Definition
A fyke is a type of fish trap — specifically, a bow-net or bag-net constructed of netting stretched over a series of hoops or bows, forming a tubular passage into which fish can enter but from which they cannot easily escape. As a legal term, fyke appears primarily in the context of fishery regulations, licensing statutes, and restrictions on fishing apparatus. Its legal significance is definitional rather than doctrinal: legislatures and courts relied on the term to specify what devices were prohibited, licensed, or otherwise regulated under fishery laws.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A type of fish-trap consisting of tubular nets that are supported by hoops.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A long bag net distended by hoops, into which fish can pass easily, without being able to return; called also fyke net.
The common and legal meanings are essentially identical in substance. The legal significance of the term lies not in any specialized doctrinal gloss but in the word's function as a statutory term of art: once a legislature named the fyke specifically, possession or use of one became a regulated act. Researchers should note that the legal record treats fyke as a known trade term requiring no further elaboration — an assumption that can obscure the device's precise physical form for modern readers unfamiliar with traditional fishing equipment.
Why It Matters in Research
Fyke is a narrow, nearly obsolete statutory term. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in one of two contexts: nineteenth-century fishery regulation statutes (particularly New England and mid-Atlantic states), or glossaries and definitional provisions in game-and-fish codes of the same era. Both Black's and Bouvier's anchor the term to the Massachusetts Public Statutes of 1882, which is the primary corpus connection — any research into the scope of that statute's fishing apparatus provisions should account for fyke as one of several specifically enumerated devices.
The term rarely generates litigation on its own. When it does appear in case law, it typically surfaces in disputes about whether a particular device falls within a statutory prohibition or licensing requirement. Because fyke is defined by physical description rather than function, courts in such disputes would look to trade usage and the common understanding of fishermen, not to legal precedent.
Researchers should also be alert to spelling variation in historical sources. Fyke, fike, and fyke-net all appear in nineteenth-century fishing regulations and trade literature. A search limited to one spelling may miss relevant statutory or administrative material.
For comparative purposes, fyke belongs to a family of fixed or semi-fixed fish traps that legislatures often regulated together — pound nets, weirs, seines, and eel pots frequently appear alongside fykes in the same statutory lists. Understanding the regulatory context of one device usually requires familiarity with the others.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) and Bouvier's Law Dictionary give identical, single-sentence definitions, each citing the same Massachusetts statute. There is no meaningful divergence among the three sources, and none of them elaborates on the physical construction of the device, its regional distribution, or the regulatory context that made it a term of legal significance. All three treat it as a known trade term needing only identification, not explanation.
Webster's 1913 is more useful than the legal dictionaries for understanding what a fyke actually is: the hooped, tubular bag construction that prevents fish from reversing course is the key feature distinguishing a fyke from simpler nets. That physical characteristic — the one-way passage — is precisely what made fykes effective and, consequently, what drew regulatory attention. The legal dictionaries' silence on this point is a limitation researchers should keep in mind.
No historical legal dictionary surveyed addresses the fyke outside the Massachusetts statutory context, the evolution of fishery regulation as a body of law, or the enforcement difficulties that made defining specific apparatus so important to nineteenth-century fish conservation efforts.
Jurisdictional Note
The term's documented legal usage in the historical dictionary record is specific to Massachusetts. Functionally equivalent devices appear under the same or similar names in the fishery statutes of other northeastern and Great Lakes states, but the precise terminology varies by jurisdiction. Researchers working outside Massachusetts should search their target jurisdiction's fishery codes for fyke, fike, hoop net, and bow net as parallel possibilities.