OF ALL COUNTRIES. 37 



These records are of the greater interest, be:ause in the 

 very next year the Fire of London swept away all the 

 books and accounts of the Fishmongers' Company. 



Herrings are another fertile source of wealth and dispute, 

 and they have left their traces through many hundreds of 

 years. The earliest written record which appears in relation 

 to them is a charter, dated 28th September, 1295, granting 

 to the Hollanders, Zealanders, and Frieslanders free liberty 

 of fishing on the coast about Yarmouth. Again, we find 

 them figuring as a staple in the commissariat of the British 

 Army, and the battle of the Herrings, fought in 1429, when 

 the Due de Bourbon was defeated in an attempt to surprise 

 a convoy carrying herrings to the English camp at Orleans, 

 is by no means the least celebrated in our military annals. 

 A fame of a more lasting and peaceful character was 

 conferred upon them in the intervening century by a certain 

 Englishman named Will Belkinson, or Belkelzoon, as the 

 Hollanders are pleased to call him, who invented the mode for 

 pickling and curing the herrings, and who, probably finding 

 England as ferocious towards any of her sons possessed of 

 original genius in the fourteenth century as she is at the 

 present day, set an example still pursued by all wise English 

 inventors, and carried his discovery to a foreign land. To 

 this English stranger the Dutch are indebted for the 

 material foundation of their political celebrity and maritime 

 ascendency in after years, and the nation proved grateful to 

 their remunerative guest. His memory was honoured by a 

 public monument at Bieroleit in Flanders, where he died, 

 and no less a personage than the Emperor Charles V. 

 considered the tomb of that great benefactor of his adopted 

 country not unworthy of a visit. 



With the lapse of time the value of the herring fishery 

 continued to increase, and in the days of Elizabeth it was 



