ABSTRACT
The sovereignty of the seas, wrote Sir John Borough in 1633, was 'the most precious jewel in his Majesties crown . . . and the principal means of our wealth and safety.'1 Borough was arguing in favour of a mare clausum, and like many antiquarian lawyers of his generation, felt compelled to trace his sources back to Julius Caesar. The Saxon King Edgar, he declared, had maintained a navy of 400 ships to assert his authority at all four corners of his realm, and he went on to describe how John, Edward I and Edward III had defended this same ascendancy. In the absence of any agreed definition of territorial water, it is not quite clear how far Borough's concept of sovereignty extended. He wrote of Edward IV granting licences to foreigners to fish off the Yorkshire coast, and of Queen Mary selling fishing rights in Ireland to her husband's subjects. But his main concern was with the Narrow Seas where, he claimed, all other ships 'vaile Bonnet' in acknowledgement of English superiority 'to this day'. The main political thrust of Borough's treatise was against the Dutch, who were getting rich and immensely strong at sea by taking £300 000 worth of fish a year out of English waters without either fee or licence - an argument which echoes that of John Dee over sixty years before.2 Queen Elizabeth had not been as remiss as Charles I:
I remember that those of Hamburg and other Easterlings (though in amitie with us) in the late reign of Queen Elizabeth of famous memory were notwithstanding stayed from passing through our
seas towards Spain, and good prize made of all other nations that attempted to do the like.
