UNDER THE TUDORS 91 



ing on the fisheries. A second reason they gave was the 

 greater love " for ease and pleasure " than in former times, 

 people now preferring to buy their fish from strangers rather 

 than to "travail and venture for it themselves," a very 

 common charge against Englishmen then and for a long time 

 afterwards. As a third reason, they said the price of fish was 

 regulated in various towns by the mayors and other officers in 

 such a way that they were often forced to sell without sufficient 

 profit, while Government purveyors made them part with their 

 fish at nominal prices. It is to be noted that they made no 

 complaint against foreign fishermen or the importation of 

 foreign fish. 



During the brief reign of Mary (1553-1558) Cecil was in the 

 shade, but shortly after the accession of Elizabeth he again 

 devoted attention to the decay of the fisheries and tried to 

 apply fitting remedies. Among the State Papers of the year 

 1563 is a long and elaborate document, copiously revised by 

 Cecil himself, which deals with the condition of shipping and 

 fisheries, and obviously formed the basis and argument for the 

 great Act made in the same year. 1 In this paper the decay of 

 the navy both in ships and mariners was traced by Cecil to a 

 variety of causes : the piracies of Turks and Moors on the 

 Levant trade, the transference of the spice trade from the 

 Venetians to the Portuguese and Spaniards, the Spanish law of 

 bottomry, the augmentation by the King of Denmark of the tolls 

 at the Sound and his recovery of Iceland, and the decay of the 

 English fisheries. Herrings and other sea fish, he said, were 



o CT * 



now taken upon our coast by strangers, who brought them into 

 the realm and sold them " to the very inhabitants of the parts 

 that were used to be fishermen," while Englishmen had them- 

 selves been prohibited from exporting fish. 2 The remedies 

 which Cecil proposed were that the importation of wines and 

 woad should be allowed only in English ships ; that English- 



1 State Papers, Dom., Elizabeth, xxvii. 71, February 1563. Endorsed, "Argu- 

 ments for Increase of the Navy," and " Arguments to prove that it is necessary 

 for the restoring of the navy of England to have one Day more in ye weeke 

 ordained to be a fish day, and that to be Wensday rather than any other.'' 



2 The exportation, without license, of herrings, among other things, had been 

 forbidden by 1 & 2 Ph. and Mary, c. 5 (1554) ; but by 1 Eliz., c. 17, subjects were 

 permitted to export sea fish taken by subjects in English ships free of customs for 

 four years. 



