To piracy was added the constant petty warfare and feuds that were carried on between maritime nations, and even between towns of the same nation.
Hallam quotes, "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.; half the instruments of Rymer might be quoted 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 the year 1254 the Winchilsea mariners attacked a Yarmouth galley, and killed some of her men.
The evil effects of this confusion of might with right, the anxiety occasioned by this constant warfare, and by these petty feuds, lingered longer on sea than on land; and kept the morals of the seafaring population of the coasts at the lowest ebb; and as one consequence, the plundering of vessels wrecked on the shores was in all parts of Europe carried on with as ruthless a hand, as was piracy and privateering afloat.
It may be somewhat interesting to consider the gradual progress of legislation with reference to this very terrible system and crime of wrecking; and while doing so, we shall receive further proof of how the rough mastery of the strong over the weak crept into the Laws, and how full a development it had in such laws, as especially related to wrecks and wreckage.
It is hard in the present day to conceive how, in the name of any government making claim to the administration of justice, such a law could have been passed as that which existed prior to Henry I., which gave the king complete possession of all wrecked property: ownership on the part of the original possessor was supposed to have been lost by the action of the sea. Whether the law originated in that strong instinct for the appropriation of unconsidered trifles, which is rather a snare to all governments, or whether it was found necessary to make the king the owner of wreckage, in order to lessen the temptation to cause vessels to be wrecked, and their crews murdered for the sake of pillage, no unfrequent occurrence in those days, however it was, the law existed, and the shipwrecked merchant might come struggling ashore upon a broken spar, and find the coast strewn with scattered but still valuable goods, so lately his, but now by law his no longer, any more than they belonged to the half dozen rude fishermen who stood watching the torn wreck, and dispersed cargo being wave-lifted high upon the beach.
Henry I., whose declining years were years of tender and deep sadness, on account of his own losses at sea, was somewhat more compassionate in his dealings with the unfortunate by shipwreck.
He decreed that a wreck or wrecked goods should not be considered lost to the owner, or become the property of the Crown, if any man escaped from the wreck with life to the shore.
Henry II. made a feeble enlargement of this scant degree of mercy—he expanded this saving clause, so that if either man or beast came ashore alive, the wreck and goods should still be considered as belonging to the original possessors; but failing this, although the owner should be known beyond all possibility of doubt, all the saved property should belong to the king; so that in those old days, if a cat was supposed to have nine lives, it was quite sufficient to account for its being for so long a popular institution on board ship; for even a cat washing ashore, would become the owner's title-deeds to all of his property that the sea had spared.
Richard I. could be generous in things small as well as great; he could act nobly upon principle as well as upon impulse; it must have been, indeed, only natural to his open unselfish nature and high courage, to spurn the idea of robbing the robbed, of making the victim of the sea's destructive power the further victim of a king's greed; he was prepared to give his laws of chivalry a wide interpretation, and let them ordain succour for the distressed by the rage of waters, as well as for the distressed by the rage of men.