From the facts set forth in the preceding pages (and they are supported by a number of less important details with which we shall not weary the readers' attention) it may be inferred that national flags came into being during the course of the twelfth century and had a twofold origin. In the case of the smaller states organised on a popular basis under continually changing Consuls or magistrates, they arose from the necessity of having some clearly recognisable rallying point in action that was not personal and therefore subject to frequent change. This was supplied either by a common devotion to a particular saint, as at Genoa and Venice, or by the adoption of one particular colour, as at Pisa, or in the solitary case of Rome, the greatest of all in wealth of historic memories, by the re-adoption of an ancient classic device, the S.P.Q.R. of the Senatus Populusque Romanus. In the larger states, which from their very size were at that period necessarily organised on a feudal basis, the banner of the sovereign lord became the national flag. This was what happened in France and (as will appear in the next chapter) also happened in England. In this, the most memorable advance in the use of flags, it was the city-states of Italy that led the way; and it was the great development during the Crusades of the activity of the maritime states of Genoa, Venice and Pisa that spread the example throughout Europe. By the end of the thirteenth century the maritime city-states of northern Europe, which had arisen to prominence in consequence of the development of their shipping under the influence of the Crusades, had begun to make regulations governing the use of their flags at sea. Thus the maritime laws of Hamburg, to which Pardessus[61] assigns a date prior to 1270, contained a provision to the effect that every burgher of that town should fly at sea a red flag[62], under penalty of three silver marks, unless the flag had been lowered in time of danger, and a like penalty was to be inflicted on any stranger who flew this flag, on plaint being made against him. A similar provision appears in the Maritime Law of Riga of the same date, with the difference that the flag is to bear a white cross, the colour of the field not being stated, though at a later date it is given as black. The Laws of Lubeck contain a like provision in 1299, the "Lubeschen Vloghel[63]" being presumably the flag, white and red in two horizontal bands, flown by that town until its absorption into the German Empire. Two years earlier, in 1297, appeared the first recorded provision for the bearing of an English flag at sea, and we may therefore, with the close of the thirteenth century, quit the wide field of research that we have been attempting to survey for a more detailed investigation of the history of British national flags. FOOTNOTES: [1] I.e. Flag (Danish and Norse), Flagg (Swedish), Flagge (German), Vlag (Dutch). [2] See Plate II, fig. 10.