HAKE. 
101 
it appears from the Report of the British Association of Science 
in 1847, that in the ninth and tenth centuries the Danes had 
fisheries on the coast of that island, from whence they were 
accustomed to send large exports to the south of Europe. In 
the reign of the English Queen Mary, Philip the Second of 
Spain paid the sum of one thousand pounds yearly for securing 
to the Spaniards the right of fishing on the Irish coast; and 
the Dutch purchased a similar right from Charles the Second 
at the price of thirty thousand pounds. It was also granted 
as a favour- to the kingdom of Sweden, in 1650, to employ 
one hundred vessels in the same pursuit; but long before this, 
in the reign of King John, the merchants of Bayonne, who 
already rented from the English crown the right of taking 
Whales in our seas, paid to the king six marks for the sole 
right of the trade of drying Congers and Merluciones on the 
English shores. Lysons supposes that these Merluciones were 
Whitings and Haddocks; but the Merlucius, Sea Pike, or Sea 
Luce of ancient authors, is represented without a barb at the 
lower jaw, and with only two fins on the back; which 
circumstance, coupled with our knowledge of the great fishery 
carried on expressly for Hakes, is sufficient to determine the 
species. Under the name of Merluce, or Sea Pike, this fish 
also occupied a station in heraldry. 
It may be here incidentally remarked also, as an illustration 
of the violent stretches of royal prerogative, by which the in- 
dustry of their native subjects was cramped for the benefit of 
strangers, that a fishery for Whales on the English coasts was 
the subject of a similar grant; by which King John assigned 
over to the merchants of Bayonne, at the price of ten pounds 
yearly, the exclusive right of taking these creatures in all the 
space between St. Michael’s Mount and Dartmouth. In the 
last-mentioned case it is probable indeed that the practical 
hardship was not great, and the plea may have been urged 
that the objects of pursuit were by prescription a royal 
possession; for the reason has been assigned, that the king 
ought to claim the head of a Whale, that his lamps might be 
supplied with oil, whilst the bones of the tail, (if such could 
be found!) were claimed by the lawyers as necessary to the 
symmetry of the queen’s dress: a precursor, it seems, of the 
crinoline of our own day. 
