HAKE. 101 



it appears from the Report of the British Association of Science 

 in 1847, that in the ninth and tenth centuries the Danes had 

 fisheries on the coast of that island, from whence they were 

 accustomed to send large exports to the south of Europe. In 

 the reign of the English Queen Mary, Philip the Second of 

 Spain paid the sum of one thousand pounds yearly for securing 

 to the Spaniards the right of fishing on the Irish coast; and 

 tlie Dutch purchased a similar right from Charles the Second 

 at the price of thirty thousand pounds. It was also granted 

 as a favour to the kingdom of Sweden, in 1650, to employ 

 one hundred vessels in the same pursuit; but long before this, 

 in the reign of King John, the merchants of Bayonne, who 

 already rented from the English crown the right of taking 

 Whales in our seas, paid to the king six marks for the sole 

 right of the trade of drying Congers and Merluciones on the 

 English shores. Lysons supposes that these Merluciones were 

 Whitings and Haddocks; but the Merlucius, Sea Pike, or Sea 

 Luce of ancient authors, is represented without a barb at the 

 lower jaw, and with only two fins on the back; which 

 circumstance, coupled with our knowledge of the great fishery 

 carried on expressly for Hakes, is sufficient to determine the 

 species. Under the name of INIerluce, or Sea Pike, this fish 

 also occupied a station in heraldry. 



It may be here incidentally remarked also, as an illustration 

 of the violent stretches of royal prerogative, by which the in- 

 dustry of their native subjects was cramped for the benefit of 

 strangers, that a fishery for Whales on the English coasts was 

 the subject of a similar grant; by which King John assigned 

 over to the merchants of Bayonne, at the price of ten pounds 

 yearly, the exclusive right of taking these creatures in all the 

 space between St. IMichael's Mount and Dartmouth. In the 

 last-mentioned case it is probable indeed that the practical 

 hardship was not great, and the plea may have been urged 

 that the objects of pursuit were by prescription a royal 

 possession; for the reason has been assigned, that the king 

 ought to claim the head of a Whale, that his lamps might be 

 supplied with oil, whilst the bones of the tail, (if such could 

 be found!) were claimed by the lawyers as necessary to the 

 symmetry of the queen's dress: a precursor, it seems, of the 

 crinoline of our own day. 



