the lord, and anyone receiving him otherwise was to be punished. If anyone transgressed the regulations he might be excommunicated. All offences not specifically mentioned were to be dealt with by the Archbishop of Rouen and the other dignitaries already alluded to.
Other naval laws of Richard, not especially connected to the Eastern Expedition, deserve notice here. One, made early in the reign at Grimsby, enacted that if the admiral, by the king's command, arrested any ships for the king's service, and if he or his lieutenant certified the arrest, or returned into Chancery a list of the ships arrested, neither the master nor the owner of the vessels should plead against the return that the admiral and his lieutenant were of record. And if any vessel broke the arrest, and the master or owner were indicted, and convicted by a jury, the ship should be confiscated to the king[1]
In the course of the expedition, Richard granted two charters of some importance to the maritime future of his country. One, dated at Messina, altered the law of wreck, and, after declaring that the king relinquished all claim to wreck throughout his dominions, enacted that shipwrecked persons who should come alive to land should retain all their goods, and that the property of one dying on board ship should pass to his heirs, the king having his chattels only in the event of there being no other heirs.[2] The other, also dated at Messina, on March 27th, 1191, granted new privileges to the inhabitants of Rye and Winchelsea, in return for the full service of two ships, to make up the number of twenty ships due from the port of Hastings. This charter had the effect of putting the two "ancient towns" on very nearly the same footing of privilege as the Cinque Ports proper, Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover, and Sandwich.[3]
But after all, as Nicolas[4] says, the most memorable of Richard's maritime laws was the code known to jurists as the Laws of Oleron.[5] Most of it had been already enacted by his mother, Queen Eleanor, under the name of the "Roll of Oleron." The Laws, which include forty-seven articles, were not expressly intended to apply to the English Navy, but rather to vessels of the
