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By Root 1699 0

“castle” for archers. The French nobles, counting on recouping expenses from booty and ransoms in England, spared nothing in competitive splendor of gilded prows and silvered masts and sails striped with cloth of gold and silk. Admiral de Vienne commissioned a Flemish artist, Pierre de Lis, to paint his flagship red, adorned with his arms. Philip of Burgundy’s black ship was decorated with the coats of arms of all his possessions, and flew silken banners bearing his bold device “Il me tarde,” meaning approximately “I don’t wait,” repeated in gold on the mainsail. Coucy’s ship, “one of the most sumptuous of the fleet … very large and richly decorated,” met an unfortunate fate in the Seine, where it was moored. It was seized with two other ships in a daring raid up the river by a Portuguese admiral acting as an ally of the Duke of Lancaster.

Coucy was not immune to the hubris of the hour. His seal, attached to a receipt of October 1386 for payments connected with the invasion fleet, bears his arms combined with the royal leopard of England. Evidently he felt endowed with some permanent claim, perhaps in relation to his daughter Philippa, first cousin of the King of England. Coucy’s personal contingent in the invasion army numbered 5 knights, 64 squires, and 30 archers.

The wide bays and estuaries of the Scheldt provided a huge, sheltered gathering place for the armada, with communication by land and sea and by inland canals to Bruges. Day after day the parade of supplies came in—2,000 barrels to hold biscuit, timber to make carts, portable handmills to grind wheat, cannonballs of iron and stone from Reims, ropes, candles, lanterns, mattresses and straw pallets, urinals, shaving basins, laundry tubs, gangplanks for horses, shovels, pickaxes, and hammers. Clerks wrote a ceaseless stream of orders, purchasing agents scoured Normandy and Picardy, Holland and Zeeland, and as far as Germany and Spain for provisions—for wheat to make 2,000 tons of biscuit, for salt pork and bacon, smoked mackerel, salmon, eels, and dried herring, dried peas and beans, onions, salt, 1,000 barrels (or four million liters) of French wine, and 857 barrels of wine from Greece, Portugal, Lepanto, and Rumania. The Duke of Burgundy ordered 101 beef cattle, 447 sheep, 224 hams, 500 fat hens, capons, and geese, containers of ginger, pepper, saffron, cinnamon, and cloves, 900 pounds of almonds, 200 of sugar, 400 of rice, 300 of barley, 94 casks of olive oil, 400 cheeses from Brie and 144 from Chauny.

Swords, lances, halberds, suits of armor, helmets “visored in the new fashion,” shields, banners, pennants, 200,000 arrows, 1,000 pounds of gunpowder, 138 stone cannonballs, 500 ramming prows for the ships, catapults, and flame-throwers were collected. Armorers hammered and polished, embroiderers worked on banners, bakers made ship’s biscuit, supplies were counted on delivery, packed, stored, and loaded into the holds. The roadsteads filled with cargo vessels, car-racks, barges, galleys, and galleons.

Of all the preparations, the most stupendous was the portable wooden town to protect and house the invaders upon landing. A huge camp enclosing a place for each captain and his company, it was virtually an artificial Calais to be towed across the Channel. Its dimensions epitomized the fantasy of omnipotence. It was to have a circumference of nine miles and an area of 1,000 acres surrounded by a wooden wall 20 feet high reinforced by towers at intervals of 12 and 22 yards. Houses, barracks, stables, and markets where the companies would come for their provisions were to be laid out along prearranged streets and squares. William the Conqueror had brought a dismountable wooden fort to England in aid of his landing 300 years before, and similar devices had been used many times since, but nothing so daring in concept and size as this had ever before been attempted. Pre-fabricated in Normandy by the work of 5,000 wood-cutters and carpenters, supervised by a team of architects, it was to be packed and shipped in numbered sections, so designed that assembly at the beachhead