Mediæval manuscripts both English and foreign have happily preserved to us not merely actual facts, but exquisitely coloured illustrations of ships. We see the vessels in every conceivable way—in course of construction, ashore, afloat, with sails spread, with sails stowed. We see them on rivers and seas, embarking and disembarking. We see them in peace and in war, bound for the Crusades, or ramming each other, grappling, hurling darts and arrows from their elevated fore-castles and stern-castles, or casting destruction down on to one another’s decks from the fighting top above. We have, too, some slight evidence in contemporary stained glass, which by reason of the demands of an exceptionally conventionalised art must be regarded with caution and only to confirm other evidence. We have the clear and valuable evidence of certain mosaics in St. Mark’s Venice, which help us more than a little with regard to the fourteenth century, and, few though they be as we remarked in Chapter I., there are some artists whose pictures of ships in mediæval times can be relied upon, after making certain allowances already indicated. In this class we may include especially Carpaccio, Giorgione and Memling. The more artistic the mode of expressing these ships becomes, however, so much the more prone to inaccuracy does the evidence incline, and to this category belong the tapestries, models in precious metals, paintings on china and earthenware and tiles. In most cases the distortion of truth has been in respect of length, breadth, and height. When we remember how thoroughly the Vikings harassed the shores of France and England sailing up the Seine and the rivers and creeks of our own land, committing piracy on the sea and pillage ashore, and finally settling down and conquering the territory, it is not to be wondered that their sway in naval architecture and construction should have been universal in northern Europe. We have in the previous chapter already dealt with the primitive craft of early Britain, and it is generally supposed that the ships which were sent from this country to assist the Veneti against Cæsar had by this time become wooden and not skin-ships. With the Roman invasion of Britain would come the introduction of Roman craft, and there can be little doubt that the Deal “galley” of to-day, which is the characteristic ship of that part of England which was so frequently the landing-place for visitors from Gaul, is a relic, much modified, from the Roman times. After the withdrawal of the Roman influence from these shores, the Saxons and Angles coming in their double-ended Viking craft quickly banished almost all the customs that the Britons had learned under the Romans. And having effected this complete transformation the Saxons settled down and practically forsook the sea and shipbuilding.