ordinance promulgated with the intention of keeping down the price of herrings, had actually raised it. Wherefore "we," concludes the new statute, "perceiving the mischiefs and grievances aforesaid, by the advice and assent of our parliament, will and grant, that it shall be lawful to every man, of what condition that he may be, merchant or other, to buy herring openly, and not privily, at such price as may be agreed betwixt him and the seller of the same herring." This failure, however, did not deter the parliament two years after from fixing a price for poultry (by the statute 37 Edw. III. c. 3); but the next year that also was repealed by the 38 Edw. III. St. 1, c. 2, which ordained that all people, in regard to buying and selling and the other matters treated of in the preceding statute, should be as free as they were before it passed, and as they were in the time of the king's grandfather and his other good progenitors.
Notwithstanding, however, the impediments and embarrassments occasioned by all this blind and contradictory legislation, English commerce undoubtedly made a very considerable progress in the course of the space of nearly two centuries included within the period now under review.
The directing property of the magnet, and its application in the mariner's compass, appear to have become known in Europe towards the end of the twelfth century, and the instrument was probably in common use among navigators soon after the middle of the thirteenth. Both Chaucer the English, and Barbour the Scottish poet, allude familiarly to the compass in the latter part of the fourteenth century. Barbour tells us that Robert Bruce and his companions, when crossing, during the night, from Arran to the coast of Carrick, in 1307, steered by the light of the fire they saw on the shore,—"for they na needle had nor stane:" the words seem to imply rather that they were by accident without a compass, than that the instrument was not then known. Chaucer, in his prose treatise on the Astrolabe, says that the sailors reckon thirty-two parts (or points) of the horizon; evidently referring to the present division of the card, of
