Legal Quays
United Kingdom legislation
The Legal Quays of England were created by the Act of Frauds or Customs Act 1558 (1 Eliz. 1. c. 11), an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom enacted in 1559 during the reign of Elizabeth I of England. It established new rules for customs in England in order to boost the Crown's finances. One of its most important provisions was the establishment of a rule that it was illegal to land or load goods anywhere other than authorised Legal Quays in London and other ports, under the supervision of customs officers. The legislation also set out which towns were authorised to act as ports.
Origins
The act was enacted largely at the instigation of Sir William Paulet, 1st Marquess of Winchester and long-serving Lord Treasurer. It established the Legal Quays and appointed commissioners to designate such quays at every port in the realm. At the most important port by far, London, Paulet himself was appointed along with Sir Richard Sackville and Sir Walter Mildmay, the Under-Treasurer and Chancellor of the Exchequer respectively, to undertake "the limitation, assigning and appointing of all the quays and wharves and places appertaining and belonging to the Port of London for the loading and lauding, discharging, unloading and laying on land thereof wares and merchandises".
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This entry incorporates text from “Legal Quays” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.