For more than six centuries, the wide-mouth bottom-scraping nets called trawls have been praised as the ultimate fishing device and cursed as a wasteful destructive scourge on the seas.

In 1376, just six years after the nets were first tried in British waters, fishermen complained to King Edward III that trawls, then called wondyrechauns, were ''destroying the flowers of the land beneath the water there, and also spat of oysters, mussels and other fish upon which the great fish are accustomed to be fed and nourished.''

The document even includes what appears to be the first description of what is now called bycatch, captured fish that are unmarketable because they are too small or the wrong species [Page 3].

The petitioners said the trawlers ''take such quantity of small fish that they know not what to do with them; and they feed and fat their pigs with them, to the great damage of the Commons of the Realm and the destruction of the fisheries.''