neighbourhood of the island of May. Anderson speaks of the Netherlanders resorting to Scotland so early as about the year 836, for the purpose of buying salted fish of the Scotch fishermen;[1] but his authority for this statement is not known. Mr. Macpherson considers the passage in the Cottonian Manuscript to be "the very first authentic and positive notice of a fishery, having any claim to consideration as a commercial object, upon the North British coast." He also doubts if it be not " the earliest notice of English fishermen going so far from their own ports on a fishing voyage, if they were indeed subjects of England; for in the age of the writer here quoted the Scottish subjects on the south side of the Frith of Forth were called English."[2]
The long reign and able and successful government of Henry II. not only enabled the commerce of England to recover from the depression under which it had languished during the whole of the turbulent and miserable reign of his predecessor, but eventually raised it to an extent and importance which it had certainly never attained either since the Conquest or before it, at least since the departure of the Romans. The intercourse, in particular between this country and France, must immediately have been placed upon a new footing, and no doubt greatly augmented, both by the restoration of the old connexion with Normandy, and still more by Henry's acquisition through his marriage of the great Duchy of Aquitaine, which gave the English crown the dominion of all the French coast from Picardy to the Pyrenees. Some years afterwards the conquest of Ireland, and the establishment in that island of a numerous English population, must have also considerably extended the range, or at least added to the activity, of English commerce in that other direction.
In several contemporary writers we find notices of the commerce of London, and also of other English cities, in this reign. Henry II., in a charter which is without date, but which was probably granted soon after he came
