The term, the Narrow Sea or the Narrow Seas, was applied at different times or by different writers to very various areas. In its original and more restricted sense it denoted the Straits of Dover; sometimes it signified only the southern sea or the Channel proper; at other times it included also the sea south of the Wash and the Texel; and yet again it was synonymous with the whole of the British seas in which dominion was claimed. In the political poem, _The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye_, which was written about 1436 with the object of rousing the nation to the paramount duty of “keeping the sea,” the narrow sea is spoken of as lying between Dover and Calais,[10] as it is also in the records of the Privy Council for 1545, which mention the appointment of ships to “kepe the passage of the Narrow Seas.”[11] Later in the same century, and very generally in the seventeenth century, it was used to include the Channel, as when the Earl of Salisbury in 1609 referred to “his Majesties narrow seas between England and France,”[12] and likewise the sea off the Dutch coast; and at this period the Admiralty usually distinguished between the guard of the Narrow Seas and that of the North Sea. But in other cases, and very commonly in the seventeenth century, the Narrow Sea was equivalent to the marginal sea along the whole coast or to the “British Seas.” Thus in one of James’s proclamations in 1604 for preventing abuses in and about “the narrow seas,” they are referred to as being commonly called the four English Seas, and this was repeated in a proclamation of Charles I. in 1633. So also Lord Chief Justice Hale in his treatise, _De Jure Maris_, describes the narrow sea, adjoining to the coast of England, as part of the waste and demesnes and dominions of the King of England; and in another work he speaks of the narrow sea lying between us and France and the Netherlands.