146 THE RELATIONS OF 'THE STATE WITH 



Government has had in view in promoting fishery legisla- 

 tion from time to time, and will enable us to form a better 

 conception of the true relationship which the State bears 

 to this important industry. 



As such a review will embrace a period of nearly seven 

 hundred years, during which about three hundred statutes, 

 dealing directly and specially with the fisheries, were added 

 to the Statute Book, besides a considerable array of laws 

 bearing indirectly upon the subject, it must necessarily 

 enter into some detail, without which it would be difficult 

 if not impossible to arrive at a proper conclusion on the 

 real relation of the State with the fisheries. 



"Protective" To the first or "protective" order of legislation belongs 

 the celebrated enactment in Magna Charta, as afterwards 



Magna Charta ra tified and confirmed by Henry III., that "all wears from 



and the 



fisheries. henceforth shall be utterly put down by Thames and 

 Medway, and throughout all England, except by the sea- 

 coast." This statute was, however, only incidentally a 

 "fishery" statute. Its primary object was the protection 

 of navigation interests ; but it incidentally involved an 

 important point in salmon-fishery legislation, which later 

 experience has served to enforce. In stipulating that 

 " kidels " or fishing weirs should be put down in navigable 

 rivers, as being an obstruction to navigation, the barons 

 conferred a great benefit on the salmon-fisheries, in so far 

 that the same structures which were an obstacle to naviga- 

 tion were a serious obstacle to the ingress of salmon. As 

 just stated, the motive which prompted this clause in the 

 Great Charter was not so much the protection of salmon as 

 the preservation of a free passage for vessels. Navigation 

 interests were paramount ; but at the same time they were 

 allied to fishery interests, and the removal of an obstacle 

 to navigation was the removal of a destructive fishing 



