A CROWN PRIVILEGE FIVE CENTURYS OLD.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 2, Issue 579, 27 September 1880, Page 2

A CROWN PRIVILEGE FIVE CENTURYS OLD.

An Act of Parliament passed more than 550 years ago has been the means of granting the Crown a troublesome prerogative. The 17th Edward 11, chapter 11, remains ' unrepealed, and as in those days statutes were drawn with commendable brevity, the whole of the text may be here given;—" The King shall have the wreck of the sea throughout the realm, whales and great sturgeons taken in the sea or elsewhere within the realm, except in certain places privileged by the King," A curious custom was subsequently grafted upon this enactment. When a sturgeon was captured it.was sent to the Royal Palace for the King's use ; the food was palatable and the flesh peculiar. The other fish granted,by the Act of Edward's reign to the King and his successors down to the present time .was not a fish, being a whale, but a custom was allowed to creep in and restrict rights which Edward II enjoyed intact. When a whale was taken on the English coast the sea monster was divided, the head being given to the King and the tail to the Queen. Blackstone mentions this as an undoubted prerogative of the Queen Consort, and gives not only the fact but the reason. The cause assigned by ancient records for this whimsical division, he says, was to furnish the Queen's wardrobe with whalebone, and a more recent commentator has observed that the reason is more whimsical than the division, as the whalebone of commerce lies ■in the head, and not in the tail of the animal. | Practically, the 17th Edward 11, chapter 11, remains a dead letter. Very few whales are now caught in British waters, and the small sturgeon are plentiful, yet such a fish as that recently sent to Windsor Castle, weighing over 3 owl, might be called a Royal fish from its size as well as from its flesh.