrive at your destination. The big square sail is not unwieldy, and although it works best when the wind is blowing you in exactly the right direction, it does not prevent the ship from sailing into the wind. Toty has sufficient experience to take the bottom corner of the sail and lash it to a forward point on the side of the ship, or even the prow, and tack into the wind.
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Of course, this puts great sideways stress on the rigging, so “shrouds” are necessary to secure the mainmast laterally, as well as the strong “stays,” which support the mast longitudinally. But these ships are up to the task. Cogs are the mainstay of England’s international trade.

It is a very hard life, taking a cog along the sea-lanes down to Bordeaux or Spain, and an even harder one crossing over the Baltic to Scandinavia. Food does not keep well, no one washes, no one shaves. It is almost impossible to keep anything dry in a storm, and you can expect to be wet and miserable most of the time. The cabins stink of urine, feces, and vomit, not to mention the smell of rat urine. They also tend to get unbearably hot in summer. Not only will you have to bear in mind the water in the hold, there is very little to stop more water getting in from the waves breaking over the sides of the vessel. You may also be woken by the constant noise of the waves. In high seas the timbers grind against one another, as if the ship is trying to wrench itself apart. If you are stuck on such a vessel for several weeks, then nerves and tempers wear thin. Men get rowdy, get drunk, and fights often break out. When that happens, you might find the old draconian sea-laws of Richard I applied. If one man murders another on board, the penalty is to tie him to the corpse and fling him into the sea. If a man so much as punches another, he can expect to be tied up with a rope and dunked three times in the sea. Bear this in mind when you feel like giving the ship’s mate a belt around the ear for laughing at you for being seasick.

Then there is the weather. If your ship is becalmed, or driven off course, you may find yourself with insufficient food and fresh water. Normally ships only carry provisions for the immediate journey, so an unexpected extension to the voyage can prove fatal. Shipwreck is the greatest fear (besides piracy). There is always a chance that you will set out to sea just as a storm is brewing beyond the horizon. Storms can be deadly for sailors and their passengers: scattering fleets, capsizing and flooding ships, driving boats onto rocks, or just dragging them out into uncharted waters. Ships’ captains often keep an axe on board, to cut down the mast if a storm looks like wrenching the vessel apart. And ships certainly do get pulled to pieces at sea. They tend only to last twenty years or so anyway, for the caulking wears out, the treenails and strakes rot, and iron nails rust. Sailing at night is particularly hazardous. There are very few lighthouses; St. Catherine’s Lighthouse on the Isle of Wight, built in 1328, is one of only a handful lit nightly as acts of charity.