of May a commission was issued to engage mariners for certain ships, and on the 20th May, an order for ships, pinnaces and barges. On the 22nd July and 10th August there are proclamations relating to the piratical fleet of Spanish ships, intercepting the English traders to Gascony, and threatening an invasion of England[328]; the Spaniards were routed, their ships taken, and the Channel cleared, in a famous engagement off Winchelsea, on 29th August, 1350, which the king directed in person[329]. On 15th June, three days before the first of the ordinances against the Labourers, the king issued two orders to counties, to raise men “for our passage against the parts over sea”--one to the Welsh lords, and the other to the sheriffs of English counties, the demands being in all for 4170 bowmen from England, and for 1350 men from Wales[330]. Whatever these edicts may have resulted in, it was not until four years after that the king really resumed his wars with France. On the 8th September, 1355, the Black Prince sailed from Plymouth with a fleet of some three hundred ships carrying an army of knights, men-at-arms, English bowmen and Welshmen, to the Garonne, for his famous raid across the south of France[331]. Later in the autumn the king collected at Portsmouth[332] and Sandwich, and at Calais, a force of three thousand men-at-arms, two thousand mounted bowmen, and an immense number of bowmen on foot, with which he took the field on the 2nd November[333]. The same summer, a fleet of forty great ships was fitted out at Rotherhithe, for a force of foot under Henry, duke of Lancaster, to aid the king of Navarre; it sailed on the 10th of July, but was unable to clear the Channel, and for various reasons did not proceed[334]; next year, however, the duke of Lancaster crossed from Southampton to Normandy with a force in forty-eight ships[335]. Thus was the war with France resumed six years after the great mortality. The means for equipping these expeditions had been provided by loans raised on the security of the enormous subsidy which the Parliament of 1353-54 was induced to vote, in the form of an export duty of fifty shillings on every sack of wool shipped to foreign countries during the next six years. According to Avesbury’s calculation, Edward had a revenue, from that source, of a thousand marks a day; it was the common opinion, he says, that more than 100,000 sacks of wool were exported in a year[336]. But another and perhaps better authority gives the annual export of wool in the middle of the fourteenth century at nearly 32,000 sacks[337]. Direct effects of the Black Death.