MARITIME LAW. Broadly speaking, the subject matter of ally action over which an Admiralty Court could take jurisdiction should be considered a topic of rite Maritime Law. In this definition prize cases would be included; but the right of capture and other belligerent rights on the high seas in time of war, the im munities of neutral shipping and cargoes, con traband traffic, etc., more properly considered, are topics of International Law (q.v.). How ever, oversea commerce being international there is little in the lex maritima which has not an international aspect. The maritime law of Great Britain and the United States is rooted in the usages and customs of merchant seafarers, shipmasters and seamen, which are of remote antiquity and have been preserved in the Code and Digest of Justinian and other compilations hereafter mentioned. The oldest repository in England of this law was the 'Black Bo& of the written in Norman French and dating partly from the reigns of Edward III and Richard II and partly from the reigns of Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, °long be fore any controversies arose between the Admiralty and King's courts about foreign con tracts, whereof they had been in peaceable pos session time out of minde (Prynne's 'Animad version on the Fourth Part of Coke's Insti tutes,) 1668). An early record of the adminis tration of maritime law in England is found in the Domesday of Ipswich, 17 Edward I (Ai) 1289). The 'Black Book) has disappeared but an English manuscript, which was in the library of .the College of Advocates at Doctors' Com mons until the dispersal of the college in 1858. had in recent years done service for the lost original. The substantive sea law of the 'Black Book> is contained mainly in a transcript of the Laws of Oleron. This last-named compila tion, which takes its name from an island off the west coast of France, near Rochefort, is ex tant in several manuscripts. The oldest of these, written in a mixture of old French and Gascon, and now in the Guildhall at London, where it was brought from the archives of Bordeaux, probably dates from the end of the 13th cen tury. The compilation is much older, no doubt;
for the Laws of Wisby, by which the merchants of the Hansa towns and other German, Scandi navian and Russian trading communities on the Baltic and North Sea regulated their conduct are mere condensations of the Laws of Oleron —and the Hanseatic League was formed in 1252.
A more complete code of sea laws than either of those mentioned is the del Mare,) of uncertain age and pedigree. Grotius asserts that it was compiled at the order of the °ancient Kings of Arragon,>> whereas Aruni and others claim it to have been the work of Pisan lawyers. Both may be right. The Con solato del Mare was evidently not compiled at one sitting; its matter is drawn from many sources, including the Roman corpus juris and the laws and customs of Italian, French and Spanish marts of commerce. While not com pleted until the 14th century, the extant form is apparently the resultant of accretions to a nucleus dating back possibly to the 11th cen tury. Anyhow, a lex maritima had become generally recognized in Europe toward the end of the 12th century and its distinction from the common law of England, as asserted by Prynne, who is quoted above, is testified to by an early rescript of the 'Black providing, that °all those who doe sue any merchant, mariner or other person whatsoever at common law of the land for any thing of auntient right belonging to the maritime law . . . shall be fined to the king for his unlawful and vexatious spite.* The extent to which the ancient com pilations have maintained their authority may be estimated from the fact that a fragment of the law of Rhodes, embodied in the Digest of Jus tinian and transcribed into the Consolato, states as correctly as any recent textbook the modern law of jettison and general average. while the rubric de 'mak° foenore (Dig. 22, 2; Code 4, 33) gives the present rules on bottomry and respondentia with absolute exactness.