Two wrecks from the 1350s

The medieval wrecks project and what we know so far

Our ongoing research project into medieval wrecks seeks to provide a sounder documentary knowledge base for future finds such as those of the designated Mortar Wreck dating to the mid 13th century, particularly in understanding patterns of trade and the discovery of new shipwreck events to close the documentary gaps.

As predicted from previous research into medieval wrecks, the strongest evidence comes from the reign of Edward III (1327-1377). The records for the fifty-year span of his reign comprise exactly one-third of our known records for the nearly 5 centuries between 1066 and 1540 traditionally accepted as the medieval period. Undoubtedly record creation and survival play their part, as does the sheer length of his reign, but there is equally no doubt that here was a king particularly interested in matters of rights to wreck, whether they pertained to himself or his queen, Philippa of Hainault, or whether restoring goods to shipwrecked merchants who had seen them ‘taken into safe custody’ by local inhabitants.

In this he followed in the footsteps of his father, Edward II (1307-1327), who seems to have been similarly interested, with 11% of our documented wrecks over a 20-year reign. Therefore records under those two kings between them account for 44% of our known shipwrecks for the Middle Ages, or over two-fifths.

Edward III’s successor, his grandson Richard II, reigned for a similar length of time as his great-grandfather, Edward II, in fact slightly longer (1377-1399) but only 8% of our known wrecks for the Middle Ages derive from his reign. In the following reign, that of Henry IV (1399-1413), interest appears to have fallen off a cliff, accounting for 3.5% of our documented wrecks for the medieval period and that pattern would be repeated thereafter.

Although it is true that there is a dearth of documentary evidence for shipwrecks from the 11th and 12th centuries, we can see that a later date does not necessarily equate to more records: royal interest played a crucial part.

Rights to wreck – a source of dispute and a source of records

Rights to wreck were the principal reason for the appearance of wreck events in the record: essentially, if no-one escaped alive to land, the right to wreck went to the crown – and was a lucrative source of revenue and goods. However, if there were survivors, then they were entitled to reclaim their goods. Merchants who survived shipwreck naturally asserted their rights, and it must have taken some tenacity to do so, after being in peril of their lives and ending up in a foreign jurisdiction. To then have had their goods taken away – whoever claimed them – must have been the final straw, particularly when there were assertions that that the goods had not been duly ‘cocketed’ for export and the threat of having to pay customs dues all over again hung over them.

Some of the shipwrecked merchants were, of course, Englishmen, but dialects at the time were not necessarily wholly mutually intelligible – see William Caxton’s famous story printed in 1490 about an English merchant asking for eggs and only being understood when he asked for eyren in Kent, which incidentally took place when forced to put in by the weather en route from London to Zeeland. Others most likely spoke English or French well as a second language due to repeated contact and at a time when the language of the court and government was in Anglo-Norman (though it would be Henry IV before a king of England spoke English as his first language). Others still would have had to depend on interpreters and legal assistance to fight their cases.

It therefore follows that disputes over the right to wreck, for example between local landowners, or between landowners and the crown, tended to make it into the record, and more straightforward wrecks did not, so there is a strong selection bias in record creation in the first place. This selection bias is further compounded by the fact that squabbles inevitably arose over lucrative and richly-laden wrecks – they were the ones worth claiming – and cases were then brought by those who had the means to do so, who of course were the ones engaged in those lucrative cargoes, and out of those, only those who were very determined and/or very wealthy or very well-connected persisted. For these reasons, we very rarely hear, if at all, of the loss of minor coasting or fishing vessels.

These issues are compounded by the variety of legal sources in which wrecks could be entered – the Close Rolls, Patent Rolls and Inquisitions Miscellaneous – which, as the name implies, covered a variety of enquiries into all sorts of cases. Our two cases today illustrate that it is sometimes by interrogating more than one source that we finally flesh out the details of a wreck.

One wreck at Coatham, not three

In our first example, we have recently realised that a cluster of wrecks in Coatham, south of the Tees, over the best part of a decade, were all variant reports of the same wreck, not a product of assiduous local reporting. In fact, it isn’t uncommon for legal wrangling over the right to wreck to persist for many years – we have one wreck where the dispute continued for two decades, and across the reigns of Edward II and Edward III, without an apparent resolution: either the document finally resolving the case disappeared long ago, or was never made, as everyone involved had died. I suspect the latter but the merchant involved was certainly more determined than most. [1]

Today’s first case is rather less extreme, only covering the years 1352 to 1359, but it illustrates the potential for wrecks to escalate to the level of diplomatic incidents – another very good reason for them to enter the record, but, again, we do not quite know how this case ends. It is quite tantalising.

However, it is clear that all three references, to 1352, 1358, and 1359, pertain to the same wreck, from the circumstances of the wreck, the description of the ship and its cargo, the location of the wreck, and the names of those involved. The ‘ship of Lescluse in Flanders’ [now Sluis, Netherlands] was ‘lately freighted with goods and merchandise to the value of 1,700l’ (worth around £1.5m to buy today, but other calculations are available: see measuringworth.com). The issue was that the goods were consigned for Scotland by Scottish merchants. It was initially thought that ‘some evildoers carried away the same, which should pertain to the king as forfeit to him’. [2]

It therefore looked initially as if local inhabitants had plundered the wreck and robbed the king of his due. However, the issue was more complex than that. The merchandise belonged to the ‘enemies of the king of Aberden [sic] in Scotland’. By 1358 the merchants are recorded as hitting back: they complained that goods ‘to no small value’ were carried away and that they had been arrested and imprisoned for six months ‘and more’ in York, being further deprived of their goods while unable in prison to do anything about it. They pointed out that the wreck and subsequent events happened during the time of truce between Scotland and England, so a state of war was not a legitimate excuse for their being deprived of their lawful merchandise. The king ‘commanded their bodies to be released from arrest and the goods delivered to them’, but the ‘evildoers’ had ‘carried away the goods while so under arrest and refused to make restitution of these to them’. [3]

In 1359 there was a further twist to the story. The merchants alleged that they had been forced to sign over their goods ‘through fear against their will’. Henry de Greystok, one of the accused, counter-claimed that the Scots had signed over their goods to be sold and the remainder were to be made over to the king ‘without this that any of the goods came to the hands of Henry or to his profit or that he imprisoned the said petitioners’. [4] It further emerged that the mayor of York had refused to affix his seal to the commission to the attorney to sell the goods: whether that was in support of the merchants, or in support of those who had carried away the goods, we are not quite clear, as we know nothing further save that the king was appointing two juries to enquire further into the matter. History is silent on the outcome, but Edward III clearly felt he had to get to the bottom of the matter. [5]

All we can deduce is that it was a significant headache to uncover the truth at the time, but that effort then has practical implications for our record now, which is dynamic and one of subtraction as well as addition: we can add new wrecks that we discover, and flesh out the information we have for those we already know about, but our research also allows us to use new evidence to consolidate records that we now see clearly hang together.

A 1354 dispute with a twist in the tail

In a similar-but-slightly-different vein, in 1354 a London ship foundered off Scarborough ‘by the violence of the sea’ while bound from London for Berwick-upon-Tweed. The case came before the king twice in 1356, as noted in the Calendar of Patent Rolls: in September that year a merchant named John de Boulton complained that, while he and the mariners ‘came to land alive’, a couple of named local men had carried away the goods that were cast ashore. [6] A wreck was then reported to the king in November as one ‘of which no-one came to land alive, whereby the goods should pertain to the king as wreck of sea, and that these goods have been occupied and concealed from him by some men of the parts adjacent to the said town’. [7]

It therefore looked as if there were two distinct wrecks, one with a happy outcome and one involving considerable loss of life, near Scarborough in the same year. That would have been completely plausible given the amount of trade on the North Sea. However, research in the Calendar of Close Rolls revealed that in 1357 a further complaint was made by John de Boulton about the ‘malefactors’ who had taken away ‘those goods and chattels and committed other enormities’. This complaint brought the matter to the fore again and there was a dawning realisation that ‘the ship contained in the two commissions is the same one’ as the circumstances were otherwise identical. It looked as if ‘the malefactors’ had tried to cover up their concealment of the goods by pretending that they had reserved them for the king.

However, the feature which broke open the case for Edward III, and which those who had carried away the goods apparently hadn’t realised, was that John de Boulton was the king’s own clerk, and John was able to use this fact to his advantage. It must have been an uncomfortable situation for king and clerk to realise that they were being played off against each other by those who had abstracted the goods. Again, we don’t know the outcome, but it must have backfired spectacularly for the ‘malefactors’. For us in 2026, this feature of the case also made us realise the two wrecks were one and the same, and needed to be consolidated, but it was only finding the reference in the Calendar of Close Rolls that enabled us to make that judgement.

An accident of survival in a corroborating source becomes a wonderful illustration of how making texts available online facilitates research. We will never be able to recover all the wrecks of the medieval past, but at least we can do our best to ensure tbat we understand them as best we can and that we have not artificially inflated the figures since we now have digital access to the major legal sources for these wrecks.

Footnotes

[1] Navis de Jehsu Christi de Portu, of which the first mention was in 1318. It was a richly laden vessel and it is probably testament to the wealth of the principal merchant in this voyage that he was able to insist on his rights. It must have taken considerable means to do so, particularly in a foreign jurisdiction. For more detail on this particular vessel, see Cant, S. 2013: England’s Shipwreck Heritage: from logboats to U-boats (Swindon: English Heritage)

[2] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, 1350-54, p38, membrane 13d, p38

[3] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, 1358-61, membranes 6d (p79) and 21d (pp218-9)

[4] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, 1358-61 membrane 21d (pp218-9)

[5] Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, Edward III, Vol. III, 1348-1377, No.375, p135

[6] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, 1354-58, membrane 6d

[7] Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward III, Vol. 10, 1354-1360