Monument record TR 36 SE 919 - Battle Of Sandwich 1460

Documentary Evidence for the battle:

'In the first weeks of 1460 Sandwich was connected with one of the few humorous incidents of the Civil War. The Earls of March, Warwick, and Salisbury were attainted refugees at Calais, where Warwick was supreme and certain of sympathy, if not help, from Kent. Some of his ships were at Sandwich and the government sent Lord Rivers and his son with 400 men to secure the town and take the ships. Warwick, well-informed, struck rapidly, sending over a force which surprised, or was admitted into, the town at night, took Rivers and his son in their beds, and brought them over to Calais.' (1)

'The Yorkists made the most of their naval strength . . . They retreated instead to safe havens: to the commands in Ireland and Calais to which Henry had appointed them, across the seas that Henry had confided to Warwick's keeping.

'Warwick . . . boxed in the Duke of Somerset's expedition to Calais, captured a consignment of pay for his troops, pre-empted Lord Rivers at Sandwich in a destructive raid . . .' (2)

Warwick's fleet and garrison at Calais were supported financially by the wool staplers and by his 'piratical forays' in the Channel, while he also had great support in numerical terms. These two factors permitted him great mobility anywhere on the southern and eastern coasts of England with a superior landing force. (2)

Members of the Yorkist cause escaped to Calais following their defeat at Ludlow in 1459. The sheriff of Kent, Lord Rivers, assembled a fleet at Sandwich in order to attack Calais. Warwick was kept informed and launched a daring raid in which one January morning, between 4 and 5am, a landing party took possession of Sandwich, and sprung Lord Rivers, his wife, and son out of their beds and carried them away to Calais. The ships of the fleet, together with their men and stores, were also carried off. (3)

Additional sources cited in source (3):
Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1461-7, 465

Location of the Battle:

The English fleet is said to have been at Sandwich. It is unlikely to have been at the town of Sandwich itself, which lies inland on a bend of the River Stour, which would have precluded both a swift raid such as this and the ease with which the English fleet was captured and taken away.

The following conjecture below on the location and strategy of the battle, or more properly, raid, is largely informed by the full description of the siltation process in (3).

Instead the fleet was probably at Sandwich haven, which did not coincide with the town itself. In the early Middle Ages the entrance to the River Stour was much wider than it is today with the haven separated from Sandwich itself by a spit of land. The area has since antiquity been subject to siltation through longshore drift, which by the 16th century was already beginning to affect shipping to the extent that buoys were required to mark the safe channel. The northern extremity of the spit at Sandwich, today known as Shell Ness, was formerly much further south and known as Pepperness. It lay to the east of Sandwich haven and the process of siltation has continued both north and east since then, as evident in the Sandwich Flats to the east. At the same time there was overland access to the town from the east.

At this period the typical trading vessel was capable of being beached in locations where there were no actual harbour or quayside facilities.

The haven would therefore fulfil the conditions of surprise, an anchorage or beaching point for a substantial fleet, an easy access route overland and an easy means of escape seawards. It is likely that the raid took place at this early hour of the morning not only to take advantage of the element of surprise, but also to take advantage of a rising tide enabling any ships beached in the haven to be refloated and carried away quickly.

Since then the area has silted up substantially and a comparison of reconstruction maps, old maps and modern maps in (3) suggests that Sandwich haven lay more or less due east of the medieval town. The raid's location is therefore today in an area which has since silted up and is therefore located through an arbitrary set of National Grid co-ordinates which approximately record the potential centre point of the action; these co-ordinates are for representational purposes only and do not necessarily reflect an actual location. Similarly, the Land Use has been recorded as both inter-tidal, to reflect its use at the time of the raid, and above high water, to reflect its current state.

<1> Page, W. (ed), 1926, The Victoria History of the Counties of England: Kent Volume II, 278-9 (Monograph). SKE7944.

<2> Michael Hicks, 2010, The Ward of the Roses, 148-150 (Bibliographic reference). SKE58671.

<3> 2010, Sandwich: 'the completest medieval town in England': A study of the town and port from its origins to 1600, 147 (Monograph). SKE55375.