Piracy was endemic in the Middle Ages. Men stole each other’s ships; they looted each other’s cargoes at sea or in port; they demanded ransoms from those captives likely to be able to pay and they threw useless crew members overboard into the sea. Life was cheap and often short.

The political world, represented by the whims of a very small number of rulers, was far from stable. On the grounds of both expense and warweariness of the troops, it was beyond the means of any monarch to continue open warfare for more than a few years. It was much cheaper, and almost invariably more swift and effective, to operate unofficially. One means of doing so was to encourage piracy.

Piracy took many forms – which merged into each other, so there are no firm dividing lines. Trade, including fishing, was always competitive and, for commercial reasons or simply to satisfy personal greed, it easily and frequently escalated into violent appropriation of other people’s goods. Ships risked being pilfered when they put into ports for supplies of water or victuals, or when they were seeking shelter from storms, and passing vessels risked being captured and ransacked.

Competition easily developed into feuds. Adjacent ports, often on the same estuary, like those on the Exe below Exeter or like Sandwich and Stonor on the Kentish Stour, fought each other over installation of weirs which obstructed shipping, over rights to bring in cargoes, to levy customs, to take the dues on ferries across their estuary. There, and on a wider scale, long-running vendettas raged between groups of ports, sometimes against their fellow countrymen but often against foreigners.

Raids on opponents’ ports, sometimes based on feuds, sometimes politi cally motivated, were an extension of the same activity. The basic pattern of a raid was remarkably simple. Armed invaders sailed into a port on a high tide, plundered any goods they found, ransacked houses and ware houses, set fire to what they left behind, and departed on the high tide of the next day, before effective defence could be mounted. A succession of raids could be extremely effective as a tool to achieve political ends, as the French showed in the 14th century: by disabling the south-coast ports they wiped out much of the commercial capability of England.

In the latter half of the 14th century cash-strapped monarchs resorted to commissioning certain leading merchants to assemble their own fleets and go to sea to harry ‘the king’s enemies’. They became known to the English as privateers, while to the French and Spanish they were corsairs.

Many ports were typically led by small groups of entre preneurs – people with courage and initiative, who had management and business skills as well as seafaring expertise. They were the merchants, who had the interests of their communities – and of themselves – at heart. Most importantly, they had never been part of the feudal system and so had never been subject to the kind of regulations which controlled the rest of society. They travelled, spreading trade, prosperity and culture across Europe.

Many merchants supplemented their income – and that of their ports – by piracy, and in the medieval period there was no dividing line between what we would now identify as legitimate trade and what we would see as illegal piracy. No law existed to define or deal adequately with maritime violence, and indeed it would have been impossible to enforce any such law. Up until the later 13th century, foreigners who suffered from depredations by English seafarers could only apply to the English king in his council for redress. But they were then referred, through itinerant justices, to the common law, which contained no provision to deal with their cases and therefore that proved of little use to them. Early in the 14th century the king and council began to appoint commissioners or arbitrators, individuals from the particular locality, to deal with each case as it arose. From 1360 offences committed at sea were dealt with by the new Court of the Admiralty. The admiral was usually a high-ranking nobleman whose business, owing to his other preoccupations, was usually carried out by deputies or lieutenants. When it proved impossible to obtain satisfaction from them, perhaps because of corruption, the petitioner could appeal to the chancellor. An important statute of 1353 gave the owners of unlawfully captured cargo the right to recover it if they gave proof of their ownership, either by their marks on the cargo or by documents, or by evidence of other reliable merchants. This was quoted in several 15th-century West Country cases, but often did not produce the desired redress: argument and evasion still prevailed.

The object of all their enquiries was to establish what had happened, to enquire into the legitimacy of the claim and obtain restitution of stolen ships and goods, or their value, rather than to prosecute the pirates. There was no suggestion of criminality. The only exception to that came briefly under the extraordinarily firm, organised, hand of Henry V, who declared that acts of piracy which involved breaching a truce were high treason, punishable by death.

Innumerable ordinary sailors met their deaths at the hands of their maritime opponents, mostly by being tipped overboard. The merchant-pirates them selves were more likely to survive, simply because they might be worth a ransom. But very few pirates, if any, were publicly punished in this period.

In addition, and just as importantly, piracy had the support of strong vested interests. People of every degree from the king downwards stood to gain from its proceeds, so there was no inclination or incentive to suppress it. From the time of King John (1199–1216) all the Kings of England (with the notable exception of Henry V) tolerated piracy, provided that they received a share of the spoils.

The fate of the stolen goods once they arrived in port is obscure, but important to this story. Some were divided up and immediately distributed to numerous people in the port or its locality, which made it very difficult for officials to trace them even a few days after the event. Some of the wine was presumably drunk, and some captured food stuffs would also have been consumed on the spot. The remainder of the wine, the spices and other goods were then sold on to traders working their way inland. It travelled along with goods which had arrived by more orthodox means and, following the accustomed trade routes, it reached the halls, the kitchens and the tables of the nobility and of the sheriffs, the senior officers of the law. The fine cloth and other luxuries reached the same desti - nations, and the means by which the goods had been obtained mattered not. Thus the network, the basis of power of the merchant-pirates, was spread far and wide; innumerable people were implicated, and absolutely no social stigma was attached to the means by which the goods had been obtained.

The majority of sea-going pirates were therefore well-heeled and well connected merchants in control of their own ships and crews, and often in control of their ports as well.

None of the pirates had any sense of national loyalty, except on the rare occasions when that coincided with their own personal purposes. At a time of confrontational politics and rich commercial prizes, piracy was guaranteed to flourish.