ea, "would vaile no bonnet," by which we
may suppose is intended the customary salutation made in courtesy to a
fellow-port.

Highly indignant, the men of Rye and Winchelsea sallied forth to teach
the Foyens better respect, our seamen in those days being as willing
to quarrel among each other as they were with the men of Normandy or
Brittany. In the quaint words of the Cornish Hals, this contempt shown
by the Fowey men, "by the better enabled seafarers reckoned
intolerable, caused the Ripiers to make out with might and maine
against them; howbeit with a more hardy onset than happy issue; for
the Foy men gave them so rough entertainment as their welcome, that
they were glad to depart without bidding farewell--the merit of which
exploit afterwards entitled them Gallants of Fowey." Of course the
Fowey men held their heads higher than ever after this, and even
presumed to wear the arms of Rye and Winchelsea interwined with their
own, in token of their supremacy. It was from such tough fibres that
the British navy was built; those strenuous days of constant conflict
and privateering were a grand tutorage for seamen, though not
unexceptionable from a moral standpoint. But a town that behaved as
Fowey did naturally had to suffer reprisals.

To quote again from Hals, we learn that certain Normans, with a
commission from the King of France to "be revenged on the pirates of
Fowey town, carried the design so secret that a small squadron of
ships and many bands of marine soldiers was prepared and shipped
without the Fowey men's knowledge. They put to sea out of the river
Seine in July, 1457, and with a fair wind sailed thence across the
British Channel and got sight of Fowey Harbour, where they lay off at
sea till night, when they drew towards the shore and dropped anchor,
and landed their marine soldiers and seamen, who at midnight
approached the south-west end of Fowey town, where they killed all
persons they met with, set fire to the houses and burnt one half
thereof to the ground, to the consumption of a great part of the
inhabitants' riches and treasures, a vast deal of which were gotten by
their pyratical practices. In which massacre the women, children and
weakest sort of people forsook the place and fled for safety into the
hill country. But the stoutest men, under conduct of John Treffry
Esquire, fortified themselves as well as they could in his then new
built house of Place, where they stoutly opposed the assaults of th