much easier to work a round shield than even such figures as are here intended to pass for men. We must plainly be content with as many men as she of the needle can manage. The accession of William the Conqueror, owing to the contempt which the Norman had of commerce, and the little care he took to protect or honour the merchant--(little would he have dreamed of ennobling, as did the Saxon, the man who had made three voyages!)--must have retarded the progress of England as a naval power. Land and castles, forests and hunting-fields, were all the Normans thought of. But though chivalry was no friend to commerce or to navigation, the crusading spirit which seized upon all the knights of Europe, gave fresh employment and a new impetus to our marine. It is thus that the reign of Richard Cœur-de-Lion came to be an important epoch in our naval history. His expedition to the Holy Land incurred the necessity of building many and large vessels; voyages were to be performed to the Mediterranean; and the British navy made its first conquest in distant seas--the isle of Cyprus. “The English navy at this time seems to have consisted chiefly, if not entirely, of large galleys, afterwards called galliasses and galiones, small and light galleys for war, and of _busses_, which were large ships of burden, with a bluff bow and bulging sides, chiefly used for the conveyance of troops, stores, provisions, and merchandise. No drawing or description of English ships before the reign of King Edward II. justifies the idea that they had ever more than one mast; but some of the busses in the fleet which accompanied King Richard I. from Messina to Cyprus, are said to have had ‘a three-fold expansion of sails’--an ambiguous expression, which may mean that they had three sails on one mast, or that the sails were affixed to two or more masts.”--(P. 75.)