 thumb|right|300px|a contemporary diagram illustrating a first- and a third-rate ship. the rating system of the royal navy and its predecessors was used by the british royal navy between the beginning of the 17th century and the middle of the 19th century to categorise sailing warships, initially classing them according to their assigned complement of men, and later according to the number of their carriage-mounted guns. ==origins and description== the first movement towards a rating system may be seen in the 15th century and the first half of the 16th century, when the largest carracks in the navy (such as the mary rose, the peter pomegranate and the henri grÃ¢ce Ã  dieu) were denoted "great ships". this was only on the basis of their roughly-estimated size and not on their weight, crew or number of guns. when these carracks were superseded by the new-style galleons later in the 16th century, the term "great ship" was used to formally delineate the navy's largest ships from all the rest.winfield, rif, british warships in the age of sail: 1603â1714, barnsley (2009) isbn 978-1-84832-040-6 ===the stuart era=== the formal system of dividing up the navy's combatant warships into a number or groups or "rates", however, only originated in the very early part of the stuart era, with the first lists of such categorisation appearing around 1604. at this time the combatant ships of the "navy royal"the term royal navy was only introduced after the restoration of king charles ii in 1660. were divided up according to the number of men required to man them at sea (i.e. the size of the crew) into four groups: * royal ships (the largest ships in the previous "great ships" grouping) mounting 42â55 guns * great ships (the rest of the ships in the previous "great ships" grouping) mounting 38â40 guns * middling ships mounting 30â32 guns * small ships mounting less than 30 guns by the early years of king charles i's reign, these four groups had been renamed to a numerical sequence. the royal ships were now graded as first rank, the great ships as second rank, the middling ships as third rank, and the small ships as fourth rank. soon afterwards, the structure was again modified, with the term rank now being replaced by rate, and the former small ships now being sub-divided into fourth, fifth and sixth rates. the earliest rating was based not on the number of guns, but on the established complement (number of men). this first classification took place in 1626, and was substantially altered in late 1653 as the complements of individual ships were raised. from about 1660 the classification moved fr
Rating_system_of_the_Royal_Navy