SALMON LEGISLATION. 135 



unfairly or too severely in respect to machinery, as by 

 engines more effective in capture than the engines ordi- 

 narily in use, or operating to obstruct and deter as well 

 as to capture. In other words, the fixing of the proper 

 duration and dates of close-time, and the regulation or 

 prohibition of obstructive, destructive, and especially 

 fixed engines, were the objects aimed at six centuries 

 ago, and are objects not quite attained even yet. 



Magna Charta had two clauses concerning salmon 

 one prohibiting the further "defending" or appropria- 

 tion of fisheries by . the Crown or its grantees, and the 

 other suppressing all weirs or " cruives," " except only 

 by the sea-coast" (an exception of which the meaning is 

 dubious, and which practically came to nothing). Long 

 anterior to this, however, the common law of Eng- 

 land had been found to prohibit all devices which 

 affected salmon-fisheries either in the way of obstruc- 

 tion or of monopoly in the words of C. J. Ellen- 

 borough, " they were reprobated as public nuisances in 

 the earliest periods of our law ;" and the clauses in 

 Magna Charta were intended to check the Crown in its 

 attempts to disregard the law as it had long before been 

 declared and acted on. A few years after Magna Charta, 

 an Act passed fixing the close-times ; other ancient Acts, 

 both public and private, varied the regulations in that 

 matter; and up till 1861, the close-times of several 

 English rivers were regulated by Acts of Richard IL, 

 which had been in force, at least nominally, for nearly 

 five hundred years. In the reign of Henry in., both 

 the common law and the statute-law of England were 

 extended to Ireland by royal ordinance ; and at intervals 



