orce of
South Britain, tend by their testimony to confirm the opinions we are
here disposed to adopt. In every successive reign, the annals of which
supply any information on the subject, the evidence is clear that the
rulers of England did not contemplate the establishment of a fleet
belonging to the nation as its own property. The tenures, moreover, by
which many maritime towns held their charters, whilst they evince the
importance attached to this department of an island's political power,
coincide altogether with the view we are taking. The obligation, for
example, under which the Cinque Ports lay of furnishing, whenever
required, fifty ships, manned each with twenty-four mariners, for
fifteen days, enabled the monarch indeed to calculate, from the
fulfilment of such stipulated engagements, on a certain supply,
adequate, it may be, to meet the usual demand; but at the same time it
implied that he had no fleet of his own on which he could rely. Whilst
the limited extent to which ships could be supplied by the most rigid
exaction of the terms of those tenures compelled the state, on (p. 126)
any occasion when extraordinary efforts were requisite, to depend
upon the varying and precarious supply produced by the system of
impressment.[98]

[Footnote 98: See Hardy's Introduction to the Close
Rolls, and Lord Lyttelton's History of Henry II.]

When Henry ascended the throne, he found still in full operation this
old system of our maritime proceedings. Whenever, as we have seen, an
occasion required the transport of a considerable body of men from our
havens, or forces to be embarked for the protection of our shores and
of our merchants, in addition to the contingent, which could be
exacted from various chartered towns, the King's government was
obliged either to hire ships from foreign countries, or to lay
forcible hands by way of impressment on the vessels of his own
subjects. A few instances, more or less closely connected with the
immediate subject of our present inquiry, will serve to illustrate
that point.

When, for example, Henry's great grandfather Edward III. was preparing
for the expedition, which he headed in person, intended to relieve
Rochelle, his grandfather John of Gaunt, February 10, 1372, as we find
by the records of the Duchy of Lancaster, commanded all his stewards
in Wales to assist Walter de Wodeburgh, serjeant-at-arms, appointed by
the King to arrest all