Captain Kidd, John Goss, Red Legs Greaves? If you re looking for the most successful
Scottish pirate, you can forget the Caribbean and you ll need to go deeper back in time.
If you re interested in the people, places and events in Scottihs history
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In the meantime, let me tell you a story
In 1306 a group of pirates captured a Dutch Merchant ship called Waardebourc
in the Bay of Biscay, as it sailed out of the
French port of La Rochelle. The pirates took 160 tuns of
wine and everything on board, burned the ship, and kidnapped the sailors.
The loss to the merchant Johannis de Wardre, a merchant of Dordrecht was immense.
In the spring of 1310, they struck again in the Straits of Dover.
This time it was an English ship on its way to London carrying cloth, jewels, gold, silver,
and numerous other valuables belonging to Alice the Countess Marshall.
People on both sides of the English Channel wanted satisfaction and compensation,
so they demanded justice from the Count of Flanders.
You see the pirate John Crabbe and his crew were Flemish, so The French king,
the English king and the Count of Hainault demanded that the Count of
Flanders arrest the criminal and compensate the victims
but he couldn t. because John Crabbe was here in Aberdeen.
Living life as an honest merchant at least that s what we ll call it for now.
I should probably give you a bit of context to all this.
1306 the year of his first recorded act of piracy
was the same year that Robert the Bruce had himself crowned at Scone.
This was slap bang in the middle of the Scottish Wars of independence
Edward Longshanks was on his last long legs and by the time of the Countesses jewel heist
was dead. His son Edward II would
have to ensure Scotland s vassal status. On the continent there was a completely
different situation. It was the French king
imposing vassalage on Flanders. The Flemish had risen up against
French occupiers and when the French king sent an army in to deal with them
the Flemish foot soldiers defeated an attack of French mounted knights
That had never happened before , and wouldn t happen again
until the Battle of Bannockburn eleven years later.
Come on the underdog! Ram it right up them!
John Crabbe attacking a ship from the Count of Hainault
s lands leaving the port of a French king was a bit like Good Sir James Douglas rampaging
the north of England after Bannockburn. I m not condoning it
Look, the Treaty of Athis-sur-Orge that ended the French Flemmish conflict
imposed such financial pain on Flanders that anyone who
stuck it to the French were applauded and the Count of Hainault, who was an ongoing
thorn anyway, sided with the French, so screw them both!
I m interpreting what the people with the Flem would have said.
Pirates even during the great age of piracy were largely privateers.
They acted on behalf of governments to attack enemy shipping and resources,
thus diminishing the enemy s ability to operate, and their reward was
whatever they could get their hands on. It was like a private navy.
The government didn t have to pay for a STANDING navy but, when they were at war,
they just gave a nod and a wink to privateers slash pirates.
A lot of Flemmy merchants and pirates settled in Scottish towns.
They could cruise the English Channel, steal stuff from the English and bring it back to Scotland.
These days we just use the Barnet Formula.
They didn t always bring it back to Scotland. Sometimes they sold it in Flemland
No surprise that in 1311 Crabbe, and a bunch of other Flemites from Aberdeen,
seized 89 sacks of wool from a couple of ships on their way to Flanders from Newcastle-on-Tyne.
Even I draw the line at The Geordies. Crabbe knew that it wasn t safe for him
to go back to Mucustown personally, so he got his associates to sell the stash.
But he wasn t pulling the wool over anybody s eyes
Edward II asked The Count of Flanders for restitution and satisfaction,
and sent a letter to the officials of Bruges to say that,
if the stolen wool was found in Bruges,
it should be restored to the rightful owners at once.
The Sheep said Look,
things were so bad that, during the early autumn of 1315,
there were so many Flemish ships robbing, cruising and killing in the North Sea that Edward II
ordered his admiral, to sail along the east coast and destroy them.
What s more he ordered that Flemings be banished from England.
Hoardes of them committed suicide by running off the
cliffs at Dover . That s lemmings.
There s no F in lemmings I know they all
The Flemings that survived had to quit the realm within forty days after the
Feast of the Holy Cross and subjects of the English
crown shouldn t help the Flemings 'with arms, horses, victuals, or other things.
Two more things happened that meant in 1315 Crabbe could go home to Flanders.
War and famine. The year before The king of France,
aided by that evil Count of Hainault, decided to settle his accounts
with the Flemings once and for all, and they advanced against Flanders in a pincer
but got bogged down in wet weather and pulled back.
What they couldn t pull back from, was the famine that raged across Europe that year.
But war and the famine meant that the Count of Flanders was happy to harbour John Crabbe
and use his skills roaming the high seas to acquire victuals and other
necessaries for the sustenance of the people.
A year later Louis X of France died and the next king decided to get on with the Flemings.
Edward II of England rescinded his proclamation of banishment
and said all the Flem could run back into England, trade in safety, and come and go unmolested.
But before this proclamation was even made, Crabbe and his
crew seized a ship off the Isle of Thanet. It was loaded with 86 tuns and 25 pipes of wine
on its way to England from a Bordeaux merchant. The Flem really stuck in Edwards throat now.
He ordered goods belonging to Flemings in England to be arrested
and demanded that the Count of Flanders make good for the cargo and the ship.
Negotiations went on for years until eventually the Count
that wasn t how Edward pronounced it, but it was close
The Count declared that he couldn t help because
he had no idea who had done this or where they could be.
Edward sent an emissary to say: It was John Crabbe. He s living in Flanders!
We even know who s got the ship now, and we know you ve been quaffing the wine,
Now we want some compensation ya thieving git! But Crabbe was nowhere to be found.
He had settled in Berwick, the ideal coastal port for
a Flemish Trader come pirate . Who was now a burgess of the town.
He was under the protection of the Scottish crown and more particularly Walter the Steward .
who would be the progenitor of the Stewart monarchs.
From here Crabbe plundered English shipping with impunity.
He was also one of the key players involved in defending Berwick against
English attack in 1319. He was a proper upstanding,
law abiding Scottish citizen and the most wanted criminal in England.
Now all good things have to come to an end.
So is the case with the reign of Robert I, the Bruce.
Just a year before he died in 1329 he managed to secure peace with England
through the treaty of Edinburgh Northampton. I ve made a video about that.
But within five years the English were back..., using
a chap called Edward Baliol as a figurehead. This sparked the second war of Independence.
Now I m not going to go through all that here, I made a series of three videos on the subject,
and I ll leave a link to them at the end so you can get a bit more of the context.
One of the key events is that Edward Balliol and his English troops
it was way messier than that had taken Perth after the Battle
of Dupplin Moor. As the Scots approached
the city to retake it from the west Crabbe sailed north from Berwick and up
the Tay Estuary to blockade it from the sea but he came across English ships and his small
Flemish fleet/pirate ships got wrecked in the Tay.
Crabbe himself only just got out by the skin of his teeth and headed back south here to Berwick
to an even bigger disaster.
Edward
Balliol, having crowned himself at Scone on 24th September 1332,
was now one of two kings of Scots
The other one was Robert the Bruce s son, the boy king David II.
Balliol was very much the English king s puppet. From Perth he headed south, closer to the
English border, where he felt safer, and based himself here at Kelso Abbey.
In a skirmish nearby John Crabbe was captured by this Mickey Mouse Scottish king
and his Anglo Scottish force of English lackeys and adventurers.
Oh, Crabbe s in trouble now. They know exactly who this guy is.
They know the mayhem he s inflicted on English shipping;
the ships that have been taken, the goods that have been stolen, the men
who have been killed. Crabbe is done for.
Hold on! he says and he asks for safe conduct to be taken to the English king.
Edward Balliol agrees. I don t know what Crabbe
says when he meets Edward III of England but he manages to persuade him that he should
be kept alive. Not only that
the King of England gave 1000 marks to pay off fines and liabilities Crabbe was
due for his attacks on English shipping, WHAT?
You can imagine that there were plenty of people in England who were pretty upset at this
but Crabbe would pay back this investment many times over.
When the English marched north to besiege Berwick in March 1333
they took with them valuable knowledge and advice from a man who had been a burgess of Berwick,
who had prepared the defences of Berwick against previous English attacks.
They went with the advice of John Crabbe. When the Scots arrived with an army and weren
t able to lift the siege of the town, it led to the disastrous slaughter on its
outskirts at the Battle of Halidon Hill on July 19, 1333.
Many great Scottish warriors died that day and john Crabbe s journey to the dark
side was complete. I say complete.
I don t know if he wanted to come back or not. The people of Berwick had no intention
of ransoming him from English hands. In fact as a punishment, they took his son,
who was in Berwick and they killed him. If there had been any chance of redemption
it was now gone. The King of England, because
'of his good service in the siege of Berwick,' pardoned Crabbe all his homicides, felonies,
and other offenses of which he might possibly be accused,
whether on land or sea.' He also gave Crabbe land in
Berwick and granted him the office of constable of Somerton castle in Lincolnshire for life.
He d come a long way from the pirate who stole from the French ship in 1306.
Crabbe was now secure in the English establishment and its king's favour.
In 1334 conflict between England and Scotland was still going on,
The English king wanted to focus on France, and in an attempt to make peace
Edward III of England sent for John Crabbe. He would have the inside track on the Scots.
In fact, the payment of ten pounds for the expenses of his travel to Scotland suggests
Crabbe was one of the English negotiators! The English ambassador to Scotland s a pirate.
We find Crabbe in numerous roles on behalf of the English crown over the next few years
including providing siege engines for the siege of Dunbar Castle
if you want to know how that turned out, then watch my video about Black Agnes.
It s in the playlist I ll leave at the end.
Two things saved Scotland in that second war of independence plague and the 100 Years War.
John Crabbe was back fighting the French. This time for the king of England.
In one engagement on 23rd June 1340 the English fleet sailed over to attack
French shipping off Bruges and Antwerp. The battle started at three in the afternoon,
but by dusk the French were nearly wiped out. Some French sailors tried to escape by swimming,
but were killed by Flemish firing down into the sea from dykes.
Some ships, led by a notorious pirate, called Spoudevisch
broke through the English cordon and headed to sea.
As soon as he realised this the English king sent Crabbe to lead the chase to catch them.
John Crabbe, the notorious pirate was now a pirate catcher!
He used to be a Scottish pirate, now he s English polis!
In the twilight of his years Crabbe carries out various roles in that
position of Lincolnshire constable: escorting prisoners, ensuring compliance
with orders, collecting fees, fines and enforcing the English king s will.
The last place we find him recorded is again in connection with the Scots.
One of the events of those second wars of independence was the battle of Neville's
Cross near Durham on 17th October 1346
The Scots as we would do many times in our history, invaded England at
the behest of the French king. The result was another disaster.
The English king was unwilling to ransom many of the Scots captured
and they were sent to various constables of castles to be guarded.
So Crabbe was summoned to appear before the council on 20th August 1346
and given the custody of Scottish prisoners transferred from the Tower of London.
the last recorded act of a Scottish pirate.
In 1352 the Flemish pirate, who had been a Scottish freedom fighter,
died an English constable. I promised you a playlist
of videos on other events of the Second War of Independence and it s coming up on screen now.
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