Another change, which had become a sheer matter of necessity, was the establishment of a permanent code of discipline. Hitherto each admiral, on being appointed to his office, had issued his own set of regulations. By use and wont there had arisen what was called "the Custom of the Sea." What remained to be done was to give expression to this custom, with the needful improvements and developments, in a statute, if that name can be applied to a set of orders promulgated by an administrative and not a legislative authority. Mention has been already made of "The Laws of War and Ordinances of the Sea, Ordered and Established by the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England" in 1652. This may, in a way, be said to be the first rough draft of the Queen's Regulations and Admiralty's Instructions. Oddly enough, the code is in thirty-nine Articles, a number which one would think a Puritan Parliament would be likely to avoid. A great part of it deals less with discipline and the duties of officers and men than with exhortations to fight well and prohibitions against holding relations with the enemy, or with "malignants." It is, however, explicit on two points: first, on the course to be taken with prizes, and then on the duties of captains engaged in convoying merchant ships. The prizes are not to be pillaged, and the captains engaged on convoy duty are ordered to protect the merchant ships, and to abstain from making profits for themselves. Valour against the enemy and obedience to command are enforced in repeated clauses, and the majority of them end with this formula, or some variation of it: "upon pain of death or such other punishment as the offence may deserve." When the Duke of York drafted his own orders for the general maintenance of discipline, he no doubt had the Parliament's laws and ordinances before him. Some of its phrases were adopted, and one of them continued in use into this century--that, namely, which forbids unlawful and rash oaths, cursings, execrations, drunkenness, uncleanness, and other scandalous acts in derogation of God's honour and corruption of good manners. But there was much in the document drawn up by the Parliament which would have been out of place in the duke's instructions. Moreover, it was so much more a general exhortation to good discipline and hard fighting than a body of regulations, that the larger part of it was dropped. The Duke of York himself issued two sets of orders, which were meant to go together and complete one another. The first contains the "general instructions" addressed to each captain, and consists of forty-four Articles. The second is headed, "Orders Established for the well governing of His Majesty's Ships, and Preservation of good order among the respective Commanders, Officers, and Seamen serving His Majesty in the same."