on the sea coast, wreck has almost within modern times ceased to be a perquisite of either, or to enrich the casual finder at the expense of its rightful owner. The history of the law as sketched below will indicate how this has come about.
History.—Of old it seems to have been the general rule in the civilized maritime countries of Europe that the right to wreck belonged to the sovereign, and formed part of the royal revenue. This was so under the Roman, French and feudal law; and in England the common law set out in the statute De praerogativa regis (17 Edw. II., 1324), provided that the king has wreck of the sea, whales and sturgeons taken in the sea and elsewhere within the kingdom, except in certain places privileged by the king. This right, which it is said had for its object the prevention of the practice of destroying the property of the shipwrecked, was, however, gradually relaxed; and the owner of wreck was allowed to recover it if he made claim to it, and gave proof of his ownership within a certain time—fixed at a year or a year and a day alike by a decree of Antonine the Great, the feudal law, the general maritime law, the law of France and English law. Richard I. released his prerogative right to wreck to the extent of allowing children, or if there were none, brothers and sisters of a perishing owner, to have his goods; and Henry III., by a charter of 1236, allowed the owner of wrecked goods to have his property again if he claimed within three months, provided that any man or beast escaped from the ship. The statute of Westminster the First (1276, 3 Edw. I.) provided that where a man, a dog or a cat escape alive out of the ship, such ship or barge or anything in it shall not be adjudged wreck, but the goods shall be saved and kept by view of the sheriff, coroner or the king's bailiff, and delivered into the hands of such as are of the town where the goods were found, so that if any one sue for those goods and prove that they were his, or perished within his keeping, within a year and a day, they shall be restored to him without delay, and if not they shall remain to the king or to such others to whom the wreck belonged. In 1277 the statute De officio coronatoris made provision for the safe custody of wreck, but coroners were relieved of their duties in respect of wreck by the Coroners Act 1887. An act of 1353 provided for the delivery to the merchants of goods coming to land which may not be said to be wreck, on payment of salvage. In Scotland, a statute of Alexander II., similar to that of Westminster, declared that v/here any creature escapes alive from a wrecked vessel, the goods cast away are not accounted wreck, but are to be preserved by the sheriff for those who within a year shall prove their property therein; otherwise they shall escheat to the crown. For a long time the view of English law was that the right to recover wrecked property depended on the fact of a live creature escaping, though in Hale's words, “because it was lex odiosa to add affliction to the afflicted, it was bound up with as many limits and circumstances, and restricted to as narrow a compass as might be”; and the admiralty records illustrate the statement. Thus in 1382 the prior of Wymondham claimed as wreck a ship which came ashore with no one on board, the men having left her for fear of their lives because of an enemy ship which was about to capture her; but the king's council, before whom it came, by certiorari from the admiral of the north, decided against the claim. In 1543, ships grounded on the Goodwins were held to be waif and wreck, although their crews to save their lives made their way to shore; and in 1637 a ship in the Cinque Ports was proceeded against in admiralty and condemned, “no man or dog being on board, but only a dead man with his head shot off.” Upon the institution of the office of lord high admiral early in the 15th or at the close of the 14th century, it became usual for the crown to grant to the lord admiral by his patent of appointment, amongst other proficua et commoditates appertaining to his office, wreck of the sea; and when, early in the reign of Henry VIII., vice-admirals of the coast were created, the lord admiral by patent under his own hand delegated to them his rights and duties in the several counties, including those in connexion with wreck. He did not, however, part with the whole of his emoluments; his vice-admirals were required to render an account of the proceeds of wreck, and to hand over to him a part, usually one-half, of their gains. This system, depending not upon any statute, but apparently upon an arrangement between the lord-admiral and his vice-admirals, continued until the year 1846. In that year an act (9 & 10 Vict. c. 99) was passed forbidding the vice-admirals to intermeddle with wreck, and it required the receivers of droits of admiralty to receive all wreck from the finders and to detain it for twelve calendar months; at the end of that period it was to be sold and the proceeds carried to the credit of the consolidated fund. The transfer to this fund of the hereditary casual revenues of the crown had previously been effected by legislation in the first years of the reigns of William IV. and Victoria, by which the civil list was instituted. The last lord-admiral, however, who beneficially enjoyed the proceeds of wreck was the duke of Buckingham in the reign of Charles I. Prince George of Denmark, Queen Anne's husband and lord-admiral, took wreck by his patent, but by a collateral instrument he surrendered the greater part of the revenues of his office to the crown. Notwithstanding this arrangement, the vice-admirals of counties, who, in the absence of a lord high admiral, received their appointments sometimes from the crown and sometimes from the commissioners of the admiralty, appear to have taken the whole or part of the proceeds of wreck until the passing of the act of 1846. The ancient law by which the unfortunate owner was deprived of his property, if no living thing escaped from the wreck, had during the 16th and 17th centuries been gradually but tacitly relaxed; it required, however, a decision of Lord Mansfield and the king's bench in 1771 (Hamilton v. Davis, 5 Burr. 2732) to settle the law definitely that, whether or no any living creature escaped, the property in a wreck remains in the owner. In Scotland it seems that the same law had been laid down in 1725, and there are indications that upon the continent of Europe there had before this date been a relaxation of the old law in the same direction. As early as 1269 a treaty with Norway provides that owners of ships wrecked upon the coasts of England or Norway should not be deprived of their goods (Rym. Foed. 1450). The system under which the lord-admiral and the vice-admirals of counties had for more than three centuries taken charge of wreck never worked well. Their interest was directly opposed to their duty; for it was to the interest of every one concerned, except the owners and crews of ships in distress, that nothing should land alive. Apart from this, the system discouraged legitimate salvors. The admirals and vice-admirals had by degrees assumed that all salvage operations were exclusively their business; they took possession of wreck brought or cast ashore, whether it was legal wreck or not, and this often gave rise to conflicts with outside working salvors. It was not until the 17th century that working salvors established the right, which they now have, to a lien upon property saved as a security for adequate remuneration of their exertions in saving it; and if the vice-admirals restored to its owners wreck that had come to their hands, they did so only upon payment of extravagant demands for salvage, storage and often legal expenses. A curious side light is thrown upon their practices by the case of an English ship that went ashore on the coast of Prussia in 1743. Frederick the Great restored her to her owners, but before doing so he exacted from them a bond for the full value of ship and cargo, and the condition of the bond was that the owners would within six months produce a certificate under seal of the English admiralty that by the law of England no “salvage” was payable to the crown or to the admiral of England in the like case of a Prussian ship going ashore upon an English coast. The records of the admiralty court show that Frederick's action in this case was intended as a protest, not against the payment of a fair reward to salvors of Prussian ships, but against exactions by English vice-admirals and their officers. Stories of wilful wrecking of ships and of even more evil deeds are probably exaggerations, but modern research has authenticated sufficient abuses to show that further legislation was necessary to regulate the taking possession of wreck and ships in distress by “sea-coasters.” Previously to the passing of the act of 1846 the only substantial protection against plunder which owners of a wrecked ship could get was to apply to the admiralty judge for a commission enabling them or their agents to take possession of what came ashore; but to obtain such a commission took time and cost money, and before the commissioners arrived at the scene of the wreck a valuable cargo would have disappeared and been dispersed through the country. Plunder of wrecks was common, and the crowds that collected for the purpose set law at defiance. The vice-admirals, even if they had been able, did little to protect the ship wrecked. Complaints from the lord-admiral that they neglected to render accounts of their profits were constant; and although the crown and the lord-admiral profited little by wreck, there is reason to think that the gains of vice-admirals and their officers, and also of landowners and dwellers on the coast, were more considerable. Many of the vice-admirals' accounts of the 17th and following centuries are extant. Most of them are for trifling sums, but occasionally the amounts are considerable. A vice-admiral for Cornwall charges himself in his account for the years 1628-1634 with a sum of £29,253, and in 1624 the duke of Buckingham found it worth his while to buy out the rights of the warden of the Cinque Ports over wreck within his jurisdiction for £1000 in addition to an annuity of £500 for the warden's life. At the close of the 17th century the vice-admirals were required to make affidavits as to the amount of their gains; in 1709 twenty of them swore that their office was worth less than £50 in the year.
The right of the warden of the Cinque Ports to wreck, above alluded to, was derived from charters granted to the ports by Edward I. and his successors; many other seaports enjoyed a similar right under early charters. It would seem that these rights were of some value, for in 1829 the little towns of Dunwich and Southwold litigated at a cost of £1000 the question whether a tub of whisky picked up at sea belonged to the admiralty jurisdiction of the one town or the other; and the town of Yarmouth is said to have spent no less than £7000 upon a similar question. It was partly in order to put an end to all dealings with wreck by local admiralty courts that the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 was passed, abolishing all of them, except that of the Cinque Ports.
Grants of wreck to individuals are earlier than those to towns. Even before the conquest it seems to have been not unusual for grantees from the crown of lands adjoining the sea to get the franchise of wreck included in their grants. A charter purporting to be of the year 1023 contains a grant by King Canute to the abbot of Canterbury of wreck found at sea below low-water mark as far as a
