[y] Boucher supposes it to have been compiled at Barcelona about 900; but his reasonings are inconclusive, t. i. p. 72; and indeed Barcelona at that time was little, if at all, better than a fishing-town. Some arguments might be drawn in favour of Pisa from the expressions of Henry IV.'s charter granted to that city in 1081. Consuetudines, quas habent de mari, sic iis observabimus sicut illorum est consuetudo. Muratori Dissert. 45. Giannone seems to think the collection was compiled about the reign of Louis IX. 1. xi. c. 6. Capmany, the last Spanish editor, whose authority ought perhaps to outweigh every other, asserts and seems to prove them to have been enacted by the mercantile magistrates of Barcelona, under the reign of James the Conqueror which is much the same period. Codigo de las Costumbres Maritimas de Barcelona, Madrid, 1791. But, by whatever nation they were reduced into their present form, these laws were certainly the ancient and established usages of the Mediterranean states: and Pisa may very probably have taken a great share in first practising what a century or two afterwards was rendered more precise at Barcelona.
[z] Macpherson, p. 358. Boucher supposes them to be registers of actual decisions.
[a] I have only the authority of Boucher for referring the Ordinances of Wisbuy to the year 1400. Beckman imagines them to be older than those of Oleron. But Wisbuy was not enclosed by a wall till 1288, a proof that it could not have been previously a town of much importance. It flourished chiefly in the first part of the fourteenth century, and was at that time an independent republic, but fell under the yoke of Denmark before the end of the same age.
[] Hugh Despenser seized a Genoese vessel valued at 14,300 marks, for which no restitution was ever made. Rym. t. iv. p. 701. Macpherson, A.D. 1336.
[c] The Cinque Ports and other trading towns of England were in a constant state of hostility with their opposite neighbours during the reigns of Edward I. and II. One might quote almost half the instruments in Rymer in proof of these conflicts, and of those with the mariners of Norway and Denmark. Sometimes mutual envy produced frays between different English towns. Thus, in 1254 the Winchelsea mariners attacked a Yarmouth galley, and killed some of her men. Matt. Paris, apud Macpherson.
[d] Muratori, Dissert. 53.
[e] Du Cange, voc. Laudum.
[f] Rymer, t. iv. p. 576. Videtur sapientibus et peritis, quod causa, de jure, non subfuit marcham seu reprisaliam in nostris, seu subditorum nostrorum, bonis concedendi. See too a case of neutral goods on board an enemy's vessel claimed by the owners, and a legal distinction taken in favour of the captors. t. vi. p. 14.
[g] 27 E. III. stat. ii. c. 17, 2 Inst. p. 205.
[h] Rymer, t. i. p. 839.