English Merchant Shipping, Trade, and Maritime Communities

This volume is the first study of the merchant fleet and maritime workforce in late medieval and Tudor England undertaken on a nationwide scale, using all the available customs records concurrently, rather than regional, county, or port-based studies that have predominated in the past. The study uses brand new methodological approaches and the latest digital technologies to provide a quantitative and prosopongraphical evaluation and analysis of shipping, considering the number, type, tonnage, and geographical distribution of vessels. It also reconstructs the lives and careers of those involved in seafaring and the broader maritime communities engaged in trading, fishing, fighting, and supporting roles. This is a foundational work, with numerous implications, its research potential extending into and connecting the fabric of socio-economic, cultural, naval, and political history. Reconstructing the maritime capacity of the realm is essential for understanding the infrastructure and manpower that sustained overseas and coastal trade, and that supported logistical and naval operations during wartime. It also enables us to explore the socio-economic composition and dynamics of coastal and estuarine communities, from major ports to small fishing villages, shedding light on the interconnectedness of regions along England's (and where the sources allow Wales's and the Channel Islands') extensive coastlines, and the various ways in which the demands, challenges, and opportunities of maritime enterprise influenced political decision-making and grand strategy. More broadly, this book challenges many of the prevailing historical narratives about the fleet: it was, for example, far larger in vessels and tonnage throughout our period than has previously been thought.

Gary Paul Baker is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton with numerous publications on late medieval and early modern military and maritime history. He is co-author of '"William Fowler", Sir William Garrard, Sir John Hawkins and the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic Slave Trade', The English Historical Review 139 (2024) with Craig Lambert, and author of 'Domestic Maritime Trade in Late Tudor England c.1565–85: A Case Study of King's Lynn and Plymouth', in The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400–1800, edited by Claire Jowitt, Craig Lambert, and Steve Mentz (Routledge, 2020). He has also published a reappraisal of Henry V's warhorses on the Agincourt campaign in 1415 in the Journal of Medieval Military History and contributed several chapters in Oliver Creighton et al (ed.) Medieval Warhorse: Equestrian Landscapes, Material Culture and Zooarchaeology in Britain, AD 800–1550 (Liverpool University Press, 2025). Craig Lambert is Professor of Maritime History at the University of Southampton and has published extensively on the maritime history of late medieval and early modern England. He is author of Shipping the Medieval Military: English Maritime Logistics in the Fourteenth Century (Boydell & Brewer, 2011), co-editor of Military Communities in Late Medieval England (Boydell & Brewer, 2018), The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400–1800 (Routledge, 2020), and Kent and Europe, 1450–1640: Merchants, Mariners, Shipping and Defence (Boydell & Brewer, 2025). He is co-author with Gary Baker of the 'William Fowler' article in The English Historical Review and author of 'Henry V and the Crossing to France: Reconstructing Naval Operations for the Agincourt campaign, 1415' in The Journal of Medieval History 43:1 (2016) which featured on the front page of The Guardian in 2015.