Seas.[1] It expands and makes more systematic the treatment of 'propriety of the seas' in the twenty-seventh chapter of the Abridgement. The theses which Welwod sets out to sustain are expressed by him thus in the titles to the four chapters of his book : (1) Dominia esse in Mari, eaque distincta; (2) Ius navigandi in Mari non esse omnimodo liberum; (3) Ius piscandi in Mari esse maxima parte appropriatum; (4) Mare esse vectigale. Selden quoted from the third chapter the more pertinent[2] of the words of Welwod, as 'Iurisconsultus Scotus', about the quarrels between the Scots and the Dutch: strangers, Welwod had written in the Epistle Dedicatory of his Abridgement to the Lords Admirals, required to be 'stayed from scarring, scattring, and breaking the shoals of our fishes; namely, upon our coasts of Scotland'.
The two English writers of distinction in the controversies of the seventeenth century regarding 'the Sovereignty of the Sea' are Selden and, in less degree, Sir John Boroughs. The controversy touching the Sovereignty, Superiority or Dominion of the English or British Seas was much more than a writers' controversy. It raised substantial and highly practical interests, such as fishing rights and rights of taking tolls; in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and later[3] the claim was intimately
- ↑ See the words of the dedication of the book to Anne, wife of James I: 'contra extraneos piscandi immunitatem in Mari Britannico iniuria usurpantes'. The Queen had in 1613 unsuccessfully tried to get a royal patent empowering her 'to graunt lycense and to compound with these strangers for an yearly revenue to be paid unto her Majestie for theis fishings'—State Papers, Dom., xxvii. 79, quoted by Fulton, p. 161.
- ↑ 'Non possum praeterire … partimque batavorum (Batavorum in Selden) audacia sic (sic omitted by Selden) evanuerunt.'—De Dominio Maris, p.16; Mare Clausum, lib. ii, c. xxxi. ('De Regis Magnae Britanniae dominio in mari Scotico, Orientali maxime & Septentrionali'), pp. 546–7 of ed. of 1636 (12 mo).
- ↑ Complaints regarding piracy made part of the ground for the levy of
