Edward of Windsor’s first experience of naval operations was as part of a small bedraggled invading army which landed on a sandy Essex beach at nightfall on 24 September 1326. The problems of naval warfare must have been apparent even to the 14-year-old Prince of Wales, the heir to the throne. The night drew in, and it was bitterly cold. Most of the force sat shivering on the beach, the cold sharpened by their damp clothes. As day dawned the situation was no clearer. They could question the Walloon masters of their ships all they might. A ruined fort on the coast to the north might have given a clue to somebody from the area, but the army consisted of the French-born queen of England, Hainault mercenaries, and Englishmen from other parts of the country. The fleet’s commander, Roger Mortimer, the renegade Earl of March, had no idea where they were. It was an inauspicious precursor to the reign of the king who would command the most potent English navy prior to the modern age.

The earliest origins of the Royal Navy are mysterious. English kings had wrestled with the problem of finding ships at least since the 880s, when King Alfred constructed a fleet to stem the seemingly endless tide of Viking raiders. Most monarchs after Alfred relied on requisitioned merchant shipping. However in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the sea became a greater priority. The Angevin kings, Henry II (1154–1189) and Richard I (1189–1199), built an extensive English empire in France, incorporating the duchy of Normandy, the counties of Anjou, Maine and Poitou, and the duchy of Aquitaine. Much of this was lost to the French in the reign of King John (1199–1216). However the Angevins left four legacies that would profoundly influence events in the fourteenth century. English kings continued to hold the duchy of Aquitaine, or Gascony. This was not English territory, but belonged to the king of France. English kings had to give homage for the duchy in a humiliating ritual in which they knelt before their French overlords. This would prove a flashpoint for future conflicts.