messages to hire some galleys and vissers, manned and armed, for his own service, and to conciliate the Genoese by paying them 8000 marks in respect of one of the dromons which had been piratically seized by Hugh le Despencer in 1321.[1] As the Scots were regarded by Edward as rebels without belligerent rights, the letting out of the ships by Genoa to England, while a friendly action, was also a perfectly correct one. France, Flanders, Holland, Gelderland, and Norway were less nice. All of them for some time covertly helped the Scots;[2] and in September, 1336, Flanders went further, and seized all the English merchants and property its territories; whereupon Edward retaliated upon Flamands and their property in England.[3]
To reduce the danger to trading ships, two regular convoys were organised at the end of the year for the trade to and from Gascony. One was directed to make rendezvous at Portsmouth, for the benefit of the merchants of the southern and western ports; and the other at Orwell, for the benefit of the merchants of the ports north of the Thames.[4] In November, Sir John Roos seems to have succeeded Sir John Norwich as admiral in the North Sea;[5] but it is nowhere implied that the two convoys, which assembled in December, were accompanied either by this officer or by Sir Geoffrey Say, both of whom probably remained in home waters.
Bayonne was again called upon for ships;[6] but the response, if not from thence, at least from some of the English ports, was so unsatisfactory—and the enemy still committed so many outrages at sea, notably off the Isle of Wight and in the Channel Islands—that on December 11th, Edward appointed a new commission of national defence,[7] to consist of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, the Earls of Surrey and Lancaster, and Sir William Clinton, and, in his mandate to these officers, once more dwelt upon the sorrow which it would cause him if, in his time, the lordship of the sea, and of the passage of the sea, as enjoyed by his progenitors, should be in aught prejudiced.
At about the same time, Edward, perhaps in consequence of the irritation occasioned him by the succour which his enemies
