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.