A WHALE AT MERSEY IN 1299. 151
that term would be applied by zoologists at the present day,
while the statement that an empty cask (dolium vacuum) was
provided for its removal from Mersey Island to Stanford renders
it more probable that the creature was, not a whale, but a
porpoise, more especially as the capture took place in the month
of May.
Two slight misprints in the Latin extract may be corrected,
namely, cum expens' unius hominis equitio should read hominis
equitis, and in the footnote eadem balaena instead of balona. Mr.
Waller criticising the expression usque Staunford ad curiam, says
it is not apparent what court is meant. Probably we are to
understand that in the month of May, 1299, the King and his
court happened to be sojourning at Stanford, and so thither the
so-called "whale" was carried as "a royal fish" to the
Sovereign.
A discussion of this point would carry us too far from the
subject, but it may be stated that from the Quo Warranto Rolls,
temp. Edw. I., it appears that a stranded whale belonged as "a
royal fish" to the king, but might be claimed as a "wreck of
the sea" by any subject able to prove that he and his ancestors
had been "immemorially in seizin of all manner of wreck of the
sea, to wit royal fish, wrecked ship, and of all other things which
would be called wreck of the sea" Whether at the present day
in a claim against the Crown for a stranded whale a plea would
be of any avail which averred that "a whale is not a fish,'
would be a question for the lawyers to settle it would at all
events give rise to an amusing conflict of opinion between the
law-officers of the Crown and the zoological experts who might be
called as witnesses on behalf of the claimant.
An earlier instance of the occurrence off the Essex coast of a
cetacean of some kind is mentioned by Mathew Paris in his
Chronica Majora, wherein we read of a whale which, coming up
the Thames in the year 1240, could scarcely pass between the
piers of the bridges, and was driven up the river as far as
Mortlake. "Ad manerium autem regis quod Mortelac dicitur,
insequentibus multis navigatoribus cum unfibus et balistis et
arcubus perveniens, ibidem jaculorum ictibus vix est peremptus."
This may have been a small Rorqual, but from its ability to pass
the bridges is more likely to have been a Porpoise. An Essex
specimen of Rudolphi's Rorqual (Balaenoptera borealis) was captured