Note 65 — Chapter I · EARLY HISTORY.

Chancery Rolls, Misc. Treaties and Diplomatic, Bdle. 14, No. 15. It is endorsed De Superioritate Maris Angliæ et Jure Officii Admirallatus in eodem. There are several copies on separate membranes in the bundle—viz., 1, 8, 12, 14, 15,—and they differ from one another, as indicated in the transcript in Appendix A. Prynne (Animadversions, 109) says that besides the roll in the Tower from which Lord Coke and Selden quoted, he discovered “an ancient copy of it in the White Tower Chapple,” and among the Admiralty papers is a memorandum by Nicholas, undated, but before 1631, on the records in the Tower respecting the Laws of Oleron and the Sovereignty of the Seas, in which he says that “in ye little closset there” a record in French exists, dated in the time of Edw. I. or II., referring to the depredations of Grimbald. There is also a transcript in a collection of MSS. in the British Museum (Harleian, 4314) and a translation of the roll, in a hand of the seventeenth century, in MS. Otho. E. ix. fol. 14.