The 1340 Battle of Sluys as depicted in Jean Froissart’s Chronicles - (Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS Fr. 2643, Folio 72r)
The story of a 14th-century Flemish pirate and adventurer.
If you like what you hear and want to chip in to support the podcast, my Patreon is here.
Sources:
Barrell, Andrew D. M. Medieval Scotland. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Cushway, Graham. Edward III and the War at Sea: The English Navy, 1327-1377. Boydell Press, 2011.
Holinshed, Raphael. Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Volume 5. J. Johnson, et. al. 1808.
Lucas, Henry S. “John Crabbe: Flemish Pirate, Merchant, and Adventurer.” Speculum 20, no. 3 (1945): 334–50.
Rose, Susan. Medieval Naval Warfare, 1000-1500. Routledge, 2003.
Wilson, Ben. Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy. Orion, 2013.
The Anonimalle Chronicle 1307 to 1334. Edited by Wendy R. Childs and John Taylor. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Script:
Today, we are leaving that last series entirely behind us and moving on to other things, travelling to other times and places, and to the stories of other people. But on our way out the door, we’re going to be picking up some bits and pieces that we came across along the way. Today, it’s one of those bits, or really I should say it’s more like being bits-adjacent, someone I encountered in reading for those last few episodes, so you definitely don’t need to have listened to them first.
Today, it’s a story of piracy, of plundering the opportunities that your time presents, really seizing the day, as I guess you could put it, and of doing so by always finding a way to make yourself useful to those in power, your presence always worth something and in our protagonist’s case generally pretty well rewarded. Today, it’s one of my standalone Medieval Lives episodes, and the life in question is that of John Crabbe.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that journeys that world in the footsteps of those who travelled it, from friars and merchants to envoys or pirate adventurers, with more on that last category coming up here shortly. It is a podcast that is supported by a Patreon, one where you can enjoy early, extra, and ad-free listening. And you can do so at Patreon.com/humancircus for as little or as much as makes sense to you. Thank you, all of you who have supported me there, whether in the past or at this moment.
And now, back to the story.
When historian Henry Lucas wrote about today’s subject in 1945, he would say of him that, quote:
“A good way to illustrate the character of medieval piracy and some of the innumerable vicissitudes incidental to the life of merchants, especially at the opening of the Hundred Years' War, is to recount the fortunes of one John Crabbe, whose name was mentioned with shudders by the people who sailed the narrow seas between England and the continent.”
When author William Gurstelle mentioned John in his The Art of the Catapult, he described him as a, quote, “swashbuckling pirate and a man of aristocratic sensibilities, a man who sailed the high seas and attended the royal courts of Europe with equal ease, finding loot and plunder in both locations alike.”
It is, I think, a very promising start, a start to a story that takes us back to more than a century before our last character, to the first half of the 1300s, and to Flanders, France, Scotland, and England. Before we get going, we should quickly situate ourselves there in that place and time.
For England, that finds us in and around the reign of King Edward II. We’ll take up our story a little before he took the throne following his father’s death in 1307, and we’ll carry it on into the long, long rule of his son. For England, and for others, the period of the Hundred Years War is just around the corner.
In France, it’s the rather more crowded royal period of Philip IV and Louis X, of Philip V, Charles IV, and Philip VI. It’s very briefly that of Jean the Posthumous, who lived for only four short days in November of 1316. Our protagonist was around for all of that, for the destruction of the Knights Templar and for near-constant conflicts in the south or with Flanders.
In Flanders, rebellion against French royalty in Bruges and other cities had led first to victory against the French army at the beginning of the century and then to defeats and a punishing treaty in 1305. It would be a time of prosperity in trade and textiles but also frequent conflict with France and other adversaries, and the financial terms of that 1305 treaty would lay the path for the uprisings and Flemish peasant revolt to come.
As for Scotland, the time we’re looking at was that of Robert the Bruce, familiar to most from his appearance as a character in the movie Braveheart, or so one once would have said. I have no idea if that’s still remotely true. Our story begins around the time Robert is facing down his competitors for the throne to first become King of the Scots.
As Lucas writes of this time:
“The decades before the outbreak of the Hundred Years' War were notoriously fruitful in commercial violence. The antagonisms of the English and Scots, the rivalry of England and France, [and] the close economic relations between England and the Low Countries bred much ill will and violence which proved a contributing cause of the catastrophe of the Hundred Years' War.”
Into this world of profitable strife our John Crabbe was born, very much a person of the time and ready to engage in a little fruitful commercial violence of his own. The when of his birth is not exactly known, but the where is more solidly traceable to a small town near the Flemish coast named Muiden, now the city at the extreme west of the Netherlands.
Lucas wrote that “Unfortunately we,” quote, “know practically nothing about John Crabbe's private life and commercial activities before 1305 or 1306.” Indeed, he continued, the Crabbe name was common enough around Flanders that you had to really be careful you were not confusing the activities of one Crabbe for those of another.
Where the story generally begins is just off the French port of La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay, and it begins with an act of piracy.
We’re in the year 1305 or 6, and John and an unknown number of his colleagues are storming and seizing a ship. It belongs to a merchant of the now Dutch city of Dordrecht named Johannis, and John and his comrades, who may or may not have included his nephew in their number, take 160 casks of wine among other goods, capturing the sailors and torching their vessel. That doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you pull off on your first time out for a bit of piracy, though perhaps I’m wrong here. It sounds more like you might have at least had a hand in one or two little jobs at sea before then. But that’s the first from John that we know of.
Lucas writes that the “chronic antagonism between the French kings and the counts of Flanders [had in recent years] finally broke[n] out in the epic struggle which reached its climax” with that Flemish victory and that damaging peace. Meanwhile “The perennial dispute between the counts of Holland and Zeeland and the counts of Flanders … now broke out with increased fury.” This “bitter struggle” would go on for year after year, “broken by uneasy truces until finally it merged with the Hundred Years' War,” and it was in the context of these conflicts that John Crabbe had helped himself to all that wine and caused so much damage in the process.
Here was a Flemish crew seizing what would have been viewed, at least by themselves, as an entirely legitimate prize. It was nothing actually underhanded or untoward in other words, just the snatching up of cargo from a hostile power, from a merchant whose town belonged to the belligerent count of Hainaut, Holland, and Zeeland, at this point William the Good.
And here was that merchant then seeking to reclaim his losses. The merchant’s claim would go to Philip IV of France and be directed on to the king’s captain with instructions that the perpetrators be punished and made to compensate the merchant. It would be brought as a November 1306 request to Robert III, Count of Flanders, John’s deed now bringing in all the immediate figures of great power in his surrounding circle, but still it would not come back to cause our main character any harm because John would not be answering the repeated summons.
He would not be punished. He would not be made to repay the merchant Johannis. Indeed, that poor merchant would just spend more money on the business and only receive satisfaction with King Philip’s 1311 intervention to arbitrate between the rival counts. When William the Good presented the long list of complaints regarding his subjects’ losses, John’s piracy would be the largest single item there in terms of monetary value. But by then, years had passed, and John was on to other things.
Not much is known as to exactly what, perhaps making himself hard to find and staying away from his Flanders residence, though as we’ll later hear that might not have been necessary. When next he was heard from, in May of 1310, it was in another letter of complaint sent to the Flemish count, this time not from the French king but from the English one, Edward II. Our John was in trouble again.
He’d been active in the Strait of Dover this time, and the financially wounded party had been a countess named Alice, sister to the Count William who we just met and married to the Earl of Norfolk. John had a Flemish crew with him for this job, many of its members mentioned by name in the letter. He had someone who was probably his nephew along with him, and he had a second ship too. He had intercepted a vessel bringing the countess’s cargo to London, emptying it of cloth, jewels, gold, silver, and more. And again, he had escaped punishment for what he’d done.
King Edward had written to the Flemish count to see that justice be done, but it was not. He had written repeatedly, only to hear back in 1315, five years after the attack, that some of those responsible had been punished. But John appears not to have been one of them, for he was no longer to be found in Flanders. He was instead in Aberdeen, hardly unique at the time for those from Flanders who thought attacking English ships a profitable venture. It was a category which John evidently fit into pretty well.
After this quick break, we will talk about exactly how well.
…
In 1311, John was once again showing up in one of Edward’s letters of grievance to Count Robert—one gets the sense that there were probably quite a lot of those. John had attacked two ships belonging to merchants of Newcastle and taken 89 sacks of wool bound for Flanders before sending it on for sale there himself. Edward’s letter to Bruges requested that they look out for the stolen product so that it could be returned to its rightful owners.
In 1316, John would return to Flanders, a dangerous step, or at least it could have been, but difficult circumstances for the land of his birth had made him very welcome there, if ever he wasn’t. 1315 had seen Count William and the French king, now Louis X, marching on Flanders, only to be put off by the excessively wet summer. Bogged down east of Lille, the king was forced to abandon the effort and burn what he could not bring back, and the count likewise turned away.
Meanwhile in England, Edward had ordered a fleet out in an attempt to address the problem of Flemish piracy, and he was also heeding Louis’s request that he banish the people of Flanders and confiscate their goods. Orders were given that all Flemings must leave his lands by late October of that year and that none of his subjects should give them any aid. Follow-up instructions in November called for two knights of each shire to ensure that no Flemings remained.
Between the regional hostilities and the famine which would soon follow those excessive rains, Flanders was in a difficult spot, and John was able to present himself to Count Robert’s court as an enemy of his enemies and one who had proven himself against them at sea. He was able to come away from the encounter as an admiral, given a fleet and orders to, quote, “acquire victuals and other necessaries for the sustenance of the [people] of the country where there was great need and famine, from enemies as prize of war, and from others for payment.”
By March of 1316, he was putting that fleet to work, capturing two ships owned by merchants of Great Yarmouth on the way from Rouen to England. John took both vessels and their cargoes back to Flanders, and more complaints were heard.
In his book Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy, Ben Wilson writes that, quote, “Men like Crabbe prolonged wars. When England and Flanders settled their differences, private wars between aggrieved merchants and shippers raged unabated.”
King Edward was actually going to soften his stance toward the Flemings that December, permitting them to come, go, and trade untroubled, but by the time he’d done so, our John had struck again, this time taking about 100 casks of wine meant for sale in England along with the ship that carried them. Edward duly ordered the confiscation of Flemish goods until the affected merchants’s losses were satisfied, but that was not the end of his interest in this latest robbery.
The taking of the wine would be raised repeatedly in council and brought repeatedly to Count Robert’s attention. Edward again and again asked for action to be taken as to the stolen vessel and its cargo, “considering that, “quote, “such rapine committed upon his merchants and within his power is not only to the detriment of the merchants but would also redound to his shame and contempt unless an opportune remedy be provided, and wishing to protect his subjects in his peace and protection from wrong and violence.” But Robert’s reply was slow to come, and when it did, it was hardly calculated to satisfy.
Robert’s letter conveyed that he had been entirely ignorant of the deed itself and the ones who had committed it. He would certainly now see to it that they were appropriately punished on the wheel if they were ever to be caught, but that was not likely as the guilty party had already been banished for murder. It was a truly brazen response, hilariously so. The English knew that John lived and moved freely in Flanders at that time. They knew that the count had already knowingly given the ship away and knew that the wine itself had actually been reserved for Robert’s own use. The deniability of it all was far from plausible, something that is emphasized by John’s sheer levels of infamy at this stage.
“By this time,” as Lucas writes, “Crabbe had won widespread notoriety as an energetic and heartless freebooter, for he undoubtedly was responsible also for other violent acts of which we have no record. His fame spread far and wide,” and he was described by a contemporary Flemish chronicler with these words:
“He wrought great damage on the seas, showing mercy to no one. Now he appeared here, now there. Now he served one person, next he turned against him and sought the favor of another. Such is the evil company of robbers,” the chronicler dramatically concluded. “They do not keep to what they promise; and in the end themselves are deceived.”
At some point during the next few years, John established himself in the Scottish town of Berwick, place we’ve dropped in on before on the podcast, in the now distant past of an old Halloween episode where I talked about William of Newburgh’s 12th-century story of a wealthy man rising from the dead and the townsfolk who dug him up, hacked him apart, and burnt the pieces, and about the terrible pestilence that was to have followed. There at the site of that story, John had arrived to “continue his robberies,” to, quote, “tak[e] advantage of the confusion created by the chronic feud between England and Scotland and repeatedly atta[ck] ships of English subjects,” as was his wont. Much as he ever would, he found a way to make himself useful.
Robert the Bruce’s forces had taken the town in 1318, but the English king would want to take it back and John would be there helping to ensure that he wouldn’t, not yet, his participation there and his great subtlety referenced in the 14th-century verse of Scottish poet John Barbour. John Crabbe would be there for the defence of that town and would remain after, with the trust and confidence of the man entrusted with the defence of Berwick, Walter Stewart, High Steward of Scotland and father of future King Robert II.
In these circumstances, John carried on as he ever had. He plundered English targets at sea and on dry earth, producing wealth and resources for the Scottish side, providing food for the royal house in 1327 and rope for the engines of war on Berwick’s walls. In 1331, he was being paid a large amount for something to do with the town watches. A year after that, his story would take a new turn.
Robert the Bruce was dead by that point, his son David II only very young still, and rule taken on by a regent. But there was another claimant to the throne named Edward Balliol, his challenge supported by those who Robert had disinherited and, though quietly at first, also by the king of England, an Edward too but now Edward III, no longer the second.
This storm of Edwards came to Scotland in 1332, winning immediate victories and ensconcing itself in Perth where a plan was made to deal with them. While David’s regent attacked these invaders by land, John was to make his way up coast and inlet with 10 Flemish ships and attack from the water. It sounded very much the sort of thing he was highly suited for, thoroughly experienced and carrying a well-established track record of success, but this time, for the first time in the story that has come down to us, he lost.
One chronicle has it that, quote, “he came suddenly on the … English ships, and in the leading position he found the Beaumont barge and captured it and killed all the people who were on it, and he thought to have similar mastery over the others, but he failed.”
Despite apparently having the advantage of surprise, he lost all 10 of his ships and very nearly himself. Somehow managing to get away, he fled back to Berwick with the bad news. There was going to be more of that.
As Edward withdrew to the south, the Scottish regent pursued and John went with him. In the fighting that followed, John and the regent were both captured, and John Crabbe, who had caused no end of annoyance to the English over the years, now found himself in the incredibly unpleasant situation of being in their power and in their hands.
And you might think that this would be the end of our John, that he couldn’t possibly wriggle his way out of this one. There’d just been too much bloodshed, too many robberies, too much money that he was certainly not going to be giving back. Indeed, reading the Holinshed Chronicle, our Shakespearean source from a previous episode, we read that he had, quote, “before that time … done many displeasures to the Englishmen by sea and land,” displeasures which the English parliament was all too aware of, and Lucas wrote of that body’s opinion, saying quote:
“As he had for years been a notorious enemy of the crown, had robbed merchants on land and sea, and hanged mariners from the masts of their captured ships, they petitioned the king to reward [John’s captor] properly and see that the culprit receive the penalty fitting his many crimes.”
The king, for his part, was inclined to agree that all this should be so, but John knew how to turn even such inopportune situations to his own advantage. He knew how to make himself useful once again, if maybe not to the quite same people as before, the same master. He requested and was granted safe passage to go see the English king, and that king must have liked what he heard because the next we hear of John Crabbe he’s no longer suffering in captivity. Instead, he’s out and freely aiding the English forces as they march on Berwick and successfully besiege it in 1333. John had changed sides.
It’s hard to say exactly what he contributed to the taking of that city by his new employers, but you can see how he had a lot to offer. On a purely informational level, had spent years in Berwick and had been highly involved in supplying and defending it. He was closely familiar with its defenders and their leadership and surely knew much he could share. And then there was whatever he might have provided as a fighter and a leader himself.
Whatever that was, his old Scottish allies were said to have killed his son for his treachery. Whatever it was, he was rewarded quite substantially for it. For his “good service in the siege of Berwick,” he was first of all pardoned for all the murder and theft and so on. He was given a Berwick property and a lifetime appointment in Lincolnshire that came with land and rent. He was paid the following year to travel with the king and advise him on his Scottish negotiations, and the year after that he was commissioned to gather and crew a fleet in royal service. One might say that he was past his time as a pirate, but it might be more accurate to put it that it was just different people who now called him one.
The 1330s are littered with breadcrumbs as to our main character. He’s submitting expenses for something done around Somerton castle. He’s doing work around Berwick and drawing funds to pay for iron, timber, and labourers. He’s being referred to as the king’s yeoman or sergeant. He’s with the admiral’s fleet in the early years of what we term the Hundred Year War, first commanding 100 archers and then 70 archers, 8 men-at-arms, and 70 sailors. When the English are looking to land their forces for an attack on the French, John is there as they win a bloody victory at the 1340 Battle of Sluys, where thousands on the French side are either drowned, slain by arrows, or murdered by Flemish bystanders as they attempt to reach the shore. When a group of French ships under the command of a well known pirate breaks through and flees, John is there, given command of the pursuit and as many as 40 ships to carry it out.
By 1341, John had been receiving royal attention for his involvement in acts of violence for about 35 years, and by Lucas’s reckoning must have been about 60 years old. Understandably, his activity started to slow but not entirely to disappear from the record. You find him providing timber or the construction of barricades. You find him involved in a wool transaction or the collection of money owed from the property of a French bishop.
Since 1335, he had been required to provide his accounts to the council as the constable of Somerton, and it’s useful to us that he had. That’s how we know that early in the year 1352 inquiries were ordered as to his Lincolnshire properties, for John Crabbe, the “Flemish pirate, merchant, and adventurer,” had died.
As Lucas concludes, we can hardly know anything as to John’s personal life, his attitudes, ideals, or ideas about the people or issues of his time, but he serves as an example of how someone might profit from the particular opportunities that the 14th century presented.
“Many men like him in England and elsewhere,” wrote Lucas, “rose from the lower walks of life by taking advantage of the needs of ambitious rulers who, constantly broadening the scope of government, required in increasing numbers new talent which could be provided only by the practical [people] of the trading class.”
It’s hard to imagine that a great many were so successful as John Crabbe at grasping after the openings those needs provided.
I hope you enjoyed the story of John Crabbe. We’ll leave it there. I’ll be back next time with a little Halloween appropriate listening, and I’ll talk to you then.