Study title

The aim of this project is to bring greater clarity and precision to academic and public understanding of the English merchant fleet in the fourteenth century. It will investigate the number and tonnage of English ships in service, the size and social composition of maritime communities (ship masters and seafarers), and the distribution of available vessels and manpower by region and port; and it will seek to establish how and why the merchant fleet changed over time, in response to forces associated with the Hundred Years War, successive visitations of the Black Death and trade competition. Foundational for the compilation of statistics, and of considerable interest in its own right, will be the piecing together of career profiles for both ship masters and individual ships, the latter casting light for the first time on the working lives of sea-going vessels. The most important sources for the project are the voluminous and finely detailed records that document the privately-owned ships that were requisitioned by the crown in wartime, principally to transport armies and supplies and to patrol the seas. These 'naval' data will be computerised and combined with compatible material from trade and taxation records.