Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 1).djvu/477

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as to secure the ship and cargo from capture by making their owners denizens of a neutral power. Then arose, for the first time, those claims to the "Right of search" which England so long insisted upon, and maintained against the world in arms; claims not yet relinquished, though now rarely enforced. It must not, however, be supposed from these so far salutary regulations that Edward or his council had any knowledge of sound commercial legislation; for, in 1303, every English merchant was commanded to restrict his business to one commodity only, and to select at once the article he would trade in. Five years afterwards they were by law prohibited from importing wine from Gascony, though, at that time, an English dependency; while, with singular inconsistency, the Parliament of England, by an Act of 1378, perceiving "the advantages derived from the resort of merchant strangers," gave foreign merchants permission to remain in the kingdom as long as they had occasion, and to buy or to sell, wholesale or retail, provisions, spices, fruits, furs, silk, gold and silver wire or thread, and numerous other small wares. The merchant strangers could likewise dispose of various descriptions of cloths, linen, canvas, and other bulky articles of manufacture, in any city, fair, or market, though in quantities of not less than a piece, it being the privilege of freemen only to dispose of them by retail as well as wholesale, with the exclusive right also of retailing wines, foreigners being restricted to their sale in the casks in which they were imported.