ttention to guarding its convoy as to operating against an enemy.
No wonder that as a rule the most that could be attempted was a short
voyage and a single stroke.

It was in 1340 that King Edward III challenged the title of Philip of
Valois to the crown of France, and by claiming it for himself began "the
Hundred Years' War." Both sides to the quarrel began to collect fleets and
armies, and both realized that the first struggle would be on the sea. It
would be thus decided whether the war was to be fought out on French or on
English ground.

The French King collected ships from his ports and strengthened his fleet
by hiring a number of large warships from Genoa, then one of the great
maritime republics of the Mediterranean. The Genoese sailors knew the
northern seas, for there were always some of their ships in the great
trading fleet that passed up the Channel each spring, bringing the produce
of the Mediterranean countries and the East to the northern ports of
Europe, and returned in the late summer laden with the merchandise of the
Hansa traders.

Early in the year King Philip had assembled a hundred and ninety ships,
large and small, French and Genoese, off the little town of Sluys on the
coast of Flanders. The fleet lay in the estuary of the river Eede. Like
Damme, Sluys has now become an inland village. Its name means "the sluice,"
and, like Damme, reminds us how the people of the Netherlands have for
centuries been winning their land from the sea by their great system of
dams to keep the sea-water back, and sluices to carry the river-water to
the sea. The estuary of the Eede where the French fleet anchored is now
pasture land traversed by a canal, and the embankments that keep the sea
from the meadow lands lie some miles to the westward of the place where
King Edward won his great naval victory.

Had the French acted at once, there was nothing to prevent them from
opening the war by invading England. Perhaps they did not know how slowly
the English fleet was assembling.

In the late spring when the French armament was nearly complete, King
Edward had only forty ships ready. They lay in the estuaries of the Orwell
and the Stour, inside Harwich, long a place of importance for English
naval wars in the North Sea. Gradually, week after week, other ships came
in from the Thames, and the northern seaports, from Southampton and the
Cinque Ports, and even from Bristol, creeping slowly along the coasts from
harbour