rabbit-warren, happened to be the early home of maritime law, is a point of some interest to the local antiquary, but has no particular bearing on naval archæology.

The origin of the Laws themselves is a much more important question, which Cleirac has answered by deriving them from the Barcelona Code known as The Consulate of the 'Sea,' which has been assigned by French writers to an almost fabulous epoch, and more distinctly by M. Boucher to the year 900 or thereabouts. The arguments by which he supports this claim to an extreme antiquity appear to us quite insufficient. One of these is the absence of all mention of the compass, from which he infers that at the time the Consulate was first drawn up, the compass did not exist; but the compass, he maintains, was in use at the time of the first Crusade, and therefore the Consulate was drawn up at a still earlier date. If, however, the compass was known at all at the time of the first Crusade, it most certainly was not in common use in the Mediterranean; and in any case it is scarcely logical to argue that because the compass, which may possibly have been known as early as the year 1100, is not mentioned, the Consulate must therefore have been written in the year 900. Sir Travers Twiss, with much greater reason, would refer it to about the year 1340; and this not on merely negative grounds, but from the very positive proof that a royal charter of 1336 is quoted in the 36th Chapter (Black Book, vol. ii. p. lxii.); a proof which may be taken as setting definitely at rest the oft-mooted question whether the Laws of Oleron were derived from the Consulate or not.

That the two spring from a common source is however at once apparent; and this common source is either the Decisions of Trani, or, as is not improbable, some other code of equal antiquity and of the same origin. The Decisions of Trani, printed at Fermo in 1507, claim to date from 1063, a claim which the editor of the Black Book thinks is well established (vol. ii. p. xliv.). He considers them the most ancient extant source of Maritime Law, and shows that the Consolato del 'Mare,' printed at Venice in 1549, and which Father Guglielmotti refers to the early part of the eleventh century, is merely a translation from the Catalan (vol. iii. p. xxxi.).

In all these codes the main sense of the law is the same, and is clearly derived from the original Jus Rhodium. There are, however, many points in which they differ from it, and there is one in which the difference becomes a distinction; it is, that 'the mariner under the modern system is a free man. The slave no longer figures as a chattel, which may be thrown.

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VOL. CXLIII. NO. CCXCII.

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overboard to lighten the ship. The crews are free men' (Black Book, vol. ii. p. xlv.). They agree amongst themselves, and they differ from the ancient law in this, that the master of a ship may not strike a mariner, and that the mariner may defend himself if the master persist in striking him (Black Book, vol. i. p. 105; vol. iii. p. 229).

This distinctive modification of Maritime Law was obviously the effect of the new nationalities which had come into the countries bordering on the Mediterranean. The free German

could not be beaten, and the employment of slaves on board was for centuries unknown. A confused chronology and a too vivid imagination have led Mr. Lindsay into a serious error on this point. He speaks of slaves as forming a large part of the Venetian crews in the middle of the thirteenth century; in describing the pomp with which the Venetian fleet got under way, he says: The oars were simultaneously thrown upwards, the sails set, and the vessel, under full press of canvas, pro'ceeded on her voyage. Hundreds of gay gondolas covered the placid waters. The galley-slaves with their hideous 'misery formed a saddening contrast to the haughty bearing of the Doge and the splendour of his court' (vol. i. p. 200). The desire to produce a picturesque effect has tempted the author beyond the limits of historical evidence; for the galleyoars were secured by grummets to thole-pins, so that they could not be tossed; and, in the thirteenth century, the galleyslave was a monster yet unborn; it may be positively affirmed that a galley-slave, as we understand the name, was unknown at Venice at that time, and for 200 years later. On this point we are not left to poetic fancy; we have explicit and clear information from Marino Sanuto, who writing in 1320 of the past century, says that the oarsmen, 180 in number, were all paid, their wages varying from 4 to 6 soldi a month. These soldi grossorum, or soldi dei grossi, are estimated by Colonel Yule as intrinsically equal to 5 shillings sterling; and though it may be difficult to fix their current equivalent, still, as establishing a relative value, the pay of the master was 15 soldi, of the carpenter 7, and of the cook 4. Their rations consisted of biscuit, beans, salt meat, cheese and wine, with leave to buy extras at the canteen on board; and they were paid savings whenever it was necessary to put them on short allowance (Mar. San. p. 57). But of the galley-slaves we have a very different account 300 years later; they were not paid, their labour was compulsory, they were forced, sforzati, from which the more familiar French forçats; and their scale of diet was thirty ounces of biscuit daily, with water; in winter, soup every

other day; and during the season, every day when in port, but never at sea, because-says Pantero Pantera-it might make them heavy and dull when they were wanted to work, and because it was difficult to cook; and this luxurious soup which was to render them dull, fat and stupid, was made of three ounces of beans, flavoured with a quarter of an ounce of oil, per man. Fleshmeat and wine were served out four times a year, namely, at Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide and the Carnival (Pan. Pan. p. 131); and a hundred years later still, Jean Marteilhe, the French Protestant, states, as the ration of the slaves, simply twenty-six ounces of biscuit and four ounces of beans per day.

During these centuries the galleys had been increasing enormously in size. The ordinary French galley about the year 1710, when Marteilhe was serving, had 50 oars, with 6 men to an oar, and a complement of 500; the galley-royal of the same period had 60 oars, with 7 men to each, and a complement, all told, of 670: but at the end of the 16th century, the complement of an ordinary Venetian galley, such as fought at Lepanto, was 400, of whom 200 were rowers; and the galleys which Marino Sanuto describes had 180 men at the oars, and a complement of 250.

The

Mr. Lindsay is thus mistaken in considering (vol. i. p. 262), that the galley as described by Marteilhe can be taken as the type of the galleys of the middle ages; the difference in size was very great; but a still more radical difference was in the manner of rowing them, a difference which seems altogether to have escaped his notice. In the time of Marino Sanuto, and for more than one hundred years after, there was only one man to each oar; the oars were thus small and very numerous. testimony of Pantero Pantera on this point is distinct and incontrovertible. It appears that just as the ancient Romans, after long trial, had decided that triremes were practically superior to quadriremes and quinqueremes, and had established this as a fact in the battle of Actium; so the medieval States of Italy, after trying four and five oars to a bench, had become convinced that three was a more efficient number, and at three they remained fixed until the invention of the large oar, scaloccio; and these oars were rowed, not in rowlocks, not through holes in the side, as has been commonly misrepresented, but secured by grummets to thole-pins, fixed in a stout bulwark, which was called the posticcio, and in French apostis.

It does not appear that galleys, as distinct from large rowboats, ever came into general use in England; for what the old writers and monkish chroniclers speak of as galleys were

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very certainly nothing of the sort; they were small vessels with auxiliary rowing power, and when used for purposes of war performed the duty of scouts: they seem to have had comparatively few oars, fitted always in single rank. But reference is often made to the galleys which formed part of the fleet which accompanied King Richard I. to the Holy Land; and Mr. Lindsay, describing the fitting out of this fleet at Dover, Dartmouth, and various English and French ports, and referring afterwards to the galleys which Vinesauf, with much exaggeration, has spoken of as innumerable,' as covering the sea,' which appeared to boil with the multitude of the rowers' (Lindsay, vol. i. p. 376), has omitted to state that these galleys, with which the king entered Messina, and which were innumerable,' numbered, in point of fact, less than forty; that it is in evidence that most of them were chartered at Marseilles; that, presumably, the others were picked up in Italy, and that fifteen more were supplied to him by the King of Sicily; and again, in noticing the battle off Dover in 1217, he says, an English fleet of forty galleys and other ' vessels attacked and defeated a French squadron of more than double its size' (vol. i. p. 394), implying evidently that the galleys were the principal part of the force; but Matthew Paris, to whom he refers, speaks of the English as getting to windward of the French by keeping a close luff;' necessarily, therefore, under sail. Similarly, at the battle of Sluys, the English got to windward under sail on the starboard tack, and though their vessels were most probably assisted by oars, they were not, strictly speaking, galleys.

But in all considerations of early naval history, it must be remembered that the accounts which have come down to us are written by men ignorant of nautical technicalities, and in a language which had not the proper technical terms; that we are therefore left to give a strict and definite meaning to their details as we best can, and that the exact words are not to be implicitly and absolutely relied on. A great deal of the doubt and difficulty which pervades the study of naval archæology is due to our reluctance to admit and recognise this as a fact. It is assumed that when a chronicler wrote of a dromon, a galley, a nef, a buss, a cog, a holker, a huissier, a palander, a chelander, or any other description of vessel, he knew exactly what he was writing about, and used the terms with technical accuracy; and yet when we notice the curious mistakes which

*This point is very fully argued out by Sir Harris Nicolas, 'His'tory of the Royal Navy,' vol. i. p. 179, note.

authors and journalists make even now, when opportunities of information are everywhere at hand, it is a natural and logical inference that the medieval writers, for the most part monks and soldiers, might and did commit extraordinary solecisms.

In the same way, the various devices which stand for ships, either on Trajan's column, or on ancient medals, are mere conventionalities, and of no authority. But very great confusion has been introduced by a mistaken reverence for these. Trajan's column, more particularly, has much to answer for in the various absurdities it has suggested to inland scholars, men of much learning but little knowledge. And even in later times, rude child-like drawings have been received with a respect to which they are not entitled. An extreme instance of this occurs in Nicolas' History of the Royal Navy' (vol. i. p. 184), where referring to a couple of sketches of the fight off Dover, the author says:- Though not actual pictures of the 'fight itself, and though certainly inaccurate representations ' of the vessels, inasmuch as they have neither masts nor sails (nor, he might have added, oars), they are yet valuable from 'affording some idea of a naval conflict in the latter part of 'the thirteenth century.' But as the sketch, there copied, represents five angry men crowded into a washing tub, it can scarcely give an idea of anything, unless it may be of the once celebrated voyage of the Conscript Fathers to Philippi.

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The seals of several of the medieval corporations are of a very different class. Although the ships as shown in them are gross caricatures, they are still of such a nature as to convey some idea of what they are meant for; and though we would not for a moment suppose that the effigies, as shown in the seals of Sandwich, Poole, Dover, or Faversham (Lindsay, vol. i. p. 399), are to be regarded as portraits, they do none the less set forth some of the leading characteristics of the vessels of the time. They show, for instance, that the ships had but one mast; that they had only a square sail, and that it was furled aloft; that they had singularly high fore and stern castles; and from the Poole seal it would appear that the rudder was known, though from the others we may judge that the steering oar was more common. In the different seals, this steering oar is shown on the quarter exposed to view, and is different in different copies; but Northern custom was to fix it on the right side, which thus from the earliest period obtained the name of steer-board, a name which the Anglo-Saxons and Northmen brought to England, and which still lives as starboard. But the word steer refers directly to the star, the pole or lode star, by which the early navigators