Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/106

104 noticed, was the most eminent of the Scottish towns for foreign commerce. It had many ships. Perth, however, was at this time, properly speaking, the capital of Scotland; and Alexander Neckham, abbot of Cirencester, a Latin poet of this age, says that the whole kingdom was supported by the wealth of that city. Inverleith (now Leith), Striveling (now Stirling), and Aberdeen, are also mentioned in charters as places at which there was some shipping and trade, and where customs were collected. Glasgow was as yet a mere village; it was made a burgh, subject to the bishop, by William the Lion, in 1175; but in the charter there is no mention of a guild, of any mercantile privilege, or of any trade whatever, except the liberty of having a weekly market. Edinburgh, though it was probably made a burgh by David I., was of little note till the middle of the fifteenth century. In Ireland, Dublin, which Henry II. granted by a charter in 1172 to be inhabited by his men of Bristol, is spoken of by Newburgh as a noble city, which, it is added, somewhat hyperbolically, might be considered as almost the rival of London for its opulence and commerce.

There are two laws of Henry II. relating to commerce, that deserve to be mentioned. Henry I. had so far mitigated the old law or custom, which made all wrecks the property of the crown, as to have enacted, that, if any human being escaped alive out of the ship, it should be no wreck; and his grandson still farther extended the operation of the humane principle thus introduced, by decreeing, that, if either man or beast should be found alive in any vessel wrecked upon the coasts of England, Poictou, Gascony, or the isle of Oleron, the property should be preserved for the owners, if claimed within three months. The other law is the last clause of the statute called the Assize of Arms, published in 1181: it very emphatically commands the Justices in Eyre, in their progress through the counties, to enjoin upon all the