A Great and Glorious Adventure by Gordon Corrigan Page B

19,000 soldiers and sailors, although only about 500 crossbowmen and 150 men-at-arms
were professional soldiers, the rest being mariners, militia and recently impressed recruits.
    Knowing that Edward was intending to sail for the Low Countries, the best alternatives open to the French admirals were to blockade Englishports or to catch the English
fleet at sea and annihilate it. In the event, they did neither. The two French admirals, Quiéret and Béhuchet, elected to take up a defensive posture across the mouth of the
three-mile-wide estuary running south-west from the island of Cadzand, deploying their ships in three lines, chained together. Béhuchet, a short, fat Norman, had been a civil servant before
showing considerable ability as a leader of raids on the English coast, and Quiéret too was an experienced sailor; but the two men did not get on personally. Both should have known better,
for they were relinquishing the opportunity of fighting a sea battle, something at which the French were better than the English despite their shortage of galleys. Instead, they were affording the
English the chance to fight a land battle on ships – and the English were very much better at fighting on land than the French. The third commander of the Great Army of the Sea – a
Genoese mercenary named Pietro Barbanero, Barbenoire, Barbevaire or Barbavera, depending on the source – was the most experienced practitioner of naval warfare of them all. He urged that such
a defensive deployment gave no room for the ships to manoeuvre and that the fleet should put to sea and make use of its numerical advantage to fight the English well away from the shore. He was
ignored.
    The English fleet sailed from the mouth of the River Orwell at first light on 22 June 1340, with the king aboard the cog
Thomas
, and hove to off the Flemish coast the following morning
at (according to Edward’s despatches) the hour of Tierce, or 0900 hours. 25 The two fleets could see each other. Edward first ordered the church
militant, in the shape of the bishop of Lincoln, to go ashore, ride the ten miles or so to Bruges, and encourage the Flemings to attack the French from the shore once the English fleet attacked
from the sea. Three knights were also landed to observe and report on the French fleet. By early next morning, 24 June, Edward knew the strength and disposition of the French fleet, and he had also
received the bishop of Lincoln’s unwelcome news that the citizens of Bruges were adamant that on no account should the English attack such a huge French fleet, for to do so would court
disaster. Rather, they said, Edward should wait a few days until he could be reinforced by Flemishships. The king ignored this advice, but, since to attack at once would
mean sailing into the sun, Edward decided to tack out to sea and position himself where the wind and the tide would be at his back. This and the redisposition of the fleet into attack formation
took most of the day. Some sources say that the manoeuvring was interpreted by the French as an English retreat and that they began to unchain their own ships in order to pursue; and Barbanero
certainly advised a move out to sea. In any event many French ships were still chained together and their fleet was still in a defensive posture when the English, with the wind, the tide and the
sun behind them, struck.
    Edward had arranged his fleet in line abreast, with one ship full of men-at-arms – infantry – flanked by two of archers. The archers were on the fore and stern castles and in the
crow’s nests, and, as the fleets closed, a storm of arrows began to cause casualties among the French. Their crossbowmen replied, but there were insufficient of them and with their much
slower rate of fire they were ineffective. When the lines of ships crashed into each other, the English sailors swung their grappling irons and the infantry began to board. This was difficult, as
many of the French ships were higher