204 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



" of £11 5s. in return for which, they were free to gather 

 " mussels on the lord's sands. . . . The lord had also 

 " profit of court, estrays, goods of felons, and wrecks of 

 " the sea, the last of which might be very productive.'' 

 The manor of Heysham in the time of Henry VIII. is 

 stated to have been worth rather more than £50 per 

 annum. It thus appears that the mussels in those remote 

 days were of considerable importance and money value 

 to the local fishermen. They were also a valuable asset 

 to the lord of the manor, producing fully one-fifth of the 

 profits of the whole manor. In the article on mussels in 

 the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. XVII., 1898, p. 110, 

 it is stated, " The chief localities of natural scalps on the 

 " British coast are Morecambe Bay in Lancashire, the 

 " flat eastern shores, especially that of the "Wash in 

 " Lincoln and similar shallow bays." 



Coming to our own experience, we find, from con- 

 versations with the older fishermen in Morecambe, that 

 the conditions of the mussel shears to-day are practically 

 the same as they were fifty and sixty years ago. This 

 area, like all other shellfish beds, is subject to various 

 influences over which man has no control. New banks 

 are formed by the action of the tides, and growth of the 

 shellfish. The channel may alter a little and smother 

 the mussels with sand, or undermine the outlying beds 

 so that they are gradually disintegrated by the currents. 

 Every winter many hundreds of tons are swept away by 

 the gales into deeper water and lost. An invasion of 

 starfish may depopulate a whole skear, leaving only a mass 

 of empty shells behind them. Before the advent of 

 railways or the institution of Sea Fisheries Committees, 

 the fishermen and local farmers used large quantities of 

 the smaller mussels for manure. This system of destruc- 

 tion, which may be regarded now as an extremely 



