Thomas Heebøll-Holm

Law, order and plunder at sea: a comparison of England and France in the fourteenth century

This article addresses the management of maritime plunder and conflict in the waters of England and France in the fourteenth century. It argues that during this century a fundamental change occurred. Around 1300, maritime conflict was handled by recourse to the strictly civil law merchant and law maritime, or by Marcher law. However by the 1350s and 1360s the kings of England and France, moved by contemporary political events and theories of sovereignty at sea, created courts of Admiralty that challenged the previous systems’ jurisdiction. These initiatives eventually paved the way for the criminalisation of private maritime conflict.

Between Pagan Pirates and Glorious Sea-Warriors: The Portrayal of the Viking Pirate in Danish Twelfth-Century Latin Historiography

The Latin words for piracy and pirates have traditionally been viewed as exclusively negative, denoting an especially criminal person and a significant threat to the commonality of humans as expressed by Cicero in the first century BCE. In the Early Middle Ages, the terms retained their negative meaning as described by Cicero, and they were used to describe Viking pagan raiders. However, the threat was now to Christendom rather than to Roman civilization. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the negative use of the term was applied to Slavic maritime plunderers in the same vein as it was used to describe the Vikings. However, in the same period, Danish historians, especially Saxo Grammaticus, also used the term in a terminus technicus sense to characterize their Danish heroes, irrespective of whether they were pagan or Christian. Thus the meaning of the pirate terminology in the twelfth century changed from denoting a criminal enemy of Christendom to describe a specific type of seaborne warfare and a wa...

Ports, Piracy and Maritime War

In Ports, Piracy, and Maritime War Thomas K. Heeboll-Holm presents a study of maritime predation in English and French waters around the year 1300. Heeboll-Holm shows that piracy was often part of private wars between English, French, and Gascon ports and mariners, occupying a liminal space between crime and warfare.