The language of the ordinance is worthy of close attention with regard to the claim to sovereignty in the narrow sea. Selden says that the ordinance shows it was held to be treason for any ship whatever not to acknowledge the dominion of the king of England in his own seas by lowering sails, and that the king prescribed penalties for infraction of the rule, just as if a crime were committed in some part of his territory on land.[63] In 1201 John still possessed both shores of the Channel, a circumstance which, according to the ideas of the time, conferred on him special rights in regard to it; and though the ordinance contains no qualification of the general term “at sea,” it is probable that it applied in particular, and at first perhaps exclusively, to the waters between the two shores. There is nothing to show whether the ordinance applied to or was enforced against the war vessels of other princes navigating the narrow sea, which was the principal feature of the rule in later times. From the terms used it is probable that it applied only to merchant vessels,--a supposition that agrees with its place in the _Black Book_ at the end of the articles entitled the Laws of Oleron, or the laws of the mercantile marine; and it was to be enforced only in voyages appointed by the Council. As already mentioned, it is reasonable to suppose that the lowering of the sail at the demand of a king’s ship was to enable a suspected vessel to be overhauled, and the king’s officers to be satisfied whether it was engaged in piracy or in lawful trade. Until the sixteenth century there is scarcely any evidence to show that the “right of the flag,” as it came to be called, was enforced even in the Channel. The record of one such incident, however, exists, which occurred in 1402, in the reign of Henry IV.,--and thus, it is interesting to note, before the oldest extant manuscript containing John’s ordinance was written,--and, curiously, the place where the lowering of the sails was demanded was not the Channel but the North Sea. In the year mentioned, the town of Bruges complained to the king and Council that a poor fisherman of Ostend, named John Willes, along with another from Briel, while fishing for herrings in the North Sea, had been captured by an English vessel and taken into Hull, notwithstanding that they were unarmed--a remark which is significant--and had lowered their sails at the moment the English had called to them.[64] It is singular that the earliest record of the “ceremony” refers to the humble herring-boats of Flanders. Later on we shall see that the lowering of top-sails and the striking of the flag became a burning question in international politics.