HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE TERRITORIAL SEA 539 



nations. The rights exercised by the crown of England, for 

 instance, in the so-called King's Chambers in the seventeenth 

 century were apparently not challenged by foreign Powers. But 

 while the sovereign rights of a state over a part of the adjacent 

 sea were recognised by the usage of nations and the opinions of 

 publicists, there was no agreement as to the extent which might 

 be appropriated, and various limits or boundaries have from time 

 to time been proposed or adopted, by which the sea pertaining 

 to a state might be divided off from that which was open 

 and free to all. From an early date attempts were made by 

 jurists to discover some general principle or to lay down rules 

 which might be applied in all such cases. Some of these 

 rules were of such a nature as to assign to states an extent 



o 



of sea almost as great as any comprised under the widest 

 claims to maritime sovereignty, and none of them received a 

 general assent. The early English lawyers of the twelfth and 

 thirteenth centuries, Glanville, Bracton, Britton, and "Fleta," 

 merely followed the Roman law with regard to the sea that 

 is to say, they held that it is by its nature common, like the 

 air, and they did not suggest any limit within which the prince 

 of the adjoining state had exclusive jurisdiction or dominion 

 (see p. 66). 



It is in the writings of the early Italian jurists, who lived 

 after the time when Venice by force of arms had established 

 her sovereignty over the Adriatic, that we first meet with 

 proposals to assign legal limits to the maritime jurisdiction 

 of the neighbouring state. Bartolus of Saxo-Ferrato, a great 

 Perugian jurist who died in 1357, and whose authority in 

 the middle ages was very great, declared the law to be that 

 jurisdiction extended to a distance of one hundred miles from 

 the coast, or less than two days' journey from it. Within this 

 space the ruler had power to apprehend and punish delinquents 

 just as he had on land. 1 Baldus Ubaldus, another eminent 

 Italian jurist, who was a pupil of Bartolus and died in 1400, 



1 Tyberiadis, D. Bartoli de Saxoferrato, Jtirisconsultorum omnium facile principit, 

 Tractatus de Fluminibus, <L-c., Bononiic, 1576, p. 55. " Jurisdictionern habens in 

 territorio mari cohserenti habet etiam jurisdictionem in mari usque ad centum 

 milliaria, . . . sicut praeses provinciao debet purgare provinciam malis hominibus 

 per terrain, ita etiam per aquam. . . . Constat autem quod centum miliaria per 

 mare minus est duabus dietia. " 



