EARLY HISTORY 43 



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. 1 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 

 Do minus utriusque ripce, as when Normandy belonged to the 

 English crown. The rolls in question are still preserved in the 



1 " Quanquain tarnen, ad primam vocem ipsorum Anglicorum, idem Johannes 

 Willes velum suum declinavit," &c., Fcedera, viii. 273 ; "omnes tamen inermes, et 

 velum suum, ad primum clamorem Anglicorum declinantes, " ibid., 277. 



