The ship in which the king himself was accustomed to make his passage to and from the continent, in the twelth century, was of the type known as "esnecca," or snake. She seems to have been a long swift vessel; but little more is known concerning her. The post of captain or "nauclerus," of the esnecca, was an office of importance, and was held under Henry I., at one time by one Roger, "the son-in-law of Albert"; and under Henry II. by William and Nicholas, sons of the said Roger, conjointly.[1] The pay appears to have been 12d. per diem.[2] The king's esnecca was the first royal yacht; and, like the royal yachts of later days, was used not only for the conveyance of the sovereign, but also for that of other great and princely personages. Geoffrey of Brittany, son of Henry II., is recorded to have been a passenger in her in 1166,[3] "the king's daughter" in 1176,[4] and the Duke of Saxony, with the queen, in 1184.[5]
The reign of Richard I., who succeeded his father Henry II. in 1189, saw the opening of a new period in English naval history. For the first time the fleet undertook a distant expedition of conquest; for the first time a regular code of naval law was established, and for the first time England headed a great naval combination of the powers, and publicly took her place in the front rank of the maritime states.
The English vessels of the period were galleys, or, as they were subsequently called, galliasses, gallions, busses,[6] dromons, vissers or ursers, barges and snakes. The distinctions separating all these classes have not been very accurately ascertained.
The galley was a reproduction, possibly with slight modifications, of the well-known Mediterranean craft of the name; the gallion was a galley with but one bank of oars; the buss was a heavy and slower vessel, of great strength and capacity; the dromon, certainly a large ship of war, seems to have been sometimes a galley of heavy burden and sometimes a vessel with sail-power only; the visser was a shallow flat-bottomed transport for horses; the barge was not unlike the modern coasting-barge or hoy, and the snake (esnecca) was the equivalent of the modern yacht or dispatch boat. There is nothing to show that any vessel of the time had more than one mast; but two and even three
