French Raid on Southampton 1338
Who Fought
Large French and Italian fleet
History & Significance
The English Channel naval campaign of the years 1338 and 1339 saw a protracted series of raids conducted by the nascent French navy and numerous private raiders and pirates against English towns, shipping and islands in the English Channel, which caused widespread panic, damage and financial loss to the region and prompted a serious readjustment of English finances during the early stages of the Hundred Years' War. This period was then followed by a French disaster caused by over-confidence and a reversing of roles which had a major effect on the English successes of the next two decades; this result was by no means assured until late 1339 and had the French fought a little longer they might have ended the war before it had really begun.
Coastal raids were not uncommon in fourteenth-century England, with privately owned shipping and occasionally royal ships from France, Castile, Genoa, Scotland and Scandinavia all conducting nuisance attacks against coastal shipping and fishing villages throughout the era, even during periods of peace. What made the naval campaigns of 1338 and 1339 so important was that these were focused and sustained raids with deliberate strategic intent, targeting major English towns rather than isolated hamlets and doing so at a critical point in the developing war.
In 1338, in the first year of a conflict subsequently called the Hundred Years' War, the French government faced a severe threat on two sides. On the south were the English territories of Gascony and Aquitaine, from which lancing raids and chevauchées could be launched into the French heartlands, and where the boundary was both poorly defined and relied far more on the allegiance of the local fief than upon national designations. To the northeast, the situation was grimmer, with the English-financed armies of Hainaut, Brabant and the Holy Roman Empire either preparing for or threatening invasion of France's northern provinces.
King Edward III, the leader of a loose coalition, suffered from financial difficulties; in spite of England's revenues from the control of the wool industry, the king's exchequer was bankrupt. Without English funding, his coalition would collapse, but unable to meet the financial requirements necessary to maintain the army in Flanders, in 1338 after just one campaign, he was unable to continue fighting without borrowing enormous sums from first Jewish then Italian bankers at high rates of interest (which he would later default on, prompting the expulsion of the Jews and separately later a financial crash in Italy). Edward's concerns were common knowledge to other heads of state in Europe and it was recognized by the French that by destroying English ports and shipping, reduced revenue from the wool trade and the inability to move reinforcements across the channel might force Edward to abandon his invasion plans.
The ground they fought on
The site of French Raid on Southampton 1338 lies on Bracklesham Group And Barton Group (Undifferentiated), bedrock that formed in the Eocene. The rock here is sand, silt and clay.
The French and Italian fleet that descended on Southampton in September 1338 found a town gravely exposed along its western and southern quays, where the defences were weakest; the raid inflicted sufficient destruction to prompt Edward III to order immediate improvements to the town walls, and Southampton subsequently became one of the first towns in England to install gunpowder weapons into its rebuilt fortifications when cannon technology arrived in the 1360s and 1370s.
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- English Channel naval campaign, 1338–1339 · Wikipedia
- Southampton town walls · Wikipedia