calculated would amount to £100,000 a-year, and which he urged should be devoted to the maintenance of the “Petty Navy Royal.” Dee was not only the first English writer who claimed the sovereignty of the sea and the fisheries for England; he was also the first who attempted to define their boundaries in detail. At the time when he wrote, it appears indeed to have been held in theory by some lawyers that the limit of the English seas extended to the mid-line between England and foreign coasts, except in the case of the Channel, where the water right up to the opposite shore was believed to be under the sovereignty of England. The doctrine, no doubt, was evolved from the opinions of the Italian jurists, whose authority was then very high (see p. 539), and from the political relations with France then and in former times. Two years before Dee published his book, Plowden, an eminent lawyer, acting as counsel in a case concerning the rights on a manor to wreck of the sea, argued for the defendant that “the bounds of England” extended to the middle of the adjoining sea which surrounded the realm, but that the Queen had the exclusive jurisdiction on the sea between England and France by reason of her title to France, and so also with Ireland; whereas in other places, as towards Spain, she had only the moiety. It was the same, said Plowden, with the sea as with great rivers. But while Plowden allowed the “jurisdiction and governance of all things” to the Queen on the sea within the limits stated, he denied to her the right of property in it or in the land under it; it was common to all men, and she could not prohibit any one from fishing in it; the water and the land under it were things of no value, and “the fish are always removable from one place to another.”[185] Dee adopted the same opinion as to the limits, but held, as we have seen, that the fisheries were appropriated. The boundaries of the Queen’s “peculiar seas,” he said, were “in all places to be accounted directly to the myddle seas over betweene the sea-shores of her own kingdom (and of all petty Isles to the same kingdom appertayning) and the opposite sea-shores of all forrein princes: and in all seas lying immediately betweene any two of her own coasts or sea-shores, the whole breadth of the seas over (in such places) is, by all reason of justice, appropriate to her peculiar jurisdiction and sea royalty,” even if the distance in such cases were 1000 miles or more.[186] On the other hand, according to Dee, neighbouring countries were to be allowed the same rights and interests in the moiety of the sea appropriate to their coasts.