Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us
Late medieval ship with a single masted vessel with sails furled. White carved depiction on dark background.

Markets, Marginalization, and Maritime Violence in Late Medieval England

Investigating Violence at Sea

In 1343, more than 150 inhabitants of Great Yarmouth attacked two ships belonging to a certain Robert Morley that were anchored at the roadstead of Kirkley, a village ten kilometres to the south, and seized around £5,000 worth of goods.1 The assailants were members of the leading families of Great Yarmouth and ranged from ship owners and traders, to holders of political office (both royal and municipal), customs officers, bailiffs, and admirals. They were involved in the administration of justice, including as members of commissions appointed by the king or his chancery to investigate violence at sea. The victim, Morley, was also a familiar figure. He came from the local area, on the border between Suffolk and Norfolk, and was one of the most important landowners in the region. He also owned multiple merchant ships. In short, he was an important man in the early years of the war between the English and French kings, which had broken out in 1337. He had been appointed Admiral of the North several times by Edward III and had defended the Norfolk coast from a possible French invasion.2

The scene of the crime—a relatively unremarkable patch of water at first glance—plays an extremely prominent role in English sources from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as one of the key sites of economic activity in the region, as a place where customs were collected by the Crown and by local actors, and not least as a hotspot of maritime violence. The fact that Kirkley Roads became such a hotspot in the first place was due to the resource conflicts fought there between various actors from Great Yarmouth and other ports along the coast—specifically, over the catching and trading of herring.

My current book project examines sites of maritime violence and how actors attempted to legitimize or delegitimize them. I understand these sites in spatial terms, but I primarily focus on the social, political, and economic place of maritime violence in late medieval England. I am interested in the importance of these discourses, and of violence itself, in two structural transformations of the late Middle Ages: first, the increasing consolidation of power and the development of a political language and a ‘political society’ that took place in England, as well as in many other regions; and second, the formation, hierarchization, and concentration of markets in a period of economic contraction and crisis. In the late Middle Ages, English overseas trade became increasingly concentrated in central nodes, developing into a hierarchical system of ports, markets, storage hubs, and places where resources were acquired and distributed.3

All for the King? Criminalization and the Development of a Political Language

The case of Morley is one of hundreds of comparable cases in late medieval English sources. Mariners, shipmasters, fishermen, and merchants attacked each other, stole goods, took people captive, drowned them, or destroyed their competitors’ ships. In other cases, maritime communities appropriated shipwrecked goods, ships, and beached mammals and threatened violence against their neighbours, often to demonstrate a legal claim to the coastal zone where the stranding had occurred.4 Usually, such violent incidents as the one on the Kirkley Roads are understood in the context of the consolidation of power. They are seen as signs of failure on the part of the late medieval Crown to enforce its claims to authority, establish a secure legal framework at sea, punish wrongdoing, and impose order at the regional level. This correlates with the impression that particular sections of the English coast were far removed from central authority—an image that is certainly implied by contemporary sources. The attack on Morley can certainly be seen in this way; for several years beforehand, he had forced people from Great Yarmouth into the service of the king and pursued them through the courts, and the town’s elites had suffered greatly during the Hundred Years War.5 However, I suggest an alternative interpretation, in that I do not understand power primarily in terms of its de facto local enforcement; instead, I see its development more as the result of interactions between royal institutions and local groups of actors.6

Fig. 1: East on the Norfolk Coast Path. Photo by Evelyn Simak. Licensed under a CC BY-SA 2.0 licence.

My project takes a two-pronged approach. To begin with, I am reconstructing the discourses with which actors framed their conflicts. Disputes like that between Robert Morley and his opponents in Great Yarmouth appear in the sources—in particular, in petitions to the Crown, chancery, and Parliament—as conflicts that directly concern the honour of the king, his rights, and the ‘common good’ or ‘common profit’ of England. This kind of framing often neglects the many more tangible conflicts between local groups with different interests, which I will return to shortly. Local actors made use of Crown resources as they fought their conflicts, but in doing so they also accepted the monarch’s fundamental role as a reference point in communications about regional conflicts. This was in part a response to the fact that the Crown regularly granted offices to the members of the local ruling classes who were generally responsible for violence. As a result, these figures often committed violent acts in a double capacity, as both officials and socio-economic elites. The parties to the conflict created narratives in which they cast themselves as loyal subjects who had suffered losses in the service of the king, or who were committing violence for the benefit of the kingdom. These narratives testify to the development in England of a political discourse landscape and a ‘political society’—two phenomena that have been increasingly highlighted in English-language research over the last few years.7 My study contributes to this discussion by bringing a comparative focus to coastal regions, and by demonstrating that this discursive landscape did not come about within a purely English context, but that non-English actors had an important role to play.

Undercurrents: Conflicts over Resources and Structural Patterns of Violence

The second prong of my project is to ask what conflicts can be found ‘behind’ the dominant discursive framings that were predicated on the Crown. To answer this question, I am mapping acts of violence in terms of the people involved and where they came from; the trade routes they were travelling on; the goods that were taken; and the distribution channels through which loot was transported and disposed of. I am also trying to identify structural patterns of violence. Such patterns allow us to understand the attack on Morley on a new level: not just as a response to Morley’s recruitment practices, which had earned him the wrath of Great Yarmouth’s elites, but as one of a series of violent actions through which the ruling classes of Great Yarmouth sought to gain control over local flows of resources.

Great Yarmouth lies on a sandy spit between the North Sea and the estuary of the River Yare. The largest herring fair anywhere on the North Sea was held every year on the dunes in front of the town. Like the Kirkley Roads, the dunes were a place where actors acquired resources—above all herring, an important long-distance trade good that was widely eaten during fasts. Both of these locations were also subject to legal disputes. The inhabitants of Great Yarmouth fought a brutal, constantly escalating feud with the Cinque Ports—a confederation of fishing ports on the English Channel—over the income and judicial rights derived from the herring fairs. From the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Kirkley Roads also increasingly became a site of conflict between Great Yarmouth and other actors in the herring trade: chiefly the neighbouring ports, such as Lowestoft, but also fishermen and traders from Holland, Flanders, and Zeeland.8

In the background lay resource conflicts over who was allowed to trade what—the so-called staple rights. These rights specified that goods could only be unloaded and put up for sale at specific locations, with local actors playing a crucial role as buyers or middlemen. Any transactions taking place outside the staple—the legal market—counted as illegal ‘forestalling’. Great Yarmouth claimed staple rights to herring, and so its elites sought to prevent the trade in herring on the Kirkley Roads, which frequently bypassed Great Yarmouth’s market, and tried to bring it into their own port—often with the threat of force. Members of the ruling classes in Great Yarmouth served as customs officers on the Kirkley Roads, a role that they turned to their own economic advantage. In 1378, the people of Lowestoft accused Great Yarmouth of mooring a ship full of armed men on the Kirkley Roads in order to force other ships to enter their harbour. The representatives of Great Yarmouth defended themselves against this charge by claiming that they were merely collecting customs for the king.9

In the 1340s, Great Yarmouth’s elite came under pressure. The Crown claimed particularly large numbers of sailors, captains, and ships during the first phase of the Hundred Years War. Ships were confiscated, which meant trade voyages could not take place. At the same time, Great Yarmouth’s harbour increasingly silted up, which may partly explain why the conflicts over the nearby Kirkley Roads became more important.10

The attack on Morley can be interpreted in light of this context. Morley was active in the maritime economy of East Anglia, including on the Kirkley Roads. As such, he came into conflict with Great Yarmouth’s elites not only due to his impressment practices, but also for more fundamental economic reasons. At the same time, the large-scale assault on Morley is not unique in the Great Yarmouth elite’s history of violence. Time and again, this legally contested space was occupied by force, attacked the actors who traded there, and compelled them to enter the harbour at Great Yarmouth.

Occupations of this kind, along with the use of violence to marginalize competitors, can be found not only on the Kirkley Roads, but also in many other regions of late medieval England. Maritime violence was applied in a highly targeted manner against economic competitors and in spaces where resources were obtained and distributed. Through both violent acts and the criminalizing discourses connected with them, which conjured up a sphere of illicit economic activity, local actors fundamentally shaped their economic environment. Their day-to-day practices actively contributed to the development and hierarchization of market structures, and thus violence plays a crucial role in any attempt to understand this process.11

The Potential of my Project

Fig. 2: Excerpt from Olaus Magnus’ Carta Marina et descriptio septemtrionalium terrarum ac mirabilium rerum in eis contentarum diligentissime elaborata anno dni 1539, showing trade with Iceland. Courtesy of the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota. Public domain.

In 1539, Olaus Magnus, the Catholic Bishop of Uppsala living in exile in Italy, produced a magnificent map of Northern Europe. In one detail, it shows a Hanseatic ship duelling with a Scottish ship with cannons, both sailing towards Iceland. In his Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, printed in 1555, he explains that the image shows English, Scottish, and Hanseatic merchants killing each other to gain access to the ports of Iceland. Magnus referred to bloody conflicts over Icelandic resources between the English and Scots on the one hand, and their competitors from the Hanseatic towns on the other. Strictly speaking, Iceland belonged to the Norwegian Crown, which after 1397 united with Denmark and Sweden, so English, Scottish, and Hanseatic merchants were forbidden from travelling there. Olaus Magnus described conflicts in a liminal space that were not unlike the conflicts on the Kirkley Roads. Sailors, skippers, and merchants occupied trade routes and the places where resources were accumulated and distributed. They did so by force and violence.12

In my view, we can form a much better understanding of the structural economic changes of the late Middle Ages—the formation of markets and hierarchies—if we take violence and criminalization seriously. In this blog post, I have taken the meandering waters of the Kirkley Roads as an example to indicate the potential of this approach. The case study reveals the processes of contraction and concentration that help us to understand structural change by observing practices.

There are two essential points here, however. First, maritime violence took place in a fluid context. Competition took place not between fixed entities, but between groups of actors in networks marked by migration and (antagonistic) interaction. In the fifteenth century, the burghers of Great Yarmouth complained that the town was declining as a result of war and plague; however, they were primarily lamenting their own dwindling importance.13 The city’s herring trade was still thriving, but it was now largely in the hands of Hollanders, Zeelanders, and Londoners, who did not acquire burgher rights. In other words, shifts were taking place within networks.

Second, maritime violence was always just one link in a longer chain of economic interactions. The sources reveal acts of violence between maritime communities—between fishermen, ship captains, and traders from port cities. But the key sites of English trade in the late Middle Ages were cities not directly connected to the sea, such as London, York, and Bristol, which established a system of satellite ports to process their foreign trade. What role did these cities play in the battles over the distribution of goods on the Kirkley Roads? Their representatives appear time and again as ship owners, as traders, and from 1400 increasingly as customs officers, so their involvement needs to be brought to light. Without these major players, the conflicts that took place during the course of structural change are hard to understand.


Feature image: A typical example of late medieval graffiti of a ship, showing a single-masted vessel with sails furled, located in Norwich cathedral, Norfolk. Photo by Medievalg. Licensed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Translated by Jozef van der Voort (GHIL)

  1. Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office: Edward III, 1343–1345 (London, 1902), 166–7, 168, 172, 385. []
  2. Graham Cushway, Edward III and the War at Sea: The English Navy, 1327–1377 (Woodbridge, 2011), 77, 91–2, 96, 114–16. []
  3. See Stuart Jenks, ‘The London Steelyard’s Certifications of Membership 1463–1474 and the European Distribution Revolution’, in Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz and Stuart Jenks (eds.), The Hanse in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013), 59–108. []
  4. For the anatomy of late medieval violence at sea, see Thomas Heebøll-Holm, Ports, Piracy and Maritime War: Piracy in the English Channel and the Atlantic, c. 1280–c.1330 (Leiden/Boston, 2013), 83–126. For ‘wreccum maris’ and the occupation of littoral spaces, see Tom Johnson, ‘The Tree and the Rod: Jurisdiction in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present, 237 (2017), 13–51; Philipp Höhn, ‘Auf der Schwelle: Meerestiere, der Strand und die littorale Ökonomie im spätmittelalterlichen England’, Das Mittelalter, 28/2 (2023), 388–406. []
  5. Cushway, Edward III and the War at Sea, 114–15. []
  6. See André Holenstein, ‘Introduction’, in Wim P. Blockmans, André Holenstein, and Jon Mathieu (eds.), Empowering Interactions: Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe 1300–1900 (Farnham, 2009), 1–34. []
  7. See Tom Johnson, Law in Common: Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England (Oxford, 2019), 269–76. []
  8. Extensive evidence for this can be found in David Butcher, Medieval Lowestoft: The Origins and Growth of a Suffolk Coastal Community (Woodbridge, 2016), 144–87. []
  9. I. S. Leadam and J. F. Baldwin (eds.), Select Cases before the King’s Council, 1243–1482 (Cambridge, MA, 1918), 60–71. []
  10. On the 1340s, see Anthony Saul, ‘Great Yarmouth and the Hundred Years War in the Fourteenth Century’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 52 (1979), 105–15. []
  11. For an illustration based on trade in the North Atlantic, see Philipp Höhn, ‘“Fighting Pirates” as a Paradigm: Conflict, Competition, and Criminalization in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Lübeck and the Northern European Trade’, Annales: Histoire, Science Sociales, FirstView (1 May 2024), 1–33. []
  12. Olaus Magnus, A Description of the Northern Peoples, 1555, ed. Peter Foote, 3 vols. (London, 1996–8), ii. 494–5. On trade conflicts in the North Atlantic, see Höhn, ‘“Fighting Pirates” as a Paradigm’, at 1–3. []
  13. Christian D. Liddy and Bart Lambert, ‘The Civic Franchise and the Regulation of Aliens in Great Yarmouth, c.1430–c.1490’, in W. Mark Ormrod, Nicola McDonald, and Craig Taylor (eds.), Resident Aliens in Later Medieval England (Turnhout, 2017), 125–45. []

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Philipp Höhn (August 15, 2025). Markets, Marginalization, and Maritime Violence in Late Medieval England. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved November 6, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14hct


Published by

Philipp Höhn

Philipp Höhn completed his doctorate at Saarland University and conducted research at the SFB 1095 (Frankfurt am Main). Since 2019 he has been an assistant at the Chair of Medieval History in Halle. In 2024 he was a fellow at the GHIL and he is currently (in 2025–6) a Walter Benjamin Fellow at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the history of violence, the social and economic history of the Middle Ages, the scientific history of medieval studies in the ‘Age of Extremes’, and maritime history.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.