Ou 



frequently come down. The poachers look upon any of their 

 neighbours turning water-keepers as traitors, and persecute not 

 only them, but their families. In some excellent spawning 

 rivers, the lessees cannot prevail on a single individual to act as 

 water-keeper, and thus the salmon are left the undisputed and 

 undeserved prey of the marauders, whose motto is a stick out 

 of the tvood, or a fish out of the water -, is neither sin nor 



crime.* 



It is argued by the opponents of the charters and vested 

 rights of patentee proprietors, that salmon are not royal fish, 

 nor to be classed as such, as Sir John Davies would intimate ; 

 and that all modern English writers agree in limiting the king's 

 right to whales and sturgeons, and that the king (according to 

 Chitty) has no general property in fish ; and that there are 

 certain glances and intimations in the case of the piscary of the 

 Bann, in Sir John Davies' report, as if the fishery in these kinds 

 of royal rivers were not acquirable but by special charter, and 

 that they are acquirable by prescription or usage as royal fish 

 may be. It is also asserted by the opponents of charters that 

 Blackstone states, in his Commentaries, that a free fishery, or 

 exclusive right of fishing in a public river, is also a royal fran- 

 chise, and is considered as such, in all countries where the feudal 

 policy has prevailed : though the making such grants, and by 

 that means appropriating what seems to be unnatural, to restrain 

 the use of running water, was prohibited for the future by King 

 John's Great Charter; and the rivers that were fenced in his time 

 were directed to be laid open, as well as the forests to be dis- 

 forested. This opening was extended by the second and 

 third Charters of Henry III. to those also that were fenced 

 under Richard I., so that a franchise of free fishery ought now 

 to be as old at least as the reign of Henry II. ; and that in the 

 case of the Duke of Devonshire against Hodnet, the Irish judges 

 declared that the Crown could not create an exclusive right of 

 fishery in a navigable river, or other arm of the sea, since the 

 Magna Charta. It is said that, with the exception of Limerick, 



* See Report of Fisheries for 1824. 



