THE JURIDICAL CONTROVERSIES 361 



state, and thus the Venetians, as lords of the Adriatic, could 

 impose taxes and penalties on navigation. " In respect of 

 both which titles," continued the Earl, "the Kings and 

 Princes in general fronting upon the seas, as Spayne, France, 

 Denmark, &c., have upon occasion offered, not only made 

 ordinances and published edicts for the ruling and better 

 ordering of the seas, but also have put them in execution ; as 

 well civilly for deciding of contracts, as criminally for trans- 

 gressions ; and have raised taxes and gabells in the seas as on 

 the land to their best benefit, as part of their regalities properly 

 belonging unto them, in sign of their sovereignty." As to the 

 distance to which this sovereignty extended, he said it was 

 " generally received to be about one hundred miles at the least 

 into the seas," unless in narrow seas only, in which case the 

 limits are divided by the channel, " except the princes of the 

 one shore have prescribed the whole, as it falleth out in his 

 Majesty's narrow seas between England and France, where 

 the whole appertayneth to him in right, and so hath been 

 possessed tyme out of mind by his progenitors." 



By another channel we may trace the course of the ideas 

 which converged and culminated in the claims of Charles to 

 the dominion of the surrounding seas viz., in connection with 

 the development of the law relating to the rights of property 

 in the foreshore and the bed of the sea. Cases frequently 

 occurred in which those rights were contested between private 

 individuals and the crown ; and in the course of litigation, or 

 in writings dealing with the subject, the rights in the sea 

 which were alleged to belong to the crown were explained. 

 We have already seen that Plowden, in a case of the kind, 

 argued that Queen Elizabeth possessed jurisdiction as far as 

 the middle line in the surrounding seas, a doctrine which the 

 queen expressly repudiated in 1602, but denied to her any 

 right of property in either the sea or its bed. The claims 

 of the crown to the ownership of the foreshores originated in 

 the reign of Elizabeth ; under James and Charles I. they were 

 systematically pursued by the " title-hunters " ; and while the 

 legal decisions in contested cases were for a long time adverse 

 to the crown, they began in the reign of James to be in its 

 favour, and gradually the idea was imported into and became 

 a part of English law that the ownership of the foreshore 



