As peasants once told the tale along Baltic shores and in Black Sea watersheds, God created the fishes intending to provide them the protection of many legs, defensive weapons, or a habitat high in the trees like birds. The foolish fishes refused, trusting, said some, in their slippery speed, and, said others, in the watery depths.Footnote 1 God conceded but at a price: If the men catch me alive, so also shall they scrape my scales off alive, cut me up alive, and cook me.Footnote 2 Popular wisdom running back plausibly, if unprovably, into the Middle Ages grasped an essential old relationship between humans and fish, capture of local populations for prompt consumption as food.
This chapter first establishes that the fishes early medieval Europeans ate came from their own neighbouring waters. The same would remain true for at least some of their descendants. The peasant majority themselves fished to supplement cereal diets with whatever aquatic foods they had the time, opportunity, and ability to catch. They valued their access to common resources. Sometimes ordinary peasants and, more importantly, a few select individuals almost everywhere also laboured to set fish before their lords, wealthy men and women of rank and power in the area. Regardless whether the actual fish-catchers or their social superiors topped the local food web, from the beginning medieval subsistence fisheries relied on small-scale, often passive, capture techniques well suited to limited and seasonally accessible local resources. Technical expertise derived from the long experience of ordinary people in their local environment. Simple means of preservation extended the use people made of recurring surpluses. Social and technical features of subsistence fisheries tended to stabilize their effect on participant communities, human and natural.
3.1 Local Supply
Medieval Europeans exploited the fish populations of all nearby waters, no matter how small. Indeed, fish from local resources predominated through much of the Middle Ages and remained significant past the period’s end. Essential to understanding of medieval fisheries is the sheer ubiquity of this activity and, especially in the early Middle Ages, of its economic role.
Surfacing all over the written record of charters, cartularies, and estate surveys, for all its fragmentary and unrepresentative quality, are words like piscatio, piscatoria, piscatura, or piscaria, terms of legal art and regional but rarely wider precision for “fishing right,” “fishing place,” “fisheries installation,” or the financial returns from the same.Footnote 3 Other texts just mention weirs, fishers, or renders of fish. Early medieval Europeans had no speedy overland transport and few ways to preserve fast-spoiling fish or to acquire them in trade. Most people lived away from the sea and so had to rely mainly on inland, rather than even coastal marine resources. When the most elaborate preindustrial shipping facilities, commercial infrastructures, and strong government support could during the thirteenth–eighteenth centuries just barely get fresh fish in an edible state the 150 kilometers from the Norman coast to Paris, medieval Europe’s richest concentration of consumers (see below, Chapter 4, pp. ***–***), that distance can be thought an effective limit for any regular movement of fresh fish (Map 3.1). For most of Europe, then, regular fish eating would mean using local freshwater or diadromous varieties.
Map 3.1 A 150-kilometer range for delivery of fresh marine fish.
The result is manifest in specific remains recovered from human food waste and in verbal records of the fishes which identifiable human groups ate or meant to eat. At sixth- through eleventh-century socio-natural sites across Europe people of all ranks consumed animals naturally present in waters near them and not exotic varieties from other ecosystems.
There are collective overviews. Meta-analysis of published results from sixty-five medieval Baltic sites and forty-five on the North Sea identified local fish fauna as the principal feature of sixth- through twelfth-century assemblages.Footnote 4 Similar review of finds from a score of eighth/ninth- through thirteenth-century settlements in present-day Austria and Hungary reveals ubiquitous dominance of four taxa, sturgeons, catfish, carp, and pike, all common to still and running waters of the Danube system from the Alps and Carpathians to the Iron Gates. Among the several thousand identified medieval fish remains in this composite sample, a single herring bone was the sole trace of a fish from elsewhere.Footnote 5 An archaeological survey of early medieval coastal communities along both sides of the southern North Sea and English Channel found them full of locally caught inshore varieties, notably small gadids, flatfishes, eel, and herring.Footnote 6
Findings from particular sites varied with ecological circumstances, as early medieval people used their own regionally distinctive aquatic communities. Select examples show this irrespective of date, watersheds, and consumers’ status (more cases are in Supplement 3.1).
Near the centre of Merovingian Frankland, the founding generation of eighth-century aristocratic nuns at Saint Irminen convent in Trier left in their garbage almost a thousand identifiable fish bones from eight taxa, just over a half of them cyprinids, one in five catfish, and one in twenty each pike or salmonids. Small numbers of perch, eel, and shad confirm the whole assemblage, freshwater and diadromous alike, came from the Moselle. Marine species were not to be found.Footnote 7
At ninth-century San Vincenzo al Volturno, equidistant between Rome, Naples, the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian seas, Benedictine monks did consume mullets, sea bass, and some sea bream from Adriatic lagoons, yet 78 percent of the fish bone in their trash was tench and other cyprinids from the limited fresh waters of central Italy.Footnote 8 The whole reflected a general post-Roman shift of Italian fish consumption from marine to inland and inshore varieties.Footnote 9
Eighth- to tenth-century high-status Anglo-Saxons resident at Flixborough in the floodplain of the river Trent about eight kilometers inland from the Humber estuary may have shifted between secular and monastic foodways, but little varied the fishes they ate. The twenty-eight taxa identified from this wet-sieved site were dominated by only seven, all freshwater or diadromous: eel, smelt, flounder/plaice, pike, small cyprinids, and salmonids were all readily accessible in nearby waters. Even the incidental species conform to the norm of local use.Footnote 10
Food remains from late Saxon (tenth–eleventh-century) London show an evolving but similar pattern: of twenty-eight taxa identified in more than four thousand bones from a half-dozen separate sites, nine were freshwater, five diadromous, and fourteen marine organisms, notably herring, but most of the bones came from eel and all varieties frequented the Thames river, estuary, and inshore coastal waters. The rise in English marine fish consumption around 1000, dubbed by zooarchaeologist James Barrett the “Fish Event Horizon,”Footnote 11 there meant mainly an increase in herring, followed by a slow rise in local cod from the southern North Sea.Footnote 12
Research on the Viking Age (eighth- to mid-eleventh-century) entrepôt Haithabu/Hedeby, on the Baltic estuary of the Schlei but with easy access to the North Sea, recovered and identified 13,842 fish bones. These included twenty-six varieties, but 39 percent were herring, 25 percent perch, and 11 percent each pike and native cyprinids (roach, rudd, tench, bream). Only a few thinly represented taxa were not then available in and near the Schlei, being brought, perhaps by visitors, from the North Sea.Footnote 13
Like dwellers beside Baltic waters those who lived scores of kilometers inland at sites now well excavated with rich early medieval fish remains consumed the occasional herring but mainly relied on stocks native to their own estuaries, rivers, and lakes. Sieved contexts from the eighth to tenth centuries at the princely stronghold of Ostrów Lednicki midway between Gniezno and Poznań contain 30–57 percent bones of sturgeon, followed by tench, pike, and cyprinids from local waters.Footnote 14 While estuarine and river sites in this region favoured sturgeon and pike-perch, people on lakes from interior Wielkopolska west to the Grosse Ploner See in east Holstein ate more perch, pike, and catfish, species of lentic habitats.Footnote 15
Returning to the post-Carolingian west, the oldest fish remains recovered from the Scheldt basin in Flanders are from emerging urban ninth/tenth-century Ghent (review Fig. 2.2). More than 90 percent are species taken in fresh water and the few marine species primarily coastal flatfishes. During the ensuing two centuries the share of flatfishes more than doubled and that of herring – also then taken along Flemish beaches – rose to 20, then 30 percent. Up to 1200, other marine varieties totalled less than 10 percent. Meanwhile fish from fresh water dwindled proportionately, though still contributing more than four remains in ten.Footnote 16
About the year 1000 a community of what modern researchers have called ‘peasant knights’ settled on a shoreline shelf beside Lake Paladru in the Isère valley some way north of Grenoble. Two generations later rising waters inundated the site, driving the settlers to higher ground and leaving their farmsteads to be studied by modern submarine archaeologists. Besides fishing gear (see Figure 3.1) they recovered 421 identifiable fish bones and more than 8,000 scales. Ninety-five percent of the bones were perch and just under 4 percent still-water cyprinids, with bare traces of pike and a salmonid. Ninety percent of the scales, however, were cyprinid, suggesting different taphonomies and thus original handling of the two principal taxa. All species taken and consumed by the settlers still inhabit the lake.Footnote 17
Figure 3.1 Eleventh-century fishing equipment from Lac Paladru.
Gear recovered from the settlement of ‘peasant knights’ included (left column) floats (top) and weights (bottom) for nets; a bronze hook, c. 3 cm (centre), and two iron fish spears (right).
This brief tour might end with the written record of late eleventh-century Cluniac monks in Burgundy and the Black Forest. Ulrich of Cluny’s initial 1079 dictionary of their sign language named six taxa, five of them native to the Rhône and upper Loire (some fifty kilometers away); the only exotic was cuttlefish. A few years later William of Hirsau, who carried Cluny’s reforms to his community east of the Rhine, reworked Ulrich’s list and raised the number of fishes to fifteen: now thirteen were migrants or residents in the upper Rhine watershed and six of the additions cyprinids from there; the only non-natives were Ulrich’s original squid and herring, conceived as salted.Footnote 18
Commonality of diversity has been the point of the past few pages. For the first half and more of the medieval millennium peoples of Latin Christendom ate a great variety of fishes, but in each location from the more limited biota of their own nearby natural aquatic ecosystems. Fresh, brackish, or salt, still or flowing, warm or cold habitats made no detectable difference to consumers. Rich people and poor alike ate the familiar fishes of neighbouring waters. Well into the high Middle Ages residents in even large urban centers still relied on these local sources of supply. In most localities that meant native freshwater varieties and elsewhere those available as residents or migrants from estuaries and nearshore marine waters. How were these food resources procured? For a long time mainly by efforts of consumers or their servants.
3.2 Direct Subsistence Fishing
Consumers can cover their own demand without a market. Economic actors assess their wants and direct the natural resources, land, and labour at their command to satisfying them. In that case the catching and the eating went to the same economic account. Such self-sufficiency nevertheless still involves implicit choices allocating scarce productive factors to one priority or another. People of unequal wealth (access to productive factors) also have different patterns of effective demand, for those who more easily obtain basic food and shelter can turn surplus energies at their command to other kinds of wants. Rich or poor, fully self-sufficient consumers must be generalist producers to obtain the variety of goods and services they need.
Early medieval society may usefully be thought to comprise two socio-economic orders, the powerful and the poor. Direct subsistence is an affair of the latter, people whose economic capabilities depended on the working capacity of simple family households. Most of them we can call peasants, for they lived from their own mixed farming and in some kind of subordination to people of power who, with or without some cover of legality, regularly seized a share of the peasants’ productive capacity. Direct subsistence fishing was one part of a survival strategy for people trying to meet basic needs from the relatively meager human and material resources they controlled. Later in the Middle Ages rural- or town-dwellers with other occupations but access to aquatic resources also occasionally covered their own demand for fish. Like most activities of ordinary folk in early medieval society, direct subsistence fishing rarely attracted the eyes or pens of literate groups. As a result, while early sources establish the prevalence of subsistence fishing, only later texts convey more of its technical particulars and organizational context.
3.2.1 Fishing “for Their Own Table”
People plainly catching their own food and eating their own catch nonetheless appear surprisingly often in the sparse and cryptic early medieval record. Incidental references in the seventh century Life of sixth-century St. Columba depict a peasant farmer who used a spear and Irish ascetics who operated nets and traps to take salmon to eat. Gall’s fishing in Lake Constance (see Introduction) followed that template.Footnote 19 So, independently, did his younger contemporary Sigiramnus (St. Cyran, Siran, d.655), who fished to feed his monasteries in the river-laced “wasteland of Brenne” (in saltu Brionae). When monks complained that Sigiramnus was too able a fisher, “for one became nauseous from eating them every day,” the saint departed to live as a solitary and so feed himself and those who took him in.Footnote 20 On the other side of the Alps early tenth-century tenants on at least two estates of St. Giulia, Brescia, paid dues from both farming and fishing; the operator of a layman’s property near Ferrara could keep one-fifth of his take in fish and game.Footnote 21 Perhaps those holdings resembled what excavators found at the Thames-side village of Wraysbury, Berkshire, where most farmsteads held fish bones, notably of eel but also resident freshwater species plainly taken from the river. Far to the east at Drohiczyn on the Bug, peasant houses, dated like those at Wraysbury to the ninth–twelfth centuries, also held scattered remains of locally procured fish and, one, an iron fish hook.Footnote 22 By that time fishing was also recognizably a seasonal secondary occupation of farmers and pastoralists in Bohemia, Norway, Iceland, and coastal lagoons of Languedoc and Tuscany.Footnote 23
More forthcoming later records often treat peasant fishing for household use as a normal activity. This was certainly the case when the administratively precocious Teutonic Order of crusading knights established control in once-pagan Prussia. The charter they issued for Chełmno in 1233 became the prototype for the rights of their subjects: each household could catch its own fish by any means except the great seine net called niewod. After generations had followed those provisions, Grand Master Conrad von Jungingen specified in 1406 that the right meant fishing with “small gear” such as hand-held nets, baited hooks, and basket traps, and even with weirs and fish-fences which did not fully block streams, “but not otherwise than for their table.”Footnote 24 Catching the very essence of direct subsistence, the phrase “for their table” in a 1342 customal had also described how established peasant tenants could fish at Alrewas, Staffordshire.Footnote 25 Back in the mid-eleventh century, a man of the abbey of Marmoutier in Berry passed the ordeal of hot iron to vindicate abbey subjects’ right freely to fish for their own use on waters claimed by the seigneur of Château-Renault; only fish taken for sale need pay a seigneurial tax.Footnote 26 Holders of tenements beside the lake of Monte Sorbo, Lazio, could fish if they turned half the catch over to their lord. An Alsatian rental from about 1160 allowed only local villagers, subjects of Bouzonville abbey, to fish at Offwiler and Obermodern.Footnote 27
Peasants fishing legitimately for domestic consumption remain visible in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century records from Iberia to the Carpathians.Footnote 28 In the Vercors, Haut Dauphiné, a 1449 charter confirmed the free fishing which inhabitants of four villages had long enjoyed: those seeking their own food were unregulated but those who sold fish had to pay for an annual licence.Footnote 29 Along the meandering rivers of the late medieval Hungarian plain, fishing was a peasant by-occupation. As water levels dropped each summer, village communities joined to block the fok, narrow channels cut between oxbow lakes and the main river, and while releasing small fish to grow, held the large ones for local consumption.Footnote 30 The Portuguese Cortes recognized river fisheries as open commons, which in practice meant nominal dues to the crown. Subsistence fishing there was associated with the cooler seasons and fish taken by angling were exempt from tithe.Footnote 31 All these common folk plainly had access to fisheries resources.
3.2.2 Mutual Regulation and Local Ecological Knowledge
To a modern viewer medieval fishing for direct subsistence is often obscure. It neither much engaged relations between lords – whose own dealings created records of property rights and political obligation – nor passed through markets where traders and tax-collectors could count it. It was rather an object of long-unwritten custom which in fact if less often in law recognized commoners’ access to fishing waters for the needs of their households. In the unlettered medieval countryside the old and customary called for no documentation.Footnote 32 Later urban and territorial administrations were more apt to call attention to these uses if only, as in Piedmonte, by exempting subsistence fishers from the licences and regulations they imposed on commercial fishing. Fifteenth-century Venetian authorities publicly proclaimed the fishery of Lake Garda “to be common to all.”Footnote 33 Statutes of the Perugia fishers’ guild from 1296 had simply conceded that locals caught fish which did not enter the market.Footnote 34
When people sensed limits to the resource and wanted to protect it, common access to direct subsistence fisheries in no way prevented mutual regulation. The council of newly formed Villa de Mar (now Saintes-Marie-de-la Mer) on the Rhone estuary’s Petit Camargue in 1307 consulted the citizens before allowing conditional use of a new type of net in the salt ponds, marshes, and channels under town control. In 1341 they agreed with the archbishop of Arles to close all fishing during the spring spawning run.Footnote 35 Lake Garda’s fishery for lake trout and cyprinids was closely regulated “to establish the common benefit and the multiple abundance of the aforesaid fishes.”Footnote 36
Through ubiquity and persistence the direct subsistence fishery shaped and transmitted dietary, technical, and environmental knowledge in peasant society. Irish archaeologist Aidan O’Sullivan has made a strong case that the families who built and rebuilt, sometimes since even long before the Middle Ages, the hundreds of riverine and estuarine fish weirs still detectable around the British Isles “passed down lore of place and practice through the generations.”Footnote 37 Fish spears collected from country people in early twentieth-century Pomerania go back in design and markings to early medieval prototypes. In England, Spain, and the German-speaking Alps the oldest known instructions for making and using fishing baits and basket traps come directly from the medieval vernacular.Footnote 38 French rural culture drew a plain distinction between indigenous freshwater organisms, known and used by generations of peasants, and the cultivated fish of intensively managed artificial ponds.Footnote 39
Chance survivals from scraps of oral folklore reflect dense empirical familiarity with local ecosystems. Those who handled many pike knew the complex markings on the creature’s head: legends from France and Brabant, Swabia and Austria, Elbe Slavs and Prussians associated the shapes with the instruments of Christ’s Passion; Latvians saw in them the fisher’s own tackle.Footnote 40 Coast dwellers from Pomerania to Flanders and Scotland shared tales explaining the twisted mouth of flatfish (plaice, sole, flounder) from its sneering complaint after losing a swimming race to determine the king of the fishes. In the nearly fresh eastern Baltic the pike was the envied winner and elsewhere the more marine herring.Footnote 41
Even long before the folklore collectors, some popular knowledge of fish anatomy, behaviour, and seasonal life cycles had at the very end of the Middle Ages already precipitated from oral vernaculars into surviving written texts. While Chapter 2 observed popular views of dietary value, late medieval vernaculars also marked behavioural and physiological features of fish species. One folk compendium from the upper Rhine valley connected food preference to spawning seasons: “Bream and nose are good in February and March [just before they spawn] and at their best when the willows are dripping wet.” Another likened the predatory pike to a robber, living by what he grabs; the nose is a scribe carrying his own ink [a black swim bladder]. Collectively both texts accurately catalog riverine fish communities in the upper Rhine and not elsewhere.Footnote 42 An independent English tract gives spawning times and occasional biological comments for twenty-six freshwater and inshore marine organisms then living in southern Britain.Footnote 43 None of that came from learned or scientific texts. Written records were for people without experience.
Ordinary people possessed unwritten traditional ecological knowledge shaped by generations of catching and eating their own fish from nearby aquatic environments. For most Europeans in the early Middle Ages and later still especially for the rural poor, those were the only fish they ate. Direct subsistence fishing is the historical background and sociocultural context for all other fisheries in medieval Europe. Cryptic early medieval signs of its presence are fleshed out from later records of practice.
3.2.3 Defending Fisheries Commons
But there was a catch. In an ironic twist, the genuine “tragedy” of the medieval commons was piecemeal loss to private interests of common access to many fisheries.Footnote 44 Like other customals written down in the later Middle Ages for many south German villages, the one from Kitzbühel in Tirol confined peasant fishing to but a few days a year and to angling or a hand net. At Stams they were forbidden any use of the local brook.Footnote 45 Chapter 6 below returns to the context, motives, and environmental ramifications of such privatization. Salient now is peasant response, which should signal their concern for the fishing. In fact, European peasants long and bitterly resisted what they saw as lords’ usurpation of their own proper use of local waters.
Collective and violent action against landlord control over fisheries reverberates across medieval centuries. Popular resistance to the early medieval trend of Italian inland fisheries to exclusive private rights is especially visible in the good Carolingian records from around 800. Subjects of Duke Guinichis of Spoleto assaulted the piscaria of Farfa abbey, “and they tore the nets of the monastery and took the fish and beat its men,” while a generation later groups of fishers near Reggio Emilia and Piacenza went unsuccessfully to court against claims by Nonantula and San Fiorenzo abbeys, in both cases failing for lack of documentary proof. Royal officials could themselves suppress common rights, as men of Istria complained of their own duke’s behaviour “in the truly public sea, where all the people fished commonly, [so] now we scarcely dare to fish, for they [duke’s men] beat us with sticks and cut our nets.”Footnote 46 The source closest to a revolt of Norman peasants c. 1000, William of Jumièges, writing about 1070, emphasized their demands for traditional access to waters and woodland.Footnote 47
Among the richest expressions of this sentiment came at the close of the Middle Ages in events now understood as presaging the German Peasants’ War. An agitator at Niklashausen in Franconia, where the Tauber enters the Main, called in 1476 for common possession of all fish and game,Footnote 48 and restive villagers in 1502 at Untergrombach, a Neckar valley lordship of the bishop of Speyer, would revoke all private rights over woods and waters “so that each countryman could hunt and fish, where or when he wished, without interference or prohibition at any time or place whatsoever.”Footnote 49 A programmatic statement the peasant army at Memmingen issued in March 1525 argued that to stop commoners taking fish from running waters violated the Creator’s grant to all mankind of power over beasts on the land, fowl of the air, and fish in the water. Christian charity would let everyone fish.Footnote 50 By late April ideas had become deeds. To rebel against the lord of Schleiz villagers from Liebengrün and Lubeschitz, Thuringia, smashed the equipment of his private fishers and themselves waded into the river Saale to catch and eat a salmon. The whole community of Neustadt on the Orla, a Saale tributary, twice paraded with pipes and drums to go fishing and returned with the booty for a public feast.Footnote 51
Local reactions best show how loss of access hit home and those could occur far from the famous general revolts. Altzelle abbey received fishing rights and lordship over the Mulde at Roßwein from the Markgraf of Meissen in 1293 and refused access to members of the community. This the people opposed for ninety years before a court decision let them fish from the town fields every Monday and Friday morning and any time the river flooded.Footnote 52 Not all were so patient. On Sunday 25 February 1408, a few days before the start of Lent, a half-dozen named men from the isle of Mersea, Essex, invaded the fishery called Seward’s flats (“Sywardesflete”) of Bartholomew Bourgcher, knight, and there took fish and forty quarters of oysters; before the court they asserted this was in tidal waters and thus “from times beyond memory … all lieges of the lord king had common fishery there.”Footnote 53 In 1490 rebellious subjects of the abbey of St. Gallen – more than a half-millennium removed from that original hermit’s hut – ripped out the weirs and traps with which their lords obtained the fish prohibited to them.Footnote 54
The long history of overt struggle against loss of access itself confirms that medieval peasants continued to value fishing as a way to supplement their usual foodstuffs. The same conclusion may be drawn from the many widely but still rarely documented incidents of illegal individual use of local fisheries resources, which is to say poaching of fish. A lawyer’s model dated from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century of pleas for an English manorial court envisioned a poor peasant swearing
how I went the other evening along the bank of this pond and looked at the fish which were playing in the water, so beautiful and so bright, and for the great desire I had for a tench I laid me down on the bank and just with my hands quite simply, and without any other device, I caught that tench and carried it off; and now I will tell thee the cause of my covetousness and my desire. My dear wife had lain abed a right full month, as my neighbours who are here know, and she could never eat or drink anything to her liking, and for the great desire she had to eat a tench I went to the bank of the pond to take just one tench; and that never other fish from the pond did I take.Footnote 55
Premeditation or sudden inspiration? An experienced steward might have some doubts, for tench are dark-coloured bottom dwellers with notably slimy skin, hard to spot or to grab. Thirteenth-century abbots with monopoly fishing rights on the then Gulf of Arras, in an oxbow of the Marne near Meaux, and to L. Bientina beside Lucca all struggled with local poachers.Footnote 56 Big visible fish like pike or spawning salmonids could be speared or netted: a Prussian peasant caught spearing pike in the Teutonic Knights’ waters in 1453 sparked a political crisis when his landlord broke him out of jail.Footnote 57 In some present-day situations pragmatic poaching is part of a continuum, with destructive exploitation and even attacks on the resource itself following local alienation due to loss of subsistence access.Footnote 58 Might some unusually articulate set of late medieval judicial and financial records reveal the same response from dispossessed peasants?
3.3 Indirect Subsistence Fishing
Medieval elites did not work. Work was for common people. The power of demand joined to the power of command over resources and men produced indirect subsistence fishing. Fish on the tables of the powerful came by effort of the poor, whether they worked as occasional forced labourers, as part-time servile specialists, or as full-time estate servants. The predominant means of satisfying elite wants in the early Middle Ages, concerted fishing by subordinates of great lay and clerical households, persisted in some circumstances into much later times.
3.3.1 Obligated Peasant Workers
Even the comparatively skimpy sources of the first millennium occasionally reveal peasants obliged to regular or seasonal work in their lord’s fishery. Prüm abbey in Luxembourg listed among its properties in 893 two fish weirs on the Moselle and three on the middle Rhine. Tenants on the Prüm estate had to maintain and operate those installations. Besides agricultural work and produce a fellow named Eurihc (sic) from Mötsch owed for this purpose a hundred poles like those for fences and a day’s labour at the weir. Free tenements at Rheingönheim (now overrun by Ludwigshafen) provided some posts for a weir and had to transport two salmon to the abbey 150 kilometers away.Footnote 59 Eurihc’s Anglo-Saxon contemporaries at Bewdley, Worcestershire, had likewise to “make a hedge to capture fish.”Footnote 60 Tenants on several mid-tenth-century properties which the bishop of Verona had along the Po owed “week work in the fishery” (opera ebdomada … in piscatione), some of them alternating between that and the hay meadows and others paired off with neighbours who did the latter job.Footnote 61
In certain settings elite exaction from ordinary farming households of prototypically servile payments in kind and in work for the lord’s fish lasted into the central and even later Middle Ages, though not always without challenge. Folk living on the Ile d’Aix off the mouth of the Charente owed the castellan of Chatelaillon a one-third share of their take in fish and seabirds.Footnote 62 Forced labour in the fishery helped spark a 1440 revolt against Ermland’s cathedral chapter, whose claims even noble arbitrators found too harsh.Footnote 63 But in 1453 the steward at Żarnowiec convent in Royal Prussia assigned specific peasants to fish Lake Dobre under supervision of expert fishers, and in Westfalia those waters which Marienfeld abbey had not leased out were harvested by labourers whom the fisheries manager had conscripted from seven servile farms.Footnote 64
3.3.2 The Lord’s Expert Servants
So far this chapter has seen part-time, occasional, at most seasonal, fishing by people recognized as agriculturalists or with some other occupation. The last two examples, however, identified some fifteenth-century individuals as ‘fishers’. In fact, specialists whose sole or principal productive work was in the fishery were present throughout the Middle Ages. The fisher Tatwine so well knew the miry Lincolnshire fens that he could lead pious and fearful Guthlac (d.714) to a secluded hermitage. Skilled household servants built the fish trap saintly Hubert, second bishop of Tongres-Maastricht, wanted in the Meuse.Footnote 65 Before the end of the eighth century, Charlemagne was warning his stewards to be sure there were able fishers and net makers on the royal estates.Footnote 66 In 832 his son Louis had thirty-two families of fishers on the Weser alone.Footnote 67 Until about 1000 these artisans were occupied primarily with indirect subsistence fishing.
Non-agricultural specialists posed a problem for the early medieval economy. Time is needed to develop skills and knowledge, to prepare equipment, and to do the work. But preoccupied specialists had little time to get cereals, fibers, and shelter for themselves. Markets allow exchange of specialized products – metal, pottery, even fish – for basic consumables but neither surplus everyday items nor an exchange of them were then dependably available. People of power, whose wealth left something over after mere survival, offered the only significant source of effective demand for most specialized output. Medieval elites and their unusually skilled subordinates worked out in practice a mix of ways to support specialists. From the consumers’ point of view they could either take certain specialized products as dues from selected otherwise generally self-supporting dependent households or they could themselves provide direct support to specialists who exercised skills for them. At one extreme bird-catchers or leather-tanners, even warriors, could live from an endowed peasant farmstead and work part-time on their specialty for the lord; at the other end of the spectrum a goldsmith or potter might be kept as a servant in the lord’s household and/or receive a stipend in kind or cash to procure his own food. Like other rare non-agricultural specialist producers then, fishers worked for lords as obligated part-timers or as full-time professional servants or employees. Whatever mix of land, goods, or salary sustained them, specialist fishers earned their keep by supplying their catch to the lord who employed them.
Reasons why medievals organized any given indirect subsistence fishery in a particular way are almost never known to us. The outcomes of such choices and accommodations are merely uncommon. Demand structures and distribution of the resource look to have played off against regional habits of economic organization.
During and after the Carolingian age most Italian church corporations with well-documented fisheries associated their exploitation with certain dependent tenures from which the lord claimed a share or, more often, a fixed quantity of the fish taken. In 813 Nonantola abbey received half the catch of everyone who fished the river Mincio in the county of Mantua.Footnote 68 Monasteries with estates in the lake district used them for fish: ten of S. Giulia of Brescia’s fifty-eight tenements at one place on Lake Iseo payed 1,200 fish a year; Bobbio’s property on Lake Garda yielded trout and eel.Footnote 69 Further down the peninsula in the marshy Rieti basin servile fishers attached to domainal units of Farfa abbey paid dues in kind. The bishop of Lucca received fish weekly from at least two nearby tenants and semi-annually from a more distant one.Footnote 70 Monks and bishops thus left operation of the fishery to local experts.
Some lords and fishers in France had similar arrangements. In the early 950s Benedictine monks at Homblières in Vermandois received from a local magnate a property on the Somme at Frise some thirty-five kilometers away for the sake of the fish it could supply. At least one tenement there was later paying a hundred eel each Christmas.Footnote 71 Troarn abbey in coastal Normandy then also had one fisher whose tenure required him to provide a set quantity of fish from his use of nets in the sea.Footnote 72 Up to the 1020s a lay landowning family owned a hereditary serf who fished the Rhône not far from Lyon.Footnote 73
Meanwhile other fishers worked directly as servants of their lords. As early as the sixth century, according to Gregory of Tours, Nicetius, bishop of Trier (c. 535–566), who needed a gift for his king, called upon his men to get fish. When told a flood had broken their trap he sent his reluctant servants anyway and they found a wondrously great catch.Footnote 74 Local fishers supplied ninth-century monks at San Vincenzo al Volturno with their steady diet of cyprinids, but what their chronicler called “fishers and sites for taking fish” (piscatori, et aras ad pisces prendendos) on Adriatic lagoons provided inshore marine varieties.Footnote 75 Around 1060/70 servants of the priory of St.-Marcel-lés-Chalon, across the Saône from the count’s town, violently smashed the boats of fishers from Chalon whom they accused of fishing illegally.Footnote 76 Abbey servants (famuli monasterii) at Fleury were accustomed to fish in the main channel of the Loire and, unused to miracles, resisted St. Odo’s advice to try elsewhere.Footnote 77 When St. Anselm needed a fish dinner, a Norman monk conveyed his instructions to a fisherman who then netted the biggest trout he had seen in twenty years’ experience on that river.Footnote 78 Just as the risen Christ rightly instructed Peter and other disciples to cast their nets on the other side of the boat (John 21:3), spiritually gifted holy men had a reputation for confounding fishers whose knowledge was merely practical.
Large resources in subalpine lakes early excited special attention. Two noble brothers from the Sundgau reportedly had prior knowledge of the Tegernsee fishery before founding an abbey there in the 740s.Footnote 79 Monastic settlement on Mondsee dates to the same period. A century later Mondsee abbey and its ecclesiastical superior, the archbishop of Salzburg, heard testimony from an experienced local inhabitant, Heribald, about the fisheries of the Wolfgangsee (then called Abersee) in the Salzkammergut. He reported that abbey, archbishop, and local castellan each ran fishing boats there, but only the first two could legally take the lake trout during their fall run and the “albuli pisces” (probably cyprinids) which ran in the spring.Footnote 80 Such arrangements continued for more than a half-millennium. Since the 1490s – and earlier records simply do not survive – abbey and archbishop each paid and outfitted full-time fishers in ten and five boats respectively.Footnote 81
A 1023 inventory by Tegernsee cellarer Gotahalm reveals the tackle such fishers could deploy. Alongside tools for other crafts, he counted thirty-four basket traps, seventeen nets of various kinds, winding reels, ropes, lines, and six fishing boats in use by abbey fishers.Footnote 82 For the next three centuries and more Tegernsee abbey, with exclusive rights to fish on the entire lake and its feeder streams, itself equipped fishers who worked under direct supervision but also claimed large numbers of whitefish as dues from designated subject tenures. After thorough religious and administrative reform in 1427 the monastery abandoned individual payments of fish and firmed up or enlarged its cadre of permanent servants. From 1443 until secularization in 1803 Tegernsee employed a team of six, seven, and eventually eight or nine full-time fishermen on annual and continuing contract with sole license to exploit the lake. For annual stipends in cash and kind, men from lakeside families worked in crews of two or three with the abbey’s gear, some of which they were paid extra to construct, and turned all of their catch over to the master cook.Footnote 83
Like monastic houses on alpine lakes, other corporate owners of highly productive fisheries long retained direct exploitation through their own servants and subjects. Even at the Venetian epicentre of the commercial economy, account books of the 1460s from San Giorgio in Alga show the canons meeting routine fish needs from their own capture and storage facilities in the lagoon and turning to the market only for Lenten treats of mackerel from the open sea.Footnote 84 At the same time institutionalized relicts of compulsory tenant fishing were supplying Scottish Cistercians at Coupar-Angus with scores, even hundreds, of fresh salmon from the river Tay.Footnote 85
Fisheries were an important element in the organization of services required by princes in early medieval east central Europe. As patriarchal states were there created during the ninth through eleventh centuries, skilled servitors – falconers, smiths, cooks, etc. – were designated to supply the castle towns where the ruler lived. Along rivers in Great Poland, Mazovia, and Pomerania traces of settlements providing fishers’ service are fairly common. They housed unfree ducal servants, tied to the nearby castle, exempt from normal public obligations, and allotted enough farmland to support their fishing for the prince. Many of those people now known entered the historical record only as the ruler transferred them to private, especially ecclesiastical, ownership during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.Footnote 86 By perhaps surprisingly naming those individuals many such charters fleetingly lend personal identity to otherwise anonymous fishers. In a typical instance from 1210 the duke of Kalisz endowed a new Cistercian house at Przemet: “These are the names of the peasants we gave them … In Domnik: Radoch, Swiątosz, Plewna, Nudasza, each of whom ought to give 12 fish of the length of a forearm three days a week, and further three jars of honey a year; Nowosz and Radzlaw with their sons should fish every day. … In Dłużyn: Zwan, who ought to fish every day …”Footnote 87 More abstractly, place names formed with the Slavic root rybitw (‘fishers’) also identify service groups. Old-settled Pannonian Slavs provided enough of a model for the fishing service organized by conquering Hungarians that the Magyar place name ribar (‘fishers’) occurs only at those communities. Royal dependants still fished the Danube in central Hungary in the 1320s.Footnote 88
Institutions to supply fish to princely courts in central Europe differed from those further west chiefly in administrative particulars and in a few centuries’ time lag, which may have produced sources with greater human detail. Quite analogous structures had been anticipated in Charlemagne’s 794/5 instructions to estate managers. They echoed still in the eleventh century at the Italian royal palace in Pavia, where dues on commercial fishers recalled a time when as many as sixty boats brought fish from the Po to a resident king.Footnote 89 A 1220 survey of royal estates in northern Portugal identified twenty-one of thirty lordships where some or all tenants owed fishing service; the most general obligations occurred at inland riverine sites.Footnote 90 Absent dependable markets supplying fish, large secular households had to make their own arrangements.
Even in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century west the same kinds of people continued to fish local waters for elite masters or employers. Cluny, with more than 400 monks by around 1100 and always many visitors, served fish on Sundays, Thursdays, and many holidays. Ulrich’s customal describes the storage tanks along the river Grosne where the cellarer went each evening to supervise selection and preparation. Some fish came by purchase or special gift, but a fragmentary survey of Cluny’s incomes from 1155 noted important resources on at least three estates in the region: at Beaumont, where the Grosne entered the Saône, seven fishers with “the office of fishing” (officium piscandi) each owed a “bundle” or “string” (cordata) of fish five times a year; some fisheries at Arpayé on the Saône paid a half or a third of the catch from mid-November to late April and another a “bundle” of fish each week; those at Montberthoud on the edge of the Dombes had been let to go derelict.Footnote 91 Across the Channel knight Robert de Ros had the right in perpetuity to send two boats of fishers from his household to Alemar, Yorkshire, whenever he was in that county. Simon ‘the Fisherman’, who had been serving the count of Leicester for an annual stipend since at least 1259, led the men who fished on the count’s behalf during the last two weeks of Lent 1265.Footnote 92
Full-time fishers under a lord’s direct authority could meet the continual need of elite households for fish to eat. Workers in indirect subsistence fisheries shared the low social standing of their peasant neighbours or fellow servants, but gained special expertise in exploiting a non-agricultural resource in inland or coastal waters. In certain well-documented situations these arrangements persisted into early modern times. More often and by means the next chapter will trace, they likely provided the structural opportunity and initial human resources for the small-scale commercial fishing and trade in fish which had begun by the eleventh and twelfth centuries to emerge in parts of western Christendom. But for a much longer time medieval Europe’s direct and indirect subsistence fishers also shared characteristic techniques and gear.
3.4 Compatible Technologies
Careful historians rightly resist the urge to read better-known methods of late medieval commercial fishers back into earlier centuries and concentrate instead on what verbal sources and excavation reports actually show of subsistence fisheries during and after the early Middle Ages.Footnote 93 That record presents techniques of catching and processing fish which were compatible with the needs of local consumers and the abilities of local producers. Both had adapted to their environments and available fish species. These methods formed the technological basis for medieval relations with aquatic ecosystems and, of course, for subsequent developments.Footnote 94
3.4.1 Small Gears for Household Use
The simplest small-scale methods required little technology but considerable environmental knowledge and skill. Capturing fish with the bare hands – like the English poacher heard pleading his caseFootnote 95 – often also entailed substances meant to incapacitate fish en masse without impairing their use as food.
Poisons and explosives are traditionally associated with clandestine fishing. Classical authors had known several herbs with piscicidal properties. More recent ethnography describes whole communities – often especially women and children – using these methods in, for instance, the traditional Balkans. Regardless of the active ingredient, piscicides work best when low and warm summer streams concentrate fish in quiet pools.Footnote 96 Among medieval sources, the mid-eleventh-century fairy tale Ruodlieb, a work of Bavarian provenance, provides a full literary description of fishing with powered extract of Anchusa officinalis (Common Alkanet, called ‘Ochsenzunge’ and ‘Buglossa’). It is the first record of a poison later widely mentioned in Latin and German manuscripts.Footnote 97 Use for this purpose of ‘taxus’ (yew, Taxus spp., or Great Mullein, Verbascum thapsus, called ‘tassus’) was banned by Frederick II in his Sicilian “Constitutions of Melfi” (1231), and then by a long run of Italian and Spanish laws.Footnote 98 The oldest references to poisoning fish with caustic quicklime also go back to thirteenth-century Italy, while subsequent fish-catching manuals and other evidence confirm this practice elsewhere.Footnote 99 Well before the end of the Middle Ages western Europeans further knew how to use that substance to detonate a stunning underwater blast.Footnote 100 Then about 1500 European popular cultures acquired a deadly piscicide of East Indian botanical origin, Animirta cocculus [indicus], which quickly replaced indigenous herbal agents.Footnote 101 These normally illegal techniques killed many fish indiscriminately.
As quiet as poison and in the right circumstances as lethally productive was the most primitive fishing technology, the spear. Multi-pronged, often barbed, fish spears (leisters) of varying design and type are well known archeologically and in medieval representations.Footnote 102 Two iron ones were found at the eleventh-century village site on Lac Paladru in Dauphiné (Figure 3.1). Indeed a thirteenth-century French poet thought fish spears common in peasant households, and tenants in the Aveyron did use them for lamprey each spring.Footnote 103 Elsewhere spearing eel was commonly acceptable but less so salmon or pike. The right to spear salmon was assured in thirteenth-century charters along tributaries of the upper Rhine but night spearing forbidden as a poacher’s trick on the Traun in 1418.Footnote 104
If legal doubts shadowed the spear and piscicides, a consensus acknowledged widely acceptable household tackle. About 1060 Sigebert of Gembloux hailed in verse Nature’s blessings on Metz and turned to its Moselle, where “I fish with the hook, you with a basket, he with nets.”Footnote 105 Legal, not literary, aims in 1406 moved the Prussian grand master to define the small gear for household fishing “to be hand nets, scoop nets, gill nets, dip nets, cast hook, basket traps, catch nets, and the like.”Footnote 106 Across medieval Europe hooks, traps, and nets in one or two fishers’ hands were recognized as the norm for feeding a domestic group.
As today, fishing with hook and line came quickly to medieval minds (see Figure 3.2). About 1180 the subsequently reputed philosopher of love, Andrew the Chaplain (Andreas Capellanus), cribbed from Isidore of Seville to derive amor from the word for hook, [h]amus, and explained that “just as a skilful fisherman tries to attract fishes by his bait and to capture them on his crooked hook,” the lover lures a person to his union of hearts.Footnote 107 The baited hook was a stock literary conceit and visual representation of fishing, but clichés lack technical or socio-economic context. Hooking techniques show many special adaptations in the Middle Ages.Footnote 108
Figure 3.2 St. Peter angling with rod, line, and hook from a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon manuscript.
Matthew 17: 24–27 specifies that Peter was to cast out his hook (Lat. hamum) to catch the fish, although other representations of the apostles fishing are with a net. Malibu, California, J. Paul Getty Museum, 85 ms 79, fol. 2r. Getty Museum open content.
Fish hooks themselves came straight or curved (Figure 3.3, also Fig. 3.1 middle). The straight hook or gorge is a double-pointed cylinder bound to the line at its midpoint and concealed in a bait. After a fish swallows the bait a pull on the line jams the gorge across its throat. Predator species such as pike, pike-perch, cod, or catfish gulp their prey whole and are well suited for gorge fishing. Wood, horn, and bone gorges three to ten centimeters long have been recovered from, for instance, ninth- through twelfth-century strata at Wolin on the Polish coast.Footnote 109
Figure 3.3 Medieval fish hooks, straight and curved (predating 1100).
Representative selections of straight (left) and curved (centre) hooks in wood and bronze and an artificial lure, bronze, c. 8.5 cm (centre) from Wolin and (right column) of hooks from Great Yarmouth (top) and London (bottom).
Curved hooks have a relatively straight shank or shaft, a bend, and a point, which may or may not be barbed. A curved hook is attached opposite the bend by binding the line behind an enlarged area or knotting the line through a hole or loop (eye) in the hook material. Medieval European fish hooks survive in wood, iron, and bronze; less durable materials may also have been used. The bronze hooks from Lac Paladru (Fig. 3.1) measure only 2.2–3.5 cm shank length. Other specimens from especially coastal locations (Fig. 3.3) run larger: 5–6 cm wooden hooks from tenth-century Wolin; iron and bronze hooks of about 5–7 cm from eleventh–twelfth-century Szczecin and Great Yarmouth.Footnote 110 What served for trout or plaice would not for pike or cod. No actual fishing lines survive, though bits of hemp and other twine occur in some sites and use of braided horsehair lines by inland anglers is well documented by the fifteenth century. A hand line mounted on prototypical wooden winding frame was good enough for Norse god Thor – as pictured on a tenth-century carved stone from the Anglo-Saxon church at Gosforth, Cumbria.Footnote 111 Poor fishers from the French shore of the Channel used single-hooked hand lines in the 1100s.Footnote 112 Set lines anchored to shoreline features or a thrown stone and carrying many hooks could be a legitimate or poacher’s method. Fishing poles shown incidentally in many early and high medieval illuminations are shorter than the people. Purposeful late medieval illustrations of fishing more often have poles equal to or much longer than the height of the people, which generally corresponds with advice in contemporary how-to manuals.Footnote 113 Reels were unknown in Europe before the seventeenth century.
Practical fishing manuals would recommend selecting baits for the fishes sought, the waters, and the season. Earlier, the seventh–tenth-century Byzantine estate manual Geoponika had recommended natural organisms and also baits concocted from animal and plant materials. In the thirteenth century men from Cotum, Yorkshire, gathered baits from tidal Guisborough Sands.Footnote 114 Artificial lures like the fish-shaped wobblers or jigs of lead, tin, or bronze recovered from early medieval sites in Poland attracted pike, pike-perch, or inshore cod (Figure 3.3 centre).Footnote 115 Literary allusions to feathered hooks begin with the thirteenth century and later these simulated insects were plainly part of small-scale fisheries in the Alps, England, and Spain.Footnote 116
Anglers await a fish biting the hook, and trapping gear likewise depends on a fish voluntarily entering a device which holds it until removed by the fisher. Some important passive technologies were easily operated by individuals. As ubiquitious as hooks and lines in medieval Europe were portable traps or pots, called variously retia, retz, Reussen, netz, weels, charpagne, verveaux, hoop nets, batrón, armadijo, or the like (Figure 3.4, also Figures 3.7 and 3.8 below). Funneled openings on rounded baskets, bags, or cones of wicker, rushes, framed netting, or other materials allowed entry but no easy exit. Some types relied on a narrow neck, others a one-way entrance of sharp inward-pointing rods.Footnote 117 Just after 1300 Bolognese agricultural expert Pietro de Crescenzi distinguished a wide form for fish attracted by an enclosed bait and a narrow one for varieties trying to hide.Footnote 118 In the British Isles distinctive funneled weels, kidells, or putts – good archeological remains of medieval date have been recovered from the lower Trent – were set to catch salmon or eel as they tried to pass up or down through openings in weirs.Footnote 119 Choice of design and location depended on the fisher’s knowledge of his quarry’s habits.
Figure 3.4 Remains of a wicker fish trap (‘pot gear’).
Early medieval records highlight the basket traps of lords’ and landowners’ indirect subsistence fisheries. Germanic law codes protected this form of property.Footnote 120 Eleventh-century Tegernsee abbey possessed thirty-four of them and twelfth-century subjects of Reichenau had to deliver cartloads of willow rods to make reussen and stakes to anchor them.Footnote 121 Later sources confirm peasants using pots both as a legitimate customary means of exploiting commons in, for instance, thirteenth–fourteenth-century Lorraine or early fifteenth-century Prussia and as a favoured and forbidden tool for poaching in the lord’s private waters.Footnote 122
Woven mesh was an ancient, familiar, and effective tool for capturing fish. Nets were important to medieval subsistence fishing but precise uses are hard to pin down. Besides many verbal and visual allusions, actual fragments of hempen twine, netting, and net-making tools survive from several northern continental sites. Some such scraps, descriptions, and representations reveal a distinct technique, others are no longer discernible. This is notably true of images where people in a boat haul a net over the side (e.g. Figures 4.1, 4.6, and 7.6 below). Medieval writers and artists were often unaware of the components and operation of complex fish-catching devices, even though back in the 890s Frankish administrators had acknowledged the special skills needed to make and use them. Fishers or their families commonly constructed and repaired their own nets.Footnote 123 Many net-fishing methods used a head line of floats and/or a weighted bottom line (Figure 3.5 and the left column of Fig. 3.1). The floats (wood, bark) and weights (stone, ceramic, lead) are often enough recovered from medieval shoreline sites that both English and Polish archaeologists have established regional typologies and inferred netting techniques from them.Footnote 124
Figure 3.5 Net weights and floats from Pomeranian ports, seventh to eleventh centuries.
Selected (left) weights in stone, 5 and 10 cm, and lead, 5 cm, from Kołobrzeg and (right) floats in wood, 10–12 cm, from Gdańsk (top) and pine bark, 10–15 cm, from Szczecin (bottom).
Small netting gear certainly aided active pursuit of schooling or individual fishes. What would now be labeled scoop or dip nets with a bag or basket on a handle (truble, pern), lift nets set horizontally on a frame, circular cast nets to throw over visible fish in shallows, even seines with elongate panels sized so one or two fishers could circle through the water to corral fish are all encountered often enough in medieval and early modern illustrations (see Fig. 7.7 below). Vernacular dialect names for these devices varied from place to place with or without – as remains true in modern ethnographies – corresponding differences in design, type, or use.Footnote 125 Ephemeral in construction and indistinguishable at historical distance, this equipment, though appropriate only for small-scale operations, is not easily associated with particular users.
Passive netting techniques also included forms small and mobile enough for one or two fishers to set and haul. The trammel net (tremaille, tramallia, Italian gorro), a distinctive arrangement of three closely parallel mesh curtains, has a long medieval record since the sixth-century Frankish Salic code.Footnote 126 The gill nets essential to large-scale late medieval herring fishing and to seasonally important whitefish catches in alpine lakes were special entangling gear for schooling fishes of closely similar size. Although gill nets for herring have been suggested a medieval invention, specialized whitefish nets were already present in the Tegernsee inventory of 1023 and Sidonius Apollinaris described setting nets at night in lakes of fifth-century Gaul.Footnote 127
3.4.2 Crew-Served Equipment and Installations
Set or drift nets might still lie within the capacity of a single fisher, but contrasting active techniques of moving a large net through the water demand more hands, traction, and equipment. This technology has two basic forms: a seine surrounds fish in the water; a trawl is drawn through the water to filter fish from it (Figure 3.6 and the latter also in Figure 6.5 below). Genuine bag-shaped trawls, pulled open-mouthed on a course through the water, are nowhere visible before the later Middle Ages, when some were plainly thought innovations in commercial fishing.Footnote 128
Figure 3.6 Schematic illustration of seine and trawl technologies.
By whatever name, most medieval sagenae (saine, Segen, seine) are plainly seines. Pietro de Crescenzi described to near perfection a beach seine, which he called a “scorticaria”: a boat circled out from shore and back again while paying a long net out behind it; the circle completed, both ends were pulled to bring the entire loop to the beach.Footnote 129 It is often difficult to determine actual examples from early centuries. Later seines are associated with fisheries in control of lords, such as the sagena Bury St. Edmunds had on Soham Mere in 1085 or those used in the thirteenth century to take bream for the bishop of Winchester and trout and charr from lakes owned by the abbey of Furness. The beach seine with which subjects of Coupar Angus caught salmon at the Campsie site on the river Tay measured 33 fathoms (about 57–66 m) long and tapered from 4 fathoms at the centre to 3½ (from 7 or 8 to a bit more than 6 m) at the outer ends.Footnote 130 A much-recorded “sagena magna” of the medieval south and east Baltic was known in indigenous Balto-Slavic vernaculars as the niewód. This method of choice in the Teutonic Order’s own late medieval fisheries had earlier been specified in twelfth–thirteenth-century Pomeranian charters and, judging from finds of locally standardized weights and floats from most urban sites along that coast, originated by at latest the eleventh century. With wings of nearly eighty meters and a depth of eighteen, the niewód marked an extreme scale for subsistence fishing.Footnote 131
Major early medieval fisheries relied greatly on passive techniques using large fixed installations. More or less permanent structures which blocked and held migrating fishes should be recognized in many of the “fisheries” conveyed as appurtenant to landed property. Barrier fishing called for knowledgeable siting and timing plus sophisticated but simple engineering. Actual construction, less complex than making nets, was well suited for unskilled labour, which could also handle regular maintenance. Work and wealth spent on construction, upkeep, and annual operation produced large seasonal yields of favoured fishes, notably salmon, sturgeon, shad, lamprey, eel, mullet, and herring. Medieval records do not consistently distinguish between barrier devices (generic ‘weirs’) which concentrated fish and large enclosure traps which prevented their escape.
Some barriers providing important fishing opportunities were natural – falls, rivermouth bars, etc. – and others built primarily for a reason other than catching fish. The most widespread barrier fishing took place at mill dams and so multiplied during medieval centuries in tandem with the watermill. The downstream migration of adult eel gave each miller – or his master – a lucrative seasonal opportunity to put basket traps or a lift net in his sluice. Reforming abbot John of Gorze (960–973) supplied his monks with fish taken at the dams of his newly built mills. Tenth- and eleventh-century Catalan charters carefully itemized the fishing rights of mills.Footnote 132 Mills and eel were closely joined in the English Domesday Book (1085) and in twelfth-century records of milling partnerships on the Garonne at Toulouse.Footnote 133 The early fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter famously illustrates the local watermill and the basket traps set above the dam to catch adult eels migrating downstream (Figure 3.7).
Figure 3.7 Basket traps (‘pot gear’) for fish and eel placed above the mill dam on the Lincolnshire estate of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, c. 1330.
Weirs built with express intent of catching fish played a large role for indirect subsistence. Fish weirsFootnote 134 across streams, rivers, or tidal channels, whether permanently built of stone and timber or of hurdles and wattle for a season, could concentrate and funnel migratory fishes to other trapping devices or just to a place where they might easily be scooped or speared. Under various temporally or territorially different names – gurges, vertevolum, venna, banna, wera, obstacula, captura, clausura, exclusa, saepes, fach, wehr, cruive, croha, paxeria, jazy, and more – weir fisheries had long-standing economic and hydrological importance.Footnote 135 Already in the sixth century Cassiodorus denounced fishing with saepes (literally ‘fences’) for endangering shipping in the Mincio, Ollio, Serchio, Tiber, and Arno rivers. The Frankish laws set compensation for damage to a vertevolum. One venna at a royal estate in the Ardennes is documented in a charter from 644 and another on the Weser can be traced in Corvey’s possession from 832 until after 1158.Footnote 136 Recorded active weirs on the rivers of Gdańsk Pomerania number thirty-one during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries alone.Footnote 137
Most such records denoted what early twelfth-century Czech chronicler Cosmas of Prague called an “assembly of timbers for fishing.”Footnote 138 The several vennae of Prüm’s ninth-century estate survey were made from stakes, poles, and large rods provided for the purpose (ad vennam, quibus venna paratur) by the abbey’s subjects.Footnote 139 A servant of St. Hubert injured his hand driving log pilings for a captura piscium in the Meuse.Footnote 140 In north Yorkshire around 1200 Robert de Daiville and the Cistercians at Byland negotiated over a reach of the river Swale with a structure of two or three bays, each ten feet wide and repairable with beams and nails, available for fishing with a net.Footnote 141 Material traces corroborate the verbal. Remains of securely dated medieval fish weirs have been recovered from the rivers Trent, Severn, Witham, Charente, Dordogne, Cher, Saône, and several Swiss tributaries of the upper Rhine. Found in the Trent gravels near Colwick was a 14-meter double row of oak and holly posts set vertically into the river bed about a meter deep and a half meter apart, braced on the downstream side with oblique posts, and filled with panels of woven hazel twigs (Figure 3.8). Dendrochronology and radiocarbon put construction in one season and upkeep through a human generation between about 810 and 880. One wing of this Anglo-Saxon device – the other wing has not been found – probably ran diagonally across the river for some thirty-five or more meters. A nearby structure with radiocarbon dates of c. 1070–1200 had one long wing and two perpendicular short ones oriented at 45 degrees to the current, so making a funnel or ‘V’ shape pointed downstream.Footnote 142 (For well-dated and productive weirs elsewhere see online Supplement 3.4.2.)
Figure 3.8 Artist’s reconstruction of an Anglo-Saxon fish weir from the river Trent.
Based on remains of wooden posts in river gravels near Colwick, Nottinghamshire, dated c. 810–880.
As distinct from generic barriers with associated catching devices or activities, more specialized large-scale fish traps diverted fish into an enclosure whence they could not escape. Fishers at Kotowice on the Odra in Silesia in 1203 used an “enclosure to catch fish” (clausuram pro capturam piscium) to supply their lord several times a week. The phrase echoes, too, in eleventh- and twelfth-century charters from Poland’s other great river, the Wisła.Footnote 143 Early medieval records depict at least three specific types, viz foreshore traps, ditches, and labyrinths.
Domesday Book mentions a heia maris (‘sea hedge’) on the Suffolk coast partly owned by Bury St. Edmunds Abbey. Foreshore traps known from archaeological and ethnographic evidence are horseshoe- or crescent-shaped walls of wood and wattles or stone set in the tidal zone with the open end toward the shore; fishes moving with the ebb are held for removal at low water. Those in Ireland’s Shannon estuary go back into deep prehistory and subsequently several groups are clearly dated to 400–800 and 1100–1350.Footnote 144 Similar constructions of wood and stone in the coast of lower Normandy have calibrated 14C dates between 580/630 and about 970. Under the name gamboa or camboa such structures were the oldest purpose-built fisheries installations in Galicia. Before 1200 Breton counterparts served local subsistence needs.Footnote 145
“A structure commonly called a verra … so constructed that fishes could enter that ditch but were not able to get out” vexed neighbours of the Clairmarais Cistercians in 1210.Footnote 146 Earlier tenth- and eleventh-century charters from the lower reaches of Seine and Loire refer plainly to “sluices” (clusa, sclusa) and “ditches” (fossatis piscatoriis) as means for catching fish.Footnote 147
Complex enclosures of embankments, wooden sheeting, and wood or reed grillwork blocked the Tiber at Rome and the mouths of coastal ponds further south in Lazio, supplying sustenance for fishers and Romans and valued incomes to great churchmen since at least the tenth century.Footnote 148 A vast linear array of closely driven stakes still straddles the mouth of the Schlei at Kappeln, subtly guiding estuary-spawning herring into a chamber they cannot escape. Elements of the present labyrinth go back at least to the later Middle Ages and its forerunners to a millennium or more earlier.Footnote 149 No less elaborate was the maze of ponds, channels, and more than nine weirs connected to Glastonbury abbey’s Meare Pool in the Somerset levels, largest wetland in southwestern England. Fish there taken with nets and traps could be stored in certain ponds and supplied live to the abbey’s kitchen or processed in the adjoining fish house and preserved for later consumption.Footnote 150
Technologies characteristic of early medieval and later subsistence fisheries were suited to make large catches from seasonal concentrations of diadromous and other migratory fishes and for smaller continuous exploitation of resident stocks. Unskilled, even forced, labour could build and operate fixed devices under expert supervision, but historic local power relations likely determined how much the latter derived from the communal tradition archaeologist Aidan O’Sullivan has suggestedFootnote 151 and how much from the hierarchical authority implied by medieval texts. Certainly it took commensurate environmental familiarity and skills for consistent success with more mobile gear, especially the small angling, trapping and netting equipment apt to help feed a simple household. Direct subsistence fishing required little capital, and that chiefly from the time spent preparing simple equipment from locally available materials. Indirect subsistence fishing entailed more investment – the lord’s allocating of his goods and his subjects’ labour – in fixed capital tied to land. Across the gamut of medieval subsistence fishing, local environmental knowledge derived from the experience of a Heribald, Tatwine, or Simon the Fisherman and conveyed through oral transmission was essential to success. Otherwise it took miracles.Footnote 152
3.4.3 Saving the Catch for Future Use
In subsistence fisheries the cost of catching and the fish for eating belonged to the same party. Especially when reliant on local supplies, people who could keep fish edible for even a few weeks or months after capture greatly extended the usefulness of seasonally large concentrations and eased provisioning for periods of seasonally high fish consumption. As just observed at Glastonbury, the catch might be held alive or the spoiling of its butchered flesh somehow delayed.
Temporary live storage was especially inviting where captured freshwater and coastal marine fishes could be retained in their own habitats. Tanks and cages made from non-durable materials are obscure in the early Middle Ages, though they may then have served peasant needs as they later did those of fishmongers and urban households (see next chapter).
On elite sites permanent fish tanks measuring up to some hundreds of square meters go back to the start of the Middle Ages. Cassiodorus retired in the mid-500s to his family estate of Vivarium on Italy’s southern coast, named for its vivaria, natural rock coves improved for storing marine fish. The three basins still recognizable there measure roughly 10–12 by 4–5 m and just over 1 m deep.Footnote 153 Charlemagne’s capitulary de villis urged regular restocking of wiwariis so a fresh supply was always available; a generation later the model survey, Brevium exemplum, noted stocked ponds inside the garden enclosure at three of four (unnamed) royal estates.Footnote 154 Structures of this kind and intent remained a feature at favoured residences. England’s king Henry III (1216–1272) had servatoria for fish made or improved at York and in his park at Windsor. His contemporaries in Champagne, Burgundy, and Savoy just had different names for the similar facilities they had built for their chefs’ use.Footnote 155
The steady demand of religious communities supported fish storage facilities at many monastic sites. Tenth-century reformers Olpert of Gembloux and Odo of Cluny each reportedly arranged a pond beside the house so monks’ grudging acquiescence in dietary abstinence could be reinforced with a constant supply of fresh fish.Footnote 156 Store ponds at Cluny, which reared no fish during its prestigious eleventh-century apogee, were set along the Grosne river across from the abbey but easily accessible to the fish kitchen.Footnote 157 Elsewhere as in England, “a single stew stocked from a natural source … is … [the] type of pond to which most documents generally refer before the fourteenth century.”Footnote 158 Especially in the early Middle Ages this temporary storage of captured fish came nowhere near purposeful rearing of domesticated varieties, but did promise fresh fish even in seasons when the schools were not easily available.
Early medieval Europeans also knew how to extend the time and space over which a dead fish could safely be eaten. The principal methods of preservation delayed spoiling by drying the fish physically or with the aid of smoke or salt.Footnote 159 Anaerobic fermentation, brining, or marinating then had less importance. The choice of technique played environmental resources, especially climate and fish species, against available economic capital.
Many kinds of fish will keep a long time if allowed to dry thoroughly and not re-wetted until ready to eat. No additional ingredients are needed. But the unaided drying of fish calls for a consistent low humidity available only at Europe’s climatic extremes, arctic winter cold or southern summer heat. And in oil-rich fishes like herring, salmonids, and the tuna family, the fat quickly oxidizes to make the flesh inedibly rancid. Codfishes, flatfishes, and pike, however, have less oily white flesh apt for drying. As observed in an introductory fish tale, since the Bronze Age and throughout pre-Viking and Viking times coast dwellers in northern Norway and their North Atlantic island colonies caught and dried local cods for their own consumption. Mediterranean hakes were parched in the summer sun.
Dense wood smoke dries fish flesh and induces chemical changes that deter bacterial action, though hot smoke and cold give different results. Smoked fish last only days or weeks, not months, but the old peasant custom was likely known to lords’ cooks and tables. Fish-smoking pits at early medieval Biskupin, a northern Polish settlement, are accompanied by bones of pike, perch, roach, bream, and catfish. Written sources hint at a wider regional practice.Footnote 160
Most of Europe lacked climate or fish to dry unaided, so extended storage or transport of dead fish in large quantities called for another raw material. Salt, which both absorbs water and is itself antiseptic, served all preindustrial economies as the great preservative. Romans had enjoyed garum, a sauce brewed of salt fish. Access to salt and fish raised the value of lagoon and estuary fisheries. But away from southern seacoasts salt had to come in large and costly quantities from isolated natural brine springs, accessible deposits of rock salt, or the fuel and space to boil down sea water. Fisheries in the Austro-Bavarian Alps were exploited in the eighth–ninth centuries together with the salteries there, and later those of inland Pomerania. Ninth century Bobbio directed payments from salt ships to its fisheries on Lake Garda.Footnote 161
The fish most notably tied to salt was herring: untreated, it spoils in a day.Footnote 162 Though herring are a northern, not a Mediterranean animal, their Latin name alecium (and so also Romance forms like hallec) derived from an old southern term for salt fish, allec, and ultimately from the Greek root for salt, hals. Hence early medieval herring fisheries arose near salt supplies, like those of the then Bay of the Somme, and herring enter the historical record “dusted” (sapoudre) with salt. Domesday Book had dues in dry-salted herrings from coastal Suffolk and so did the Norman fair at Fécamp. Further south in the Atlantic, pilchards or sardines and in the Mediterranean also anchovies were handled in the same way, landed and quickly, still with heads and entrails intact, heaped up into salt-covered piles. Dry-salted herring traveled in bundles, bags, or baskets and kept some months, though not so long that great quantities reached consumers far inland. That would await methods for anaerobic brining in sealed barrels unfamiliar to early medieval fishers and fish-eaters (see Chapter 8).Footnote 163
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Working in tandem the fish-catching and fish-preserving technologies of the early Middle Ages could take only limited quantities from even abundant and accessible animals and convey those in edible condition to only a limited range of consumers. Rich and poor had to eat from nearby stocks and, to a large degree, recent catches. Coupled with relatively persistent structures of elite lordship over peasant family households, this tended to stabilize relationships between subsistence fisheries and the local aquatic ecosystems they exploited. Perhaps the visible pattern was reinforced by what present-day geologists and climatologists suggest to have been relatively quiescent planetary conditions during the eighth through early eleventh centuries.Footnote 164 Absent external pressures or shocks of human or natural origin – anything from greatly increased demand or slow habitat change to catastrophic political or flood events – most mutual local adaptations were probably more or less sustainable, if surely not equitable for all participants.
Local people actively exploiting aquatic resources to serve needs of both peasants and lords were, therefore, ubiquitous throughout the early Middle Ages. Subsistence fisheries fit well into the stable institutional structures and the relatively unimpacted environment characteristic of the second half of the first millennium CE in Europe. While some of those local relationships would continue long thereafter, most fish, fishers, and fish-eaters would eventually be caught up in the large-scale socio-economic and environmental transformation which medieval Europe experienced after about 1000. Successive chapters follow the changes, their impacts, and the consequences which rippled from them.
