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Sometimes the research goose lays a golden egg that you just have to share straight away, and this is one of them.
A number of wrecks in the record involve historical personages one way or another: Henry VIII witnessed the loss of theMary Rose; Daniel Defoe recorded the wrecks of the Great Storm in 1703, and is one of our best sources for that storm, as well as writing Robinson Crusoe; in Mrs Mary Roberts and Charles Lightoller, we have relatively ‘ordinary’ people who acquired a degree of fame as prior survivors of the Titanic and later went on to be involved in other wrecks in English waters. Sometimes, too, there are accounts of celebrity survivors – a violin virtuoso and his celebrated Stradivarius, both of whom fortunately survived.
On this occasion we have an unexpected connection with a historical figure – though, when you pause to think about overseas trade in the Middle Ages, it shouldn’t really have come as a surprise.
A piece of research in the Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous – summaries of Chancery documents for the 13th to 15th centuries – proved to be more interesting than anticipated. These are enquiries by royal officials known as escheators – who worked at local, usually county, level – into a wide variety of matters of life and death, hence their name, the Inquisitions Miscellaneous. They are now in the National Archives and were summarised – or calendared – in published volumes in the 20th century. Along with the Calendars of Patent Rolls (copies of letters patent, or open documents) and the Close Rolls (copies of letters close, or sealed) the Inquisitions Miscellaneous forms one of our principal sources of medieval wreck records.
One such document concerns a ship freighted with wine at La Rochelle for Nieuwpoort, Flanders (now in West-Vlaanderen province, Belgium) in 1400. This voyage was never intended to touch the English coast at all, but it did, ‘by the bad piloting and default of the master’ – in other words, it was significantly off course when it was wrecked at Shoreham-by-Sea. Wrecks of ships on the English Channel coasts while bound from Atlantic ports in France to the northern coast of France or Flanders are not at all uncommon, and nearly always driven by southerly or south-westerly winds onto the Sussex or Kent coastlines. [1]
In this case though, there is none of the usual ‘tempest’ or ‘stress of weather’ but an accusation of navigational incompetence: behind those words ‘bad piloting’ and ‘default’ we sense the exasperation of the merchants who were now involved in an administrative and legal headache.
As the documents show, this headache was caused by tracking down their goods in a foreign country: the wine was stolen by local men. Again, this isn’t an uncommon story throughout history – wine and spirits were attractive in their own right, and lucrative. We discover the names of some of these men – tuns of wine which had been unlawfully taken up and hidden, instead of being turned over to the merchants or the authorities, were located in the cellars of two men called Simon Benefeld and William Hulle. Simon Benefeld had dealings with a cloth trader named John atte Gate – who was part owner of a ship named La Nicholas of Shoreham. All three men were MPs – Benefeld and atte Gate successively representing New Shoreham, and Hulle Salisbury, so we start to gain a sense of the rising power and dominance of the mercantile classes in the 14th century but also a sense that they weren’t averse to a side hustle when opportunity arose. [2]
They led us to our man. In 1407 La Nicholas was freighted by a London mercer (dealer in cloth) with wool from Chichester for Calais – this is not a shipwreck, but it is important evidence for a close network woven between the mercantile classes of London and Sussex, and it was worth following the documentary trail for these connections.
The same London mercer was Mayor of the Staple of Calais through which wool was exported from England – La Nicholas fits entirely into this pattern of regulated trade at a time when Calais was under English control, so he was a significant figure on both sides of the Channel. Our mercer joined together with two other merchants, William Marchford and Thomas Aleyn, in 1413 to ship some more wool from Chichester to the Staple of Calais in three ships. It was a considerable quantity of wool, some 20 sarplers or 20 tons.Alas, these three ships were ‘submerged by a tempest near the coast by Shorham’, and the wool ‘driven ashore by the same town’. [3]
Our London mercer? None other than ‘Richard Whytington’, thrice Lord Mayor of London (appointed, then elected, both in 1397, again in 1406, and for the last time in 1419), and thrice finding his trade shipwrecked in this one incident. It isn’t often we find such a well-known figure behind a historical wreck incident. The pantomime based on the folk tale often tells us of the vicissitudes the young Dick Whittington experienced, but even as the real-life wealthy and established merchant it is clear that he also had his share of setbacks.
The gaps in the medieval record are significant – we essentially have nearly as many records for medieval shipwrecks as there are years between 1066 and 1540. Oh no, they aren’t evenly distributed at all: there isn’t anything like a even match of one wreck per year but instead we have several missing years and great variability around the numbers of wrecks recorded. The wrecks around 1413 are a case in point: we have no records for 1410-11, two for 1412, one other besides Whittington’s wrecks for 1413, none for 1414, one each for 1415 and 1416; seven in 1417, with three for 1418 and a decline towards one each for 1419 and 1420. It isn’t a case of more tempests in a particular year, but instead issues of record creation and record survival. Wealthy merchants like Richard Whittington were simply more likely to leave a documentary trail.
Oh yes, we now have 3 more records for the year 1413, to add to the one we already had, and Richard Whittington is behind them!
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© National Portrait Gallery, London
Footnotes
[1] Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, Vol. 7, 1399-1422 No.172
[2] History of Parliament Online, Simon Benefeld and John atte Gate
[3] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Henry V, Vol. 1. 1413-1416, p149; History of Parliament Online, William Marchford
