Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/610

Rh 584 SEA LAWS Holy Land, in company with Louis, that the collection of customs of the sea contained in The Book of the Consulate of the Sea (see vol. vi. p. 317) was held in high repute in the Levant, directed on her return that a record should be made of the judgments of the maritime court of the island of Oleron (at that time a peculiar court of the duchy of Guienne), in order that they might serve as law amongst the mariners of the Western Sea. He states further that Richard I. of England, on his return from the Holy Land, brought back with him a roll of those judgments, which he published in England and ordained to be observed as law. It is probable that the general outline of Cleirac's account is correct, as it accords with a memorandum on the famous roll of 12 Edw. III., "De Superioritate Maris Angliae," which, having been for many years carefully preserved in the archives of the Tower of London, is now deposited in the Public Record Office. According to this memorandum, the king's justiciaries were instructed to declare and uphold the laws and statutes made by the kings of England, in order to maintain peace and justice amongst the people of every nation passing through the sea of England : " Quae quidem leges et statuta per dominum Ricardum, quondam regem Angliae, in reditu suo a Terra Sancta correcta fuerunt, interpretata, declarata, et in Insula Oleron publicata, et nominata in Gallica lingua La Leye Olyroun." The earliest version of these Oleron sea laws, which, according to the memorandum above mentioned, were re- ceived in England in the latter part of the 12th century, comprised certain customs of the sea which were observed in the wine and the oil trade, as carried on between the ports of Guienne and those of Brittany, Normandy, Eng- land, and Flanders. No English translation seems to have been made before the Rutter of the Sea, printed in London by Thomas Petyt in 1536, in which they are styled "the Lawes of ye Yle of Auleron and ye Judgementes of ye See." French was, in fact, a tongue familiar to the English High Court of Admiralty down to the reign of Henry VI. A Flemish text, however, appears to have been made in the latter part of the 14th century, the Purple Book of Bruges, preserved in the archives of Bruges, in a handwriting somewhat later than that of the Liber Memorandorum. Prefixed to this Flemish version is the title, " Dit es de Coppie van den Rollen van Oleron van den Vonnesse van der Zee." Certain changes, however, have been made in the Purple Book of Bruges in the names of the ports mentioned in the original Gascon text. For instance, Sluys is in several places substituted for Bordeaux, just as in the Rutter of the Sea London replaces Bordeaux. That these sea laws were administered in the Flemish maritime courts may be inferred from two facts. First, a Flemish translation of them was made for the use of the maritime tribunal of Damme, which was the chief Flemish entrepot of the wine trade in the 13th century. The text of this translation has been published by Adriaen Verwer under the title of the Judgments of Damme. In the second place, there is preserved in the archives of the senate of Dantzic, where there was a maritime court of old, famous for the equity of its judgments, an early manuscript of the 15th century, which contains a Flemish reproduction of the Judgments of Oleron headed "Dit is Twater Recht i Vlaenderen." So far there can be no doubt that the Judgments of Oleron were received as sea laws in Flanders as well as in England in the 14th century. Further inquiry enables us to trace them as they followed the course of the wine trade in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Boxhorn, in his Chronyk van Zeelande, has published a Dutch version of them, which Van Leeuwen has repro- duced in his Batavia Tllustrata, under the title of the Laws of West-Capell in Zealand. Verwer has also pub- lished a Dutch text of them in his Nederlanfs See-Rechten, accompanied by certain customs of Amsterdam, of which other MSS. exist, in which those customs are described as usages of Stavoren, or as usages of Enkhuizen, both ports of active commerce in the 15th century. Of these customs of Amsterdam, or, as they were more generally styled, "Ordinances of Amsterdam," further mention is made below. A new and enlarged collection of sea laws, purporting to be an extract of the ancient laws of Oleron, made its appearance in the latter part of the 15th century in Le Grant Routier de la Her, printed at Poitiers in France by Jan de Marnef, at the sign of the Pelican. The title- page is without a date, but the dedication, which purports to be addressed by its author Pierre Garcie alias Ferrande to his godson, is dated from St Gilles on the last day of May 1483. It contains forty-seven articles, of which the first twenty -two are identical with articles of the " Judg- ments of the Sea," in the Liber Memorandorum, the re- maining articles being evidently of more recent origin. A black-letter edition of this work in French*, without a date, is preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and to the last article this colophon is appended : " Ces choses pre- cedentes sont extraictes du tres utille et profittable Roolle Doloyron par le diet Pierre Garcie alias Ferrande." An English translation is printed in the appendix to A View of the Admiral Jurisdiction, published in 1661 by Dr John Godolphin, in which the laws are described as "an Extract of the Ancient Laws of Oleron rendered into English out of Garsias alias Ferrand." Although this new text had the recommendation of an advocate who had filled the office of judge of the Admiralty Court during the Commonwealth and been appointed king's advocate- general by Charles II., it seems to have been superseded in a short time by Cleirac's Us et Coustumes de la Mer, to which was appended the following clause of authentication : " Tesmoin le Seel de 1'Isle d'Oleron, estably aux contracts de la dite Isle, le jour du Mardy apres la Feste Sainct Andr6 1'an mille deux cens soixant-six." Cleirac does not inform us from what source or under what circumstances he procured his text, nor on what authority he has adopted in certain articles readings at variance with those of Garcie, whilst he retains the same number of articles, to wit, forty- seven. The clause of authentication cannot be accepted as a warranty above suspicion, as the identical clause of authentication with the same date is appended to the early Norman and Breton versions of the rolls, which contain only twenty-six articles. Cleirac's version, however, owing probably to the superior style in which it was edited, and to the importance of the other treatises on maritime matters which Cleirac had brought together for the first time in a single volume, seems to have obtained a preference in Eng- land over Garcie's text, as it was received in the High Court of Admiralty during the judgeship of Sir Leoline Jenkyns, and an English translation of it was introduced into the English translation of the Black Book of the Admiralty made by John Bedford, the deputy registrar of the High Court, and dedicated to Sir Leoline Jenkyns. It seems to have been Bedford's intention to print this translation under the title of " Sea Laws " ; but the manu- script passed into the hands of Sir Leoline Jenkyns, who gave it to the College of Advocates in 1685. The Black Book itself, which was missing for a long time from the Admiralty registry, has recently been discovered and has been replaced in the archives of the Admiralty Court. Of these two versions of the sea laws of Oleron the earlier obtained a wide-world reception, for it was translated into Castilian (Fuero de Layron) by order of King Alphonso X., and a Gascon text of it is still preserved in the archives of Leghorn, apparently in a handwriting of the 15th cen-