John Crabbe (died 1352)

John Crabbe (before 1305 – 1352) was a Flemish merchant, pirate and soldier. He defended Berwick Castle for the Scots against English forces in 1318, but after being captured by the English in 1332 assisted the English when they again besieged at Berwick in 1333, and became a loyal servant of Edward III, for whom he also fought at the Battle of Sluys.

John Crabbe was from the small town of Muide in Flanders (now Sint Anna ter Muiden in the Dutch province of Zeeland), situated on the coast near the mouth of the river Zwin, which in the fourteenth century connected Bruges, Damme and Sluis with the North Sea. He may have been an elder brother of Peter Crabbe and Baldwin Crabbe, and it is known that he had a nephew called Crabbekin.

Although Crabbe probably began his career earlier, the first notice of him as a pirate is in 1305, when he attacked the Waardeboure of Dordrecht at La Rochelle in the Bay of Biscay, seizing the cargo, which included 160 tuns of wine, burning the ship, and kidnapping the sailors. According to Gurstelle, Crabbe largely owed the success of his attack on the Waardeboure to his development of a catapult which could be fired from the deck of his ship. Since Dordrecht was under the jurisdiction of John II, Count of Holland, and the Counts of Holland and Zeeland were a 'traditional enemy of Flanders', Lucas suggests that Crabbe considered the Waardeboure 'legitimate prey'. The ship's owner, one John de le Waerde (Johannis de Wardre), a Dordrecht merchant, sought damages of 2000 livres tournois. He enlisted the help of Philip IV of France in negotiations with Robert III, Count of Flanders, but after four years Crabbe and his men had not been brought to justice. When summoned to trial they had failed to appear; thus, although they were found guilty, de le Waerde was not indemnified.

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