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VIOLENCE OF THE FISHERMEN. After the passing of the Act of 1842, 

 the erection of numerous weirs, illegal under its provisions, took place. 

 The Crown did not institute proceedings against them until the violence 

 of the public fishermen, whose livelihood was ruined, aroused attention 

 to the need for interference. 



Among the meshes of an Act of Parliament many a knot will be but 

 loosely tied, or they may be broken through by powerful means, by 

 great voracious fishes, as large flies burst the web in which lesser ones 

 are caught. The wording of a clause may be so vague that the Act it 

 proposed to defeat cannot be prevented, or the use of a word of doubtful 

 interpretation may occasion a protracted suit. Impatient of the ' law's 

 delay,' the fishermen in some instances made an appeal to the higher 

 court in which Judge Lynch presides, and redressed their grievances by 

 ' the strong arm' in the manner so graphically described by the pen of 

 Sir Walter Scott* 



Though far from intending to justify such proceedings, which must 

 always be deprecated not only on account of their intrinsic evils, but 

 on the wider grounds of the injury reflected by acts of violence on the 

 country at large; it would seem on inquiry into one case in which 

 the cot-men took the law into their own hands that there were many 

 circumstances to extenuate the act. 



A great stake-weir had been erected at Passage, the gorge of the 

 Waterford estuary, by a tenant of the Marquis of Waterford. The 

 information laid against it by order of Government was dismissed by 

 the Waterford magistrates. The appeal to quarter sessions was also 

 dismissed by them, although the assistant barrister gave his opinion 

 decidedly against its legality. The cot-men expressed their gratitude 

 for this interference of the Crown, (in a difficult point of law between 

 rich and poor,) in trying a question of public right. But finding the 



* An attack of the Solway fishermen on the weirs of ' Quaker Geddes, ' one 

 of the partners of a 'tide-net fishing company' is introduced in the Scotch 

 novel of ' Red gauntlet.' In the scene between the placid partner and the fierce 

 laird of the Solway,' the latter thus addresses the innovator: " I tell you in 

 fair terms, Joshua Geddes, that you and your partners are using unlawful craft 

 to destroy the fish in the Solway, by stake-nets and weirs; and that we, who 

 fish fairly, and like men, as our fathers did, have daily and yearly less sport 

 and less profit You will destroy the salmon which make the liveli- 

 hood of fifty poor families, and then wipe your mouth, and go to make a speech 

 at a meeting." At a dinner-party in Edinburgh, this conversation ensues: 

 "You must nave heard that the fishermen at Brokenburn, and higher up the 

 Solway, have made a raid upon Quaker Geddes's stake-nets, and levelled all to 

 the sands?" "In troth I heard it, Provost, and I was glad to hear that the 

 scoundrels had so much pluck left, as to right themselves against a fashion 

 which would make the upper heritors a sort of clocking hens, to hatch the fish 

 that the folks below them were to catch and eat." 



The introduction of these inventions into the romance was a pardonable 

 anachronism ; its author was too much a noticer of 'manners as they rise,' and 

 a true Scottishman, not to seize such a theme for his pen, and not to bristle up 

 against invasion in any shape, and fight manfully under the national motto of 

 nemo me impune lacessit. His letters under the 'nom de guerre' of Malachi 

 Malagrowther, successful in repelling an injury to the currency of Scotland, 

 are celebrated. ' Eedgauntlet' was written in 1824, when his residence as an 

 * upper heritor' on the Tweed may have made him sensitive as to performing 

 the function of an incubator. The same year a select committee was appointed 

 to inquire into the state of the salmon fisheries of Scotland. 



