This book proved difficult to write for a number of reasons. When I initially decided to tackle the subject of the medieval navy in England for my doctoral thesis, I opted for Edward III’s reign in the mistaken belief that I would be attempting to draw out a skeletal picture from a few disparate pieces of evidence. Instead, when working on the subject of the navy over the years 1327–1377, the author is confronted with an overwhelming mass of information. Governmental records such as the Close and Patent Rolls and the Foedera, Conventiones, Litterae et Cujuscunque Generis Acta Publica include hundreds of entries detailing in fragmentary form the daily concerns and activities of the king’s council, civil servants and rank and file bailiffs and sergeants who realised the considerable naval ambitions of England’s most powerful medieval monarch. Lists of admirals and mariners survive, as do shipping censuses and maritime accounts. We have records from builders and shipyards, bailiffs and customs officials, merchants and sea captains, and the complaints of the maritime community in parliament.

By contrast, when considered through the spectrum of the chronicles and narrative poetry which prove so valuable for charting the course of land campaigns, the subject of naval activity is opaque. In fact it is so obscure that one important twentieth-century historian, Edouard Perroy, chose to omit it completely. Aside from the major battles, there was little about the mundanities of naval warfare to excite contemporary writers. Fighting at sea was considered brutal, squalid and bloody as it occurred in what was considered a frontier zone, exempt from the normal conventions of warfare. The merciless nature of naval fighting was therefore contrary to the spirit prevailing in fourteenth-century chivalric literature. Both of Edward III’s major naval victories were viewed with mixed feelings by some commentators who were likely to laud his successes on land. Most monastic writers were also firmly terrestrial, and had little familiarity with naval matters. As such we have little clear evidence about naval activity from sources which describe political events and wider history in prolific detail.

Partly because of the disparity, this book is divided into two parts. My original, somewhat dry, thesis was primarily concerned with dealing with the bulk of the evidence and was mostly drawn from governmental records.