The English Village Community / Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry; An Essay in Economic History (Reprinted from the Fourth Edition)

by Frederic Seebohm

But the best illustration of what they were may be derived from the arrangements now at work for catching salmon in the Wye and Severn.

Cytweras.

Hæcweras.

The stranger who visits this locality will find here and there across the muddy shore of the Severn structures which at a distance look like breakwaters; but on nearer inspection he will find them to be built up of rows two or three deep of long tapering baskets arranged between upright stakes at regular distances. These baskets are called putts or butts or kypes, and are made of long rods wattled together by smaller ones, with a wide mouth, and gradually tapering almost to a point at the smaller or butt end. These putts are placed in groups of six or nine between each pair of stakes, with their mouths set against the outrunning stream; and each group of them between its two stakes is called a 'puttcher.' The word 'puttcher' can hardly be other than a rapidly pronounced putts weir, i.e. a weir made of putts. If the baskets had been called 'cyts' instead of 'putts,' the group would be a cytweir. So, e.g., the thirty cytweras at Street would represent a breakwater such as may be seen there now, consisting of as many puttchers. This use of what may be called basket weirs [p153] is peculiar to the Wye and the Severn, and has been adopted to meet the difficulty presented by the unusual volume and rapidity of the tidal current.

Group of Puttchers on the Severn near Tedenham.

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Then as to the hæcweras there is nothing unusual in the use of barriers or fences of wattle, or, as it is still called, hackle, to produce an eddy, or to entrap the fish. Thus a statute (1 Geo. I. c. 18, s. 14) relating to the fisheries on the Severn and the Wye uses the following words: 'If any person shall make, 'erect, or set any bank, dam, hedge, stank, or net across the same,' &c.

These wattled hedges or hackle-weirs are sometimes used to guide the fish into the puttchers, but generally in the same way as more permanent structures on the Wye, now called cribs, to make an eddy in which the fish are caught from a boat in what is called a stop-net.

Salmon fisheries.