8.1.1.1 Early Export Centres

Expansion of the herring industry under way from around 1200 centred on large easily accessible nearshore spawning agglomerations, encouraging regional concentration of fishing, processing, and marketing activities. Two areas stood out, the southern North Sea region associated with Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, and the Danish straits, notably the Øresund along southwestern Scania.Footnote ⁵ In the North Sea large autumn schools of herring along the coast of East Anglia attracted fishers and buyers from England, Flanders, Germany, and France to an international fishery. Using mainly drift (gill) nets, the fishers took herring in hours of darkness as the fish followed their plankton prey toward the surface. After a century’s growth, peak years c. 1340 of the herring fair at Yarmouth drew some 500 ships, and fragmentary English customs accounts record annual exports of 700–1,800 lasts (at 12,000 herrings the last,Footnote ⁶ 8.4–21.6 million fish), so perhaps 5,000 metric tonnes (mT). A large but uncounted share of the catch went to Flanders and surely still more to English domestic consumption. Written records suggest most of Yarmouth’s herring were dry salted (‘powdered’) but from around 1300 some proportion were smoked to become ‘red herrings’ and a growing number packed in barrels.Footnote ⁷ From schools in the same waters fishers of Calais smoked ten million herrings in 1321 and exported twenty million. More than thirty million a year traveled by barge up the Seine to Paris, feeding the massive increase in herring remains seen there and at all other well-excavated northern French sites.Footnote ⁸ Taking English and French exploitation together, it is not unreasonable to think that each year around 1340 they may have removed from the southern stock at least 15,000 mT of fish. Quantities taken and shipped by Yarmouth and other southern centers shrank after the 1360s.Footnote ⁹

Herring schools off Scania had much earlier attained mythic scale.Footnote ¹⁰ About 1215 Danish historiographer Saxo (c. 1160–c. 1220) prefaced his Gesta danorum:

Even as Saxo wrote, the historic local subsistence use of Scanian herring was undergoing quick commercialization under the growing influence of merchants from north Germany who, contemporary chronicler Arnold of Lübeck acknowledged, brought great wealth to Denmark in return for the god-given fish.Footnote ¹² Amply provided with salt from Lüneburg and hungry buyers in central Europe, what would become the Hanse towns gained territorial concessions on the Skanör peninsula and elsewhere nearby and built up exclusive access to the fresh catch. During the run of August to October merchants on the beach bought herrings caught just offshore by what became five to seven thousand small open boats each initially crewed by five to eight Danish peasants. Their self-organized temporary boat associations made good use of a seasonal gap in the agricultural routine. Fishers set drift nets overnight and fixed nets on posts by day. A fee to the king, lord of the beach, licenced them to make temporary shelters, land their catch, and freely sell to the highest bidder. Each could salt but six barrels for family consumption. With the industry’s growth, by the fourteenth century the labour supply increasingly drew upon migrant workers from interior Denmark, and even Germans, Dutch, and English, some of them brought in by the Hansard merchants, who also hired Danish and German women to salt and pack the catch.Footnote ¹³ Each barrel was inspected for quality and branded with the merchant’s mark. After sales at the September Skanör herring fair, the product was shipped south to towns along the Baltic or around Jutland to those on the North Sea. Wider distribution by, for instance, 1252, had Øresund herrings entering Flanders assessed per thousand for tolls.Footnote ¹⁴

Tolls paid at Lübeck, chief of the Baltic Hansa towns, in later decades of the fourteenth century provide the only substantive grounds for estimates of this fishery’s scale: in 1368 the town received 76,000 standard Rostock barrels (117 kg legal weight, 100 kg of that wet fish, the rest salt; 900 herrings then, but up to 1,200 something more than a century later). Annual receipts during 1398–1400 ran from 81,172½ to 69,975½ barrels. At twelve barrels the last and the last calculated at 12,000 fish, a modest 70,000 barrels held 84,000,000 fish … or something over 7,000 metric tons of fish flesh. Yet, as economic and environmental historian Poul Holm calculated in 2016, Lübeck itself handled only about one-third of the deliveries to Hansa towns in the Baltic, implying at least 225,000 barrels sent in that direction. Holm then posits another 50,000 barrels sent westwards to the Hanse’s members in the North Sea and some further number directly to Flanders, to bring exports up to 300,000 barrels. If Danish domestic consumption came to another 100,000 barrels, the total processed each year was 400,000 barrels from an annual late fourteenth-century Scanian herring catch exceeding 40,000 mT live weight (or, considered another way, 400,000,000 fish).Footnote ¹⁵

Noble Burgundian councillor Philippe de Mézières toured the area in 1389 and marveled:

Indeed in this very decade Dordrecht imported nearly 1.5 million fish a year and the Flemish staple at Damme taxed more than sixteen million in only the fall quarter of 1387, in both cases primarily carried by Hansards.Footnote ¹⁷

None would doubt that the Øresund yielded Denmark’s greatest medieval export and in all likelihood this fishery was the largest anywhere in medieval Europe. But the late 1300s were its apogee: by early decades of the following century the Scanian schools were in trouble, noted as failing in 1402, 1425, and years after 1436. In the 1490s Lübeck received from all Denmark barely 20 percent of the herring it had a century earlier from the Øresund alone. Despite a debased coinage Danish crown incomes from beach licences were down 30 percent. To replace lost royal incomes already in 1429 King Eric instituted tolls on shipping through the straits. Despite a brief revival around 1500 neither the fishery nor the trade ever fully recovered.Footnote ¹⁸

In retrospect by about 1300 effective mercantile organization had plausibly brought the herring industry of northwestern Europe near limits of its traditional techniques. Coastal concentrations of fish could be exploited effectively with a modicum of operating capital, much of it going for salt, and thus supply inexpensive Lenten protein to large regional concentrations of Europeans. Dependence on a few regional spawning stocks left the industry susceptible to ordinary environmental fluctuations affecting the year-to-year presence of the schools and possibly vulnerable to larger changes. As already mentioned, from the mid-thirteenth century continued pressures of demand drove herring prices rapidly upward, doubling at Calais, for instance, between 1268 and 1300 and doubling again by 1341.Footnote ¹⁹ Short-term changes in supply superimposed year-to-year price variations exceeding 25 percent (Figures 6.1 and 6.2). The critical bottleneck was time, the need for quick processing which anchored this fishery within sight of the beach, and the limited durability of its product, which hindered access to consumers well inland. Writing in the 1330s Francesco Pegolotti warned his fellow Italian merchant travelers to be sure they got only good-smelling herring from the most recent pack.Footnote ²⁰ How did this change?

8.1.1.2 The Interplay of Technologies and Regional Success

Successive waves of economic and technical innovation lapped across the herring industry during late medieval centuries. A historically critical antecedent, of course, was thirteenth-century involvement of long-distance merchants, English and Flemish traders shipping out of Yarmouth to Bruges and to Bordeaux, the importers to Paris, and most famously those proto-Hansards in the Baltic. To different degrees each commercial interest could reach more customers with a more durable and portable product, but for much of the thirteenth century and beyond most herring continued to be salted whole and handled dry in bundles. The fish whose remains are recovered from sites on the twelfth–thirteenth-century Øresund are as whole as those from Haithabu 200 years earlier.Footnote ²¹ Traders from Köln, who distributed Scanian herrings into the Rhine basin and areas to its south and east, then dealt in korbherring, herring in baskets.Footnote ²² Consumers of the ‘powdered’ herring of Paris and its region left only skeletal remains of entire fish throughout the thirteenth and into the fourteenth century.Footnote ²³ Managerial accounts for 1289–1291 from a herringry Durham priory possessed on the coast southeast of Newcastle detail a product salted, dried, and packed into baskets with straw. Archaeozoologist Alison Locker’s most widespread survey of medieval herring remains in England finds entire, not gutted, fish prior to c. 1300. The most recent study of massive numbers of bones dating 1360–early sixteenth century at York reports no evidence of gutting or use of barrels and infers fish of English origin, even if 1370 legislation called for Hanseatic methods. Historian Maryanne Kowaleski has wisely judged that ‘white’ herring were certainly salted, “but there is considerable difference of opinion about whether they were fresh, lightly salted, heavily salted or packed in brine …”Footnote ²⁴

A first series of waves spread gutting, barrels, and packing in brine fitfully across regions of production. Deftly carving out the gill area of each fish (kehlen in Danish, kaaken in Dutch) extracted most of the entrails, directly exposed more flesh to the salt, and left for archaeozoologists distinct evidence of the practice on individual skeletons and the collective mass of herring remains at a site. (Particulars of processing fish little interested medieval writers, but not some sharp-eyed graphic artists as in Figure 8.1.)Footnote ²⁵ Packing in watertight barrels kept air from dry- or wet-salted fish and eased their handling in bulk. Salt brine required a sealed container but ensured full and continual contact of the fish with the preserving agent.Footnote ²⁶ The three techniques need not be applied together but came to be so in the late medieval industry.

Figure 8.1 Brined herring, kaaken and barreled.

“Salsus autem in vsum hominum vitra quoquis aliis pisces sanus durare potest” [When salted the herring remains suited for human use longer than any other fish]. Allec woodcut from Hortus sanitatis, cap. III, fol. 274r [p. 547]. Strassburg: Johann Prüss [not after 21 October 1497]. First used in a printing by Jacob Meydenbach at Mainz, 1491, this image appeared widely in multiple subsequent redactions of the Hortus by various Rhineland printers dating to and after the 1490s. Licence cc0 / Public domain.

Image reproduced with permission of Technische Universität Darmstadt, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Signature Inc IV 203.

Indubitably some people in the Baltic had known for a long time how prompt butchering of herring extended the usefulness of their product. Herring remains with many vertebrae but no diagnostic skeletal elements have been found at Truso, the Viking Age trading post on the Wisła delta, and at a Slavic stronghold of ninth–thirteenth-century date located beside present-day Kołobrzeg on the Pomeranian coast.Footnote ²⁷ Adoption of the practice further west is evident at Selsø-Vestby, a production site radiocarbon-dated 1290/1380 on Roskildefjord, close to the Øresund,Footnote ²⁸ so reinforcing the assumption that much of the Danish catch was so processed by the early fourteenth century. Köln merchants were handling barreled herring by the same time. Herring barrels of Baltic oak with tree rings from fourteenth-century timber harvests are well known in Flanders (recycled to line wells and latrines). The English industry adopted barrels – at least for the ungutted smoked Yarmouth ‘red herrings’ – in the 1300s but tried the full ‘Scanian cure’ only at their end. In Scotland herring barrels appear in records from 1360 and become normative in the 1400s.Footnote ²⁹ Scholarly consensus now probably acknowledges that Hansards handled mostly gutted, brined, and barreled herring by the peak period of Scanian production in the late fourteenth century but adoption further west was delayed. Coupled with Hanseatic inspections and regulations to ensure a product of durable quality this difference helps explain the dominance of Øresund herring on contemporary international markets.

A further pulse of technical and economic innovation then transformed the herring fishery.Footnote ³⁰ Flemish fishers, once leading foreigners off the English coast, followed by their northern country cousins from Zeeland and Holland, all squeezed out of the Øresund by the Wendish towns, most eagerly adopted the kaaken process to North Sea stocks,.Footnote ³¹

Flemish fishers further led the Netherlanders in a gradual transition from coastal to offshore (‘deep sea’) fishing for herring. This entailed two further interlocking technical changes. First, probably before the end of the fourteenth century they discovered that the fish kept and tasted better if they were gutted and salted down while still at sea, then reprocessed and packed on shore. Hauling salt required a larger ship, soon built for the purpose as a “herring buss,” but then a larger crew could stay at sea catching and packing herring for a week or more. The tether to shore undone, Netherlanders could depart contentious and perhaps failing English shores for unexploited spawning stocks in the central and northern North Sea waters they called Noordover, and eventually off Shetland and Iceland. Higher salinity fed these fish to larger size than in the Baltic. Ostend alone landed 2,400 tonnes in 1467.Footnote ³²

Unlike the rowing skiffs or flat-bottomed vessels launched over the beach for day voyages after herring – still the norm in early fifteenth-century Holland and elsewhere – the buss was a keeled vessel of thirty to sixty tonnes capacity, requiring crew of a dozen and harbour facilities (Figure 8.2). The specialized ship design and infrastructure to support it were developed at the start of the fifteenth century in fishing ports along the coasts and Maas estuary of Flanders and Zeeland. By 1476 Flanders had 125 busses and Zeeland 150, but Holland only 100. Subsequently endangered by the Habsburg–Valois wars, the centre of the industry slid northwards, first to places around Brielle (Brill) on the Maas in south Holland and eventually to the more secure towns of the Zuider Zee. About 1520 the Dutch herring ports along the Maas were landing about 12,000 last (144,000 barrels) each year and those around Enkhuizen on the Zuider Zee still only about 1400 last (16,000 barrels).Footnote ³³ The proverbial Dutch herring kings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were but the last step in a century-long process.

Figure 8.2 A Flemish herring buss, c. 1480.

Thought to be the earliest image of this special-purpose ship design. Print of engraving by so-called Master W with the Key. Bruges, c. 1480. Now in Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-2014-30.

Reproduced with permission of Dr. Jeroen ter Brugge, curator, Maritime collections, Rijksmuseum.

At the start of the sixteenth century, then, just one of the Low Countries’ several herring-fishing regions was landing twice the fish of Lübeck at its peak (see p. 321 above). For some generations the Netherlanders had backed up their technical superiority with investments – salt, nets, ships, barrels – and with government policy – safe conducts, convoy defence.Footnote ³⁴ But in the words of historian Richard Unger, “the greatest impetus to the use of all the superior methods was the presence of a market for the preserved herring and a market that had potential for growth.”Footnote ³⁵ When the herring were unloaded, some went straight to nearby urban consumers. At Deventer, where next to no eating of herring is visible in food waste from the the ninth through fourteenth centuries, in the 1400s and 1500s herring contributed 15 percent of the recovered fish bones.Footnote ³⁶ More of the catch was washed and layered in barrels with salt for an extremely durable product, edible for a year and more. Price advantages on the Antwerp market offered consumers good reason to substitute domestic for Hanseatic herrings, so by the mid-fifteenth century Flemings, Zeelanders, and Hollanders were supplying the shores of the North Sea, the Rhineland, and, after failure of the Scanian spawning stock, even the Baltic. By century’s end they provided most of the herring imported by the English.Footnote ³⁷

8.1.1.3 An Evolving Consumer Base

So where were those late medieval consumers whose demand drove the fishing and the trade in herring? While thirteenth- and fourteenth-century evidence of eating herring in England, the Low Countries, and northern Germany scarcely needs further mention,Footnote ³⁸ the course of distribution and demand in Europe’s interior and more southerly regions should be established by more than occasional trade agreements. Many diverse source materials trace the penetration and limits of eating this preserved fish far from its native seas.

Herring remains increase greatly in thirteenth-century contexts at all sites in northwestern France.Footnote ³⁹ To the south both archaeological and written records thin out. Herring were on markets in Berry at Déols in 1235 and Vierzon in 1430.Footnote ⁴⁰ In most years between 1306 and 1362 the papal household in Avignon spent heavily to transport large quantities by way of La Rochelle, Toulouse, and Bordeaux for Lent, but these fish were also ordinary fare for the chapter of Saint Trophime at Arles in 1352.Footnote ⁴¹ A century later the comital household of Angoulême ate herrings when in residence at Cognac during the cooler months. At Tours in 1480 municipal guards got these fish as a regular ration; notables, however, took only a symbolic ‘pittance’ to open a banquet.Footnote ⁴² Fourteenth-century references in Burgundy are merely occasional, but in 1406/7 the toll station at Chalons passed “306 milles & 26 tonetz(?) [sic] de harenz tant blans que sors.”Footnote ⁴³

Hanse towns from Lübeck east to Reval (Tallin) handled distribution around the Baltic and its affluents, as far upstream as, for instance, Kraków and Novgorod.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the Empire’s interior, however, Germany’s then largest city and an early but distant affiliate of the Hanse, Köln, claimed staple rights on goods moving along the Rhine. This enabled it to control trade in herring throughout that river basin and further to the east. Köln merchants handled Scanian herrings from the 1200s, but from about 1370 also a competitive product from the North Sea. At first the fish were designated as ‘basket herring’; barrels appeared in the trade shortly before 1300 and became the norm a generation or so later. From this node on the lower Rhine the herring, sometimes inspected, repacked, and resealed, went by water and overland to Frankfurt am Main, Strasbourg, Nürnberg, and beyond, even to the skirts of the Alps.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the 1320s herring likely from this commercial network fed mercenary soldiers at Metz and inmates in the hospital at Klosterneuburg.Footnote ⁴⁶ They were the only imported fish bought by members of the Tirolian noble Schlandersberg family between 1394 and 1401 and by their von Peucheim counterparts at Horn castle on the Danube for Advent and Lent in 1444–1446. At the very time herring appeared on dining tables and price-fixing lists for the Council at Constance (1414–1418) – where contemporary illustrations show open barrels of unmistakably gutted herring – a retail price series (herring sold by the piece) becomes available for transactions at Augsburg.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is said that south German consumers preferred the unripe herrings Netherlanders caught in June and July, earlier than Hanse rules allowed. Smoked as bocking or dried as matzginshering (modern Matjes) they could arrive by way of Köln well before any fish from the Baltic.Footnote ⁴⁸

Crossing the Alps or sailing into the Mediterranean with loads of northern fish was another story, so fourteenth-century penetration of those markets long remained modest. Stuck in Avignon a homesick Pavian cleric, Opicino de Canistris (1296–1336) missed the allecia desiccata and other fishes he’d known back in Ticino but contemporary Florentine market customs expected them only in small quantities.Footnote ⁴⁹ As Pegolotti completed his mercantile handbook about 1340, he advised buying only those freshly processed salt herring taken in the North Sea between England and Flanders. His benchmark price at Antwerp was two denarii per small barrel (tinello).Footnote ⁵⁰

Conditions changed after the Black Death. In 1384 Francesco Datini, merchant of Prato and trader in Florence and elsewhere, could import 643,000 herring from Southampton to Genoa and Pisa. The venture went so well that over the next twenty-five years he brought in thirty-nine shipments of 200–600 balle (‘bundles’, each of a thousand fish) from England or Flanders, always timed to hit the Lenten market.Footnote ⁵¹ A century after Datini, papal courtier Paolo Giovio was thoroughly familiar with their regular availability in Rome: “from Jutland’s shores are brought to us herrings, foot-long fishes in baskets [crates?] preserved with salt and smoke.”Footnote ⁵² Certainly by the fifteenth century Italian consumers and likely those elsewhere were aware that their salty little fishes could originate from various exotic northern waters.

So unlike Thomas Aquinas, who had needed a miracle to get a herring in late thirteenth-century Lazio, over the following 200 years consumers on markets across Latin Christendom could likely obtain a herring if they wanted it enough. People at greater distance from the North Sea or Baltic found their opportunities later, more dispersed, and more expensive. They may also have appreciated them more. Popes paid heavily to get herring to Avignon. In the1390s Margherita Datini in Prato and the brothers Kaspar and Sigmund von Schlandersberg in the Vischgau (Val Venosta, Alto Adige) waited impatiently for the herrings’ arrival.Footnote ⁵³ However French courtier, diplomat, and poet Eustache Deschamps (1346–1406/7), envisaged “those spoilt herrings, pickled and smoked, yellow, black, and stinking,” and monks at Eynsham in Oxfordshire consumed in the fifteenth century only a fraction of the herrings that they had in the thirteenth.Footnote ⁵⁴ Was the reluctance in later medieval England, France, and the Rhineland a matter of taste and fashion (see Chapter 2, pp. 83–84 above) or of having more options? Did greater abundance drive the wealthy away from the ‘fish of the poor’? Did more widespread distribution and deeper markets balance less demand from elite consumers? Alison Locker has shown that, taking into account the relative size and weight of food per individual fish and thus numbers of fish remains, the trend since the fourteenth century was for herring to yield to cod as the largest single source of fish flesh in English diets.Footnote ⁵⁵

To recapitulate before turning to those codfishes, European herring fisheries went from broad use of local coastal stocks in the twelfth century through dependence on southern North Sea and Øresund schools to exploitation of distant-water populations by the end of the Middle Ages. Over several hundred years, at each successive stage of expansion of the industry merchant entrepreneurs supplied ever more distant eager consumers with larger production from stocks further offshore. The evolution was closely linked to a market which called forth technical improvements, greater commercial complexity, and higher investment.

8.1.2.1 Norse Fisheries and Trades

Long familiar in the north, stockfish came south when Viking Age northerners trading to Danish Haithabu brought some as ship’s rations.Footnote ⁶⁰ However nothing before the eleventh century indicates northern Norwegians placed any special priority on cod fishing or carried on any trade in this product. When available, local cod, fresh, dry-salted, or salted, was also eaten along European coasts further south.Footnote ⁶¹ So not all cod eating is stockfish nor marks long-distance trade.

Development of Norse society and the cultural integration of elites into Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries – a process symbolized after the 1030s by official Christianity – modified demand for northern goods in, at first, the Norwegian west (Bergen) and south (Oslofjord).Footnote ⁶² To the furs and hides of marine mammals which the Vikings had sought in the far north, their descendants added fish, of which traces occur around Trondheim and Bergen before 1100. In 1103/7 King Eystein, brother of a crusader to Jerusalem, imposed a tax in kind on northern fishing and soon thereafter signs appear of English and north German demand for Norwegian cod.Footnote ⁶³ A settlement at Vågan on the main Lofoten land mass became the only quasi-urban centre in the north. It served for tax collection, fish processing, and trade with merchants from the south.Footnote ⁶⁴ Norwegians themselves carried stockfish to England well into the thirteenth century, but Hansards came to Bergen for it. Irrelevant here is the process whereby the Hanse established economic hegemony in later medieval Norway, save to observe that the Germans more than once violently drove English rivals from Bergen and had their return outlawed. But Norwegian monarchs did normally sustain sullen German and English acquiescence in the Bergen staple, the rule barring foreigners from trading beyond that city to Lofoten a thousand kilometers north or, into the fifteenth century, to Iceland a thousand kilometers west. Norse stockfish went to European tables through Bergen.Footnote ⁶⁵

Stockfish delivered to Bergen in summertime had dried in the subfreezing overnight temperatures of an arctic spring. Men who were otherwise peasants fished through the late arctic night and brief dawn of February and March.Footnote ⁶⁶ The inshore stock of smaller cods which had served the original subsistence fishery could not sustain commercial demand. Fishing zones shifted from coasts near the farms to offshore of southeastern Lofoten, where the big migratory cod arrived to spawn.

Structural constants and shifts in the fishery fill in the broader picture.Footnote ⁶⁷ Early trips by northerners to Bergen gave way in the 1200s to Bergen merchants dealing in north-country harbours. Only after Norway’s mid-fourteenth-century loss of economic and political strength could Hansard merchants successfully evade Norwegian protectionism and deal directly with northern processors of the fish. Most business still occurred in Bergen, whence men of Lofoten sailed each May, but late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sources document numbers of illicit ventures to the far north, too. In both venues merchants advanced to northerners goods on credit for future delivery of fish, a good indicator of the Hansards’ drive to lock down future supply.Footnote ⁶⁸

When it comes to counting stockfish production and thus gauging the scale of the Norwegian fishery, medieval records are obscure. Knowing that the value of stockfish entering late fourteenth-century Lübeck each year was one-quarter that of the herringFootnote ⁶⁹ simply omits too much. Extrapolations by Norwegian scholars make something in the order of 3,000–4,000 tonnes of skreið out to provide half the value of Norway’s exports about 1300, with half or more of that weight going to England. Output likely peaked then: a century later Europe’s demographic crash and competition from other fisheries are thought to have cut the volume by a third to a half. The next grounded estimates for 1518–1521 come to annual exports of about 1,500 mT and about 2,800 mT in the 1560s–70s. Nevertheless economic historian Arnved Nedkvitne describes 1350–1550 as the ‘Golden Age’ of Norwegian stockfish.Footnote ⁷⁰ The assertion rests not on the size of the catch but on changing values in late medieval European markets.

Northern regions better survived Norway’s fierce late medieval economic and demographic crisis than did the country’s south. Deteriorating climatic and economic conditions for northern agriculture and for a mixed subsistence strategy highlighted the continued relative strength of demand for fish. The grain which a fixed weight of stockfish could obtain in Bergen rose rapidly after 1350. Relying on what are sparse price references from Bergen, Nedkvitne found a kilogram of stockfish worth only 2.1 kg of rye flour before the Black Death but averaged 7.3 kg in the following century (1351–1440) and slid only slightly to 6.3 kg of rye by 1500.Footnote ⁷¹ Even exports only half those of around 1300 thus earned around 1400 half again more of the essential cereal little grown in the north. Settlements in the far north moved toward the coast. Some places and men came to specialize in fishing. Land rents, hitherto calculated in weights of butter, became – the first evidence is from 1432 – expressed in weights of skreið.Footnote ⁷²

Icelanders, mid-Atlantic cousins to Norwegians, increased their fishing for subsistence but not for export up to 1264, when their independent Commonwealth acquiesced to Norwegian suzerainty. Local chiefs sponsored seasonal fishing for this purpose. Overseas markets were attracting effort by 1300, when first isolated cryptic references then direct evidence establish Icelandic skreið as strong competition to the Norwegian product.Footnote ⁷³ With dried fish supplanting coarse woollen textiles as the island’s principal export commodity, a trend considered ‘recent’ in a Bergen charter from 1340, the fishery challenged pastoralism as an axis of Icelandic culture. At least for trading purposes Icelanders also abandoned their traditional standard of value, a unit of native cloth, in favour of a quantity of fish. The price of skreið relative to cloth in Iceland rose by 34 percent during the first half of the fourteenth century and, after a plateau, by another 70 percent during the fifteenth. Lucrative prospects help explain why four of five animal remains in Icelandic archaeological sites from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are of fish, mostly heads and anterior skeletal elements of cods, the waste from stockfish production.Footnote ⁷⁴

Distant resources were pulled into the service of European demand for fish and so distant societies were pulled in as well. Norwegian and Icelandic scholars advance stockfish exports as the chief economic element integrating these peripheries into the developed and expanded Europe of the later Middle Ages.

Recognition that Europe was reaching out has equal validity and wider resonance. King Håkon V acknowledged the driving force of European demand in the famine year 1316, when he required any merchant seeking dried fish or other goods in Norway to arrive with grain.Footnote ⁷⁵ Just after 1400 English traders, their search for stockfish at Bergen thwarted by German competition, turned to Iceland. So did English fishers, who in 1416 explained that failure of fisheries in home waters had sent them (illegally) to the abundant resources off Iceland.Footnote ⁷⁶ In tacit, sometimes open, defiance of the Bergen staple and the express commands of Danish and English monarchs alike, both trade and fishery grew. English buyers bid twice what skreið directed to Bergen might get and eventually offered Icelandic fishers goods in advance for future delivery. English fishers worked deeper water with longer lines and more hooks than did the natives. They arrived in late spring and stayed to midsummer, often using salt to cure their catch on board and ashore. After 1420 some wintered over. By the 1430s an anonymous English political poet could assert “Of Yseland to wryte is lytill nede / Save of stokfische.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Risky business tantalized with rich rewards: individual ships returned to Hull in 1460/1 laden with 60,000–90,000 stockfish.

Not all welcomed the English. Icelandic annals and Danish diplomatic correspondence indict English mariners for stealing fish, looting, violence, and even murder of the Danish governor in 1467. Landowners fearing loss of labour banned full-time fishing as well as the overwintering foreigners who might offer such work. Meanwhile Hanseatic merchants and seamen also wanted what Icelandic waters offered and they boasted better official relations. A naval war ensued in the 1470s and 1480s, with armed fleets from Hamburg facing English escort vessels. Icelandic sources record eight armed clashes among Germans and English between 1486 and 1532. English traders, many from Bristol, reduced operations. English fishers, many from the east coast, hung on through the 1520s, even though in 1500 Iceland declared English long-liners outlaw, freely open to attack.Footnote ⁷⁸ As observed in Chapters 4 and 6, medieval fishing communities in England and Germany had customs protecting and allocating the resources of home waters. Wealth over the horizon belonged to the one who could take it.

8.1.2.2 Who Ate Which Medieval Codfishes?

For all that stockfish production and trade contributed to medieval development of northern resource-based economies and inspired tenacious ambition among Hansards and English, stockfish consumption lagged well behind that of herring. Smaller volumes reached more limited markets. Widespread local stocks of gadids and possibilities for salt cures elsewhere competed with the northern product. Ambiguous, even erroneous, nomenclature and incautious use of zooarchaeology blur distinct use of different ecosystems.

Stockfish abundantly filled a major dietary role in the north: Scandinavia, the Baltic, north Germany, and England. Even there, however, local gadid fisheries could often provide rival fresh and salted alternatives. In southern Norway, Sweden, and the east Baltic the initial large headless imports of the eleventh–thirteenth centuries were later replaced by smaller locally caught cods.Footnote ⁷⁹ In England the first surge of gadid remains during the eleventh and twelfth centuries identifiably came from the southern North Sea. Overall the big specimens of Norwegian origin became numerous only during the 1200s, earlier in London than in York. While this dominance may have faded some at York, headless long-distance imports remained strong in London contexts until the early 1400s. Recovery a human generation thereafter was likely associated with Icelandic supplies and then, after 1500, with a rising supply of salt cod (not stockfish) from both Iceland and Newfoundland. These were the fish challenging herring for primacy on English tables.Footnote ⁸⁰

Even before 1200, kitchen middens in northern Germany and the Rhineland were filling with bones from big headless cods,Footnote ⁸¹ but southwards of roughly the river Main physical remains are lacking and the written record (cookbooks, kitchen accounts, etc.) is thin or negative past 1400.Footnote ⁸² As earlier observed, the chef for the pope chosen by the Council of Constance found even his recipe for stockfish appealed mainly to people from western and central Germany.Footnote ⁸³

The Flemish menu of seafoods lacked gadids before the eleventh century. Throughout the ensuing 400 years recovered remains of the most common representatives of the family, haddock and whiting from the southern North Sea, still rank well behind those from herring and flatfishes. Cod numbers grew but slowly, with isotope and skeletal evidence indicating none but local cods until the very end of the Middle Ages and only thereafter the appearance of fishes originating in the North Atlantic. Yet kitchen accounts for 1428/9 at the duke of Guelders’ border post on the Rhine at Lobith show consistent purchases and inventory of stockvisch .Footnote ⁸⁴

Writing in the 1390s the Parisian Menagier articulated the potential ambiguities of combining medieval names and bones of codfishes. Morue, says he,

The householder was well informed about both preparing stockfish and their origin. His knowledge anticipates a shift in the archaeological evidence across northwestern France, where up to his time cod in any form is conspicuously ill-represented at all kinds of sites while other gadids, notably whiting, are often quite common. Only in the course of the fifteenth century do some contexts in Paris acquire large numbers of cod remains in the headless state indicating a preserved product.Footnote ⁸⁶ Cod were by no means absent from Norman and northern Breton coastal fisheries and the fish markets and tables of that region, but further south all along the French Atlantic front hake and whiting were the gadids which mattered.Footnote ⁸⁷

The same was true of medieval Spain and Italy. Though stockfish were likely known to some, not until the sixteenth century did preserved cods from distant waters there join hake (merluza, pixota) and other regional catches, whether fresh or preserved, as significant dietary elements.Footnote ⁸⁸ Castaway Querini in 1432 assumed his fellow Venetians were unfamiliar with the “stockfish dried in the wind” (stocfisi seccano al vente) he encountered on Lofoten and as late as 1516 exploration chronicler Peter Martyr d’Anghiera thought it necessary to tell his initially Spanish and Italian readers that cod resembled tuna (!).Footnote ⁸⁹ Subsequent early modern references to bacalao are vague as to whether these fish were air-dried and so ‘genuine’ stockfish from arctic waters or the then proliferating salt fish of English, Dutch, Icelandic, or New World provenance.Footnote ⁹⁰ As earlier quoted, Paolo Giovio conflated hake and stockfish, but did associate the board-like objects with Scandinavian marine frontiers and northern European tastes. Southern European demand for bacalá drove no medieval program. That is an early modern fish tale, the sequel to the medieval one of commercializing cods for northern European consumers.

8.1.3.1 In Eastern Atlantic Waters

Enterprising fourteenth-century fishers found offshore opportunities south and west of the British Isles. They were less tied than the northern commercial fisheries to a single speciesFootnote ⁹¹ – though the close cod relative, hake, and the sardine or pilchard, kin and ecological counterpart to the northern herring, played major roles.Footnote ⁹² These and other regional fishes engaged the attentions of coastal communities around the Channel approaches and Bay of Biscay. All participants need not be surveyed here, nor are all so far thoroughly studied by historians. The new fisheries built on prior experience with inshore and estuarine resources.

Along the English south coast increased landings of hake and cod appear in fourteenth-century written and archaeological records from Exeter to Southampton. Hake especially was here an offshore species caught during March–June in the western approaches to the Channel (the Celtic Sea) south and west of Cornwall. Already by the 1350s hake of Cornish origin were reaching Avignon by way of Bordeaux.Footnote ⁹³ This was but one part of a new marine fishery in southwestern England which exploited diversified ecosystems along the continental shelf. Each spring and summer sharp-eyed spotters posted on shoreline cliffs in Devon and Cornwall signaled boats with seines to surround schools of migratory pelagic pilchards (adult sardines). Workers on shore, many of them women, dry-salted the fish for a month, then washed and pressed them under weights for ten days before barreling for export, as well documented by 1450. A byproduct, ‘train oil’, was valued as fuel for lamps and a lubricant. Other crews went off with salt in their holds to spend long summer weeks on the west coast of Ireland fishing herring, flatfishes, and more hake and using landing sites like those of English in Iceland to salt them down. Conger offered another option. Such multi-species fisheries in seasonal succession could support full-time professional fishers and more capital-intensive infrastructure.Footnote ⁹⁴ Fishing families began to cluster into new harbour- and seaside communities. The fisheries participated in the synergy among multiple marine and terrestrial sectors which pushed the southwest from a backwater to a leading region in the sixteenth-century English economy.

Breton fishers, who began only in the 1300s to leave sight of land, targeted much the same waters and species.Footnote ⁹⁵ From March to June they sailed for a day or more, fished night and day for hake, then returned. Papal purchasing agents shipped thousands of Breton hake to Avignon in the 1370s–80s, and a generation later the royal household of Navarre was buying “merluz seco de Bretagne.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Those fish came from coastal villages on both sides of the peninsula where men were said to have no employment other than at sea and the fishery was helping to drive the maritime economy. In 1427 papal permission for Sunday departures legitimized boats making two voyages a week. Using the product of local brine springs and of more southerly French coasts, the salting season for hake and conger lasted from Easter to Michaelmas. All around the coast dozens of sites with sheds and racks for drying hake and conger were a lucrative seigneurial monopoly. Heavy fines coerced fishers to deliver those species for a set price. The duke leased his drying facilities to consortia of merchants in 1279 from Bayonne and later from Nantes, where his inspector also checked the mesh in fishing nets. The fishers themselves salted or brined mackerel and sardines on board ship, so evading this seigneurial impost. Only toward the end of the fifteenth century did Bretons along the northern coast start to sail farther toward Cornwall or elsewhere to catch cod, a variety absent until then from the markets up the Loire which they supplied. By 1515, however, English authorities in Ireland were blaming Breton fishermen for depleting stocks of salmon, herring, ling, and hake to the disadvantage of English ships.Footnote ⁹⁷

On another western extremity of the European mainland, Spanish Galicia, an abrupt coastal topography and narrow (20–30 km) continental shelf put deep water unusually near shore. What had earlier been inshore subsistence fisheries grew rapidly after Spanish Christians gained control of the south and opened regular sea routes to the Mediterranean. Large-scale fishing in the late thirteenth century established a base for new or re-established coastal towns – La Coruña, Pontevedra, etc. – to integrate economic activities in each Galician estuary.Footnote ⁹⁸ Many aspects – not least the target species and ways of preservation – are reminiscent of stockfish and herring industries in the north. Hake (pixota) were taken offshore on baited lines from small boats. One royal charter made very plain that these were to be dried, not salted, for commerce. During summer and autumn, sardines (juvenile ‘pilchards’) frequent plankton-rich western Iberian estuaries and inshore waters. Skilled crews hired by town-based companies caught them in costly encirclement nets and delivered the catch to processing plants on land, where women removed the heads and viscera before stacking the fish for dry salting (sardina de pila) or racking them to smoke before brining (sardina arencada). Full-time sardine workers for half the year might in the other season fish hake or conger but also tend fields and vineyards. Exports to other Iberian regions began to grow in the late fourteenth century, achieved market dominance after 1400, and expanded still more after 1450. In the 1490s annual shipments of Galician sardines unloaded at Valencia alone held twice the fish in Dieppe’s best fifteenth-century herring catch; at least comparable quantities were then also going to Portugal (itself a sardine producer and exporter), to Sevilla, and to Barcelona. Quantities of larger fishes, hake and conger, were commensurate.Footnote ⁹⁹

8.1.3.2 From Local Abundance to Distant Tables

Subsistence or artisanal fisheries with potential for commercial expansion in the high and later Middle Ages were not necessarily all that far ‘offshore’, at least from the fishers’ point of view. Besides herring off Danish beaches and pilchards in Cornish coves, consider briefly two more products then reaching far-off consumers from what Parisians or Londoners surely would have thought northern ‘frontiers of the sea’.

What clerks and officials from Stockholm to Kraków called strekfusz (alias stracfuss, strakus, etc.) and clearly distinguished from stockfish draws attention to the importance of fish-drying in the northern maritime interior as well as ocean shores.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Prussian chronicler Simon Grünau, who treated seventy-two fish varieties in a 1526 description of his province, identified strekfusz as dried eel, sturgeon, salmon, herring, whitefish, and bream, saying the name came “from the places where one first dries them in the air.” Grünau mentioned Prussian exports to German, Polish, and Czech lands from the Elbe to the Carpathians.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Sources going back to the 1320s from Prussia and Poland reveal “dried fish called strekfuss” (sicci pisces strekfussy dicti ) everywhere from royal households to local marketplaces and more often identified as pike than any other named fish.Footnote ¹⁰² Oil-free as cod, pike were common in the many lakes of Prussia and Finland as well as the Gulf of Bothnia, the nearly fresh northern arm of the Baltic. In excavations at medieval Uppsala the big Norwegian stockfish bones from thirteenth-century layers give way after about 1325 to fewer small Baltic cods and many large pike, typically cut for hanging to dry.Footnote ¹⁰³ When Swedish internal customs records begin in the mid-sixteenth century, salmon and dried pike make up 80–90 percent of shipments to Stockholm from Bothnia. Contemporary northern historian Olaus Magnus observed the lucrative profits gained in this export trade and how from the acres of fish spread out to dry at one Bothnian processing site, Bjuröklubb, “there rises such a stench of fish that far out to sea sailors as they approach are aware of it flying out to meet them” (see Figure 8.3b).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ So also brackish or freshwater frontiers could support fisheries of near mythic scale.

Salmon from Scotland, another resource as locally traditional as pike in eastern Baltic lands, emerged as an important export industry during the fifteenth century, in part by replacing sales by count with packaging in salt and standard barrels. While runs elsewhere dwindled, Scotland’s less intensive agrarian regime and regulatory protection sustained local stocks. Royal grants had given lay and ecclesiastical magnates rights over specific estuarine and riverine locations to deploy nets and traps and take adult fish returning from the sea to spawn. Rights holders employed obligated peasants or let the fishing out to consortia of free commoners for shares of the catch, but churchmen also claimed one fish in ten as tithe. Export agents at Aberdeen and Leith consolidated local surpluses.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Principal export markets for Scotland’s salmon developed where local stocks had been depleted all around the southern shores of the North Sea. Scots first shipped salmon to the Low Countries in the fourteenth century, then expanded sales to eastern England and, especially after 1450 to France. Fragmentary surviving customs accounts show Aberdeen alone exporting 200–500 barrels a year in the late 1420s–early 30s and the national total going over 2,000 barrels by the 1470s and 3,000 in the 1530s–40s. Receipts for import tolls on the principal shipping channel to Antwerp corroborate such numbers. Prices rose almost continually from the 1420s into 1580s and profits from this trade helped underwrite Scots’ overseas credit operations.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ But the gustatory appeal of those salmon which each year passed through the northern entrepôt faded on the long further journey to Rome: Paolo Giovio consigned this import to consumption by commoners, “for the salted ones lose their original nobility.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

8.1.3.3 On the Southern Frontier

Distinctive environmental structures of Mediterranean waters held maritime opportunities and challenges different from those of northern seas. Diverse local fisheries have already been examined, but the region offered few of the large-scale single-species commercial possibilities which so excited the north. A major exception was the marine migration of pelagic bluefin tuna, a top oceanic predator. Mobile schools of 50- to 200-kilogram parcels of rich and oily flesh gathered annually off southwestern Spain before entering the western Mediterranean to spawn and to forage on mackerel and sardine in a counterclockwise gyre past the northern coast of Sicily, along Sardinia, and then westwards off Provençal and Catalan shores. Other populations occur in the Adriatic and eastern reaches of the sea.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Owing in part to their being an unusual homeothermic (‘warm-blooded’) fish, bluefin move too fast for effective trawling with wind-powered vessels or more than incidental capture by hook and line, but if the schools can be stopped or contained, hard and bloody work with harpoons and gaffs yields a huge return.

Principal late medieval and early modern fisheries for bluefin arose along the north coast of Sicily and the southwestern corner of Castile (coastal Andalusia). Both production centres emerged during the thirteenth century, with the Sicilian industry likely leading growth in the 1300s and Andalusian output playing a larger role by the late 1400s. Capture techniques revived or improved upon ancient forms of barrier fishing. Spanish almadrabas were permanent locations where, as well known in the classical Mediterranean, upon sight of the tuna, boats directed by signals from shore-based observation towers moved out to deploy a massive vertical net in front of the school. Stopped and then surrounded by a wall of mesh the fish were hauled to shore behind teams of oxen and there butchered. Early modern descriptions and images depict immense beach seines (Figure 8.4a).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Sicilian tonnara were semi-permanent installations of a type first recorded in tenth-century Byzantium but also known to contemporary Arabs. At chosen coastal sites a long leader fence was anchored perpendicular to the shoreline to divert migrating schools into successive impounding chambers, ending in the ‘death chamber’ (camera della morte) where men raised the net floor and took the fish with barbed harpoons (Figure 8.4b). Documented enterprises multiplied from perhaps a dozen in the thirteenth century to about thirty in the fifteenth, when the fishery expanded westwards from Palermo to Trapani.Footnote ¹¹⁰

a. Sixteenth-century representation of the almadraba in Bay of Cádiz.

Almadraba depicted in Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Civitates orbis terrrarum 1572–1618, vol. 5, image 19. Original engraving attributed to Georgius Houfnaglius. Original is Public Domain.

Reproduction thanks to the Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

b. Tonnara trap (modern schematic).

Schematic of tonnara after Brandt, Fish Catching Methods, fig. 274, and similar published images elsewhere, redrawn by D. Bilak for R. Hoffmann.

Figure 8.4 To catch the bluefin tuna.

Whether taking the fish by seine or trap, each of these enterprises employed 200 or more workers, seamen, butchers, cookers, coopers, packers, spotters on cliffs or towers, and armed guards, for neither coast was without danger from North African corsairs or Christian rivals, local or dynastic.Footnote ¹¹¹ Both generated significant demand for salt and fuel supplies and otherwise stimulated local economic activity, but did so from distinctive positions in political economy. The Sicilian crown retained tuna trapping rights but leased individual sites to entrepreneurs who selected a knowledgeable, quasi-hereditary labour chief, the rais, to assemble and operate the catching crew. This team formed a share association for the duration of the tuna season, mid-April to late June. Shoreward of each tonnara salaried and wage labourers butchered the tunas, then cooked, brined, and barreled the flesh. Investors from Palermo’s civic nobility, from Genoa, and from other towns in Sicily itself, financed the enterprise by advance purchase of its catch or its product, tonnina, the processed and packaged tuna meat of various grades. In post-Reconquista Andalusia great landed families (grandees) early gained control of almadrabas, along the Bay of Cádiz. But between 1299 and 1444 successive Castilian monarchs rewarded the loyalty of the Guzmán family, counts of Niebla and since 1445 dukes of Medina Sidonia, with what became a claim to exclusive private rights over all tuna fishing along the entire shore from the Portuguese border to Gibraltar. Struggles for control – even to private naval bombardment of a rival’s working almadraba – suggest the value these magnates placed on the fishery, whether for its material product or as a sign of power and prestige. From the 1520s or so and into the eighteenth century the house of Medina Sidonia and its servants actively and effectively enforced their monopoly, assembling the capital, hiring the specialized workers, employing numbers of slaves, and marketing the product.

Managerial accounts for medieval tonnara are not known to survive. Fragmentary fifteenth-century financial returns let historian Henri Bresc estimate each killed one or two thousand fish a year and packed roughly the same number of standardized barrels, so forty to eighty tonnes of marketable tonnina. If so, the thirty Sicilian traps operating in the fifteenth century annually turned thirty to sixty thousand bluefin into 1,200 to 2,400 tonnes of product.Footnote ¹¹² Individual Spanish almadrabas seem to have taken more and larger fish than did their Sicilian counterparts. When the Cádiz enterprise was temporarily in royal hands during the 1510s, the five years of full accounts averaged annual capture of 6,000 tunas yielding seventy-eight tonnes of processed meat and marketable byproducts. That may have been an unusually low return. Subsequently the two almadrabas run by the ducal house –which kept precise records – together averaged 29,487 fish a year during the 1520s–30s; if those enterprises handled their catch as had their rivals in Cádiz, this meant an annual output of about 400 tonnes. But when the same Medina Sidonia tuna fishery peaked out in the 1540s–60s it caught more than 100,000 fish and preserved for sale some 10,000 tonnes of mostly salted and brined product;Footnote ¹¹³ at that rate the smaller catches of the 1520s–30s would have come to almost 3,000 tonnes per annum. Processing and marketing destroyed or dispersed the skeletal material, so tuna bones are rare in archaeological contexts and can neither directly verify nor quantify the written references to these fisheries.

Besides extensive regional distribution to coastal cities and their hinterlands, preserved tuna from Sicily and Andalusia was marketed and eaten around the western Mediterranean. In peacetime from the early fourteenth century on, Palermo annually shipped thousands of barrels to Naples and Tuscany – where Pegolotti knew them in the 1330s – to Liguria and Rome – where Paolo Giovio found brined tonnina in all the taverns in 1524 – and in the fifteenth century, even ‘Spanish style’ to Sevilla.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Andalusian exports to Catalonia, insignificant until a 1374 break in dynastic wars, grew strongly from the first half of the fifteenth century, when the traps also proliferated along the Catalan coast.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Though the capture sites were more removed than Sicily from Italian urban markets, by the early sixteenth century Castilian, Genoese, Florentine, and Catalan merchants were handling large volumes of Andalusian tuna to Cagliari, Naples, Livorno, and Genoa. No quantitative assessments of this trade have been proposed.

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If modern estimates are to be believed, even just as approximate orders of magnitude, a minimal late fifteenth-century year’s catch of Atlanto-Mediterranean tunas, now also including those from Provence, Catalonia, and the Adriatic,Footnote ¹¹⁶ may have yielded in the range of 3,000 tonnes of processed fish. Higher Spanish yields would have put the total over 5,000 tonnes. This was more than three times the contemporary Norwegian output of stockfish and about equal to the latter’s peak two centuries before. But brined tuna in barrels begins to approach the weight of the live animal, while a given kilogram of dried and mostly deboned stockfish had been at least 4.5 kilograms of live cod. In the latter terms, then, the wild biomass of cod and tuna taken around 1500 were roughly equivalent (5,000–7,000 mT) while about 1300 the Norwegian take of cod had been two or three times larger (13,000–18,000 mT). Yet both paled by comparison to herring where processed and live weights more closely aligned. As earlier remarked, North Sea herring catches of the early fourteenth century reached or exceeded 15,000 mT and at the end of that century the Øresund take at 40,000 mT was three times greater still, so two to five times larger than probable maxima taken in the great medieval single species fisheries elsewhere.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Sadly, though wisely, historians have attempted no similar calculations for the herring catch in the fifteenth-century North Sea nor that of sardines and pilchards across the waters between Cornwall and Portugal. Surely, however, from before 1300 to beyond 1500 aggressive expansion of European fishing into hitherto little-used stocks and waters on all of Christendom’s maritime frontiers brought large new marine biomass into European diets and enlivened many regional economies.

8.2.1.1 Preserved Fish

The big commercial fisheries increased the durability of their products with two major technologies, conceivable as ‘wet’ and ‘dry’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The former method mostly applied to fishes with oily flesh – herring, sardines, tuna, salmon – and the latter to gadids, flatfishes, and pike, species which store energy-rich fats and oils elsewhere. Wet brining processes sealed the oils away from the air or induced chemical changes to more stable compounds. Most effective on large scale, these methods required economical access to copious supplies of salt. About 1400 it took a tonne of salt to pack every five tonnes of Scanian herring and more for the Dutch method; 500 barrels of tonnina required 15.5 cubic meters of salt.Footnote ¹²⁰ In some southern fisheries olive oil could replace salt brine. Drying fish had climatic preconditions, freezing cold or blazing hot, so long as the humidity was low, but the process was cheap and the product kept well in dry conditions. A combined procedure, dry salting, put the processor back into dependence on the salt trade and, to judge from the history of herring and cod, gave a less durable but often cheaper product.

In medieval towns of appreciable size, salt, dried, and pickled fishes were the stock-in-trade of ‘salt-fishmongers’ or ‘herringers’ (harengier, allecistae, ślędzowniki), retail merchants distinct from purveyors of fresh, preferably live, local fish.Footnote ¹²¹ Manuscripts of the health manual Tacuinum sanitatis illuminated in Lombardy in the late fourteenth century depict shops retailing different fishes as pisces saliti (Figure 8.5).Footnote ¹²² While herring or sardine might be eaten straight from the container or simply warmed, other preserved varieties demanded special culinary preparation as well. Eberhard, chef to Duke Henry ‘the Rich’ of Bavaria–Landshut (1404–1450) asked “Would you like to make a good stockfish?” Soak it for half a week and then cook in lard with ginger and saffron. The Parisian compiler of the Menagier alternated soaking the stockfish and beating it with a mallet. Tonnina from the cask had to be elaborately washed in fresh water and so, too, the most strongly brined or dry-salted herring.Footnote ¹²³ Then recall (Chapter 2) that a chorus of physicians and dietitians – Eberhard among them – condemned all preserved fish on medical grounds. No wonder elites uniformly sneered and thought consumption an act of penance. Bishop Matthias von Rammung of Speyer left no doubt in his 1470 kitchen ordinance: “Herring shall not be considered a fish dish, [for] one can in no way make them acceptable.”Footnote ¹²⁴ To varying degrees and as compared to freshwater fishes if available, this was no high-status food. Its purveyors rather sought much larger markets.

Figure 8.5 The saltfish monger.

As represented in a manuscript of Tacuinum sanitatis illuminated in Lombardy c. 1370. ONB cod vind. ser. nova 2644, fol 82v ‘pisces saliti’.

Reproduced with permission of the Austrian National Library.

8.2.1.2 At Unprecedented Scale

Mass markets for preserved fish were served by shipments and sales in bulk, “by the last and by the hundred” as some English accounts put it. Indeed the standard measure for Galician sardines was the ‘thousand’ by count and actual shipments of sardines and herrings alike were, as previously observed, in many, many thousands. As early as 1321 an estimated thirty million herrings entered Paris; with time and freshness no constraint, most were sailed or hauled slowly but cheaply up the Seine. A century later Portuguese and Galician shipmasters each year delivered sardines in the millions and hake in the tens of thousands to Barcelona and other Catalan ports. Merchants come to Kraków from elsewhere could offer salt fish at retail for just three days – though they could await a fish day – and thereafter sell only by the cask or keg.Footnote ¹²⁵

Bulk packaging dominated. At customs frontiers of landlocked Aragon in 1447–1448 sardines arrived in baskets, dried and smoked herring in crates (pirotas), and brined tuna in barrels. While stockfish and some other dried products traveled in bundles or bales, barrels of diverse but often closely regulated sizes became the standard unit for preserved fish. In the north Hansards likely set a pattern which Netherlanders, English, and Scots emulated. Hanseatic legislation set the ‘Rostock barrel’ at 117 kilograms. Scottish parliamentarians repeatedly legislated use of the ‘Hamburg barrel’ of 14 gallons (c. 60 liters?) for salmon and a smaller size for herring. On the outer estuary of Rhine and Scheldt late fifteenth-century officials tolled herring, salmon, and other fish arriving in barrels on most vessels making for Antwerp. Standard Sicilian barrels for tonnina held 45 and 60 kilograms and in Andalusia barriletes measured one quintal (c. 46 kg) and barriles four (184 kg).Footnote ¹²⁶ By any measure that was a lot of food.

The mass market had social substance, too, with herrings acknowledged a fish of ‘the poor’ by Alan of Lille in the mid-twelfth century and Philippe de Mèzieres at the end of the fourteenth. Portuguese King João II had the same view of sardines.Footnote ¹²⁷ Actual rations suggest these observers were correct, or at least came to be. Up to the thirteenth century in northern France and Flanders alike herring remains are found among all social ranks near the coast but inland only at high-status sites (castles, monasteries); thereafter from around 1300 herring become a general feature even of poor urban households throughout the area. In 1390 the almoner to the king of France bought 78,000 herrings on the Paris market and distributed them to hospices and poor households.Footnote ¹²⁸ Further south sardines were the one fish commonly eaten by late medieval Portuguese workers and peasants. Recipients of charity dinners in Valladolid chewed hake and sardines.Footnote ¹²⁹ The spread of preserved marine fishes to more modest consumers ever further inland was associated with improvements in durability and with general advances in transport infrastructure, both of which would cut the cost of fish actually eaten (not spoiled in transit).

Distribution costs along the supply chain certainly affected monetary values of preserved marine fish compared to other foods. At Constance during the Council herring sold for 14 pfennig the quarter-pound when in good supply and 36–48 pfennig more normally, while similar-sized local ganckvisch went for 4 pfennig the quarter or 12 pfennig the pound.Footnote ¹³⁰ There close to the head of Rhine navigation and some 500–600 kilometers from the nearest herring fishery, herring cost four to ten times more than its local freshwater counterpart. Stockfish, however, at 2 schilling for a small and 3 schilling for a large (1.0–1.5 kg?) may have more closely matched the local pike, carp, or tench at 18–20 pfennig the pound – still way over the price of meat. Nevertheless, by calculation of historian Arnved Nedkvitne, about the time of the Council the markup inland consumers paid over Bergen prices for stockfish had dropped by half from that of a century before (down to 250 percent from almost 500).Footnote ¹³¹

Few medieval consumers could live beside a large, fish-rich lake. For the majority north of the Alps preserved herring offered more for the money than did most other fish. Fiscal assessments and tolls bore this out, asking less from herring shipments.Footnote ¹³² But widespread consumption and a clear price advantage for herring followed noticeably upon better preserving techniques. In seasons of abstinence during 1444–1446, the kitchen at castle Horn on the Lower Austrian Danube repeatedly purchased dozens of herring at 1.5 or 2 pennies per fish, a price one-third or less than paid for any of the local fishes that also came to the table.Footnote ¹³³ Other northern marine taxa sold at different price points than herring yet still gained against competing fish or other protein sources. When the bishop of Coventry bought food in 1461, herrings at four to the penny compared favourably to 12d for an eel; a stockfish at 3d gave more for the money than a fresh tench at 6d or a pike at 8–12d. Frankfurt’s market regulations in 1487 priced a pound of herrings the same as ⅔ pound of salt cod, ⅓ pound of (local?) salmon, and a pound of beef.Footnote ¹³⁴ Sardines were the cheapest and most common on markets in Piedmont and Madrid, at the latter priced some 10–20 percent less than equal weight of other preserved fishes.Footnote ¹³⁵ To reiterate, no fish on medieval markets provided cheap calories, but much anecdotal and incidental evidence confirms that some preserved varieties did offer the least costly meat alternative people could buy.

8.2.1.3 To Be Eaten Far Away

Although marine fishers could work near or far from home and preserved fish were relatively bulky low-cost commodities, all the frontier fisheries supplied consumers at great distance from sites of their catches. Cartloads of Baltic herring paid tolls 200 kilometers inland at Poznań and Gnieżno by the 1240s and so likewise a generation later did river boats with them at stations on the middle Elbe. On the market in Kraków herring from at nearest Pomerania (600 km) and by 1300 more normally Scania or the North Sea were always the most common, even stereotypical, fish. As already seen further west, traders from Köln passed herrings on to centres up the Rhine and its tributaries. Merchants from Nürnberg had other options, too: in 1429 the Volkmeier brothers imported 36½ barrels directly from Szczecin. Some of that herring Nürnbergers re-exported to Salzburg, but men from Ulm and Linz also themselves obtained it in the Low Countries.Footnote ¹³⁶ The one marine fish bought by Austrian gentry at the start of the fifteenth century, preserved herring first occur in deposits of Viennese latrines only at the century’s end.Footnote ¹³⁷

Recipe collections rarely mention herring but stockfish were the one marine product named in the oldest known German-language cookbook, compiled in Würzburg before 1350.Footnote ¹³⁸ Those slabs of dried Lofoten cod had been carried more than 2,000 kilometers by sea via Bergen to Lübeck, and likely by circuitous water routes again well more than the 600 straight-line kilometers from the Hanse town to their destination. The Parisian menagier knew well that “stofix” had come from “frontiers of the sea” and been dried to keep a very long time.Footnote ¹³⁹

Generations earlier, Gascon traders had ranked among the best customers at Yarmouth’s herring fair.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Thanks in part to their successors, buyers for fourteenth-century popes at Avignon could find herrings and hake at La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Toulouse. Merchants in Burgundy supplied more herrings, too. More customers than just the papal curia kept the latter trade going, witness the quantities of those fish tolled at Chalons in 1406.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Traders in the English West Country contracted to ship many tons of their salted hake and other fishes into Castile.Footnote ¹⁴² Smoked and dried herrings arrived at Basque ports from northern Europe, and so did 2½ tonnes of them on a Flemish ship at Lisbon in 1402. Among imports to Aragon in 1413–1414, marine fish comprised 10 percent by value: conger, hake, herring, sardine, eel, and miscellaneous dried varieties, some having been carried about 200 kilometers over rugged Pyrenean or Cantabrian mountain passes and the rest a greater distance up the Ebro valley from the Mediterranean. People nearer Iberia’s Mediterranean coast in Murcia and Valencia ate brined herrings from the North Atlantic, too, and also dried hake and salt sardines from Galicia and the Gulf of Cádiz.Footnote ¹⁴³ Aringhe imported from Bruges were the first salt fish mentioned for Barcelona in the merchant manual a resident Florentine trader compiled in 1396.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ But the earliest known consignment of Atlantic fishes to southern Italy in 1426 – sixty dozen dried hake and 3,550 sardinesFootnote ¹⁴⁵ – pointed straight back to Galicia. The very term southern Europeans applied since the fifteenth century to dried or salt-dried gadids, bacalao/bacalà, derived from a lowland Germanic (Flemish/Dutch, Low German) name for a cod. Humanist Paolo Giovio avoided the vulgar vernacular, but well knew the distant origins of both the herrings and the dried cods he could buy at Rome’s market.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Though become elements of local cuisines from Poland to Provence to Portugal, these fishes never swam in local waters nor bore indigenous names.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

As emblematic of the new frontier fisheries as the stench of a Bothnian fish camp or the fish and salteries in Dieppe which assaulted noses of a Czech embassy, then, must be those headless cod skeletons in Paris or London, while the heaps of their heads moldered beside the Norwegian Sea (Figure 8.6). Quite without modern technologies the medieval fish trades separated the lives and death of these animals from their ultimate consumption and disposal.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ How alien to a European landsman or -woman were the board-like stockfish and strekfusz, named not as familiar beasts but for the poles and racks on which they had dried, or the slippery kaakharing and tonnina, swimming in barrels of brine? None in Kraków, Nürnberg, Lyon, Madrid, or Florence had otherwise laid eyes on their like. How did a late medieval Parisian imagine those distant seas whence he drew his food? Long before the industrial age, medieval frontier fisheries, pressed by mass demand for the least expensive fish, distanced consumers from the animal and the producing ecosystem. At the same time, requirements for bulk preservation and marketing pushed the largest offshore fisheries to rely on abundant stocks of single species. This standardization enables more extensive series of fish prices, while, as seen below, exposing certain targeted fish stocks to risks from both depletion and environmental fluctuations.

Figure 8.6 Headless codfish as commodity.

“‘Colfish’ of the English, whose head we do not show you here because not even among the English (among whom it is clearly foreign) has it anywhere [i.e., in any scientific work] been ascertained for us.” Pierre Belon (Petrus Bellonius), De aquatilibus, libri duo. Cum eiconibus ad vivam ipsorum effigem, quoad eius fiere potuit, expressis (Parisis: apud Carolum Stephanum, 1553), p. 134. Note precise representation of fins and body structure of Gadus morhua. But Pollachius virens, called in England ‘saithe’ or, from its darkish flesh, ‘coalfish’, is a gadid of very similar outward appearance often taken together with cod.

8.2.1.4 Fluctuating Prices

Previous chapters looked at prices to show fish as generally expensive sources of calories and of protein, with herring (and sardine) ‘for the poor’ a partial exception. Relative values of individual species differed some from market to market but even the earliest records show high short-run variability. Anecdotal impressions of longer-term rising price levels appear by around 1100. Serial or quasi-serial records from the mid-thirteenth century up to and beyond 1400 confirm this trend for herring, cod, salmon, and Navarre sardines (Section 6.1.1 in Chapter 6 above). What now follows attempts a closer look at prices for preserved products of the growing frontier fisheries, especially in the almost two centuries between the Black Death and the so-called Price Revolution of the 1500s. As was seen for farmed carp, species with individuals of fairly uniform size and standardized packaging make for more consistent series. While improved scholarly access to late medieval prices remains limited to products as common as salted or brined herring, stockfish, and rarely other preserved fishes, evident long- and short-term variations had implications for fishers, consumers, and regional stocks of some fishes.

Late medieval fish prices must be understood against a general post-plague pattern of shrunken European populations and reduced demand for basic subsistence goods, notably grain, accompanied by the survivors’ rising per capita wealth and effective demand for ‘better’ goods, notably animal protein, on the part of a larger proportion of those fewer consumers. Prices for grain fell everywhere and those for meat, dairy, and fish rose. The resultant ‘price scissors’ meant gains for protein producers and losses for those dependent on cereal sales. Hence consuming and producing perspectives differ.

Figure 8.7A–D indexes annual values from those published data sets worth calling herring price series which begin appreciably prior to 1500.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Separate charts for two series, England and Utrecht (Figures 8.8 and 8.9), have been extracted better to illustrate general trends. This quantified material can be augmented with shorter or less serial but seemingly well-grounded observations elsewhere. These data sets collectively tell similar stories about late medieval herring. Nominal and silver prices in England (Figure 6.1) had slowly doubled between the 1210s and 1340s, then doubled again briefly in the economic chaos of the 1350s, which provoked short-lived 1357 legislation to regulate prices at the Yarmouth herring fair.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ After falling back they rose again from the 1360s to attain early fifteenth-century levels twice those of a century before (Figure 8.8). In the following two or three generations English consumers found herring prices little changed, but from the 1470s these fell by as much as 20 percent. New increases after 1500 were balanced by loss of silver value and the start of the general inflation of the sixteenth century.

Figure 8.7A Britain.

Figure 8.7B North Sea ports and inland.

Figure 8.7C Northern Low Countries, coast and inland.

Figure 8.7D Central Europe, Baltic, and interior.

Figure 8.7 Annual herring prices (indexed), 1360–1550.

Figure 8.8 English herring prices, 1400–1540, indexed.

Figure 8.9 Quinquennial index of herring price at Utrecht, 1460/5–1535/9.

None but anecdotal pre-1350 herring prices elsewhere leave only the observation of general parallels between England and the continent from the post-plague decades to the mid-1500s (Figures 8.7 and 8.9). Most curves peak during the first quarter or third of the fifteenth century and flatten or decline during its second half. The telling exceptions, given what is now known about shifting production zones, are from the Low Countries (Ghent, Utrecht, Leiden, Antwerp), where a positive price trend lasted into the late 1400s (Figure 8.9 provides a clear example). Although late medieval elites turned away from herring, that market deepened as improved packaging for greater durability maintained the geographic and social breadth of this still relatively cheap protein. Herring which had been one-fourth the price of an equal weight of stockfish around 1300 came to half that level in 1550.Footnote ¹⁵¹

That same ‘Price Revolution’ of the sixteenth century marked nominal prices for preserved cod as well, but exiguous published data obscures earlier developments in both producing and consuming regions. The likely best data set, that for Bergen stockfish published by Arnved Nedkvitne, aggregates values along the supply chain at more than generational scale. Figure 8.10 graphs these as silver per hundred fish. Consumers in inland England thus paid in coined silver an average of 30 percent more for stockfish in 1400 than they had before 1350, and sellers in Bergen received 2½ times what they had in 1300. Reflecting the reciprocal movement of two commodities, if the fishers selling in Bergen converted that silver to rye flour, they got 3½ times what their predecessors had a century before.Footnote ¹⁵² This more than compensated for lower export volumes and enabled purchases of textiles, German beer, and other enhancements to living standards in Lofoten. It was a bonanza for Norwegians in the north. Although the premium shrank in the course of Europe’s fifteenth-century demographic recovery, as late as 1500 sellers of stockfish still got twice the return of their forebears two centuries earlier. As so described the late medieval situation more reflected cereal prices responding to decline in human numbers than it did the price of the fish, which moved in an opposite direction, to the benefit of late medieval Norwegian producers. When new demographic and market patterns reversed those relationships and pushed Norse product to ever lower exchange values, Nedkvitne’s ‘Golden Age’ of Norwegian stockfish came to an end.Footnote ¹⁵³

Figure 8.10 Stockfish prices along the supply chain, c. 1280–1550.

Published stockfish prices for Iceland reveal similar clear trends in thin but consistent data.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ During early fourteenth-century decades when Icelandic exports were taking off, the price of skreiđ rose by a third, but then held steady through the century’s second half. Strong European demand in the 1400s almost doubled the price again. Medieval Icelandic culture and political leadership privileged a farm-centred economy where fishing provided only extra subsistence or income. Elites discouraged independence and growth of the fishing sector, so preferred stable prices.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Consequences for organization and labour in fisheries are observed below (pp. 377–379).

From continental consumption markets for stockfish and other preserved gadids, good price series become available only with the fifteenth century, so cast no light on pre- and post-plague market fluctuations. In England after the 1420s a downward trend of stockfish prices is counterbalanced by a rise for ‘cod’. This fits anecdotal evidence that mid- to up-market English consumers were then abandoning preserved fish for fresher forms and for meat.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ At Rostock, however, prices for several cod products moved in reasonable unison upwards during the first half of the century and then flattened until after 1500.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Prices for salted and barreled salmon rose slowly in late fourteenth-century Scotland and, from 1411, England as well. A sudden trough around 1450 is attributed in both countries to currency manipulation, followed by further rise to and beyond the 1520s.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Fully conceding the fragmentary, questionable, and incommensurate quality of much available data, in the long term late medieval prices for preserved herring, cod, and salmon look driven by interplay of fluctuating human numbers with the greater per capita wealth and discretionary incomes of the post-plague period. The cheaper product, herring, responded more positively early on, while larger and more costly cods performed better during the fifteenth century. For many late medieval Europeans even the new mass-marketed fish from marine frontiers remained a commodity at the margin between subsistence necessity and an affordable luxury … or else the cheapest way to gain animal protein without flouting religious constraints. When the cost of cereals fell, as after 1350, larger discretionary incomes allowed a greater share of Europe’s population to eat more fish, even at greater cost, but still, for those consumers, at the lowest price points. The Christoffels Jans household whom we visited in the 1490s (pp. ***–*** above), contemporaries of Zuan Caboto, personified this situation.

Stronger prices in the Low Countries could help sustain local fishers and merchants investing in more productive new technologies and market strategies which let them undercut competitors and capture more stagnant markets elsewhere. Overall, and acknowledging such important regional anomalies as the slipping English market for preserved herrings, late medieval price trends suggest a strong large-scale demand for preserved fish products both widened and deepened in most regions north of the Alps. But as to be observed more closely below, at shorter temporal scale natural fluctuations as well as political conflicts could also affect herring prices.

Did similar conditions prevail in southern Europe before the sixteenth-century surge of preserved Atlantic and New World fish into the Mediterranean sustained a new long-term rise in effective demand and prices?Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Useable serial data from southern Europe remains confined to two Iberian regions, nearly landlocked Navarre in the northwest (Figure 6.2) and Mediterranean coastal Valencia (Figure 8.11), where published prices begin only after 1410 and end by 1490. Both data sets, however, include key regional marine products (sardine, hake, conger) and, as already observed in fourteenth-century Navarre, moved roughly parallel to those for herring in the north. After the 1410s what had been rising prices for brined sardine and dried hake in Navarre went flat. A coincident early fifteenth-century plateau initiated the series from Valencia, followed, amidst much interannual variation, by slightly lower post-1460 values resembling those then seen for much northern herring.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ In both instances, sardines, close ecological and dietary counterparts to northern herring, also showed the most extreme year-to-year fluctuations.

Figure 8.11 Fish prices in late medieval Spain: Valencia.

Data from E. Hamilton, Money, Prices, and Wages in Valencia, Aragon, and Navarre, 1351–1500, appendix III, pp. 215–221. Indexed and graphed by R. Hoffmann and K. Hoffmann. © R. Hoffmann.

Dare we infer some medium-run late fifteenth-century balance between effective demand and normal supply up and down coastal western Europe, while only inland markets for stockfish and the North Sea herring remained buoyant? The call for Scottish salmon in domestic, English, and Low Countries markets seems to have held strong. What lack of clues leaves a mystery are price relations for tuna and for those diverse products from dynamic new regional fisheries exemplified by Bretons and men of the English West Country.Footnote ¹⁶¹ But as indicative as long-term trends are for understanding ecological and social developments in the marine fisheries, also notable are the great volatility of prices in all the annual series and the changing fates of some regional herring fisheries still to be investigated below. Long and short run price fluctuations reflect different aspects of interactions between medieval people and the fish of the sea.