From the masthead of the commander-in-chief’s ship by day flew a banner, and by night a lantern hung in order to direct the sailing of the fleet. The officers of the Cinque Ports were ordered to cut adrift the banner of a hostile commander in an engagement, so that the whole of the enemy’s fleet might be thrown into confusion. Before the close of Henry II.’s reign another crusade was undertaken, but the ships of the Southern sea seem to have reached to larger dimensions by now. There is a record of a ship built in Venice for France in the year 1268. She was 110 feet long, 40 feet broad, and 11½ feet deep in the hold. She had also 6½ feet of head-room on her main deck. Her crew totalled 110 officers and men, and she was of about four or five hundred tons burthen.[49] The English ships had another opportunity of testing their sea-going qualities in the Mediterranean, for during a storm in the year 1270 the English squadron was the only part of the allied fleet that escaped without loss. During Henry II.’s reign the magnet seems to have been first commonly used in navigation. From an old MS. in Corpus Christi College Cambridge we see the derivation of that anchor which is also freely used by balloons nowadays and which seamen find extremely useful when dragging for a lost anchor or cable—the grapnel with its several flukes projecting from a common centre. The MS. mentioned illustrates a sea-fight, and sailors are seen keeping the enemy’s galley close alongside by means of one of these anchors or grappling irons. The other anchors, as will have already been noticed by the reader in the illustration of the warship by Giotto’s pupil in Fig. 35, were stockless. Edward I.’s charter, granted to the Cinque Ports, ordained that each time the king passed over the sea the Cinque Ports should “rigge up fiftie and seven ships” every one of which was to be manned with twenty armed soldiers. These were to be maintained at the ports’ own cost for fifteen days together. In this charter we come across the expression, so familiar to us now, “before the mast.” Thus it adds: “And that they be free of all their owne wines for which they do travaile of our right prise, that is to say, of one tunne before the mast, and of another behind the maste.” [Illustration: FIG. 40. SEAL OF DAM (WEST FLANDERS) (A.D. 1309).]