THE DOMESDAY SURVEY 



On the Severn, of which the wattled ' basket weirs ' are, as Mr. Seebohm has shown, 

 of great antiquity, and ' meet the difficulty presented by the unusual volume and rapidity of 

 the tidal current,' the ' wattled fence (is) ' technically called a hedge.' l It is probable therefore 

 that the ' heiamaris ' was an actual wattled weir such as that described above. 



There were, however, other devices for catching fish on the coast by enclosing them, 

 namely the ' stake-net ' and ' kettle-net." The latter can be etymologically connected with 

 the ' kidels ' of the Middle Ages, the 'kydelli ' of the Great Charter. But this is so imper- 

 fectly realized that the New English Dictionary (1901), while rightly deriving the word under 

 ' kiddle ' (p. 690), derives it also from ' kettle ' on p. 680 ! The ' kettle-net ' is a variety of 

 ' stake-net,' 'excepting that the enclosure or " pond " is quite simple, and the escape of the fish 

 is cut off by the falling tide.' It is used along the south coast from Beachy Head to Folke- 

 stone for the capture of mackerel inshore.* ' By an arrangement of stakes, nets, and a pound, 

 it turns the fish into a particular direction from which there is no escape.' With ' the outer 

 edge of the circle just below low-water mark at neap tides, the interstices between the stakes 

 (from id to 12 feet high) are filled in with old nets.'* This contrivance is worked ' where 

 the shore is flat and sandy,' and is condemned as ' perhaps the most objectionable of all sea 

 fishing nets.'* The kettle-net was defined by the late Lord Herschell, in 1891, as follows : 

 'A kiddle consists of a series of stakes forced into the ground some 700 feet in length with a 

 similar row approaching them at an angle,' etc. (New English Dictionary). 



Domesday, however, mentions that seine or draw-nets were in use on the meres of 

 Cambridgeshire and at Hampton on the Thames, and proves that at many places rents 

 were paid in herrings. These can hardly have been caught by the contrivances described 

 above. 



Devices of this kind for catching fish are of immemorial antiquity ; ' the stake-nets 

 which now fringe the shore of Scotland are identical in principle with the weirs in China, in 

 Malacca, in Brazil, and in Borneo ; with the engines which in the sixteenth century were 

 placed on the coasts of Virginia by the aboriginal inhabitants, and which are now placed on 

 the same coast . . . the putts and putchers which are confined to a single estuary in England 

 [i.e. the Severn] have all their counterparts in the Dutch East Indies." 5 



A sea-water fishery on the Essex coast is distinctly mentioned as early as the days of 

 Henry I., when a grant, at one of the Oakleys, to Savigny Abbey by Alvred Gernon and his 

 wife includes a fishery on the sea (in mare). 6 Domesday records the existence of ' one fishery' 

 at Little Oakley. 



1 Fltheriet Exhibition Literature (1884), i. 319. * Ibid. i. 317, 513. 



3 Ibid. vii. 47. * Ibid. x. 422. 



8 Ibid. xiii. 7. Compare ii. 455-6. ' Calendar of Documents preserved in France, p. 292. 



425 54 



