Page:Englishhistorica36londuoft.djvu/334

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326 THE DATING OF THE EARLY PIPE ROLLS July Ramsay used information from this volume, 1 as Mr. Davis also did in his brilliant volume England under the Normans and Angevins (1905), but both these historians cited as its source Mr. Archer's Crusade of Richard I (1888) ; and in his preface Mr. Archer expressed his special obligation to myself for informing him of its existence (pp. vii-viii). Mr. Archer headed this excerpt from the roll : ' Account of the purchase of the ships which went to Jerusalem and of wages paid to the underwritten pilots and sailors of the same for the voyage ' (pp. 11-13). Even Stubbs, in spite of his interest in the beginnings of the navy, 2 cannot, from what he has written on the subject, have been acquainted with this evidence. 3 With his usual sagacity, however, he conjectured how the fleet was raised, 4 and the Pipe Roll of 1190 proves that his conjectures were right. The case of a former Chichele professor, Captain Montagu Burrows, R.N., is even more decisive. For in his Cinque Ports (1888) he not only asserted that they did not take any part in Richard's crusade, but explained why they could not do so. Their ships, he observed, were too small, and they ' formed in fact a naval militia, a home squadron, the business of which was to guard the narrow seas during the absence of their king 5 As I may not have another opportunity of commenting on the Pipe Roll of 2 Richard I (1190), I would here observe that it records the purchase of '33 ships of the Cinque Ports, two parts 6 of which were bought for the king's use for the transport of his garrison with him to Jerusalem '. As we read of * a year's pay of 790 captains and sailors, each captain of whom was reckoned at the rate of two sailors ', I make these ships' companies to have been composed — assuming that each ship carried but one 1 captain ' — of thirty-three ' captains ' and 724 seamen. This would give us an average crew of a ' captain ' and twenty-two men. 7 Captain Burrows relied, for his description of the ships and of their crews, 8 on (1) ' the "Ports Domesday Book", 1 The Angevin Empire, pp. 282-3. 2 Const. Hist. (ed. 1874), i. 592-4 (§ 162). 3 As editor of the Expugnatio Lyxbonensis, a tract appended to his edition of the Itinerarium (Memorials of the Reign of Richard I), L cxliv-clxxxii (see also Mr. Has- sall's edition of the prefaces to the Chronicles, pp. 196, 344), the bishop had a special interest in the subject. 4 ' Even of the fleet of 1190 a large proportion was in no respect national property : the vessels of transport which composed no small part of it were no doubt hired by the king, or possibly impressed for the occasion ... it is probably to this crusade that we owe the form of a permanent navy ' {Const. Hist. i. 593). 5 p. 81. 6 i.e. two-thirds. 7 In strictness, this number would require a total of 726 (not 724) men ; the writer is dependent on the figures given in Mr. Archer's book, as he is, at present, confined to the house by illness. * pp. 86-9.