then a third between her masts or at her flag. If the foreigner still refused to strike, a broadside was usually poured in, and the vessel might be carried into port and the offender punished. In the reign of Charles II., Spaniards, Dunkirkers, Frenchmen, and other foreigners, were not infrequently brought before the courts and fined for refusing to strike. If a merchant vessel refused to strike until she was shot at, she was compelled to pay to the king’s ship twice the value of the gunpowder and shot expended. In England the custom, no doubt, originated in the Channel, probably in the time of the early Angevin kings, when the opposite coasts were under the same rule; and it is most probable, as formerly said, that it arose in connection with the exercise of jurisdiction over pirates and for securing peaceful commerce. In early times the utmost lawlessness prevailed on the sea: it would be a common duty of the king’s ships to satisfy themselves as to the character of the vessels they encountered, and the lowering of the sails and the coming under the lee, for “visit and search,” might well be a relic of a duty enforced for that purpose. With regard to ships of war, the ceremony appears to have been first confined to the Channel, and was held to be peculiarly a privilege of the admiral of the narrow seas. Thus, when Captain Plumleigh was appointed admiral of a squadron for service in Ireland in 1632, he was ordered by the Admiralty if he met “in any part of the narrow seas with the _Convertive_, in which Captain Pennington commands as admiral of those seas,” to take in his flag, and to “continue it furled whilst in sight of that ship, it being an ancient honour and privilege belonging only to that admiral to carry the flag in the maintop in those seas.”[393] Monson also tells us, in referring to the decision of the Lord High Admiral in Gondomar’s case, above alluded to, that every ship of the king’s serving under an admiral could not demand the striking of the flag when out of sight of the admiral; but the foreign ship, “be he admiral or no, is to strike his top-sail and hoist it again, to any one ship of the king’s that shall meet him.” He further states that any foreign ship or fleet arriving in an English port, or passing by a fort or castle, had to take in their flag three times, and advance it again, unless the English admiral’s ship was in the same harbour, in which case they were to keep it in so long as the admiral was present; “but if any other ship of his Majesty’s be there but the admiral’s, they are not bound to keep in their flag, but only to strike it thrice as aforesaid.” Monson added that he wished, in these later times (the reign of Charles I.), “that his Majesty’s ships would take more authority upon them than is due,” in order to curb the insolence of the French and the Hollander--a wish which, as we shall see, must have been fully gratified. It was against the Dutch that the striking of the flag