Such are the cases which were adduced to prove the rights of the English crown to exclusive fishing in the British seas. On the other side there is an overwhelming body of testimony to show that the fishery was free. It may be noted in the first place that Bracton and the other early English lawyers, unlike those of the seventeenth century, made no claim for an exclusive fishery. They merely propounded the Roman law that the sea and the shores of the sea were common to all; that the right of fishing in rivers and ports was likewise free to all; and that animals, _feræ naturæ_, including fish, belonged to no person. The law laid down by Bracton and the others was not, of course, international; but if it had been in agreement with English jurisprudence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (as it was made to be in the seventeenth) to consider the sea fisheries as the property of the crown, that would have been declared, because Bracton was embodying the customary law of England, and adopted Roman law only when that failed him. He is careful to state that wreck of the sea and “great fish,” such as sturgeons and whales, “belong to the lord the king himself by reason of his privilege” or prerogative, precisely on the ground that Callis, Coke, Selden, and Hale claimed the sea fisheries generally for the crown in the seventeenth century. Had any such right existed or been thought of in the reign of Henry III., Bracton could not have failed to incorporate it, since the king placed the archives and everything necessary at his disposal to enable him to embody the common law of England.[116] So also there is nothing in the rolls of Edward I. and Edward III., which deal with the sovereignty of the sea, to indicate any claim to the fisheries; nor is there in the Admiralty ordinances and regulations in the _Black Book_, although it was part of the duties of the admirals to supervise the sea fisheries and to enforce the laws relating to them. But the assertion that the fisheries were free in those early times does not depend upon negative testimony. Liberty of fishing was guaranteed in various treaties concluded with foreign nations from the middle of the fourteenth century until the end of the sixteenth. The first of these was made in the reign of Edward III., and it was in keeping with the liberal policy of that monarch in regard to the promotion of foreign commerce. It was almost a necessity, for English fishermen were by themselves unable to meet the home demand for fish. Fish caught by foreigners were regularly imported into England, and such importation was encouraged by the crown and by Parliament until after the Reformation. Foreign fishermen were also encouraged, as is shown by the mandates of Edward I. and Edward II. above alluded to, and by many others.