FUNCTION AND ORGANIZATION OF PRIZE COURTS 41 
proceed only from the grant of the Crown.” Lord Phillimore 
then added: 
RE 
«But from ancient times a certain portion of those rights were assigned 
to maintain the dignity of the Lord High Admiral; hence arose the 
distinction between droits of the Crown and droits of admiralty. At the 
outbreak of war it was the practice of the Crown to grant its interest in 
any prize taken to the captors thereof—that is, to the officers and men 
of the ship which effected the capture. This left a few cases, which 
will be referred to hereafter, of droits of the Crown which had not been 
granted away; but, putting these aside, the practical distinction was 
between captures which enured for the benefit of the officers and men of 
individual ships of His Majesty's Navy or commissioned privateers, on the 
one hand, and droits of admiralty on the other. 
“When the office of Lord High Admiral ceased to be filled, and the 
Crown in lieu thereof appointed Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, 
droits of admiralty reverted to the Crown, and upon the surrender of the 
hereditary revenues of the Crown which it has been the practice for recent 
Monarchs to make upon their accession, and which surrender by his present 
Majesty is embodied in the Civil List Act, 1910 (10 Edw. 7 & 1 Geo. 5, 
c. 28), passed to the Exchequer. Hence arose the somewhat paradoxical 
position that droits of the Crown went to the Navy, and droits of admiralty 
to the Exchequer. Before this war the practice was, as already stated, that 
each captured prize enured, subject to any rights of the flag officer, for the 
benefit of the officers and men of the capturing ship or ships; but at the 
beginning of this war the Crown did not make the usual grant. The Naval 
Prize Act and the Proclamation thereunder have constituted the droits of 
the Crown one fund ‘for the entire benefit and encouragement of the 
officers and men of our naval and marine forces.” ”? 
Then taking up in turn the four cases submitted to the tribu- 
nal, Lord Phillimore laid down the following rules which were to 
serve as guiding principles in the decisions of future cases: 
First, the proceeds of condemned goods brought into British 
ports in the ordinary course of a voyage without any pressure, 
direct or indirect, on the part of British ships, that is, without 
the “hand of violence,” to use the language of Lord Stowell, being 
laid upon them, and which were seized by the customs authori- 
ties, were to be treated as they had always been, as “droits of 
admiralty,” and were not therefore payable into the naval prize 
fund. The same was true of condemned goods brought in by 
vessels which had diverted voluntarily to British ports and of 
vessels which called at British ports for bunker coal. 
1 The whole subject of prize droits is luminously discussed in its historical 
aspects in Rothery’s Prize Droits, Being a Report to H. M. Treasury on 
Droits of the Crown and of Admiralty in Time of War, revised and anno- 
tated by BE. S. Roscoe (London, 1915). See also an article 3 Thos. Baty 
entitled Prize Droits, 32 Law Quarterly Review (1916), pp. ff.