Hi, I'm Kevin Hicks and welcome to my youtube channel the history squad now this is part
seven of our hundred years war series this is the battle of Winchelsea. Now if you've missed any of
our previous episodes you can go to our playlist in the description. Now just a point, have any
of you ever heard of the battle of Winchelsea? Now I have interestingly I've been to Winchelsea
but when I went there I didn't realize that once upon a time it used to be a port
on the channel coast of England now it's a little bit landlocked but let's have a look
shall we so battle of windshield see 29th of August 1350 or the battle of les Español summer
the battle of the Spanish on the sea don't you just love that the English had 50 ships but the
um Spanish fleet the Castilian fleet had 47 but many of them were these enormous fighting galleys
yeah now at the end of the day the English one but i'll go into that later on I just want to show you
um what I've done of course here's Thomas my famous little model here which I'm gonna have to
retire after this film and put it in its cabinet and there it will be nice and safe now the reason
has been a bit of a gap in between the episode six and episode seven of this hundred years war
series of mine is I just couldn't get my head around how to make an enormous galley a fighting
galley of this Castilian on fleet so in the end I gave up and I thought i'll draw one because I
can draw so here we go this is pretty much the scale and it's using descriptions of the day
so before we commence into the battle itself I've got to show you the disadvantage that the English
ships had although they outnumbered the the spaniards yeah they are at a great disadvantage
these slow-moving cogs my famous Thomas yeah soon to be retired yeah
compare it to the drawing that I've done this is the best I could do from descriptions of the day
look how high the four castle and stern castle is and they were loaded packed with crossbowmen
right up on the top there the mastheads these castles right up there they can shoot down massive
disadvantage but also they had a weapon that I i'd never even thought of heavy weights iron
weights stone lead anything like that that they could then throw off their higher deck onto the
lower decks smashing into the men trying to board or even damaging the ship so the English are at a
great disadvantage and they already knew this so it must have taken a great amount of courage for
these English warriors these English sailors to take on this Castilian fleet calculate eh
so that there's going to be a battle at sea right however we were actually at peace with France
supposedly since the Edward iii's victory at the siege of calais um there was this truce yeah the
truth it's known as the truce of calais 1347 yeah and the french fleet though have been devastated
by the action of capturing calais burning ships capturing ships down in normandy all that kind
of stuff so the french hired what you must call I suppose a mercenary fleet the Castilian um fleet
the uh the Spanish fleet their commander was Charles de la Cerda
really they these were professional pirates right and there's a massive problem in the
channel because of these Spanish pirates you see England had a massive trade with south of France,
a Bordeaux, Gascony uh in per year now get your head around this because I love this
they would import 100 million litres of red wine from gascony yeah and gascony being an English
enclave was getting quite surrounded by french forces relied on food and supplies being bought
from England yeah but in 1349 uh Cerda they the the Castilian captured English vessels
loaded with red wine and threw the crews overboard yeah now you must understand about these
um Spanish pirates right they were attacKing the south coast of England
they would murder rob loot rape and they were also slavers there's a kind of a piece that's
missed out of um of history of slavery is the slavery that went on in the medieval times
where you know the south coast of England south of Ireland south of wales
people were captured and sold Tunisia places like that and it's awful so people were terrified
of these pirates yeah and when Cerda in 49, 1349 captured these ships full of red wine for England
and murdered the crew oh my goodness me the King is up in arms yeah but in 1350 uh April 1350 there
was a truce signed between us the English and the french and the Castilian fleet under Cerda
he's not going to be paid anymore but they carry on they are simply pirates
so the King with his fantastic intelligence network he's told by his spies
where this massive 47 um ship fleet of of the Castilian fleet is actually sailing what's
happened is they've come all the way from the south loaded with Spanish wool and goods
and they've come into the famous place sluice, shluis schlewers. Loads of you
guys have been telling me how to pronounce it yeah I think it's sluice right so there you go
now on the 28th of August the King uh sails from sandwich to Dungeness and he has his fleet ready
to intercept the Castilian fleet but I've got to tell you this little bit it's uh 29th of April
yeah that the fleet is ready and the King with his noblemen are listening to uh singing and flute
playing and it's a German ditty and I'm gonna see I know one yeah see if I can play it for you
Henceincline I love it yeah. And then the lookout above spies
the Spanish fleet on the horizon and he they don't oh my goodness no the King
toasts everybody good luck chaps yeah can you imagine that and then the trumpet is sounded
yeah so the trumpet is sounded everybody goes to their ships and this is where I've
got to change this whole thing right because now there is a battle about to commence so before we
really get stuck into the fighting I thought i'd show you this map
this is the bottom right hand corner the eastern corner Kent and Sussex and i'd like to show you
London is up here this is the river Thames then the Medway but Winchelsea is just here
and as you can see it will be a really safe port yeah, but this is all now landlocked. So
the battle must have taken place somewhere along here yeah and there are white cliffs here. So
let's get on to the actual fighting so battle of Winchelsea 29th of August
1350 and how was I going to describe this to you how are we going to do it yeah
little polystyrene ships yeah isn't this a great idea I hope you like it now so the King
they've toasted each other out they go but the Spanish fleet the Castilian fleet under deserter
has got the wind behind them now as a bit of a landlubber an ex-soldier a lot of this was foreign
to me when I was learning about it but the English fleet they sail towards them tacKing into the wind
they then do this incredible thing they turn their ships around in the path
of the Spanish the Castilian fleet leaving large gaps in between them
and then they spill the wind from their sails and basically slow down so much
what this means is the Spanish fleet catch them yeah and as they come alongside
the English ships throw grappling hooks and grapple and smash into the Spanish ships so I'm
going to turn this all the way around so you can see the action from the front so just bear with me
so I've turned it around so it it's facing you now so you can see what's happened as the Spanish
ships come alongside the English ships the English ships throw the grappling hooks and so on and so
forth some of them even smash into the uh the Spanish ships what this becomes is once the ships
are all tied together it becomes nothing more than a land battle at sea but the problem is of course
the height of some of these Spanish ships so the English have got scaling ladders would you believe
which they throw against the Spanish ships our bowmen are pouring shot into
the uh crossbowmen trying to keep them down don't forget I can release at least five or six arrows
easily before a crossbowman can actually release one this is nothing more than a battle it's going
to be a slogging match once the English have got off their boats there is going to be absolute
slaughter but the King's ship the Thomas my lovely ship has sprung a leak she smashed so heavily into
her Spanish ship that she's starting to actually sink so the King transfers his flag to a captured
ship then meanwhile the prince of wales his ship is beginning to sink either because it's
sprung one of its boards or because weights have gone through and he is in big trouble because he
can't actually transfer onto an enemy ship because they're beating him back then Henry of Lancaster
hits that enemy ship from the other side which allows the prince to climb aboard with his men
onto the Spanish ship this is one heck of a battle but then there's a twist in the tail uh an English
ship a really important English ship is being towed away by the Spanish yeah and then a young
man actually cuts one of the ropes as he leaps on board this Spanish ship and drops the sail
they are then overpowered but my wife asked me a question which being an ex-soldier I sometimes
don't think of these things she says how did the English do it all right so we have seamanship yeah
they've come alongside they've turned and they've grappled but at the end of the day what this was
was a fight by force of arms yes there are bowmen keeping down the crossbowmen but the rest of it
was hand-to-hand combat killing the enemy face to face and don't forget there was hatred here
because of what the Spaniards had actually done along the coast of England and to some of our
red wine fleets so anybody who was left alive on board the Spanish ships were thrown overboard they
were killed there is no love lost here and yet the deserter with some of his ships manages to escape
back to some of the ports one of the ports they went to was sluice so the battle of Winchelsea
what happens now is this fleet having been defeated will allow the English to transfer
their focus down into gascony although the channel is still a dangerous place
it will allow the prince of wales to launch his chevauchée which is going to be the next
stage of our series the hundred years war. Well I hope you enjoyed our little film yeah and of
course my models yeah if you did please thumbs up let's hear about it in the comments section
we're having so much fun with these comments keep them coming thank you very much we'll do our best
to answer them all yeah now the other thing is share the videos if you can yeah help me make this
grow and then I can improve the models that's if they need improving yeah but now we've got
a Patreon account so I need to give a shout out to Ian Tucker thanks buddy, Nicholis Redfern for
their support in maKing these videos possible yeah but for now thanks a billion yeah and bye for now.