HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE TERRITORIAL SEA 543 



Plowden, the Elizabethan lawyer, believed that this work 

 contained the law as it existed before the Norman Conquest, 

 but it is now declared to contain much that is spurious. 

 Whether that be so or not, there is no doubt that this principle 

 of maritime delimitation was adopted by many of the lawyers 

 and scholars of Elizabeth's time, as Dee and Plowden. 1 Even 

 well on in the next century no less a personage than Lord 

 Chief -Justice Hale, in an early unpublished treatise on the 

 law of the customs and seaports, maintained that the king 

 had "right of jurisdiction or dominion of so much at lest of 

 the sea as adjoines to the British coast nearer then to any 

 forren coast." 2 From internal evidence this tract appears to 

 have been written about 1636, and the influence of Selden's 

 Mare Clausum, which was published at this time, and in which 

 the mid -line was repudiated as a boundary of the British 

 seas, was shown in Bale's later treatise. In it the mid-line 

 was abandoned, and the "narrow sea, adjoining to the coast of 

 England," was declared to be " part of the waste and demesnes 

 and dominions of the King of England," who had in it the 

 double right of jurisdiction and property or ownership, " Master 

 Selden " being referred to as authority. 3 



There is no evidence that the principle of the mid-channel 

 as applied to the sea was ever homologated by an English 

 sovereign or Government. Notwithstanding its currency in 

 the reign of Elizabeth, we know that it was explicitly dis- 

 avowed by the queen herself in diplomatic controversy with 

 the King of Denmark, who, in virtue of it, claimed the whole 

 of the sea between Norway and Iceland. Still earlier the 

 English Parliament vainly petitioned the victorious Henry V., 

 fresh from his conquests in France, to impose tribute on vessels 

 passing through the Channel, on the ground that he possessed 

 both shores, and therefore had a legal title to the intervening 

 sea. 4 But although the mid-line appears never to have been 

 clearly adopted, there are two circumstances, both referring 

 like Cnut's charter to the Channel, which may point to its ancient 

 usage there. One is that an important fishing-bank, the Zowe 



;_ 1 See p. 102. 



2 Brit. Mus. Hargraves MSS. , No. 98 ; printed by Moore, Hist, of the Foreshore, 

 362. 



3 A Treatise relating to the Maritime Law of England, 10. 4 See p. 35. 



