centralised in the king's hand. Increase of wealth in the nation supplied him with a larger revenue, and the formation of a Royal Navy in the modern sense became at last possible.

Before leaving the mediæval navy, the picture may be completed by one example of that brutal violence which has been mentioned as a feature of the sea life of the time. I have spoken of the feuds between the different towns, and of complaints of excesses committed on the coast by armed forces appointed to protect them. One concrete example is better than any amount of general statement. Here is an instance of sheer devilry taken from the unhappy years of the minority of Richard II., when the State was weak, and Englishmen had been brutalised by the savage wars of France.

In 1379 Sir John Arundel was appointed to the command of a force of archers and men-at-arms, which was to go to the help of the Duke of Brittany. It was to sail from Southampton. As the weather was unfavourable, there was some delay in starting, and Arundel quartered his soldiers in a nunnery. The house, according to a common practice of the time, contained, in addition to the nuns, many married women whose husbands were absent, widows, and unmarried girls, who were sent there for safety and education. Arundel's soldiers violated these women, and pillaged the chapel. Disregarding all complaints, he not only went to sea without punishing the offenders, but allowed them to bring their booty and several of the women with them. There were also, it appears, prostitutes in the ships. The ecclesiastical authorities fell back on the only revenge then within their power. They formally cursed Arundel and his thieves with bell, book, and candle as the ships sailed away.

To men accustomed to the licence of the French wars, this doubtless appeared a very impotent form of retaliation. But they soon had occasion to change their minds. A violent storm burst upon them, apparently, since it swept them out of the Channel, from the east or north-east. To lighten the ships, these savages threw overboard all the women they had carried to sea. The danger might have been avoided if Arundel had listened to the advice of his sailing-master, John Rust, a sailor of the now very much decayed little town of Blakeney in Norfolk, who warned him that a gale was coming on. But Arundel, though a good soldier, as he showed when defending Southampton in 1377, was neither a seaman himself, nor sufficiently a man of sense to listen to those who were. Having first incurred disaster by his obstinacy, Arundel sealed his own fate by persisting in again overriding the opinion of Rust. He had been driven to within sight of the coast of Ireland, and, in his frantic desire to escape the misery of his position on shipboard, insisted that an attempt should be made to land. It was in vain that the sailors pointed out to him that it was far safer to keep at sea. In an explosion of sheer fury, largely excited, we may presume, by fear, Arundel killed some of them. Then Rust and the others made the hopeless attempt to land the madman whom they had the misfortune to be compelled to obey. Seeing a small island near the coast, the sailing-master attempted to get under its lee, but found the water too broken. Then, as a last resource, he tried to beach the ship, but she struck on the rocks, and went to pieces. Arundel, to whom every opportunity seems to have been given by fate to display his folly, was one of those who contrived to reach the shore. He might have escaped if he had not stood within reach of the waves, shaking the water out of his clothes. Rust, who had also come through alive, seeing his peril, ran forward to drag him back, and both were beaten down and dragged under by the next wave. An uncertain number of other vessels, with many knights and men-at-arms, perished in the same disaster. This may stand as sufficient example of what was possible when the brutality of the Middle Ages coincided with the licence of the sea. We may hope that the details of the story were heightened in the telling, but there is no reasonable ground to doubt its substantial truth, and the mere fact that such a tale could be told shows what was believed to be possible.