DROIT, a legal title, claim or due ; a term used in English law in the phrase droits of admiralty, certain rights or perquisites assigned by the Crown to the lord high admiral. (See also WRECK.) The most important of these in modern times consisted of ships and goods captured in port in time of war ; others were flotsam, jetsam, ligan, treasure, deodand, derelict within the admiral's jurisdiction; all fines, forfeitures, ransoms, recognizances and pecuniary punishments; all sturgeons, whales, porpoises, dolphins, grampuses and such large fishes, with the share of some prizes— such shares being afterwards called "tenths," in imitation of the French, who gave their admiral a droit de dixieme. The droits of admiralty were definitely surrendered to the Crown by Prince George of Denmark, when lord high admiral of England in 1702. In prize law droits of admiralty are distinguished from droits of the Crown which, before 1914, were granted to the captors of ships and cargoes captured at sea by duly commissioned ships of war. (See H. C. Rothery, Prize Droits, being A Report to H.M. Treasury on Droits of the Crown and of Admiralty in Time of War [1915] ; also the Law Quarterly Review, vol. xxxii., p. 38, and the Naval Prize Act, 1918; also Holdsworth, History of English Law, vol. i. pp. The term droit is also used in various legal connections (for French law, see FRANCE: Law), such as the droit of angary (q.v.), the droit d'achat (right of pre-emption) in the case of contraband (q.v.), the feudal droit de bris (see WRECK), the droit de regale or ancient royal privilege of claiming the revenues and patronage of a vacant bishopric, and the feudal droits of seigniory generally.