A Great and Glorious Adventure by Gordon Corrigan Page A

ships is generally agreed to be around 200 and all
chroniclers of both sides agree that the French fleet outnumbered that of the English, then 150 is probably the most the English could have had. If we allow that around 50 ships would have been
carrying horses, stores and the ladies going out to join the queen and that a 100-ton cog could carry at most 100 men of whom 25 would be crew, then the maximum number of soldiers might have been
around 5,000, in the proportion of three archers to two men-at-arms.
    By the time Edward and his fleet were ready to leave England, in June 1340, the English knew that the French fleet had been moved to Sluys, now silted up but then the main port for Bruges,
north-east of it at the mouth of the Zwin on the south side of the Honde estuary. As the only purpose of stationing the fleet there would be for an invasion of England, or at the very least to
prevent an English army from crossing the Channel, Edward decided that he would meet the threat head-on and, rather than avoiding the French ships and landing at Dunkirk or Ostend, would do battle
with them.
    This was an audacious plan indeed, and, when Edward suggested it, his chancellor, Archbishop Stratford, argued strongly against it; and when he could not change the king’s mind, he
resigned his office and returned the Great Seal of England to the king. 24 Edward summoned his most experienced admiral, Robert Morley, and asked his
opinion. Having previously served Edward II and been party to the coup that deposed him, Morley initially served on land in Edward III’s Scottish wars before taking to the sea. He had shown
himself a most accomplished organizer and leader of raids on the French coast and had been appointed Admiral of the North in February 1339.Morley pointed out the dangers of
the king’s plan and advised against it, and this opinion was backed up by the very experienced Flemish seaman John Crabbe, originally a mercenary pirate in the Scottish service who had been
captured by the English and changed sides and was now the king’s captain. Edward lost his temper and accused all three of plotting against him, telling them that they could stay at home but
he was going anyway. He was mollified only when Morley and Crabbe announced that much as they opposed the caper, if the king went, then so would they.
    The story of the Battle of Sluys – the first major engagement of the Hundred Years War – is not one that springs to the lips of every English schoolboy, but in its way it is as
significant as the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1558 and the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. For if it had been lost, the 20,000 troops that Philip of France was amassing to invade England would
have found nothing at sea to oppose them and precious little on land once they got there. Like Admiral Jellicoe at Jutland over half a millennium later, Edward III was the one man who could have
lost the war in an afternoon.
    Up to this point, despite the improving English ability to mount coastal raids, the French had been superior at sea, and had the Great Army of the Sea, as Philip termed it, been in the Channel a
year earlier, things would have been very different. Then, not only would the French have mustered many more ships overall than they did now, but also they would have had many more galleys, swift
and manoeuvrable and far more suited to war at sea than the sluggish English cogs. Fortunately for the English, the combination of a revolution in Genoa that had resulted in a regime no longer
inclined to hire galleys and crews to the French, and English raids that had burned beached galleys at Boulogne, had left the French with only six galleys, four of their own and two Genoese. In
addition, the fleet had twenty-two oared barges, not as manoeuvrable as the galleys but more easily handled than the cogs nonetheless, seven sailing ships specifically built as naval vessels, and
167 requisitioned merchantmen. 5 Manning the ships were around