Of greater interest and importance than this question of the lowering of the sail or the ordinance of John is the claim put forward by the Plantagenet kings to sovereign lordship and jurisdiction in the “sea of England,” for the maintenance of peaceful navigation and commerce,--a claim which may still be read in some of the rolls of Edward I. and Edward III. The great importance of these documents for the English pretension to dominion of the sea in the seventeenth century was shown by the fact that Boroughs, Selden, Coke, and Prynne all quote freely from them, Selden especially turning to them again and again for fresh quotation and argument. They are the more interesting since the claim to the sovereignty of the narrow sea in the reign of Edward I. could not, as Boroughs points out, be based on possession of both shores; the king was not then _Dominus utriusque ripæ_, as when Normandy belonged to the English crown. The rolls in question are still preserved in the Record Office, and the earlier parchments appear to have been collected together in the reign of Edward III., in connection with the consultations that the judges held in 1338 on the subject of the maritime laws.[65] The documents were first brought into prominence by Lord Coke[66] and Selden,[67] both of whom published parts of them. The handwriting belongs to the beginning of the fourteenth century, and its contents show that it must have been drawn up after 1304 and before 1307, in which year Edward I. died. The events that preceded may be summarised as follows. During the war between Edward I. and Philip the Fair of France it was concluded between them in the year 1297 that notwithstanding the war there should be freedom of commerce on both sides, or a truce for merchants, known as sufferance of war, and in the following year certain persons were appointed by both kings to take cognisance of things done contrary to this truce, and to pass their judgments according to the law of merchants and the tenor of the sufferance referred to.[68] On 20th May 1303 a treaty of peace and alliance was signed at Paris,[69] the first article of which embodied a declaration of amity and mutual defence of all their respective rights, and the third that each would abstain from assisting or succouring the enemies of the other. A little later in the same year four agents or commissioners were appointed by Edward and four by Philip to hear complaints and decide upon them, and the English members were instructed to inquire into the “encroachments, injuries, and offences committed on either side during the truce or sufferance between us and the said King of France, on the coasts of the sea of England and other neighbouring coasts, and also towards Normandy and other coasts of the sea more remote.”[70] To these commissioners the following joint complaint or libel bears to have been submitted on behalf of England and certain mariners of other nations, charging one