Remains of Henry V warship believed to be buried in Hampshire
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Version 0 of 1. Deep in the oozing mud of the river Hamble in Hampshire, visible only at the lowest tides as a U-shaped ripple on the surface, possibly lies a ship that was one of the glories of Henry V’s navy. Ian Friel, a historian who has devoted decades of research to Henry’s navy, believes it is the Holigost, built for the king in 1415 by recycling the hull of a captured Spanish warship, the Santa Clara. Not an inch now shows above the surface, but Friel – whose book on Henry’s navy is published on Monday – has convinced Historic England to commission work including sonar surveys of the seabed, drone photography of the site and possibly wood sample dating. The site is being considered for a protection order to defend it from treasure hunters, although it would have been stripped of any valuables when it was laid up. Most of Henry’s navy comprised hired-in ships or privately owned merchant ships pressed into service, but the Holigost was one of the four ‘great ships’ commissioned by the king. It was completed in November 1415, just too late to join the flotilla that ferried Henry, his soldiers and horses to the king’s victory at Agincourt in northern France, but suffered extensive damage in the thick of the fighting at the naval battle of Harfleur the following year, and was repaired in time to fight again in 1417. The ship was repaired again in 1423 by a diver called Davy Owen, the first recorded instance of a diver used to make underwater repairs. Henry himself may have sailed on it, as Friel found records of a royal cabin being added. The ship, built to terrorise and conquer the French, was painted with a French motto, Une sanz plus. “‘One and no more’ – in other words, the king alone is master,” said Friel. “Henry was making it perfectly clear – there’s God and there’s Henry, and that’s your lot. “It may have been the humbler ships that actually did most of the work, but these great ships were floating symbols of power and prestige, richly ornamented with elaborate carvings, flying huge flags, towering over the much smaller merchant ships. They would have been, and were intended to be, an absolutely awe-inspiring sight.” The ship was laid up in a specially built dock in the Hamble in the years after Henry’s death in 1422, and in its last years afloat was crewed by one man who had the unenviable responsibility of pumping and bailing day after day to keep the water out. Stripped of its mast, contents, and timbers from the superstructure including the cabins, it probably finally sank when the dock collapsed due to lack of maintenance, and has lain there ever since. Friel first spotted the site more than 30 years ago in a grainy aerial photograph that showed the wreck of a modern cabin cruiser, the known wreck of another of Henry’s ships and a peculiar shape in the mud, which the more he peered at it, the more it looked like the outline of half the hull of another ship. He and several archaeologists went out in a rubber dinghy and probed the mud with poles, enough to convince them there was something down there, but there was never funding for a full investigation. He stressed that publicising it now is not a publicity stunt for his book, but to ensure that the site gains protection. If he is right the Holigost lies close to the wreck of the most spectacular of Henry’s ships, the enormous Grace Dieu, the largest ship built in England up to that date, which proved a floating white elephant. Although that wreck was spotted in the 19th century, it was so enormous, with a keel 40 metres long – twice the size of Henry VIII’s Mary Rose built a century later, that it was thought modern, and only identified in the 1930s. It took so long to build, using more than 3,700 trees, that the sea war was over by the time it was finished. It apparently only sailed once, when the crew mutinied – possibly, says Friel, because it was so hard to sail – and forced it into the Isle of Wight. It was laid up within a few years without ever firing an arrow in anger – and was then hit by lightning, and burned to the waterline. Friel said: “The Holigost was never as spectacular as the Grace Dieu, but in some ways it is more important – an identifiable medieval ship, that fought in known engagements, would be an incredibly rare thing to find anywhere in the world.” |