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tion of the fish, but they do, ormay, take all the fish 
passing up into that portion of the Bay. 
“The names which fixed engines bear sufficiently 
indicate their antiquity. ‘Weirs’, ‘garths’, ‘goryds’, 
‘baulks’ ‘hangs’, ‘butts’ and ‘kettle nets’, are corruptions 
of Saxon, Celtic and Norman words, and have been 
handed down by successive generations of fishermen from 
their Saxon, Celtic and Norman ancestors. But, 
though the engines are certainly old, their use has never 
been tolerated. Their erection, except on the sea coast, 
was reprobated in Magna Charta; they have been pro- 
hibited by many succeeding statutes ; and fixed engines 
may be said to exist not by virtue of the law but in 
defiance of law. 
“There were two reasons which the Legislature con- 
stantly gave in the olden time for putting down these 
engines. In the first place, they interfered with the 
navigation ; in the next place they gave one fisherman 
a monopoly of the fishery which was nominally open to 
all the King’s subjects. Fixed engines were, in short, 
in the first instance, an encroachment on the public 
rights. Time has in most cases now given their owners 
a prescriptive right in their use. But the engines 
were originally an encroachment on the rights of others. 
The man who erected a fixed engine usually placed it 
on his own shore. He was usually possessed, therefore, 
of the soil on which the engine stood. But this is not 
always the case; the kettle nets in Rye Bay, and we 
believe many of the hose nets in Bridgewater Bay, are 
fixed on the property of the Crown ; and the same thing 
is probably true of other fixed engines. 
“We understand that in Rye Bay and on the Sussex 
coast, the Board of Trade, acting on the instigation of 
the Admiralty, have positively refused to allow the 
erection of any new fixed nets, or to permit the present 
nets to remain beyond the lifetime of their present 
possessors. We seeno reason why the same rule should 
