Digital Library V: A History of the Foreshore and the Law Relating Thereto (1888)

In the common-law world, historical and legal argument are frequently intertwined, a phenomenon reflected in the title of this week's addition to the digital library of historical environmental law, Stuart A. Moore's A History of the Foreshore and the Law Relating Thereto, published in London by Stevens & Haynes in 1888 (available on the Internet Archive and in Gale's The Making of Modern Law).

Moore's work was part of a wave of antiquarian interest in early writings on property rights in the seashore (today this topic would be labeled "public trust doctrine") that seems to have been motivated largely by legal and economic issues at stake during Britain's industrial revolution. So in addition to his treatment of a legal manuscript by the Elizabethan-era mathematician Thomas Digges and other early sources, Moore reproduced in his work "A New Treatise by Sir Matthew Hale, from a MS. in his Handwriting", which Moore believed to be an early version of the influential De Jure Maris and other works by Hale published by Francis Hargrave in the late eighteenth century. And, as Moore explained in his introduction, the whole work was born out of a project to issue a new edition of Robert Gream Hall's Essay on the Rights of the Crown and the Privileges of the Subject in the Sea Shores of the Realm, first published in 1830:
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