Superbly researched and densely detailed history of military use of naval vessels from the days of Alfred the Great up to the execution of Charles I. As Rodger points out, it is not really a history of the British Navy as we understand that term. Until the last half century covered by this book, there is no such thing. The "navy" consisted of privateers, commandeered merchant vessels, etc.
The first half the text(which totals only 434 pages, the other two hundred pages consisting of appendices with lists of when ships were built, commanders, naval terms, and notes), covering up to the Tudor era is fairly dry and academic. There is little else that can be done with this part of the history: we simply don't have the details for Rodgers to be able tell tales of sea battles, commanders, and incidents at sea. But once Rodgers gets to the Henry VII and primary source materials include these details, while never losing sight of the goal of a serious academic history, he starts telling a tale worthy of any adventure story. The stories of Drake, Hawkins, and the characters on the Navy Board were great reading and set up the other parts of the book on other aspects of war at sea.
Rodger rights his book as a series of chapters on these different aspects over specific periods of time. Thus he gives us chapters on the different types of Ships 1066 - 1455, Operations 1266-1336, Administration 1216 - 1420, and Social History 1204-1455, the latter discussing where both the commanders and the sailors came from. All of these subjects are essential to understanding how what would become the Royal Navy came to be.
My only real criticism is that while the book contains a fair number of black and white plates mostly showing images of vessels as they were represented in their own times there is not much to show what the ships really looked like in any kind of proportional representation. I've build model ships, been to several naval museums with lots of models etc. so have a good notion of what ships of the 18th century and later were like but could not get any real sense of what the ships, galleys etc. of medieval England that Rodgers talks about were really like or even how big they were. There is one half page set of silhouettes comparing four ships from the 15th - 17th Centuries with the Victory which one can see in Portsmouth. But this a small portion of the subject matter of the book and the comparison is limited to the largest of the ships from this era: Henry Grace a Dieu (1514), Sovereign of the Seas (1637), Wasa (1628), Grace Dieu (1418). There is nothing depicting the smaller vessels to any kind of scale and for most of the period of this book, these smaller vessels were what English Naval History was all about.
Still this is a small quibble and I enjoyed this enormously, recommending it highly to anyone interested in English history (specifically English, not British or European; the naval forces of Scotland, Ireland, and the continent are mentioned only insofar as necessary to understand what is going on the English) generally or naval history of any kind particularly in the age of sail.
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