The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed significant change to the appearance, armament, mobility and size of state shipping. Naval vessels transformed from the medieval large craft that could aid and transport armies, to the modern ships that were heavily armed and easily manoeuvrable. Warships advanced from ships of war in 1500 to weapons of war by 1650. Although the reforms to naval administration and fiscal policy discussed in the previous chapters were crucial to deliver improvements to the size and shape of fleets, transnational interactions and knowledge also facilitated the architectural enhancements to warships. Yet, the thriving international theatre of shipbuilding expertise was not the only influence for the design of these vessels. Their development was also shaped by the character, ambitions and influence of individual monarchs, as heads of state. Personal aspirations, maritime expertise and interstate competition all contributed to the structure of fleet composition, as well as to the visual appearance of warships.

Naval ships were a product of their surroundings, which included their rulers, and for this reason Louis Sicking and Hervé Coutau-Bégarie have suggested that a cultural and ecological divide existed between the northern and southern European maritime theatres. Warship architecture, maritime expertise and tactics deployed in warfare varied by location and this affected the potency of sea power, knowledge and the cultural traits used to connect navies with their nations. For these reasons, this chapter explores and assesses whether the architectural improvements to the English and French navies from 1500 to 1650 should be perceived as products of national or transnational influence.

To ensure that the integrity of data is maintained, it is important before discussing architectural advances to address the instances when different methods were used to measure an early modern vessel's size. This varied not only according to the years of focus, but also by geography, meaning that England and France did not always use the same procedures for determining a ship's dimensions. As techniques and formulae used for this differed by both time and location, direct comparisons between crafts that were not sourced in the same location can be difficult to draw judgement on concisely.

On Tuesday, March 21, 1933, the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris performed an unusual program. Like most Parisian orchestras in the 1930s, the OSP regularly offered audience-pleasing gems from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but this concert exclusively featured music composed within the previous thirty-five years by French composers. The contemporaneity and overwhelming Frenchness of the program meant that the audience heard evidence of several major trends in early twentieth-century French music. They took in the modally inflected harmonies and Symbolist inspiration of Maurice Ravel's and Gabriel Fauré's works from the late 1890s. And they encountered the polytonality and neoclassicism of more recent compositions by Darius Milhaud, Germaine Tailleferre, and Igor Markevitch. In its first Parisian performance, Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos shifted from evocations of Balinese gamelan to Parisian fairground tunes to quotations from Mozart, representing tendencies in interwar French music toward exoticism, art of the everyday, and retrospectivism. A regular concertgoer would have been hard pressed to find another public concert so emphatically supportive of recent French music.

The concert's stated theme – “works dedicated to Mme. la Princesse Edmond de Polignac” – made it remarkable in another way. Rarely was a patron so publicly and positively acknowledged by concert organizers. As seen in the previous chapter, critics were more likely to evoke the figure of the patron when they hoped to score rhetorical points against a given piece. And outside of a salon, several works associated with the same patron were almost never performed alongside one another. But de Polignac was not only the dedicatee of the OSP's featured composers. She had also commissioned four of the pieces on the program (those by Tailleferre, Milhaud, Markevitch, and Poulenc), as well as seventeen others between 1916 and 1939. While de Polignac's impact was extraordinary, and while the OSP concert was exceptional in its acknowledgement of de Polignac's largesse, both the patron and the concert nevertheless represent a broader phenomenon: through their commissions, aristocratic patrons collectively exerted enormous influence on the development of interwar French music.

Twenty years before the OSP concert, French patrons did not commission multiple pieces. Even one-off commissions were rare.

The aristocratic commissions of the 1920s and 1930s intersected with another phenomenon that exerted a profound influence on French music: the rise of entrepreneurial patronage of modern dance, and with it, an explosion of new music. With the seemingly oxymoronic phrase “entrepreneurial patronage,” I intend to capture the dynamic blend of motives that fueled the creation and management of a number of Paris-based concert dance companies between 1920 and the mid-1930s. Like aristocratic patrons who commissioned for salon performances and costume balls, entrepreneurial patrons were collectors who used their financial resources and social capital to elicit new music from their favorite composers. And like aristocratic patrons, entrepreneurial patrons felt a deep desire not only to fund but to participate in artistic creation. Unlike aristocratic patrons, who subscribed to cultural mores that restricted their participation in for-profit endeavors, however, entrepreneurial patrons plunged themselves into the decidedly unrefined world of “the market.” They entered into productive albeit largely zero-sum competition with managers, impresarios, and other entrepreneurial patrons.

Sergei Diaghilev provided the model that French entrepreneurial patrons would follow in the years to come. Drawing on the resources of his investors, he advanced an art-for-art’s-sake agenda through a public-facing, profit-seeking ballet company starting in the years before the First World War. As Lynn Garafola argues, Diaghilev's “extraordinary genius” lay “in his teaming of art and enterprise and his intuitive understanding of how the marketplace might be exploited to serve the traditional ends of high art.” After the war, Diaghilev's success inspired rivals to enter the fray. They sought to emulate his methods, sometimes drawing on substantial personal fortunes to do so. Competition between dance companies meant competition over creative resources. Composers, painters, and choreographers became hotly contested commodities. Entrepreneurial patrons rushed to secure commitments from fashionable figures whose participation would bring prestige and modernist cachet to their troupe. The result was dozens of new works, most of which required new ballet scores that not only enriched the sounds of the dance world but quickly entered concert repertories, furthering many of the musical styles for which interwar French music is best known today.

Despite their substantial support for new music, including over thirty commissions for ballet scores, the individuals who pursued entrepreneurial patronage during the interwar years remain enigmatic.

Source Information for Chart 4

Below is a non-exhaustive list of the documents consulted in the production of this chart. It provides an advisory guide of relevant sources that, when combined, account for the growth and decline of the English and French fleets. For some years, namely the earliest years of this study, and during the late sixteenth century in France, the data presented is produced by estimates and is supported by statistical trends and manuscripts that account for a small part of the navy's whole.

Most oared vessels had only one deck and, therefore, did not have their tonnage recorded because of reduced capacity to store tuns of cargo. Tunnage typically applied to sailing craft, not oared. For consistency, all vessels that were primarily propelled by oar have been separated in this chart from other sailing craft.

Small vessels such as pinnaces, flutes, shallops and brûlots have not been included in the following charts when they are not typically referred to as part of the squadrons, but instead as an auxiliary to them. Their primary purposes were to transport troops and provisions, and to accompany the larger carracks and galleons. The majority were not armed with multiple heavy cannons because they were not designed to be so. The exceptions to this rule are galliots. These vessels were small-armed galleys and they are included when they are mentioned in source. Another reason for their inclusion is that it is only fair, bearing in mind that the lesser rowbarges of England for 1545 are also integrated because they were recorded in naval inventories of the time. Where there is evidence that these vessels were armed, and so could be used for purposes other than just to transport goods, they have been included.

The strength of both fleets for the years 1640 to 1650 is covered in chapter six.

For the first quarter of the sixteenth century, neither the naval administrations of the Tudor nor Valois dynasties changed notably from their medieval predecessors. Apart from the admirals, most officials overseeing the navy's upkeep were employed on an ad hoc basis. When the navy was required for service, it was organised through relying on similar (and in some instances the same) private networks as the army. Yet, with the expansion of long-distance trade, and with both state-approved and non-sanctioned violence at sea increasing, the early modern period quickly witnessed a rising demand for naval power. In turn, with the growth of armed sea forces, reform to administrative infrastructure was required to accommodate for it. However, the political and geographical differences between England and France, covered in this chapter, led to the emergence of two distinct organisational structures for controlling and maintaining these resources. The role and authority of the respective admirals, in particular, was reformed with significantly different results. Whereas in England the overall responsibilities of the admiral for naval affairs diminished as administrative bodies were created to oversee many of the office's tasks, France on the other hand, experienced quite the opposite, as its most senior position received greater jurisdictional control over the kingdom's sea forces.

Scholarship that has addressed the role and authority of the two admiralties has come to the same opinion. The French admiral held greater administrative responsibility than his English counterpart. He controlled and exercised his rights over the admiralty courts, while also being the principal orchestrator for organising maritime resources for war. In England, on the other hand, the lord admiral's role was more superficial. Although he was expected to command naval campaigns, it was chiefly the monarch and their professional administrative specialists who transformed and then subsequently upheld administration, especially after the creation of the Council of Marine Causes. The holder of the English admiral office then, unlike in France, was, according to C. S. L. Davies, ‘remote from the day-to-day administration.’ Historians have consequently questioned the purpose of the redundant English office, with N. A. M. Rodger and Andrew Thrush suggesting that England's naval administration was ‘quite capable of functioning without’ it.