JAMES I. : DISPUTES WITH THE DUTCH 169 



pay, and which were then payable to the Duke, 1 but it was 

 made use of by the Duke's agent to cover the collection of the 

 assize-herrings. The duty of collecting the tax was assigned 

 to Mr John Brown, one of the Duke's deputies. The detailed 

 instructions he received in 1616 do not appear to have been 

 preserved, but they were probably similar to those issued a 

 year or two later (see Appendix G). He was to proceed to the 

 North Isles in one of the king's pinnaces and there to demand 

 the assize duty from the foreign fishermen. 



At the end of July 1616 Brown, in one of the king's vessels, 

 appeared among the Dutch busses at work off the Scottish 

 coast, and began to carry out his instructions, offering a " quit- 

 tance or receipt " for the tax claimed. Probably to his surprise, 

 it was peaceably paid by the busses, amounting for each to one 

 angel or a barrel of herrings and twelve cod-fish. The fisher- 

 men were told that if they did not pay it the amount would be 

 doubled in the following year ; and that the king had a right 

 to levy this tax for a distance of 100 miles from the coast in 

 virtue of the agreement made with the States at the baptism of 

 Prince Henry. 2 Although the toll was paid by most of the 

 busses, it was without the consent of the captains of the 

 convoying men-of-war. They came to Brown and demanded 

 to see his commission ; and it is said that he showed them the 

 letter which the Duke of Lennox had obtained from Sir Noel 

 Caron. Since no force had been used in collecting the tax, the 



1 Caron to the States-General, ^^ 1616. Brit. Mus. Add. MSS., 17,677, 



J, fol. 152. In an account of the oppressions of Lord Robert Stewart in the 

 Orkneys and Shetlands in the sixteenth century, it is stated that that nobleman 

 laid heavy tolls upon the Dutch fishermen and the Norwegian traders. In 1575 

 the inhabitants complained that he compelled " the dogger boats and other fishers 

 of this realm to pay to him great toll and taxis bye auld use and wont, to wit, ilk 

 boat ane angel noble, ane hundreth fish, and twa bolls salt" (Oppression* of the 

 Sixteenth Century in the Islands of Orkney and Zetland, xlviii. 4). It appears 

 from a complaint of merchants of Bremen, in 1614, that it had been a custom 

 " past memory of man " for each ship arriving at the Orkneys to pay six angels 

 and one dollar for ground - leave and water-leave (Reg. Privy Counc. Scot., x. 

 247) ; and the Dutch are said to have given to the agent of the Earl of Orkney a 

 barrel of salt for his " oversight " of each ship, and to have offered the Earl for 

 each ship "an angell and ane barrell of birskate (biscuit) bread," while he demanded 

 "no less than ane double angell or ane Rose noble at the least" (MSS. Adroc. 

 Lib., 31. 2. 16). 



2 See p. 81. The treaty did not contain any stipulation of the kind ; and, 

 moreover, the Scottish copy was then amissing. 



