On the east coast, where the Dutch carried on their great herring-fishing from busses, there is evidence that a limit was early fixed within which they were not allowed to fish, but no contemporary records relating to it appear to have been preserved. It is probable that an arrangement was come to between them and the Scottish fishermen, possibly in the reign of James V. or even earlier, by which they were not to fish within sight of land. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the question of unrestricted fishing was raised in an acute form, there was a remarkable unanimity of opinion in Scotland that the ancient and established custom was that foreigners were not allowed to carry on their operations within a “land-kenning” of the coast,--that is, not nearer than where they could discern the land from the top of their masts. This distance was usually placed at fourteen miles, but sometimes a double land-kenning, of twenty-eight miles, was claimed; and we shall see that the former distance was embodied in the Draft Treaty of Union with England in 1604, as well as proposed to the States-General as a provisional limit in 1619 (see p. 192), and declared by Parliament and the Privy Council of Scotland to be the bounds of the “reserved waters” belonging to Scotland. Welwood, a Scottish lawyer who wrote at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, states that before his time, after “bloody quarrels” about sea affairs between the Scots and the Hollanders, the disputes were arranged on the understanding that in future the Hollanders were to keep at least eighty miles from the coast of Scotland, which, he says, they did for a long time. If they were driven nearer by stress of weather they paid a tax or tribute at the port of Aberdeen, where a castle was built for this and other reasons. This tax, he adds, was paid until by frequent dissensions at home and the audacity of the Hollanders the right was lost.[154] There is no very satisfactory evidence to show in how far the statements of Welwood were in accordance with the facts. In the records of the Privy Council a case is mentioned which might be interpreted in another way. In 1587 two English ships belonging to Shields, coming from the “easter seas” laden with fresh fish and bound for England, were seized and brought into port by one Thomas Davidson of Crail, apparently on the plea that they had been fishing too near the shore. The owners contended that the fish had been caught “upon the main sea, outwith his Majesty’s dominions, where not only they but the subjects of all other princes had had a continual trade and fishing in all times bygone past the memory of man.” But even, it was argued on their behalf, if the fish had been caught within his Majesty’s waters, still, in respect of the “continual trade” which strangers had had there in all time past, “there being no inhibition made or published to the contrary as yet,”