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no fishery in the kingdom can show a prescriptive title, or prior 

 to the first year of Richard I. ; and that all the royal grants by 

 Elizabeth, James I. and Charles, are mere waste paper, and 

 protections of monopoly. But Sir John Davies, whose high 

 attainments as a lawyer, and character as a man, have been 

 universally acknowledged, in his Report of the Royal Fishery of 

 the Bann, says : " That in this river, about two leagues from the 

 sea, where the stream is navigable, there is a rich fishery of 

 salmon, which was parcel of the ancient inheritance of the 

 Crown, as appears by several pipe rolls and surveys, where it is 

 found in charge as a several fishery, but now it is parted (granted) 

 by the king to the city of London in fee farm. The profits of this 

 fishery have been taken and shared among the Irish lords for 

 the space of two hundred years past, who have made incursions 

 and intrusions on the possession of the Crown in Ulster, and 

 have possessed by the strong hand the territories adjoining the 

 river Bann, till the first year of the reign of our lord the king 

 who now is."* 



The learned judge, Baron Pennefather, in his charge to the 

 jury, at the fishery trial in Lifford, in 1835, against the Rev. 

 Mr. Staples, said, *' The question is, what passed by this 

 patent, (of the Crown to the Irish Society,) and to what extent 

 the grant was made. It appears by an inquisition taken in the 

 45th year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, that the legal right 

 in these fisheries was found to exist in the Crown ; and this 

 right then existing is the foundation of the plaintiff's claim 

 here. In thus calling your attention to this right of the 

 Crown, I am not called upon to discuss any of the topics intro- 

 duced, as to whether the Crown, since Magna Charta, had the 

 power to create a several fishery in a navigable river ; because 

 I think this inquisition of Elizabeth must now be taken as 

 evidence, that whatever it finds as then belonging to the Crown, 

 was properly found to be in the Crown. The Charter grants 

 * all the water, stream, or rivulet, of the Bann, from the high 



* From a work entitled Discovery of the True Cause why Ireland was 

 never subdued until the Beginning of the Reign of James. By Sir John 

 Davies. 



