the men were given eight days' wages, and wages for eight days more were delivered at the same time to the persons appointed to pay them.[1] The officers also were granted prests or payments in advance. In June, 1205, Thomas of Dover, William FitzSuanild, and John Clerk of Hythe, three masters of the king's galleys of the Cinque Ports, received £15 in prest upon their wages; Thomas of Gloucester was paid £5 in prest for the galley of Bristol; and two others received the same sum for the galley of Ipswich.[2] The wages were apparently in addition to food and rations, including wine; and we have notices of payments for herrings, bacon, etc., sent as supplies to the king's ships.[3]
There were even pensions for the wounded, for, in 1202, Alan le Waleis, who had lost his hand on service, was granted a penny a day, and, until it should be paid, was to be lodged in an abbey.[4] But officers and men alike seem, as a rule, to have found their own clothing, though there is a record of the king having, in 1205, given six robes to certain galley-men of Bayonne.[5]
Selden,[6] Prynne,[7] and others quote a document, said to date from the year 1200, and purporting to be an ordinance made by John at Hastings, enjoining every ship meeting the English fleet at sea to lower her sails at the command of the king's lieutenant or admiral; but the document contains internal evidence against its genuineness, and is probably of a date considerably later than that ascribed to it. Indeed, in the 'Black Book of the Admiralty,' to which Prynne refers, there is no writing of a date earlier than the reign of Henry VI., and most of the earlier ordinances copied into the volume may be suspected of corruption, while some of them are almost certainly forgeries and fictions. It is not until a later period that we encounter any good evidence of a formal assumption by the kings of England of a claim to the sovereignty of the Narrow Seas.
King John died on October 19th, 1216, and was succeeded by his son (by Isabella of Angoulême) Henry III., who was a child of nine.
In the course of Henry's long reign mention is made, not only of "great ships," "galleys," and "longships," etc., but also "sornecks" (probably vessels different from the "snake" or esnecca of an earlier age), "nascellas," "passerettes," and "barges." The
