The traffic thus re-established flourished continuously under Henry VII and his son. The French wars of the latter produced interruptions, but their actual duration was not of great extent, and the merchants on either side were only too eager to resume business as soon as politics allowed. Every autumn, as soon as the vintage was complete, the wine ships set out from all English ports between London and Bristol, together with a few from Wales and Ireland, and, uniting into fleets for protection from the voracious rovers who infested the havens of the French coast, sailed across the tempestuous Bay to the mouth of the Gironde. There they were obliged to anchor and send ashore the chambers of their cannon so that no surprise attempt might be made on the richest port of France, some of whose citizens looked back with regret on the golden days of English rule, when business was brisk and taxes few. The last stage of the journey then commenced with the toilsome seventy miles’ struggle with the swift yellow stream before anchor could be dropped in front of the embattled walls of the wine city.
In a busy year, when the whole wine fleet had arrived, there were as many as seven or eight thousand Englishmen in the town at one time—merchants, factors, clerks, and seamen—and no doubt they made the place exceedingly lively; it must have been a depressing winter for the Bordelais when war prevented their coming. After two or three months spent in completing cargoes by the leisurely business methods of the time, the homeward voyage was begun in January or February.[[186]] The sailor of early Tudor times probably differed little from the type described by Chaucer a century before:
A schipman was ther, woning fer by weste:
For ought I woot, he was of Dertemouthe.
He rood upon a rouncy as he couthe,
In a gowne of faldyng to the kne.
A dagger hanging on a laas hadde he
Aboute his nekke under his arm adoun.
The hoote somer had maad his hew al broun;
And certainly he was a good felawe.