Before the Wooden Wall
- 2 hours ago
- 10 min read
By Gary Oswald.
If there is one thing that has defined the geopolitical situation of the British Isles over the last 500 years, it is the fact that they have a moat. The nature of British warfare has been that it happens in other people’s lands because foreign armies do not get past the Royal Navy. The British have many times been defeated on the continent, by Nazi Germany, Napoleonic France, Ancien Regime France, Habsburg Spain etc. and yet never faced the invasion that any other European country would as a result because that enemy could not cross the North Sea due to British naval and aerial superiority. This goes all the way back to the Spanish Armada. You could defeat the UK and force them to terms but any victory would be incomplete because you could not hit the heart of them as you could not get past the 'Wooden Wall' of the Royal Navy to land troops in London.
Except, the history of the 1,500 years prior to that is of constant armies from the continent landing in modern day England and smashing it up. This includes the Romans, the Irish, the Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans, the French, and loads of exiled rebels who routinely would return from the continent with an army to overthrow the current King. The Wooden Wall clearly did not exist during the Wars of the Roses when this happened four different times.
So what changed to make the British capable of intercepting foreign armies aiming to land on their shores? In three words: cannons on ships.
There had been previous attempts to mount projectile firing weapons to ships, such as catapults, but the installation of cannons was the first time a reliable way of sinking ships in the North Sea was developed. Prior to that any attempt at deep sea battle would be ineffective as you'd have to get close enough to the other ship to either board or use a ram, something that in deep waters isn't easy. The most effective way to use a ship to attack another ship pre-cannon was in shallow waters close to shore, something that isn't great at stopping armies landing. It's much better at preventing armies which have landed from then retreating.
So what changed to make the British capable of intercepting foreign armies aiming to land on their shores? In three words: cannons on ships.
There had been previous attempts to mount projectile firing weapons to ships, such as catapults, but the installation of cannons was the first time a reliable way of sinking ships in the North Sea was developed. Prior to that any attempt at deep sea battle would be ineffective as you'd have to get close enough to the other ship to either board or use a ram, something that in deep waters isn't easy. The most effective way to use a ship to attack another ship pre-cannon was in shallow waters close to shore, something that isn't great at stopping armies landing. It's much better at preventing armies which have landed from then retreating.
The first cannon mounted on an English ship was in 1338, but it wasn't until the 1500s that it really became standard. 1506 is when the Scottish Navy first used cannon fire to break rebels in the Western Isles and it really became a priority for the English only after the break with Rome in 1534 left them dangerously politically isolated. The main innovation of the English in particular was to replace bronze guns with much cheaper and more available iron guns (at the expense of harder gun founding and heavier cannons) which meant they could put much more cannons on their ships.
This also meant that ships had an effectiveness that wasn’t linked directly to the amount of men on board. Previously if you were going to win a battle at sea, you’d need to have as many soldiers as the opponent. There’s still advantages to this, in that cavalry are nullified by having to fight on ships, but post 1500, you could have a ship sink a troop ship with thousands of people on board without having to kill those soldiers yourself. This is why the first ships in Europe (China was many years ahead here) to rely on cannons were oar driven galleys in the Mediterranean who had a manpower disadvantage compared to sail ships due to needing to man the oars. With cannons they could shoot down a bigger ship without needing to board and so the advantages of oars in terms of manoeuvrability became much more significant.
From the point of view of the English state which, under the Tudors, had become terrifying isolated and outmatched by its continental rivals, this gave a way in which a larger army could be destroyed without having to be engaged. Cannons on ships was the cheapest, easiest way to defend England from attack.
Because of this it wasn't until the Tudor Era that it became English policy to try and intercept a fleet on the ocean. It's only then that there is an attempt to find and locate fleets with the beacon system sending warnings to the navy when a ship was sighted because it is only then that that is useful. With the cannons, you can find a fleet and sink it long before it gets to land, thus creating the Wooden Wall. It could still fail, as it did during the Glorious Revolution where the fleet was positioned in the wrong place, but it was now an achievable strategic aim and one which the British, made significantly stronger by the 1603 Union of England and Scotland, normally succeeded in doing.
So any conversation about the English or Scottish navies prior to 1500 has to remember that stopping an invading army reaching Great Britain simply wasn't a thing they were either capable of or attempting to do. What they were used for was much more to move your own armies around and prevent your enemies moving their own armies in the same way. If your ships could attack your enemies ships in a river or near the shore, you could stop them from being able to disappear to sea and hit you sixty miles north in another day.
And the modern consensus is that England wasn’t really a major naval power during the time period from 1066 to 1545. They did not have a permanent organised navy during that time for one. They weren’t a non-existent naval power, they normally could scrape up enough ships to ferry their army into Europe and they notably defeated the French Navy a few times, but they weren’t on the level of the top naval powers. Those were based in either Scandinavia, the Lowlands or the Mediterranean. That was where naval innovation was largely happening. The English army of that period was significantly more innovative and feared than its navy with most of its biggest victories, such as Crecy or Agincourt, being on land and the Navy primarily being used as a ferry.
A look at England’s naval record in that time period backs that up. During the Hundred Years War, Castile and Genoa leant their fleets to France with devastating effect and it was only when England could isolate France from those powers that they regained control of their southern shore. During the Scottish Wars of Independence, it’s the Scots not the England who have control of the Irish Sea, conquering the Isle of Man, raiding Wales and invading Ireland. The English conquest of Wales, while ultimately successful, was hampered by their lack of ability to invade by sea, with armies having to fight through the mountains instead. Again superior fighting at land overcoming weakness at sea.
In the early post-1066 era, Dublin’s fleet became the masters of the seas around Wales and both Anglo-Saxon and Welsh rebels against the powerful Anglo-Norman army borrowed that fleet to land on Great Britain, where, once on land, they inevitably lost and England was unable to respond to this at sea. When England armies did land in Ireland they were devastatingly effective but this lack of control of the sea limited English expansion from the East Coast and the two most significant arrivals of Anglo-Norman forces during that conquest, the initial invasion under Strongbow and the royal invasion under Henry II, both only happened with the assistance of Irish fleets.
While tradition often says the Scandinavian threat to England ended with the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, the superiority of Danish naval power meant this wasn’t true. In both 1069 and 1075 the Danish fleet of Sweyn II attacked Northern England and met no serious opposition, instead accepting money to depart, the last time England had to pay ‘Danegeld’. Canute IV of Denmark’s planned invasion of England in 1085, ultimately called off after Canute was killed by a peasant’s revolt, likewise caused complete panic among the Anglo-Norman rulers. In 1098 the Norwegian fleet of Magnus Barelegs defeated the English in Wales and in 1138, Denmark raided the East coast of England and escaped unchallenged. The original Auld Alliance of Scotland and France also included Denmark and during the Scottish Wars of Independence the Danish fleet took control of the North Sea and raided England again. In both 1363 and 1369 the Danes offered to bring a French army to London with conviction that the English could not stop them. Denmark also had the ability to shut off England from the tar, pitch and masts England bought in the Baltic preventing them from making new ships. They remained the undisputed superior naval power in the North Sea until the Tudor era.
And if France didn’t take the Danes up on the offer, it was because prior to the cannon era they felt pretty certain they could land troops in England by themselves if they wanted to. Under Prince Louis they did do so during the First Barons War and the main reasons it didn’t happen again was due to rebels within France preventing the king being able to focus on England. A Wooden Wall was simply not a practical strategy prior to the innovations around cannons.
There is however one exception to this. The English Channel is very narrow and very shallow. If you know for a fact that the enemy is on one side of the English Channel and is trying to get to the other, then unlike trying to intercept a Danish fleet moving throughout the entire North Sea or a Spanish fleet with the entire South Coast to aim for, you have a pretty good chance of engaging that fleet in battle. If that army is one which is noted mostly for being a cavalry army and is less effective without access to their horses, you also have motive to do so even without cannons.
And this was the situation Anglo-Saxon England faced in 1066 when William the Conqueror was ready to invade England to press his claim to the throne.
There has been an increasingly common take that Anglo-Saxon England was richer and more powerful than the Norman England that conquered it. This is not baseless, the Anglo-Saxon merchant trade was thriving and there are certainly signs of decline post-1066, the neglect of the English fleet being one of them. There’s also the growth of lawless badlands on the Scottish and Welsh Borders and the inability of London to prevent the growth of their most powerful vassals into castle enforced semi-independent feudal lords, which are both signs of a weaker central state. Having said that, Norman England conquered large parts of France, Wales, Scotland and Ireland while Anglo-Saxon England was conquered itself three times, twice by the Danes and once by the Normans, so there are also signs the other way. What is perhaps more true is that Anglo-Saxon strength waxed and waned but a strong Anglo-Saxon state tended to be one that understood the important of trade and naval superiority, because a weak Anglo-Saxon state was routinely attacked from the sea.
And in 1066, England was in a strong position. In particular, their fleet had spent the last 20 years at the height of its power. In 1045 the English fleet forced the submission of the Isle of Man, in 1047 and 1048 it went to Denmark to fight Norway, and in 1049 the same fleet attacked Flanders on the behalf of the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1054 that fleet attacked Scotland and in 1063 they attacked Wales and that ability to attack from the sea was key to English victory in both wars. Against that the Duchy of Normandy had no existing fleet and had to create its own from scratch, both by building it and by buying ships from other polities, primarily Flanders.
All throughout the summer of 1066, the English fleet waited at the Isle of Wight for the Norman fleet to try and cross, at one point even launching a spoiling attack against Normandy. They must have been reasonably confident that they could intercept the Normans on the coast, ideally hitting them while they were disembarking, while the army could attack onto the beach. And there is every chance the Normans would have simply given up were they not aware that England could not keep all its forces on the southern coast because Harald of Norway was also ready to invade to press his claim. Harald arrived in York in September, drawing off the English Army to fight him. At the same time, the English fleet had to return to London to be resupplied after two months patrolling the channel.
This gave William his opportunity. Both the English Army and the Navy withdrawing at the time for different reasons, after the Norman fleet was ready to cross, meant the timing could not have worked out any better for the Normans. Except the first attempt to cross the channel failed, because the winds were blowing in the wrong direction. Instead, for a fortnight, his fleet waited in the Somme estuary, hoping that the westerly wind that prevented his crossing would end before the English got back from defeating the Norwegians. It was a close-run thing.
The English fleet was resupplied in time to get back to sea, but not to catch the Norman fleet before it had fully disembarked the Norman army. The English army also arrived too late to challenge the landing, arriving a full two weeks after the landing during which the Normans had built fortifications and acquired more horses, and the speed in which it sped south to try and do so meant it was much weaker than it could have been when it arrived there. The English army seems to have then tried to hold defensive positions until it could join up with the fleet, but was attacked and defeated by the Normans before the fleet arrived.
This was yet another example of superior skill in land battles overcoming the Norman lack of interest in Naval superiority and it is not difficult to think of ways in which the Normans could have been slightly unluckier and been caught by the English fleet, allowing the English army a much easier job.
Obviously this is not the only way for William’s invasion to fail, the Battle of Hastings itself was a close run thing. And given that Anglo-Saxon England and Norman England differed hugely in both internal structure and external relations, any failed Norman Invasion has profound effects. But it is perhaps more interesting if the way it fails is because of the English fleet proving the effectiveness of the Wooden Wall strategy 500 years ahead of time.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.