In 1401, to counteract the fear of invasion, Henry ordered certain ports and towns each to build him a barge or ballinger.[1] Parliament, which had not been consulted, demanded the cancelling of the order, and the king was obliged to submit.[2] In April, Richard, Lord Grey of Codnor, was made Admiral of the Northern, and Sir Thomas Rempston, Admiral of the Western fleet, and they appear to have gone to sea in June;[3] but naval forces other than theirs were simultaneously employed in the Bristol Channel against the Welsh, who were led by Owen Glendower. Hotspur was in command against him. At Bardsey Island Hotspur took a Scots ship which had probably been sent with supplies to the Welsh, and near Milford he captured another Scots vessel full of men.[4] Few details, however, of the naval campaign in that quarter have been preserved. In the same year a remission of service, to the extent of five ships, one hundred men, and five boys, for the five next occasions of the calling out of the fleet of the Cinque Ports, was granted to the town of Hythe, in consideration of damage caused there by a fire and a pestilence, and of five Hythe ships and a hundred men having been lost at sea.[5]
The year 1402 witnessed several acts of piracy by both English and French. According to the chronicler of St. Denis,[6] the initial fault lay with the English. Three thousand of the most skilful sailors of England and Bayonne, it was supposed with the approbation of Henry, were banded together for piratical ends, and they incessantly harrassed the French coasts. Among other acts of theirs, if the chronicler may be trusted, were the ravaging of the Isle of Rhé, and the kidnapping of a hundred poor fishermen of Picardy. Obtaining permission to make reprisals, the French made incursions on the coasts of England, and fought two or three small actions at sea, sometimes being successful, and sometimes being beaten.
The disorganisation of the navy at the time is well shown by the complaints of some peers and others who were sent, at the end of 1402, to bring to England Joan of Navarre, the affianced wife of King Henry. After saying that they had been eleven days at sea, and were in sight of Brittany, when contrary winds obliged them either to enter the Spanish Sea (the Bay of Biscay) or to return to
