It was a squadron of the Kentish ships of the Ports’ federation that, in the year after Magna Charta, under one of England’s finest heroes and greatest men, that grand fellow, stout-hearted Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, Chief Justiciar of England and Constable of Dover Castle, Cœur de Lion’s favourite pupil in arms, saved England from invasion by rounding up the fleet with which the renegade leader Eustace the Monk—“pirata nequissimus” one old chronicler calls him—was making for the Thames, and dealing the French the first of the series of knock-down blows of which Nelson struck the last at Trafalgar. The story of the “Battle of Bartholomew’s Day,” the 24th of August, 1217, is one we ought not willingly to let die. There is hardly a finer tale in all our history than that which tells how De Burgh’s sixteen Cinque Port warships from Dover, with nineteen or twenty small craft, stood out to meet the Monk’s hundred and odd ships—eighty of them the largest vessels of the time—off the North Foreland; swept round them astern, weathered them and closed, grappled them fast, under cover of a stinging fire of archery and crossbow bolts, cut down their sails, and then, flinging up in the air handfuls of quicklime to blow into the faces of the Frenchmen, boarded and overpowered the enemy in hand-to-hand fight with falchion and pike and battle-axe. They fought it out from early morning until the afternoon was spent, when fifty-five ships of the Monk’s fleet had been taken, and the rest, except fifteen ships that ran away, all sent to the bottom.
Again, in the tremendous Midsummer Day’s battle in the harbour of Sluys, the “Trafalgar of the Middle Ages,” although to most people the event is barely a schoolbook memory—the great naval victory that made Creçy possible—once more the Ship-and-Lion flag at the masthead of vessels from the four Kent ports was to the fore, well up in the van of King Edward’s attacking fleet and in the thickest of the fighting. And at the battle of “Espagnols-sur-Mer,” off Winchelsea, where again Edward the Third fought in person, together with the Black Prince; off St. Mahé; and at Harfleur, covering Henry the Fifth’s landing for the march that ended at Agincourt, and in many another hard-fought action in the Narrow Seas after that, Kentish men in the Kentish ships of the Ports’ Navy full well played their part.