Читать книгу The Sovereignty of the Sea - Thomas Wemyss Fulton - Страница 10

Fig. 1.—Edward’s Noble.

It appears to have been in connection with the former victory that Edward coined his famous gold noble, in which the obverse bears the effigy of the king, crowned, standing in a ship with a sword in one hand and a shield in the other, while the reverse bears the legend from St Luke, Jesus autem transiens per medium eorum ibat, “but Jesus, passing through the midst of them, went his way,” which Nicolas thinks was meant to indicate the action of the king in passing through the French fleet at the battle of Sluys. The impress on the obverse has been usually regarded as symbolic of Edward’s power and sovereignty on the sea. The unknown author of The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, written some ninety years later, makes frequent reference to Edward’s noble,—

“Ffor iiii thynges our noble sheueth to me,

Kyng, shype, and swerde, and pouer of the see,”49—

and it is always mentioned by the English writers on the sovereignty of the sea as evidence that Edward exercised that sovereignty. A recent author50 doubts whether there was any connection between Edward’s noble and the battle of Sluys or the claim to the sovereignty of the sea; but at all events in the next century, in the reign of Henry VI., when the naval power of England had again sunk to a low point, the noble was made an object of jest and derision among foreigners, especially the Flemish and French. They told the English to take away the ship from their noble and put a sheep on it instead—an allusion, no doubt, to the growth of sheep-farming in England.51

If Edward intended to symbolise his naval power and sea sovereignty by the device on the gold noble in the early part of his reign, it was certainly inappropriate towards the end of it. The navy had been starved for the sake of the army, and when the Spaniards defeated the English fleet and were masters of the sea, complaints became rife as to the insecurity of the country. The king had then to listen to language from his Parliament to which he was unaccustomed, and which must have galled him. There are many instances in our history where the Commons have shown their spirit and temper when they thought the navy was inadequate for its duties, and on the occasion in question, in 1372, after granting a naval subsidy, they called the king’s attention to the fact that while twenty years previously, and always before, the navy was so noble and so numerous in all the ports, coast towns, and rivers that the whole country deemed and called him King of the Sea,52 and he and all his country were the more dreaded by sea and by land by reason of the said navy, it was then so decreased and weakened from various causes that there was scarcely sufficient to defend the country, if need were, against royal power, by which there was great peril to all the realm.53 From this complaint of the Parliament it would appear that the title of king or Lord of the Sea was applied in a popular sense, to signify the great sea-warrior who had overcome his enemies and made himself master of the sea.

There was another symbol or supposed symbol of the sovereignty of the sea, which later became exceedingly prominent—viz., the striking of the flag or the lowering of the top-sails to a king’s ship, about which there is little to be found in the records of those times. It is nevertheless with this that the earliest of the records relating to the subject is concerned, and it is a very interesting one. The famous ordinance of King John which compelled the lowering of the sails has given rise to much controversy. It was first brought prominently to notice by Selden in 1635,54 but it is also contained in the little work of Boroughs on the Sovereignty of the British Seas, which was written in 1633, although not published till 1651, and that author transcribed it from a manuscript in the possession of Sir Henry Marten, the Judge of the Court of Admiralty. Selden gave as his authority for it, “MS. Commentarius de Rebus Admiralitatis,” without further specification, and its authenticity was questioned by contemporary critics. Prynne, who, like Boroughs, was Keeper of the Records, printed it in 1669 from the Black Book of the Admiralty,55 and from the fact that the Black Book was lost until quite lately, and the existence of Selden’s manuscript in the Bodleian Library was overlooked, and that used by Boroughs unknown, some recent authors have regarded the ordinance with suspicion.56 The most elaborate account of the various manuscripts containing the ordinance of John is given by Sir Travers Twiss in the Introduction to the Black Book of the Admiralty; and through his efforts the original Black Book, lost for more than half a century, was found at the bottom of a chest in 1873.57 Twiss gives the following free translation of the ordinance, made by the Registrar of the Admiralty Court in the reign of James II.:—

Item, it was ordained at Hastynges for lawe and custome of the sea in the tyme of Kyng John, in the second yeare of his raigne, by the advice of his temporall lordes, that if the lieutenant of the king or the admirall of the king or his lieutenant in any voyage appointed by Common Counsell of the Kyngdom did at sea meet with any shyps or vessells laden or empty which would not stryke and lower their sailes at the command of the kyng’s lieutenant, or the kyng’s admirall, or his lieutenant, but makeing resistaunce against those of the ffleet, that if they can be taken that they be reputed as enemies, and their shyps, vessells, and goodes, taken and forfeited as goodes of enemies, albeit that the maysters or possessors thereof should afterwards come and alleadge the same ships, vessells, and goodes to be the goodes of friends of our lorde the kyng, and that the company therein be chastized by imprisonment of their bodies for their rebellion at discretion.58

This ordinance is the last of a series of articles in the third part of the Black Book, which contains Admiralty regulations, the Laws of Oleron, and other three ordinances of King John, as well as ordinances which purport to have been made in the reigns of Henry I., Richard I., and Edward I. The facts ascertained by Sir Travers Twiss show that of the six or seven extant manuscripts which contain the ordinance, the oldest was written before 1422 and probably about 1420,59 and appears to have been drawn up for the use of Sir Thomas Beaufort, the Lord High Admiral. The manuscript used by Selden was probably written between 1430 and 1440; that of the Black Book itself a little later, but still in the reign of Henry VI.60 The others are not older than the seventeenth century. None of the manuscripts is therefore contemporaneous with the reign of John, but it is clear that the ordinance existed and was ascribed to John in the reign of Henry V., before 1422. Moreover, from intrinsic evidence it is proved that part of the Black Book originated in 1375, in the reign of Edward III., and that the compilation of other parts of it is still earlier. Pardessus,61 the great authority on ancient marine laws, is of opinion that the part of the Black Book which includes the ordinance of John contains the results of the consultations with the judges in 1338 on the subject of the maritime laws, which were recorded in the roll, still preserved, of 12 Edward III., De Superioritate Maris—which also, as we shall see, claimed supremacy for the king in the sea of England. Twiss, however, thinks it was more probably compiled between 1360 and 1369. He is of opinion that the ordinance is authentic, and was in reality, as it purports, made by John at Hastings on 30th March 1201, and that it was transcribed into the compilation of the Black Book with the earlier ordinances of Henry I. and Richard I.

The arguments against the authenticity of the ordinance are mainly that it is written in the French language instead of in Latin, as was customary at the time; that there is no other evidence that John was ever at Hastings; and that the terms “king’s admiral” or “king’s lieutenant” are not to be found in contemporary documents. Twiss has shown that John and his Queen were at Canterbury on Easter Day 1201, and it is not an improbable conjecture that the king passed from Canterbury to Hastings, and thence to London—a supposition that Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, the author of the Itinerary of King John, regards as quite possible. Twiss also explains in an elaborate argument that the circumstance of the ordinance being written in French offers no difficulty, if the compilation of the third part of the Black Book is assigned, as above stated, to the reign of Edward III.; but there might be some difficulty in deciding whether the ordinances attributed to Henry I., Richard I., Edward I., and John were originally written in French as they now appear in the Black Book, or were at first drawn up in Latin and translated into French by the compilers.62

The best authority is therefore in favour of the authenticity of the ordinance; but whether it be held as genuine or apocryphal there is no doubt that in the reign of Henry V. it was incorporated among the official regulations of the Admiralty, and it is almost as certain, as Twiss and Pardessus believe, that it was contained in the Admiralty regulations in the reign of Edward III. The question whether it should be antedated one hundred and fifty years, or thereabout, and placed in the reign of John, or ascribed to the time of Edward III., when so much consideration was given to naval affairs, is perhaps of minor importance.

The language of the ordinance is worthy of close attention with regard to the claim to sovereignty in the narrow sea. Selden says that the ordinance shows it was held to be treason for any ship whatever not to acknowledge the dominion of the king of England in his own seas by lowering sails, and that the king prescribed penalties for infraction of the rule, just as if a crime were committed in some part of his territory on land.63 In 1201 John still possessed both shores of the Channel, a circumstance which, according to the ideas of the time, conferred on him special rights in regard to it; and though the ordinance contains no qualification of the general term “at sea,” it is probable that it applied in particular, and at first perhaps exclusively, to the waters between the two shores. There is nothing to show whether the ordinance applied to or was enforced against the war vessels of other princes navigating the narrow sea, which was the principal feature of the rule in later times. From the terms used it is probable that it applied only to merchant vessels,—a supposition that agrees with its place in the Black Book at the end of the articles entitled the Laws of Oleron, or the laws of the mercantile marine; and it was to be enforced only in voyages appointed by the Council. As already mentioned, it is reasonable to suppose that the lowering of the sail at the demand of a king’s ship was to enable a suspected vessel to be overhauled, and the king’s officers to be satisfied whether it was engaged in piracy or in lawful trade.

Until the sixteenth century there is scarcely any evidence to show that the “right of the flag,” as it came to be called, was enforced even in the Channel. The record of one such incident, however, exists, which occurred in 1402, in the reign of Henry IV.,—and thus, it is interesting to note, before the oldest extant manuscript containing John’s ordinance was written,—and, curiously, the place where the lowering of the sails was demanded was not the Channel but the North Sea. In the year mentioned, the town of Bruges complained to the king and Council that a poor fisherman of Ostend, named John Willes, along with another from Briel, while fishing for herrings in the North Sea, had been captured by an English vessel and taken into Hull, notwithstanding that they were unarmed—a remark which is significant—and had lowered their sails at the moment the English had called to them.64 It is singular that the earliest record of the “ceremony” refers to the humble herring-boats of Flanders. Later on we shall see that the lowering of top-sails and the striking of the flag became a burning question in international politics.

Of greater interest and importance than this question of the lowering of the sail or the ordinance of John is the claim put forward by the Plantagenet kings to sovereign lordship and jurisdiction in the “sea of England,” for the maintenance of peaceful navigation and commerce,—a claim which may still be read in some of the rolls of Edward I. and Edward III. The great importance of these documents for the English pretension to dominion of the sea in the seventeenth century was shown by the fact that Boroughs, Selden, Coke, and Prynne all quote freely from them, Selden especially turning to them again and again for fresh quotation and argument. They are the more interesting since the claim to the sovereignty of the narrow sea in the reign of Edward I. could not, as Boroughs points out, be based on possession of both shores; the king was not then Dominus utriusque ripæ, as when Normandy belonged to the English crown. The rolls in question are still preserved in the Record Office, and the earlier parchments appear to have been collected together in the reign of Edward III., in connection with the consultations that the judges held in 1338 on the subject of the maritime laws.65

The documents were first brought into prominence by Lord Coke66 and Selden,67 both of whom published parts of them. The handwriting belongs to the beginning of the fourteenth century, and its contents show that it must have been drawn up after 1304 and before 1307, in which year Edward I. died.

The events that preceded may be summarised as follows. During the war between Edward I. and Philip the Fair of France it was concluded between them in the year 1297 that notwithstanding the war there should be freedom of commerce on both sides, or a truce for merchants, known as sufferance of war, and in the following year certain persons were appointed by both kings to take cognisance of things done contrary to this truce, and to pass their judgments according to the law of merchants and the tenor of the sufferance referred to.68 On 20th May 1303 a treaty of peace and alliance was signed at Paris,69 the first article of which embodied a declaration of amity and mutual defence of all their respective rights, and the third that each would abstain from assisting or succouring the enemies of the other. A little later in the same year four agents or commissioners were appointed by Edward and four by Philip to hear complaints and decide upon them, and the English members were instructed to inquire into the “encroachments, injuries, and offences committed on either side during the truce or sufferance between us and the said King of France, on the coasts of the sea of England and other neighbouring coasts, and also towards Normandy and other coasts of the sea more remote.”70 To these commissioners the following joint complaint or libel bears to have been submitted on behalf of England and certain mariners of other nations, charging one Reyner Grimbald or Grimaldi, a Genoese who is known to have been at the time in command of ships in the service of France operating against the Flemings, with seizing their merchants and merchandise contrary to the treaty at Paris:71—