A new and enlarged collection of sea laws, purporting to be an extract of the ancient laws of Oleron, made its appearance in the latter part of the 15th century in Le Grant routier de la mer, printed at Poitiers in France by Jan de Marnef, at the sign of the Pelican. The title-page is without a date, but the dedication, which purports to be addressed by its author, Pierre Garcie, alias Fer rande, to his godson, is dated from St. Gilles on the last day of May 1483. It contains 47 articles, of which the first 2 2 are iden tical with articles of the "Judgments of the Sea," in the Liber Memorandorum, the remaining articles being evidently of more recent origin. A black-letter edition of this work in French, with out a date, is preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and to the last article this colophon is appended : "Ces choses pre cedentes sont extraictes du tres utille et profittable Roolle Doloy ron par le dict Pierre Garcie alias Ferrande." An English transla tion is printed in the appendix to A View of the Admiral Jurisdic tion, published in 1661 by Dr. John Godolphin, in which the laws are described as "an Extract of the Ancient Laws of Oleron ren dered into English out of Garsias alias Ferrand." This new text seems to have been superseded in a short time by Cleirac's Us et coustumes de la mer, to which was appended the following clause of authentication: "Tesmoin le Seel de l'Isle d'Oleron, estably aux contracts de la Bite Isle, le jour du Mardy apres la Feste Sainct Andre l'an mille deux cens soixant-six." Cleirac does not inform us from what source or under what circumstances he procured his text, nor on what authority he has adopted in cer tain articles readings at variance with those of Garcie, whilst he retains the same number of articles, to wit, 47. The clause of authentication cannot be accepted as a warranty above suspicion, as the identical clause of authentication with the same date is appended to the early Norman and Breton versions of the rolls, which contain only 26 articles. Cleirac's version, however, owing probably to the superior style in which it was edited, and to the importance of the other treatises on maritime matter which Cleirac had brought together for the first time in a single volume, seems to have obtained a preference in England over Garcie's text, as it was received in the High Court of Admiralty during the judgeship of Sir Leoline Jenkyns, and an English translation of it was introduced into the English translation of the Black Book of the Admiralty made by John Bedford, the deputy regis trar of the High Court. It seems to have been Bedford's inten
tion to print this translation under the title of "Sea Laws"; but the manuscript passed into the hands of Sir Leoline Jenkyns, who gave it to the College of Advocates in 1685. The Black Book itself, which was mislaid for a long time from the Admiralty Registry, was discovered in the 19th century and placed in the Record Office.
The parent stock of the Visby sea laws, which guided the mariners and merchants of the North sea and the Baltic, may have been a code preserved in the chancery of Ltibeck, drawn up in the Old Saxon tongue, and dated 1240. On the other hand the Visby sea laws may have been a separate code drawn up at Visby. The fact of a resemblance between the two is not conclu sive for all the mediaeval sea laws in general treated maritime questions, which were then of a simple nature, in much the same way.
No definite answer can be given to the question, How did this collection of sea laws acquire the title of the "Visby sea laws" outside the Baltic? Under this title they were received in Scot land in the i6th century, as may be inferred from extracts from them cited in Sir James Balfour's System of the more Ancient Laws of Scotland, which, although not printed till 1754, was com pleted before his death in 1583. The text of the Visby sea laws generally current in England is an English translation of a French text which Cleirac published in 1641 in his Us et coustumes de la mer, and is an abbreviated, and in many respects mutilated, version of the original sea laws. From a practical point of view the question is not of importance; the existence of this well known code is the matter of interest.
See Pardessus, Collection de lois maritimes anterieures au XVIII.e siecle (6 vols., 1828-45) ; Schlyter, "Wisby Stadslag och Sjoratt," being vol. viii. of the Corpus furls Sueco-Gotorum Antiqui (Lund, 1853) ; The Black Book of the Admiralty, ed. by Sir Travers Twiss (4 vols., 1871-76) ; W. Ashburner, The Rhodian Sea Law W. S. Holdsworth, History of English Law, vol. i. (1922).