tly closed to the French
and Scots the English armies did as well on land as the navy did at
sea. Four years before this first great battle with the Spaniards the
English armies had won from the French at Cressy and from the Scots at
Neville's Cross. Six years after the Spanish fight they won from the
French again at Poitiers. But in 1374 Edward III, worn out by trying
to hold his lands in France, had been forced to neglect his navy; while
Jean de Vienne, founder of the regular French Navy, was building
first-class men-of-war at Rouen, where, five hundred years later, a
British base was formed to supply the British army during the Great War.

With Shakespeare's kingly hero, Henry V, the fortunes of the English
armies in France revived. In 1415 he won a great battle at Agincourt,
a place, like Cressy, within a day's march of his ships in the Channel.
Harfleur, at the mouth of the Seine, had been Henry's base for the
Agincourt campaign. So the French were very keen to get it back, while
the English were equally keen to keep it. Henry sent over a great
fleet under the Duke of Bedford. The French, though their fleet was
the smaller of the two, attacked with the utmost gallantry, but were
beaten back with great loss. Their Genoese hirelings fought well at
the beginning, but made off towards the end. In 1417 Henry himself was
back in France with his army. But he knew what sea-power meant, and
how foolish it was to land without making sure that the seaways were
quite safe behind him. So he first sent a fleet to make sure, and then
he crossed his army, which now had a safe "line of communication,"
through its base in France, with its great home base in England.

Henry V was not, of course, the only man in England who then understood
sea-power. For in 1416, exactly five hundred years before Jellicoe's
victory of Jutland, Henry's Parliament passed a resolution in which you
still can read these words: "that the Navy is the chief support of the
wealth, the business, and the whole prosperity of England." Some years
later Hungerford, one of Henry's admirals, wrote a _Book of English
Policy_, "exhorting all England to keep the sea" and explaining what
Edward III had meant by stamping a ship on the gold coins called
nobles: "Four things our noble showeth unto me: King, ship, and sword,
and power of the sea." These are themselves but repetitions of Offa's
good advice, given more than six centuries earlier: "He who would be