4.1.1 “To Make Their Living by Fishing”

Medievalists now think almost commonplace the advanced state or considerable post-Roman survival of commercial activity and written record in early medieval Italy. No surprise, then, to find early signs of market fishing there about the same time as Venetians were first winning mercantile renown. The recorded artisan fishers, however, fed not the new trading city but the old seat of long-departed Byzantine governors, Ravenna. In 943 an association of fishers, the schola piscatorum, reached agreement with the archbishop, to whom much public authority had fallen, for exclusive access to the fishery of the Badoreno. In return the fishers’ own officers would handle fixed and hereditary payment to the archbishop of every fourteenth fish taken or an equivalent share in cash and enforce his first refusal on all sturgeon over four feet long. The money would presumably come from the fishers selling to Ravenna’s other inhabitants the other thirteen fish and lesser or superfluous sturgeon.Footnote ⁸ A generation later in 997 a less fully described consortium of fishers leased from the Church of Ravenna the fishery on the lagoon of Commachio for an annual rent of twenty denars.Footnote ⁹

Looking across the Po plain from then marshy and estuarine Ravenna, well-organized indirect subsistence fishers on alpine Lake Garda were already noticed. Yet not everyone beside that lake laboured in service to the big abbeys. At Lasize on the southeastern shore, in 983 eighteen named local landholders had the passing Emperor Otto II confirm their rights to fish and to fortify their shoreline, along with their exemption from royal dues. Not a century later in 1077 Henry IV reiterated this privilege for the original group’s twenty successors, now called “poor fishermen” (pauperes homines piscatores) from the perspective of the imperial court, though their numbers included local clergy and several distinct kin groups.Footnote ¹⁰ By the thirteenth century another consortium of Garda fishers was leasing priority access to the upper Adige, where the lake’s salmonids migrated to spawn. The bishop of Trent could preempt the largest fish, but the fishers, who had their own equipment, freely disposed of all the rest.Footnote ¹¹ Eventually Venetian state regulations for the Garda fishery in 1433 were explicit: the waters of the lake were common to all and many poor subjects there lived ex arte piscandi, “from the craft of fishing.” This was feasible because, as even thirteenth-century financial accounts confirm, people like the count of Tirol’s agents from Merano were eagerly buying salt trout, eel, fish in aspic, pickled fish, and other Garda products.Footnote ¹²

North of the Alps fishers often appear among the earliest free artisans to achieve official acknowledgement and, hence, record. On the Rhine in 1106 Herrich, Sethwin, Satmar, and twenty more named “fishermen of Worms” agreed to provide quarterly to the bishop two salmon and to the count one salmon in return for hereditary collective control over the wholesale market in fish. If members died without heirs, the group coopted replacements. Other fishers were welcome to sell their own catch, but only the privileged could buy for resale, though not outside the city nor before midday.Footnote ¹³ Free fishers at Tulln on the Danube are known since 1270, when the regent confirmed their access to all waters of Lower Austria not privately held and posted. The Tulln fishers’ initial loose fellowship became a guild before 1469, when a municipal ordinance regulated the members and their hired help who fished from boats with seines, traps, and lines, as well as through the ice. The town complained of fishers more eager to send their catch forty kilometers downriver to Vienna than to supply their neighbours. For leases on private waters and for fish in waters open to all, the half-dozen master fishers from small-town Tulln competed against their numerous rural counterparts, called Gäufischer.Footnote ¹⁴

Medieval artisan commercial fishing was by no means confined to inland waters. Around the Gulf of Lions, from Marseille to Perpignan, commercial fishing emerged within the seigneurial institutional framework from the late eleventh century. Urban markets, like that at Montpellier, where the abbot of Aniane was buying mullet and sea bass in the late twelfth century, encouraged fishers settled on barrier islands to intensify their exploitation of lagoons and the open sea, while paying a share of their catch to their lords. About the same time some hundreds of Marseille fishermen had formed a trade association with its own jurisdiction and influence on municipal government.Footnote ¹⁵

Despite Aelfric’s hesitant protagonist and the fate of that real fishing boat swept with Earl Harold Godwinson from Chichester to Normandy by a storm in 1064,Footnote ¹⁶ full-time professional fishing in the Channel grew, if slowly. Shortly before 1100 Queen Mathilda freed fishers settling at Roscelin on the Norman coast near Dieppe from dues on sale of fresh or salt fish, and in the next centuries such imposts in cash or kind were being collected from fish sales at Caen, Dieppe, Pont-Audemar, and Vernon.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet not until after 1300 did a Breton and western Norman coastal boat fishery supplant peasant part-timers fishing from shore, and nearly another century passed before fiscal records and eventually a papal bull of 1428 acknowledged that in this region whole communities and “many people make their living from fishing.”Footnote ¹⁸ By then nearshore marine fishing had become a full-time and nearly year-round occupation along southwestern English coasts and was developing in Sussex as well.Footnote ¹⁹

Small-scale commercial fishing remained in the high and later Middle Ages a characteristic activity all across interior Europe, and especially within marketing distance of large towns. Milan’s markets had fresh fish of seven local freshwater species, said home-town author Bonvesin da la Riva (c. 1240–c. 1315), from fishers who exploited nearby streams, rivers, and lakes.Footnote ²⁰ Well-organized local guilds and teams of fishers along the Rhône supplied much-appreciated bream, sturgeon, eel, lamprey, shad, burbot, and pike to consumers in Lyon, Avignon, Arles, and Tarascon.Footnote ²¹

At Paris up to 200,000 inhabitants by the early fourteenth century were a huge attraction for fish supplied from a distance by lords’ estates, by fishmongers specializing in either marine or freshwater varieties (see below), and by fishers exploiting the nearby aquatic habitats of the Seine. As artisans go, the last are in some ways especially well served by surviving records.Footnote ²² By the 1260s numbers of individuals worked with permission of rights holders such as the monasteries of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Saint-Magloire, the cathedral of Notre-Dame, and the king, who together controlled fishing a dozen kilometers up- and downriver from town. The “king”s fishers” were actually then licenced to catch “all kinds of fishes” by one Guérin Dubois, whose ancestors had received the fishery as a fief from King Philip II.Footnote ²³ As mid-thirteenth-century academic John of Garland saw while strolling along the river, these fishers worked on foot or from boats with seines, hoop nets, pot gear, and angling rods (Figure 4.1). Large fixed traps belonged to shoreline property owners and holders of high justice, who also leased out shoreline access.Footnote ²⁴

Figure 4.1 Artisan fishers in the Seine at Paris, 1317.

Miniatures of rod fishing and fishing with a seine net from small boats in the Seine below the bridges of Paris, as depicted in a marginal illumination done at St. Denis in 1317. Other pictures in the same source show angling and spearing from similar vessels.

From Paris BN, MS fr. 2090–2092 “Life of St. Denis,” II, fol. 97r detail.

Freshwater fishers of Paris displayed their catch for sale daily at the city’s “pierres à poisson,” designated markets along the Seine where they and the poulterers squabbled over space to work, or peddled their goods through the streets from carts or baskets. One market was on the right bank at the Castelet, the headquarters of the king’s governing provost, and the other beside the Petit Pont on the left.Footnote ²⁵ Fishers were forbidden to buy fish for resale, which was the exclusive privilege of the freshwater fishmongers, of whom more below.

Already by the 1260s the freshwater fishers formed one and later two officially recognized corporate communities, the pêcheurs à verge and pêcheurs à engins . A privilege renewed in 1515 further describes their organization, treasury (filled by own dues), fraternal obligations, and the right of a widow to succeed her deceased husband so long as she did not marry outside the “rank.” A 1292 register of taxpayers, which omitted people too poor to pay, named ten such peschéurs.Footnote ²⁶ That likely comprised but a small minority of a group later commonly described as “poor fishers … who fish to earn their poor living and the maintenance of their wives and children.”Footnote ²⁷

Towns dotting the banks and terraces of the Rhine from Basel to Mainz offered tens of thousands of potential buyers, so late medieval artisan fishers spread all along the upper river. About 1300 a friar from Colmar guessed as many as 1,500 fishers had been working along only the Alsatian shore.Footnote ²⁸ At the largest settlement in that reach, Strasbourg, by 1315 a fishers’ guild with its own statutes shared oversight with municipal authorities. On the opposite bank, three kilometers downstream others fished under the aegis of the local lord. Further below in the Palatinate free fishers were organized in another thirteen or more communities.Footnote ²⁹

Medieval artisanal fishing may attain some technical zenith in the valli da pesca of the Venetian lagoon, an elaborate adaptation to and modification of the seasonal movement of local fish stocks. Diverse species tolerant of broad variations in salinity inhabited the nutrient-rich continental shelf waters of the upper Adriatic and the rivers which feed it.Footnote ³⁰ Early each spring various mullets, sea bass, flatfishes, and sturgeon leave the open sea for the faster-warming lagoon, where they can feed and spawn. Juveniles and adults depart the lagoon as it cools in autumn to winter over at sea. People learned to exploit these seasonal concentrations of fishes.Footnote ³¹

Sparse early medieval sources, Cassiodorus among them, depict the Roman refugees who settled the barrier islands and elsewhere in the lagoon taking fish migrating through inter-island channels and into tributary rivers. The knowledge so accumulated evolved into construction of valli da pesca, complexes of wooden fences and reed (cane) grillworks (grisuole or velledelli) meant to guide the arriving fish into temporary enclosures of lagoon waters. Using as bases more permanent salteries erected on islets or the shallowest mudflats, fishers could thus harvest mature and young fish with relative ease for much of the year. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, extant private charters document piscarias with seasonal management of channels, opening access at the turn of January and February, starting to fish a few weeks later, then shipping fresh fish to local settlements and salt mullet, for instance, to nearby Veneto and Friuli. The norm came to be keeping the valli enclosed from July to Christmas. The community on Malamocco required fishers in its public waters to bring their catch to its public market. The 1173 excise schedule for the Rialto market named six primarily freshwater, two diadromous, and six marine species, all at least seasonally native to the lagoon and its feeders.Footnote ³² By the 1200s owners of private salteries were employing their own fishers or leasing exclusive access in return for fixed payments of fish, daily during Lent or seasonally.

With consolidation of rule out of Rialto (modern ‘Venice’), a confraternity of Pescatori di San Nicolo e di San Rafaele formed before or in the early thirteenth century and obtained an exclusive right to fish ‘public’ waters.Footnote ³³ In return these Nicolotti annually presented the doge with 2,400 salted mullet which he distributed to officials. The republic licenced individuals or partnerships to operate valli – now become the predominant capture system in the northern lagoon – and to use other specific gears for particular species or in certain seasons. Governmental action thus brought into the written record what fishers themselves had learned long before.

On what remained an artisanal and at most a regional scale, vallicoltura comprised a cultural adaptation to the ecosystems of the lagoon. The fishers did not practice aquaculture, but cleverly manipulated wild populations. The fish stocks confined each summer to the valle were neither selected nor of non-native origin; they were neither artificially fed nor their reproduction controlled. Even the Venetians’ purposeful use of barriers and enclosures simply but knowingly extended the weir and trap technologies well recorded elsewhere. What likely began as primarily subsistence-oriented arrangements were by around 1000 gaining a strong market role and by 1200 a strong professional identity.

4.1.2 Transitions: From Servants to Sellers

While the evolution of fishing in the Venetian lagoon may be reasonably inferred, only rarely do surviving records elsewhere offer a glimpse of the actual processes which at various times turned especially onetime providers of lords’ indirect subsistence into market-oriented catchers of fish for sale. Historian Paolo Squatriti reasonably speculates that some ninth-century landowners both north and south of the Alps controlled more fish production than they could consume, so sold their surplus and valued their fisheries in monetary, not dietary terms.Footnote ³⁴ Another intermediate or transitional condition is suggested in late tenth-century Pavia, where operators of sixty boats on the Ticino were no longer obliged to supply fish to the royal palace. Instead the chief fisher (magister pischatorum) saw to their payment all year long of cash dues to the palace steward, who was to use the accumulated fund to buy fish on Fridays whenever the royal household was in residence.Footnote ³⁵ The market provided a means to adjust the seasonality of nature – fish to catch – and society – fish to buy – with the erratic presence of court demand. By 1179 the same group of Pavian fishers was negotiating rights of access with competitive monastic fishers.Footnote ³⁶

Late thirteenth-century fishers at Klosterneuburg, a priory and subject small town on the Danube above Vienna, experienced a like transition from obligations to fish to obligations to pay from the proceeds of fish sales. Their written customal recognized that those who used seines, lines and pots, or other boat-operated gear would pay the convent ten pennies annual dues and those who fished from shore or by wading only five. The priory had first refusal on all “large and strong fish” (perhaps referring to sturgeon) before a fisher could “sell to others” (vendere aliud). If fishers wanted to build a special trap, the prior might pay half the costs and get half the catch, but if he did not contribute, the canons received only the catch of every ninth day and night. By the 1320s the monastery’s account books show large and regular cash expenditures for pike, sturgeon, and other local fishes, but even at the end of the fourteenth century all sturgeon were still subject to its preemptive claims.Footnote ³⁷

Local emergence of artisan fishing is also visible in rural settings, but still with an orientation to urban demand. On the Odra river near Wrocław two villages named Kotowice, one belonging to the convent of Trzebnice, the other to the bishop, were both largely populated by fishers. In both places thirteenth-century documents detail fixed dues of measured quantities of fish payable on several specified days each week. By the mid-fourteenth century, however, the bishop was claiming from his subjects only an annual thirty-groschen “fisher’s rent” and in the early sixteenth century the nuns were content with leasing the fishery out for seven marks a year. In both instances, the fish were being peddled in Wrocław.Footnote ³⁸

At Katzwang on the Rednitz just south of Nürnberg a legally hereditary tenure called “Das Fischhaus” had by the 1450s been in Fischer family hands for at least three generations. It included fields, meadows, and exclusive fishing rights in a designated reach of the Rednitz, five named old-channel lakes, and an excavated “Fischgrub” probably meant for temporary storage. Each successive tenant owed Ebrach abbey forty florins entry fine, ten florins annual rent, and “customary” services including six services of fish worth thirty pfennig each. The abbey further claimed first refusal to purchase “the fish that he would carry to Nürnberg for sale.”Footnote ³⁹

This chapter opened with fictive but credible tales of artisanal fishers in late Anglo-Saxon England. Historians Maryanne Kowaleski and Harold Fox have drawn attention to the much later regional transition from subsistence to market-oriented fishing in coastal Devon. Successive fourteenth-century customals from the lay-owned manor of Stokenham mark the slow shift of a well-adapted local fishery. In 1309 unfree tenant farmers already possessed equipment to take from Start Bay porpoise, salmon, plaice, sea bream, skate, conger, and mullet for their own use. Their lord, however, claimed a third of their catch, his choice whether in fish or cash, and some preemptive right over the rest. Furthermore before and during Lent a rota of the 160 farms had to provide three crews of nine villeins each to fish mullet for the lord, with spotters atop the cliffs to signal the seiners to surround the schools. By 1360, however, the obligation had been halved and the beaches where the fishers launched and landed become regular sites for sales of their catches.Footnote ⁴⁰ An incipient similar transition is visible in the 1365 pipe roll of Irish Cloyne, where ten fishers in cottages at Ballycotton in East Cork paid cash rents to their lord but also:

The latter unintended echo of limits on direct subsistence fishing reflects the market’s tilt of the balance in lord–tenant relations.

4.2.1 Social Positions: Residence and Status

Residential patterns of market fishers reflected the occupational clustering normal in medieval communities and earlier noted in large-scale specialized indirect subsistence fisheries like those of lakes on both sides of the Alps. In eleventh-century Iceland, a purely rural society, specialists gathered first seasonally, then year-round, at protected shore sites where they could lease land from owners and take fish to exchange with inland farmers for food and fabric.Footnote ⁴³ At Gdańsk excavations in tenth–thirteenth-century layers have found fishers living in the port quarter beside other artisans, sometimes even in the same houses.Footnote ⁴⁴ Indeed the fishers’ row, quay, or holm remains a relict feature in many present-day European cityscapes. At Nürnberg in 1363 twenty fishers lived along the Regnitz on the upstream side of town and at Heidelberg in 1439 fifty-four clung to the bank of the Neckar.Footnote ⁴⁵ Arles had only some dozens of fishing households but smaller Martigues as many as eighteen in its shore suburb in 1308.Footnote ⁴⁶

Artisan fisheries may have embodied economic innovation but they remained socially stable elements, little disruptive of local human relationships. Even on the seaboard, inshore marine fishers returned home every night or at least every few nights.Footnote ⁴⁷ The scale of enterprises and of technology differed little from norms in subsistence fisheries. This was no lucrative calling. Indeed, as already seen, from eleventh-century Lake Garda to late medieval Paris contemporaries plausibly associated fishers with poverty. Galician ports ranked the status of fishermen below that of merchant sailors.Footnote ⁴⁸ Until a storm flood in 1394 destroyed the community, dwellers at “Walraf’s landing” (Walraversijde) on the open Flemish coast fished to supply the market in Ypres but also cut peat and otherwise eked out a poor living from small sandy fields.Footnote ⁴⁹ Tithe payments by participants in Scarborough’s North Sea fishery differentiated the majority of small men who worked skiffs close to shore from the few who ran vessels into the North Sea or to Iceland.Footnote ⁵⁰ Some fishers at contemporary Arles also did well enough to join other master artisans on the municipal council and large lessees of fixed capture devices on the Seine became wealthy from feeding a Paris reinvigorated after the end of the Hundred Years War.Footnote ⁵¹

But even men big enough to hire helpers still themselves fished beside their crew and claimed only a share in the catch, not an owner’s prior right. Equal shares for each worker and for ‘the boat’ were recognized norms by the 1150s in Brittany and southern England. A famulus working for one of Pavia’s fishers received one-third of the catch, but in coastal Artois of the 1180s disputes over tithes on local herring catches revolved around definition of a crewman’s share.Footnote ⁵² A century thereafter Klosterneuburg’s customal specified equal shares for all who fished collectively through the ice or built a specially constructed trap.Footnote ⁵³ Fishers in Genoa and nearby Ligurian ports also used familiar commercial partnerships for shared ownership, operation, and returns from fully equipped fishing vessels, while familial partnerships long remained the norm for inshore boats in southwestern England.Footnote ⁵⁴ Further egalitarian social tendencies in medieval artisan fisheries are remarked below.

4.2.2 Small-Scale Technologies

Matched to household-based enterprises were the proven techniques for exploiting local resources which characterized this branch of the industry. Indeed medieval fishers who were plainly engaged in supplying local and regional markets drew on the same technical repertoire already seen in the hands of subsistence fishers. A livelihood for an artisan’s family required consistent exploitation from well-known local aquatic systems, calling for judicious seasonal deployment of diverse equipment.Footnote ⁵⁵ Aelfric’s stereotypical Anglo-Saxon market fisher put out nets and hooks from his little boat and the part-time specialists who sold salmon and inshore cod to consumers in contemporary Iceland added pot gear and weirs to that simple inventory.Footnote ⁵⁶ To the east where catches from the Danube supplied a Viennese market, the lines, pots, seines, and special fixed trap handled from shore or afloat by fishers at Klosterneuburg in the late thirteenth century were closely replicated in the 1469 regulations governing their counterparts and competitors upriver at Tulln.Footnote ⁵⁷

All it takes to amplify the sophisticated variety behind generic terms are opportunely detailed sources. Thirteenth-century records from Como show several variants on three basic netting techniques – “reti a semplice maglia, reti a mantello [trammel], e reti a sacco,” that is passive enclosure, entanglement, and something more active, perhaps a seine – each adapted for specific fishes.Footnote ⁵⁸ Not far away at Pavia market fishers’ use of small boats on the Ticino and Po rivers was remarked in privileges from the early eleventh through mid-thirteenth centuries, but the rich complexity of their activities emerges only with their fourteenth- and fifteenth-century ordinances. To take pike, tench, chub, nose, eel, sturgeon, small trout or grayling, and (unidentifiable) balbi for sale to the townspeople these men handled baited lines and also pot traps, bertavella, which they anchored in the rivers and in ditches. Some bertavellos were large enough for sturgeon. Of netting gear they used several types: missia were long nets deployed overnight in the big rivers, perhaps as drift nets since objects illegally fixed in the stream caused them damage; the cazia or caccia (literally ‘hunt’) had mesh attached to poles at a fixed site and was large enough that several fishers might share its construction and catch; the tragg or tracta, however, suggests some kind of seine. Fishing through the ice was also a collaborative effort using nets.Footnote ⁵⁹ As many (and, to the distant observer, as obscure) particulars can be pieced together about tackle and techniques of fishers then supplying Paris from the Seine or London from the Thames estuary.Footnote ⁶⁰

Small rowboats or two–three-man sailing skiffs like those seen in medieval Pavia or Iceland also served the inshore fishers at Scarborough, who pursued skate in summer, plaice in winter, lobster during Lent, and small cod year-round.Footnote ⁶¹ Such modest investments in water craft, seines, and other moveable gear also supported artisans fishing inshore Mediterranean waters. In 1380 Antoine Sardine [sic], Guillaume Mathieu, and Guillaume Esimisol entered into a three-year contract with the Bishop of Antibes, who provided them with a new boat and a grubstake of oats and beans. When the boatmen engaged in coastwise shipping, they paid the bishop three-quarters of their profits; net fishing cost them only one-third but night fishing with lights half, for the bishop then also provided the fuel. Fishing ad lumen was important for sardine in Sicily as well as Provence, and both areas shared use of boat seines called, respectively, xabica or bourgin.Footnote ⁶² Calling for greater investments of capital and labour were the fixed weirs and traps taken at lease by fishers around Paris and in estuaries along the Gulf of Lions or ProvenceFootnote ⁶³ or the great niewód seines assembled by cooperative fishing teams (maszoperla, matschoppen, etc.) to take herring off the twelfth-century south Baltic coast.Footnote ⁶⁴

Yet even the latter groups were still engaged in marketing a recently caught product to mainly local and regional consumers (in contrast to those treated in Chapter 8 below) and employing capital equipment equally familiar in indirect subsistence fisheries of nearby lords. While increased scale and intensity of fishing effort cannot be excluded in transitions from subsistence to artisan fisheries, it seems unlikely that the ubiquitous artisan producers of fresh or lightly preserved fish for nearby markets ever plainly used capture methods unknown to peasant and seigneurial subsistence fishers in the same neighbourhoods. Fishing for sale itself neither necessarily nor evidently called forth technological innovation and change. On the other hand, the marketing function did often (not invariably) reshape relations within household enterprises.

4.2.3 A Gender Division of Labour

In most places small-scale marketing of fresh local fish involved male fishers turning their catch over to wives to sell. The social pattern, today a cliché, thus foreshadowed emergence of long-distance marine fisheries which would remove men from their communities for extended periods of time.Footnote ⁶⁵ Twelfth-century municipal codes for newly Christianized interior Castile expected that wives and children of local stream fishers would peddle the catch. At Toledo these women hawked fresh fish on the street, while imports were offered in shops.Footnote ⁶⁶ The same activity is well documented at Paris, where a wide-ranging tax roll from 1292 identified fish sellers among the most numerous roles of women who worked in the victualing trades. A generation earlier poet Guillaume de la Villeneuve caught voices of those like poor Norman Luce Rossel, fish peddler spouse of a blind English immigrant recently cured in a posthumous miracle of St. Louis: ‘Herring, smoked and white, freshly salted,/ I want to sell my herring./ Others you hear cry “weevers!”/ And also bleak from the sea [sardines?].’Footnote ⁶⁷ But women from the families of small-scale fishers on the Seine routinely walked and stood about the city pitching the tubs of live fishes they bore in their arms or on their heads, for at only three designated sites were they permitted to set up carts or stalls. The wife of Pierre le Nourrissier was standing properly to sell at the Petit-Pont in 1422, when royal officers seized her wares for her man’s illegal fishing. Margot la Goujonne (sic) and a half-dozen other wives of local fishers made up the majority of pedlars arrested in 1428 for defying the rules.Footnote ⁶⁸ In Scandinavia likewise, Malmø’s city council set up that town’s first guild of petty retailers in 1534 to regulate an exclusively female trade in fresh fish.Footnote ⁶⁹ In a sense, then, some women found themselves on the sharp edge of the commercial revolution and, more so than their menfolk out on the water, experienced material changes in their daily lives.

The pattern was not, however, everywhere the same. Augsburg’s 1276 Stadtrecht prohibited woman fishmongers and the same rule applied at Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Zürich had no legal ban and some records indicate women helping their husbands, but they were there normally neither fish sellers nor commercial fishers.Footnote ⁷⁰ Why did south German women plainly play in regional artisan fisheries nowhere near the role they continued to have in subsistence fishing there? For now, the operational and interpersonal features of households based on artisan fisheries – differing just enough to matter from peasant farming or handicraft production – deserve the attention of researchers in local records across medieval Europe.

4.2.4 Collective Organization

Heads of households in community-based artisan fisheries characteristically joined their fellows in mutual pursuit of shared concerns, blending what present-day commentators might distinguish as economic, social, and environmental interests. Common rights and collective uses were familiar in both rural and urban settings. These essential features had less to do with personal legal freedom or ownership of resources than with users’ liberty of economic decisions and the role of (informal) community in constraining them. Indeed simplified modern economic models of common property resources poorly fit both the relations and the outcomes of small-scale medieval commercial fishing. Like other contemporary artisans, fishers organized and regulated themselves to advance group interests, mediate internal conflicts, and promote egalitarian and sustainable forms of exploiting local resources for local market consumption.Footnote ⁷¹

As discussion of technology has already made plain, individual effort caught most fish, but collective institutions of various kinds were as familiar to country watermen as to those based in towns. Fishers from each village along the Lago di Bientina near Lucca in the thirteenth century jointly leased the fishing in a distinct area, then set rules for participation and methods for the term of their lease.Footnote ⁷² On both sides of the English Channel men from a fishing harbour jointly contracted with a broker (hôte) to market their catch.Footnote ⁷³ Fishers’ confraternities on Dalmatian Rab and in the Quartier Saint-Jean of Marseille enter the written record by about 1300 and later claimed privileges not unlike those at Ravenna back in 943 or much-recorded Paris.Footnote ⁷⁴ Of course the bulky ordinances of late medieval fishers’ corporations – what follows draws notably on those from the Zürichsee in 1386, Pavia in 1399, Auenheim in 1442, and others more incidentally – most fully report their activities and role, but the changing functions of literacy and public administration do not obscure the importance of collective practices among artisan fishers in most corners of medieval Latin Christendom.

One long-standing historical cliché has medieval guilds and urban craft corporations epitomize narrow artisanal self-interest. Certainly fishers’ organizations reinforce much of that stereotype, though only if we acknowledge that their interests, like those of their neighbours in other trades, were more than simply material. Of course a major preoccupation aimed to secure licence to fish and sell the catch: this was the sole purpose of the documents which first report the schola piscatorum at Ravenna in 943 and the organized fishers at Worms in 1106.Footnote ⁷⁵ Rights of the Seine fishers to sell in Paris were set out since the provost’s compilation of the 1260s and reiterated in royal charters throughout the fourteenth–sixteenth centuries. At Marseille and some other French coastal towns guilds enforced a special fee on outsiders who wanted to sell fish.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Venetian confraternity of Nicolotti had formed before or early in the 1200s, by which time their annual payment of mullet to the doge ensured them of exclusive access to all public waters in the lagoon. Surviving statutes date only from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries.Footnote ⁷⁷

Governance and reproduction of the organization called for rules of succession to membership, selection of officials, and procurement of material and supernatural support. The Nicolotti gained membership by hereditary succession and those become too old to fish were privileged to join the fishmongers, making for vertical integration of the city’s fish supply. On the Rhine at Auenheim guildsmen took their place by hereditary right or payment of five schillings, which was also demanded of former members seeking reinstatement. Each year they selected two “honourable men” to inspect and enforce the rules. Similar routes to membership applied in Paris and Pavia, though the latter fishers also dedicated their entire catch the first week of September to funding their association. Parisian fishers attended and served at the morning mass on the day of their patron, St. Louis, while at Zürich the guildsmen shared regular common meals and took active part in the funerals of their deceased fellows.Footnote ⁷⁸

Social fellowship reinforced solidarity. While eating in the fishers’ hall at Zürich in 1446 city fisher Heini Schwab and (unrelated) country counterpart Werli Schwab came to (temporary) agreement over use of nets in the lower Zürichsee.Footnote ⁷⁹ Resolving conflicts among members was always a major concern of organized artisan groups. Users of different gear had sometimes incompatible needs and expectations. The Zürichsee agreement of 1386 banned anchored gill nets and limited use of the largest open-water seines, while setting strict dimensional rules on other tackle. Guild statutes at Pavia confronted conflict directly: though lifting of another’s bertavellum trap was heavily fined, up to four such traps could be removed to set the long drift net called missiam and an even larger fine applied to any fisher whose stakes, fascines, anchors, or other barriers damaged any missiam; on the other hand, a fisher could put his own trap in a ditch already being used by another and on three days’ notice even some other device.Footnote ⁸⁰

Collective groups also oversaw access to specific sites and tried to adjudicate or alleviate disputes which arose. The Auenheim guild required those who would lease certain locations for set nets to assemble at Kitzingen before dawn the day after the Feast of Mary’s birth (8 September), then within the next eight days mark each site with two special posts. Fishers on the Seine could make exclusive claims only after Easter, when demand for fish softened.Footnote ⁸¹ This did not always work. The resource potential where the Zürichsee flowed out into the Limmat provoked long antagonism between the Bachs family, who owned a great weir, and trap fishers Jäkli Buss and Johans Vischer. The 1381 election of a guild master and efforts by the Bachs faction to amend the guild charter provoked violent confrontations in first the fishers’ hall, then the city council chamber. One party grabbed the charter, the other barred the doors. Before guild leaders brought temporary peace with heavy fines for all, eight fishers led by Buss and Vischer trapped Bürgi Bachs in the city bathhouse and beat him up. Still, in 1384 Bürgi’s son Bertschi caught Jäkli Buss driving piles to anchor his row of fish traps and attacked him with a stake. The antagonism rumbled on as late as 1397.Footnote ⁸²

Egalitarian norms commonly keynote the artisan fishers’ measures of technical and social self-governance. A guiding principle among regional guilds on the Provençal coast was to enable each fisher to earn his living from his craft.Footnote ⁸³ In this spirit at Auenheim none could begin to fish through the ice until safety had been tested with an oar. Then the initial lessee of a site was obliged to post his intention to fish there and to accept three more partners at equal shares. No one could have more than one ice fishery.Footnote ⁸⁴ Subject to the proviso that each newcomer must possess the necessary equipment, nearly identical rules applied in the Pavia statutes from 1399.Footnote ⁸⁵ Each fisher of the Seine above Paris could claim only so many sites as he could actually work himself. Marseille forbade using two boats to pull a seine or trawl and the 1386 agreement on the Zürichsee limited perch lines to ten per fisher, each only up to thirty fathoms long.Footnote ⁸⁶

A frequent effect and occasionally an articulated intent of the constraints artisan fishers set on their own activities tended toward conservation and sustainable use of local resources. Restrictions on gear and of seasons occur in all the statutes and customaries. The agreement among Traun master fishers in 1418 prohibited equipment judged “hazardous” (schedlich) and summer draining of side channels for its harm to roe and small fish.Footnote ⁸⁷ The Pavia guild banned fishing for two spring spawners, grayling from May to November and pike from May to 24 June.Footnote ⁸⁸ Rules “that the good folks of the fishery have made as to nets” and their enforcement on the Thames around London openly reasoned that undersized mesh harmed the reproduction of fish. Those at Lake Garda in 1433 aimed explicitly at the “common benefit and abundance of the aforesaid fishes.”Footnote ⁸⁹ When the Venetian government substituted its own legislation in 1491, local interests resisted: four lakeside communes complained that “the said rule … will be prejudicial and detrimental to the greater part of our poor subjects, many of whom make their living from the craft of fishing.”Footnote ⁹⁰

Efforts to regulate and preserve fisheries transcend artisan communities, so later in this chapter we explore another angle and then revisit these topics in Chapter 6. The point just now is simply that medieval artisan fishers did use collective measures to maintain their relatively equal access to local markets and to preserve familiar local resources supplying them.

4.3.1 Freshly Caught from Nearby Waters

Markets with fresh and lightly preserved products from local and regional fisheries were common in medieval towns. At Arras the toll schedule from 1024 anticipated sales of sturgeon, salmon, shad, plaice, cod, herring, and porpoise from estuarine and coastal waters. Likewise when Parisian intellectuals, Alan of Lille in the mid-1100s and John of Garland a century later, would celebrate the diversity of fishes there available, they named species native to the surrounding region. Up to the twelfth century even salt herring – called in later French hareng d’une nuit, blanc, or frais-poudré – were prepared in limited number and for only regional distribution.Footnote ⁹² In the 1170s the Rialto market in Venice regularly offered fifteen varieties from the lagoon and its connected waters.Footnote ⁹³ A generation or so later an anonymous Oxford schoolman described a London fishmonger displaying two dozen different identifiable fishes of southern English waters, eight freshwater, ten marine, and six tolerant or migratory between both.Footnote ⁹⁴

Surveys of markets which enter the record a bit later, such as that at Barcelona beginning in the 1260s, also reflect fish stocks from local waters, little more.Footnote ⁹⁵ Well inland, Merano’s 1317 market ordinance distinguished sales of fresh local fish from preserved imports, and late fifteenth-century stewards from the Count of Leiningen’s castles in the Palatinate went to towns along the Rhine –Worms, Speyer, Oggersheim, Oppau, Mannheim, and Altrip – to shop for the river’s fish.Footnote ⁹⁶ About the same time, Breton fishers were selling their year-round catches fresh to consumers in Anjou and Maine, while salting down for shipment elsewhere only surpluses from their less reliable summer fishery.Footnote ⁹⁷ Even in the arid plateau of southern Castile the fresh fish then on offer at inland towns (Cuenca, Guadalajara, Madrid, and Toledo) were those native to the watersheds of the Júcar, Tajo, and Guadiana and perhaps some inshore species from the Valencian coast 150–250 km away.Footnote ⁹⁸ Culturally similar demand on different markets elicited responses from different local ecosystems.

The fish trade was among the first in medieval towns to specialize and to have its own designated site for sales. Hamburg’s oldest marketplace, which predated Danish sack of the town in 845, was called the ‘fish market’ into the thirteenth century. Passing documentary references confirm special fish markets operating by 1127 at Ypres, 1169 at Louvain, 1191 at Ghent, and 1286 in Brussels.Footnote ⁹⁹ The riverbank location where Kölners bought and sold salmon and other fresh Rhine fishes was distinctly mentioned by 1183,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ about the same time King Alfonso VIII of Castile, in his later much-copied compilation of municipal law for Cuenca, heavily fined anyone who sold local fish outside the public market, even from his own dwelling.Footnote ¹⁰¹ By the end of the twelfth century fish were being sold in Rome at the “Foro Piscium” beside the church of Sant’Angelo and since 1296 the fish sellers’ statutes at Perugia confined this activity to the guild hall.Footnote ¹⁰² The marketplace with inspection facilities where local fishers at Namur displayed their catch differed from that where marine fishes were sold, as also at both Lübeck and York.Footnote ¹⁰³

Sheer size meant high medieval Paris had greatly elaborated facilities. As already seen besides ambulatory street pedlars, who could stop to rest or make a sale but nowhere set up to receive customers, the city allowed retailing of fish on the “pierres au poissons” at the Castelet, the Baudet gate, and the Petit Pont. The Castelet location provided six covered positions for wholesalers, who could also pay the king for permission to set up their own stands at Les Halles, on the rue de la Cossonnerie, or de la Cochonnerie. Local fisherfolk or so-called marchands forains, actually fishers from settlements along the Seine and Marne, competed for places on the stones and, if those were filled, could still display their wares at the same locations so long as they blocked no traffic.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Characteristic institutional and economic relations on the fish market arose from the encounter of consumer and supplier interests. As for other vital consumables, medieval public authorities, morally and politically obliged to seek some balance, took large responsibility for market operations.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This oversight might be under the prince’s aegis, as in Cuenca’s twelfth-century charter, the royal provost’s jurisdiction at Paris, or the monarch’s control over London fishmongers’ privileges. Elsewhere communal or municipal statutes held sway. It often seemed wise to download actual supervision of fish selling to self-regulating suppliers, corporate guilds of fish sellers like those remarked above at Perugia and Bologna. Different administrative arrangements generated different kinds of records, providing historians with many prescriptive and a few descriptive accounts of how fish actually reached market consumers.

4.3.2 Fishmongers

Diverse vendors, not just fishers and wives with their own catches, offered consumers fresh fish from their baskets, pushcarts, benches, stalls, or stones (Figure 4.2). Men and women who specialized in retailing fish, what the Veronese called “pischaroli vendencii pisces recentes,” were in most places plainly distinguished from the fish catchers.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ At Zürich they handled sales for fishers from beyond the Zürichsee, and in Basel, Würzburg, and Kraków they had formed their own guilds by the late fourteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Such traders had been active in most middle-sized English towns for a least a generation before 1304, when York counted as many as fifty fishmongers and nine more purchasing agents (“forestallers of fishmongers”).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In smaller places with abundant local resources such as Berlin or Tortosa, however, fishers themselves remained the main sellers of fish.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Permanent shops long remained rare, probably reflecting the continued seasonality of both demand and supply, which changed only gradually with the commerce in preserved fish products to be explored in Chapter 8. As market relations intensified, especially where larger urban populations concentrated demand, specialized fishmongers organized both regional supply networks and local distribution. Two extended examples, Rome and Paris, suggest the more common and a probably extreme development.

Figure 4.2 Fresh fish displayed in baskets set out on stones for market sale in Strasbourg, 1517.

Woodcut by artist Hans Frank illustrating discussion of prices and morality by the famous Alsatian preacher Johannes Geiler von Kaysersberg (1445–1510), Die brösamlin doct. Keiserspergs vffgelesen võ Frater Johañ Paulin barfůser ordẽs: Vñ sagt võ dẽ funffzehen Hymelschen staffelen die Marie vff gestigen ist/vñ gãtz von dẽ vier Leuwengeschrei; Auch von dem Wãnenkromer/ der Kauflüt, sunderlich heupsche matery bei. lxii. predigẽ/ nutzl … Publication: [Strassburg]: [Johannes Grüninger], [1517], part II, fol. 47v.

Reproduced with permission of Temple University Library Special Collections.

Marketing of fish to medieval Rome’s many consumers began with collaboration among local fishers and retailers. By the late eleventh century a corporate group called the Schola piscatorum Stagni (“Association of fishers of the pond”), many of whom sold fish in the Tiber-side quarter, Trastavere, was organizing access to waters in Tiber delta lagoons and provoking tension with church corporations which owned most of the fishing rights and ran their own subsistence fisheries there. In 1158 the Schola collectively contracted with one monastery for exclusive rights to fish the Stagno di Maccaresse in return for a fixed rent in kind and the landowner’s employing no more than two of its own fishers. By 1296, when the original contract was renewed at a slightly lower share or annual payment in cash, 160 members were claiming right of succession in the Schola. Further renewal in 1362 left this arrangement unchanged, but people in the Schola were already reordering their relationship into a marketing guild, the Ars piscivendulorum urbis (“Craft of fishmongers of the city”), first so named in 1363. Notarial registers show members of the Ars taking piscarie in the Tiber and along the nearby coast on five- to ten-year leases, for which they made to the religious or lay owners significant annual cash payments plus a few symbolic fishes, often the much-prized shad. Toward that century’s end some leasehold contracts varied the annual rate depending on whether the pope was resident in Rome or not. Leading fishmongers such as Paolo Rossi, Nucio Gibelli, and Cola di Nucio di Cecco had also become property holders in Trastavere and around the fish market beside Sant’Angelo in Pescheria.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Early records of the Ars are gone, but workings of the late medieval Roman fish market come clear from the 1405 revision of its statutes. Municipal authorities allowed tax-free retail sales of fish by anyone who paid for a site, but a regular and reliable supply of sturgeon, eel, shad, drum, sardines, prawns, and dolphin – all named in the statutes – was provided through the guild’s two major participant groups, the coctiatores, large wholesale fishmongers, and many small retailers, the pescivendoli. Coctiatores contracted for delivery from fishers on the Tiber, coastal lagoons, or local store ponds, but were obliged to deal publicly with the retailers and could sell to any individual retailer no more than one-third of any shipment. The latter in turn were to offer their goods at designated public sites or, exceptionally, in specific households which had requested service, always taking personal responsibility for the quality of their merchandise. All members agreed to boycott any “magnates and nobles of the city, monasteries, churches, hospices, religious, or their servants” who failed to pay their bills to either wholesalers or retailers and also any fishers who might then turn around and offer the fish as their own. Membership in the Ars was hereditary or by cooption and required regular dues to fund inspection for quality, settlement of internal disputes, and an annual procession, mass, and festival on August 15, feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, the group’s patron.Footnote ¹¹¹

The Ars (with its free market rivals) outfitted the rich Roman market in those fresh fishes which humanist papal secretary Paolo Giovio celebrated in 1524. Much of what his De romanis piscibus libellus reported about roughly thirty-one native central Mediterranean fishes (and five invertebrates), seven catadromous or euryhaline, and five freshwater taxa he had lifted from classical sources, but he also knew the local dialect name for Tiber sturgeon, that trout and other freshwater fishes came from interior lakes, and that pike were a more northerly species found in Italy’s Alpine waters.Footnote ¹¹²

Counterparts elsewhere to Rome’s coctiatores and pescivendoli took like initiatives to reflect and satisfy local customers’ needs. The Venetian guild of Compravendi da pesca included wholesale and retail fishmongers from its formation in 1227; only licenced members could sell in the fish market (Pescheria) beside the Rialto bridge. In 1304 fifty-four licensees were named. Those neither investors in lagoon fisheries nor retired Nicolotti with sons and other kin in the fishery, could connect with suppliers through a privileged inspection and brokerage agency for all foodstuffs, the palo.Footnote ¹¹³ Individual enterprises can be harder to track. At Arles a local fishmonger, Rostagno Laugier alias Spanhoget, contracted in early January, 1434, with two local fishers, Jean and Bertrand de Grans alias Bernoyes, for “all the good fresh fish” they would catch up until Easter from a named salt pond thirty kilometres down the estuary near Fos-sur-Mer or elsewhere. Up to the start of Lent, Rostagno would pay seventeen groats a basket and take delivery at the pond three times a week; during Lent he would up the price to eighteen groats and get his fish every day. Baskets and terms of payment – including a guaranteed minimum of ten florins, half in mid-Lent and half at Easter – were contractually defined, as was Rostagno’s responsibility for all shipping costs.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Thirteenth-century statutes encouraged also London fishmongers to go out and make deals at actual fishing ports: economic records from around 1300 show some of them as shipowners with regular links around the Thames-centred region and interests as far as Yarmouth, Boston, and Lynn. But aggressive efforts to channel all London’s fish through fishmongers’ hands by banning local fishers or non-Londoners from selling at retail provoked such opposition from fellow citizens as to render moot even occasional royal privileges to that effect.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Strength of demand on the semi-arid Spanish plateau induced inland municipalities unwilling to rely on local subsistence fishing or voluntary sales from privately owned fisheries to auction off the exclusive right to sell fish on their marketplace or a specific location. Obligados, the merchants or elite investors who took such contracts for the Lenten season or up to two years, were obliged to sell contracted quantities at pre-set prices but commonly exempt from sales tax (alcabala).Footnote ¹¹⁶ They secured their inventories by digging streamside holding tanks or enclosing pools with netting (facilities called in either case Xudrias, judrias, or sometimes sudrias).Footnote ¹¹⁷

Dealers in many places transported and held live fish for future sale. Where waterways were available, boats with a perforated compartment in the hull, what the Dutch called ‘waterschip’, circulated new water among the living cargo. There first recorded in 1339, hulks of at least ten medieval examples have been identified in fields once beneath waters of the Ijsselmeer (Zuider Zee). Some carried eel from coastal fisheries to consumers in Flemish towns and even London.Footnote ¹¹⁸ On the Rhine traders hauled salmon in such craft and on the Rhône and Saône they were common enough to be assessed a special toll.Footnote ¹¹⁹ More direct overland routes called for pack trains, whether equipped with wooden tanks or moving just fast enough that during cool seasons fish carefully packed in straw and baskets remained edible. Sicilian mule trains thus carried fresh fish the twenty kilometers from Sferracavallo to Palermo, while ‘panier ponies’ likewise linked fishing ports along the Yorkshire coast to inland towns.Footnote ¹²⁰ Could Havelok and Grim have used such means to supply Lincoln back in the tenth century?

Like Castilians, London fishmongers kept their stock alive in the ‘stews’ or ‘stanks’ some had dug into the riverbank or built from timber and netting on the other side of the Thames at Southwark.Footnote ¹²¹ In Kraków only local merchants with a storage facility (halder) were allowed to carry unsold fish over until the next fast day.Footnote ¹²² A display manuscript given the French king in 1317 depicts in one marginal illustration (Figure 4.3) a vendor on a floating store tank moored beneath a Parisian bridge, who lifts a wriggling fish for inspection by a prospective customer.Footnote ¹²³ Fishmongers in towns of the Hungarian kingdom from Bratislava to Obuda caged off vivaria or reservacula in protected reaches of the Danube to keep their stock alive through the winter for Lenten consumption. Such facilities in the Rhône at Lyon or Avignon were worth as much as a good city house.Footnote ¹²⁴ Big fishmongers controlled significant capital investments. Their storage facilities and supply chains aimed to anticipate and satisfy customer demand with some freedom from natural seasonality or the mere luck of the day’s haul.

Figure 4.3 A sale from live storage, Paris, 1317.

A Parisian fish seller displays to a prospective customer a lively fish from his floating storage tanks on the Seine, as depicted in a marginal illumination done at St. Denis in 1317.

From Paris BN, MS fr. 2090–2092, II, fol. 129r detail.

While the buyer from the store tank on the Seine was getting a freshwater fish in particular, he and many fellow Parisians generally enjoyed what may have been the widest access to fresh fishes in all medieval Europe.Footnote ¹²⁵ Their regional supply network reached so far with a complex institutional arrangement called the chasse marée as to cap with products of the distant sea those creatures which flowed in from the fresh waters ringing western Christendom’s richest concentration of market consumers.Footnote ¹²⁶

Artisan fishers of Paris and environs, already met earlier in this chapter, offered the city their own local catches of freshwater fishes native to the Seine and its nearby tributaries. Multiple seigneuries with rights and jurisdictions in and around the city complicated the fishers’ access to waters and customers. This confusion of authority – and hence records – affected even more the work and our present knowledge of the quantitatively more essential fishmongers. The latter comprised at least two and sometimes three or more organizational groupings, whose diversity reflected both political and essentially functional, even ecological, differences.

Local supplies were greatly augmented from the surrounding region by ‘freshwater fishmongers’. Royal privileges from 1182/3 had conceded the right of butchers established in the area of the Castelet to sell fish – perhaps especially when sales of meat were stopped during Lent? – but by the mid-thirteenth century the king’s provost, Etienne Boileau, recognized the poissonniers d’eau douce as a distinct craft with its own organization and regulations.Footnote ¹²⁷ A householder wishing eel, barbel, carp, tench, roach, lampreys or the like might turn to their members at the “pierres au poissonniers” near the Castelet or Petit Pont, or find the least of them hawking such fish in streets across town. Some of what these fishmongers had to offer came from their own fixed fish-catching installations, permanent weirs or traps taken on lease from riparian landowners along the Seine or other streams. Others owned their own fishponds, too. The largest such men were more strictly importers and buyers, exercising their exclusive corporate privilege to buy fish within two leagues (roughly 10 km) of Paris and sell them in the city. This right the poissonniers had to exercise where the fish were caught and not from people who were already carrying their own fish to Paris. Up to ten in the morning the freshwater fishmongers could legally sell only to consumers, but thereafter they could also market their supply wholesale to other retailers. Jehan de Lievre was jailed in 1473 for violating the first rule, but back in 1428 Jean Haucie, who brought several hundred carp from Picardy, was able to sell some to fellow dealers and others to retail pedlars.Footnote ¹²⁸ Freshwater fish markets were officially supervised through the royal kitchen administration and received especially solicitous attention when Anglo-French hostilities and the English occupation during the 1420s–40s threatened the security of marine supplies.

Poissonniers de poisson de mer, narrowly defined, handled fresh, i.e. not preserved, fishes from the sea.Footnote ¹²⁹ This supply came to Paris exclusively by commercial means – so not through estate-management channels – and under official regulation. Twelfth-century shippers on the Seine, the mercatores per aquam, likely handled some marine fishes, but the volume of consumption and supply soared thereafter and in inverse relation to limited, probably declining, freshwater supplies.Footnote ¹³⁰ The provost’s book of trades from the 1260s recognized a mature corporate grouping. Memoranda regarding internal tariffs on marine fish entering Paris in 1321 suggest 5,000 standard cartloads at 6,000 fish per load in that year.Footnote ¹³¹ Thirty million marine fish would be more than 150 per Parisian. Forty years later in 1361, when an emergency tax to ransom the king from English captivity was apportioned, the trade in seafish subject to royal authority was valued at 10 percent more than that in meat and ten times that in freshwater fish.Footnote ¹³² But no marine fish were to be had in Parisian waters, or even so near that fishers could, as in Rome or Bologna, themselves transport a fresh catch up the river to fishmongers and consumers.

Already by the 1260s an elaborate system, the chasse marée, was in place to provide and distribute to Parisian consumers fresh fish from the Norman and Picard coast some 150 and more kilometers away. There is no evident reason to think these arrangements had existed as recently as the start of the thirteenth century, when Philip II Augustus expelled a rival and disobedient vassal, John of England, from his hereditary possession of Normandy. The system then lasted up to the Revolution, all the while pushing preindustrial transport technologies to the limit.Footnote ¹³³

Such nearshore marine catches as rays, whiting, gurnards, weever, seasonally fresh herring, and salmon, arrived at the great market of Les Halles on pack horses (and only centuries later, wagon trains) from such fishing ports as Honfleur, Cayeux, and Boulogne. There wholesale buyers and shippers had arranged at each return of the local fishing fleet for the catch to be laid in specially designed baskets, lightly dusted (poudré) with salt, covered with straw, and sent off in the charge of specialized transporters. The convoys, and a legal case from 1361 thought fifty to two hundred horses a normal size range, made the trip in thirty-five to forty hours during the winter months and, with extra relays of fresh horses, twenty-four hours in summer, arriving at Les Halles with the morning sun. They followed set and privileged routes protected by royal authority against seigneurial tolls and imposts that might slow their progress and raise their costs. In 1315 royal officials took legal action against the prior and seigneur of Milly-sur-Thérain (Oise) for demanding tolls and in 1352 against the abbot of Saint-Denis and a half dozen other lay and religious lords for seizing fish in return for passage. Nor were fishmongers permitted to go out and make advance deals with the transporters after they had crossed the Oise some twenty-five kilometers from the city. Lest disputes over the transport and marketing make the fish worthless, these cases went straight to the king’s high court, the Parlement de Paris, which by the mid-fourteenth century had set up a special panel to settle them promptly.Footnote ¹³⁴

Elaborate but practical regulations called for immediate inspection of the cargo arriving at Les Halles, payment of the shippers, and obligatory quick sale of a fast-spoiling commodity. The crown authorized sworn brokers, vendeurs, to approve each shipment for sale, set a just price on it, and mediate between the shippers and the fishmongers. As time passed the shippers gained a stronger voice in managing the system and removing some privately held charges against their business. In 1361 the collectivity of the marée was allowed to fund its own endowment with a charge of two denier on each livre of fish sold. To ensure wide and competitive distribution, no dealer, whether wholesale merchant or retailer, could take more than six pack-horse or three wagon loads in a day. In the warmer season from Easter to 1 October (St. Remi) the fish had to be sold the very day they arrived in the city; the cooler season allowed one day more. Remains of the fishes especially associated with marine fishmongers – the whiting, fresh herring, mackerel, cod, gurnard, dogfish, rays, sardines, sea trout, salmon, and porpoise named in their ordinances – are especially well represented in elite archaeological contexts of later medieval Paris.Footnote ¹³⁵

Personal names identified with the fish trades in the several books of returns on the taille, a tax on the wealth of non-noble Paris households between 1292/3 and 1313, totaled 648; after resolving duplicate and repeated entries, these labeled 263 individuals. Just more than 200 of those people dealt in fresh fish, and while not one in ten identified him- or herself by source of supply and hence ‘craft’, about half lived close to the Castelet, Petit Pont, or other locations for selling freshwater fish and the others around Les Halles, the site for handling fish from the sea. Members of both groups fell mainly among the higher, but not highest, taxpaying brackets. Jehan le Grand, a wholesaler in marine fish, was assessed thirty livres tax on his wealth in 1313 and his fellow fishmongers, Mauger of Cayeaux and Guillaume Babille, were each charged 22 lb. 10 s. – when three taxpayers in four owed less than one livre. Jehan and his wife Geneviève had recently acquired city property worth 294 livres, but no fishmonger achieved office as echevin or provost of the merchants, the leading positions in the mercantile community.Footnote ¹³⁶

Beside the 200 Parisian dealers in fresh fish around 1300, self-identified ‘herringers’ (harenguers) then numbered sixty-one. For some time after the mid-thirteenth century ambiguity or instability prevailed between their standing as part of the marine fishmongers or a separately organized craft. Eventually this became a free trade, what the English called ‘salt fish merchants’,Footnote ¹³⁷ who handled not fresh fish but a preserved product. As compared to the fishmongers they served a different market segment, faced different technical problems with the quality of their goods, used different modes and routes of transport, and ultimately drew on different animals captured by different means from different, no longer local, ecosystems. Salt herring in thirteenth-century Paris can stand for new trends in medieval fisheries to be examined at length in Chapter 5 below.

What especially struck observers of high medieval Parisian markets were the huge diversity and sheer quantity of fish on offer. In the mid-1200s John of Garland set his lesson on Latin and French vocabulary of crafts, tools, and occupations as a walking tour through Paris. Fish sellers, he said, sold salmon, trout, roach, two kinds of lampreys, eel, fresh cod, plaice, pike, tench, ray, herring, mullet, perch, gudgeon, and stickleback, plus the meat of porpoise.Footnote ¹³⁸ Some 200 years later an anonymous writer on the rich food supplies of Paris near the close of the Middle Ages turned a half eager, half disgusted eye to the chasse marée:

Paris was a bottomless pit for the consumption of fish. Demand-driven local market mechanisms let Paris, like and beyond the lesser cities of the medieval west, pull live, fresh fish out of every water body within its technical reach.

4.3.3 For the Sake of Safe Abundance

As was by 1200 the general pattern for other dietary necessities, a ubiquitous regulatory climate promoting abundant, cheap, and safe supply on local fish markets reflected the strength of urban demand and the political importance of consumer interests. Whatever the issuing authority, the commonalities among rules on dozens of fish markets from one end of western Christendom to the other are remarkable. What follows tries only to describe the rough consensus on provisions and procedures which everywhere set the prevailing tone. Such provisions aimed first to maximize supply and retail competition,

Not only had fish to be sold in public, the designated open markets welcomed outside suppliers. Neither the privileged fishers at Worms in 1106 nor the powerful fishmongers’ guild of thirteenth- through fifteenth-century London could bar entry to others with fish to sell. The London corporation fought the fishmongers to a standstill on this issue.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Bans on private dealings before fish reached the market, what the English called forestalling and regrating,Footnote ¹⁴¹ and on transactions between outsiders further encouraged direct consumer access to fish producers. Sellers on Perugia’s market could not legally buy from lakeside peasants carrying their catches to the town, while Krakow applied the same rule to trade along the Wisła, requiring fishmongers who found supplies in rural marketplaces to provide sealed certificates of the fish’s legal origin.Footnote ¹⁴²

Like effects were expected from the controls many places imposed on resale or re-export. Some like Cuenca’s late twelfth-century charter, heavily fined anyone who removed fish from the district, while fourteenth-century markets at Tortosa and Zürich demanded a special licence to resell fish. In the 1520s the royal Scots burgh of Stirling forbade regrating of salmon in particular.Footnote ¹⁴³ Restricting the time or quantities allowed for legitimate purchase and resale had similar motives. Midday was the earliest Trento, Rovereto, Pavia, Madrid, Grasse, Worms, or London allowed dealers to buy fresh fish for resale. The Grasse statutes of 1263 further restricted subsequent sales to single-serving quantities.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ All of these measures served to promote a retail buyer’s market.

Freshness was an understandably high regulatory priority, vigilantly protected in customary ‘burghal laws’ of barely urbanizing twelfth–thirteenth-century Scotland and in communal market statutes of precociously commercialized Italy.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Practical measures could be ingenious. At Grasse the ordinance allowed no salt on fish being set out for sale for the first time, then required a layer of salt on subsequent days. Torino ordered the tails cut short on fish being offered for sale a second day and Leuven the seller to display a black flag. At Swiss Fribourg, fresh fish not sold the day they arrived on the market had to be donated to the local hospital. Berlin sought the same ends by allowing sale of live fish only.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Public display and shaming sanctioned people who transgressed community rules by selling bad fish. At Rostock in 1338 Luscus piscator was jailed “because he sold rancid fish on the fishers’ bridge.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The fish market statute of 1335 at Grasse forbade sale of ‘pisces putrefactos’ under pain of 50 sols fine and the fish were seized and thrown away. Market overseers in Paris pitched ‘mauveis poisson’ into the Seine, while Zürich made convicted sellers of spoilt fish themselves dump the offending product from the bridge over the Limmat. Bamberg ordered rotten fish publicly burnt.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

A generally hygienic marketplace was also thought essential for dealing with perishable foodstuffs. Shortly after 1300 fish sellers at Barcelona and at Malchin in Mecklenburg alike were held responsible for cleaning the market, with the latter small town charging a special fee to cover the expense.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In 1427 authorities at Winchester prosecuted a group of fishmongers for dumping rotting entrails of fish on the public roadway behind their place of business, while in 1481 Roman officials banned fish sales at Campofiore market because the heat made fish go bad.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Perugian statutes originating in the thirteenth century make a special point of forbidding fish sellers or anyone else urinating in the fish market (mingere in domo pisciarie), and repeat the stricture in a later article to include ‘nor any other turpitude’ (nec aliquam turpitudinem). Hygiene had a moral aspect, too: Perugia and Rome both forbade games of chance on the fish market, the latter asserting that this measure would stop blasphemy.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Consumer safety of all sorts was thus a second principal aim of market regulation.

Ongoing official concern for honest dealing reflected both cost and safety. Fish sellers had not only to use standard measures but to present their goods properly “according to their nature” (secundum eorum naturam) in the words of a Grasse municipal ordinance.Footnote ¹⁵² Cuenca’s late twelfth-century fuero specified that river fish were to be sold according to the same weights as meat and grouped by size.Footnote ¹⁵³ Perugian ordinances of 1279 required sales by sauma or salma, a unit of volume, defined in earlier communal statutes.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The latter resembled the standard fish baskets with which Parisians and Londoners were then already familiar. London authorities regularly inspected the baskets and burned in public those found illegally small, so catching four fish sellers in one incident at the time of Edward II (1307–1327).Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Vendors were especially obliged not to mix fish varieties in their displays or in unit sales baskets. Echoing long-documented practice in places like London and Rome, a Paris court in 1393 found a fishmonger guilty for having sold whiting and cod in the same basket.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Plainly participants on local markets were thus expected to know and care about specific fish varieties.

Rules on at least some marketplaces further and explicitly aimed to protect local and regional fisheries resources by limiting the impact of consumer demand on what were thought to be important or threatened species. The earliest ordinances set down by Paris provost Etienne Boileau in the 1260s imposed minimum sizes for sale of six riverine species: pike, eel, barbel, tench, chub, and carp.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In 1313 London fishmongers took, condemned, and burned a net from the abbey of Lesnes, because it “was too close and insufficient for fishing, to the injury of the water (pro destruccione riparie) and common damage to the whole city and people resorting thither.” A two-inch minimum mesh size for all waters upstream of London probably went back to the 1280s, and so, too, the fishmongers’ opposition to more destructive gear. The city’s 1419 legal compilation, Liber albus, reports fishmongers seizing eight such nets which “were false, to the destruction of the advantageousness of the waters of Thames, in regard to the fish breeding in the same waters, to the loss of all people, as well of the city as others, both living near to and at a distance from such city.” An expert panel appointed by London council measured the nets, found four acceptable, and had the others burned.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Perugia’s communal statutes of 1279 had already imposed protective size limits on pike, eel, trout and crayfish as part of regulating market sales “so that a greater abundance of fishes may be had in the city.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Tortosa set rules in 1394 and 1444 on market sales of shad in order to protect local stocks of this anadromous species.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ At Zürich authorities marked the sale counters with the legal minimum length for several varieties and to ensure proper identification had images painted on the wall of the adjoining Rathaus.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The official actions here noted were all directed toward the market setting and sector. Concerns for food security and future resource sustainability were plainly not incompatible with commercialized regional fisheries and market consumption of local fishes in the Middle Ages.

Urban markets for fresh fish, early fruits of Europe’s commercial survival and revival, connected artisan fishers to a largely town-dwelling clientele of courtiers, officials, clerics, merchants, and other artisans. Viewed from another perspective, local markets linked soon-growing numbers of people who lacked direct access to fisheries or to subordinated fishers with the resources which could, at some cost, meet their needs for fish. The resources – fish stocks and the human skills and labour to exploit them – were local and regional, keyed to nearby natural aquatic ecosystems. The connections were organized and maintained by people of the fish markets, fishers and fishmongers, by whose expertise and along whose networks the fish traveled from the waters to the kitchens and trenchers. Large markets, Paris being the extreme case, spread out the largest, most complex networks. Consumer demand drove expansion, and consumer interests – cheap, safe, sustainably abundant supplies – were defended against those who controlled and profited from the supply networks. Networks and protection alike remained based on general local knowledge and familiarity with the local ecosystem. But markets, even ‘imperfect’ markets affected by local power and cultural expectations, set and communicate value differently than by simply asserting and taking action to satisfy a want. Markets use prices.

4.4.1 Price Formation

When it came to fish, natural and cultural forces, the latter not necessarily or simply economic in quality, collectively formed medieval price relationships, especially on the urban markets which dominate the known historical record of price but then as well the market sector itself. Specific seasons, varieties, and group behaviours all mattered.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

On natural but also cultural grounds the season and success of catches strongly affected the price of fresh fish. Some long-favoured species were inherently rare in nature (unusually large specimens or predators atop the trophic pyramid) and others became so over time (see Chapter 5 below). Market scarcity also reflected accessibility, manifest in the knowledge, labour, energy, time, and capital it took to catch any given fish. Most fishes have a season of natural peak availability, commonly when their spawning concentrations are especially susceptible to passive capture techniques (weirs, traps, gill nets). Their continual consumption at other times of year called for more expensive active seine and trawl technologies or individual baits on hooks, while seasonal dispersal lowered the efficiency of fishers’ efforts. In consequence, the fifteenth-century kitchen at the Duke of Guelders’s Lobith toll station on the Rhine, for instance, bought different varieties at different seasons, while laws at Tortosa acknowledged the seasonal spawning migration as determining the fishery and market for shad. Rhinelanders had reason to call them Maifisch. The price of fresh herring in Artois and Flanders peaked in early August some 25–30 percent above annual means, just before the migratory schools reached the region for a season there traditionally dated 24 August through 11 November.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ But extant data sets may lack the fine resolution needed to detect natural phenomena more subtle than the feast or famine of such migratory animals, here one week and gone the next.

On days and seasons when cultural ideology ordered fish to replace meat, however, everyone knew fish prices went up. Municipal ordinances in Sicilian towns Palermo and Catania set one level for fish on meat days and a higher level on Fridays and other fish days, while at Vercelli they distinguished the Lenten price from that of other seasons. Fishmongers at Tortosa got 25–30 percent more per pound of popular varieties in Lent than at other times.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Scottish royal accounts for 1343 clarify that the king’s kitchen paid twelve pence per salmon before Easter and afterwards only four.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Whatever the season, what people in various medieval communities were prepared to pay and take for different kinds of fish show certain broad parallels and some curious variations, the latter perhaps attributable to local differences in taste. Chapter 2 already observed prices differing by factors of two to four on markets in late twelfth-century Venice and Cuenca, the former ranking sturgeon, trout, and turbot the highest per pound and the latter also trout. Small fish of whatever origin were least valued.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ So certain varieties commonly claimed a premium, as did fish of relatively greater size. How much of the latter might be attributed to the greater efficiency and less waste in consuming a larger fish? And how much derived from scarcity and display values? These considerations came clearly into play in the three customary value groupings used along Breton and Norman coasts: ‘royal’ or ‘free’ taxa – sturgeon, salmon, dolphin (fish), trout, turbot, weever, red mullet, and sea bass – rated the highest, followed by fish “à lard” – marine mammals and tuna –, and at bottom all kinds of “vulgar fishes.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Valuations survive from several towns and territories of the late medieval Empire. The Lübeck market featured bulk quantities of the preserved stockfish, local cod, and herring for which the town gained fame, but in the early 1400s next to the stockfish salmon took the highest price; a century later this rough rank-order still prevailed.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Interior sites on salmon rivers such as Cheb (Eger) in the highest reaches of the Elbe system gave salmon a 20 percent premium over pike or trout; absent the salmon at Amberg in the Danube watershed, pike led. Both there and in Tirol small river species (gudgeon, dace, etc.) got half or less of the preferred varieties.Footnote ¹⁷¹

Price relations around the late medieval western Mediterranean, while reflecting the great diversity of marine life there, bore interesting parallels of scale and ecology. Early fourteenth-century sturgeon topped the charts from Valencia to Avignon, with other species ranked also by size from tuna or grouper “and such other fishes as have that size” (et tot altre peix de tall qui haja escata) down to the cheapest “peix menut” weighing several to the pound and costing but 10–15 percent of the top. But red mullet and some of the larger sea breams went for more than their size might predict.Footnote ¹⁷² By the 1400s, however, price listings at Grasse no longer referred to sturgeon, ranked tuna at the top, then grouped other fishes in descending value as peys bergo, peys mercant, and, priced less than a third of the top, peys selvage. The upper group, going for 2.5 patac the pound, included red mullet, sea bass, some other mullets, brill, dentex, gilthead, and two other porgies of more modest size. Cheapest were the usual small fishes as well as whiting and dogfish.Footnote ¹⁷³

During the central and later Middle Ages, then, markets across Europe had their favoured fishes, sturgeon most generally, then other locally and regionally common large varieties: along seacoasts, tuna and big inshore species; inland, salmon and pike. But certain smaller fishes – trout, red mullet, weever – further stand out as especially valued by consumers, while in some inland areas they were also willing to pay fairly well for large cyprinids. In general, however, small fishes came cheap, which meant anywhere from one-half to one-eighth the price per pound of the most expensive ones available at the same place. Surely size alone conveyed some prestige value and the possibility of higher market returns could motivate fishers to target high-priced species and specimens.

Institutions and groups who consumed much market fish could also by their coming, going, or mere deportment sharply affect local prices. English king Edward I’s residence at York during 1298–1305, with his courts of justice, exchequer, and other servants on hand for a conquest of Scotland, so inflated all prices that a joint ordinance of the royal council and civic authorities undertook in 1301 to establish price controls on all victuals, including fish.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Well-known high prices for fish on the market of Avignon during the pontificate of the gourmet John XXII (1316–1334) inflated leases of the fishery on the coastal Étang de Berre to ten times what they had been worth in 1300. Subsequent more abstemious and fiscally weaker papal regimes brought them down by half in the 1340s–60s, only to be halved again by century’s end when Avignon sheltered only a contested pontiff.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ A century and more later provisioning contracts at Madrid rose in value when the Castilian royal court arrived and sank with its departure.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

A congeries of causes thus made fish prices variable and, especially for fresh fish, often volatile, sometimes fluctuating abruptly from week to week or year to year. For now the tidiest early examples of interannual variations are series for fresh herring in England and for several local species in Navarre. Because those data sets run longer and say more about long-term changes, they will appear below as Figures 6.1 and 6.2.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Germane at this point are simply the year-to-year variations in English herring prices by factors of two or more in the early thirteenth century. In late fourteenth-century Navarre the price per hundred fresh sardines could double or fall by more than half from one year to the next. That per pound for the other staple of the region’s fishery, hake, shifted only about half as abruptly, and that for the product of local inshore fishing, conger, still less again. While short-term cultural changes of the sorts just mentioned cannot be ruled out, it is worth observing that the more pelagic fisheries for herring, sardine, and hake appear to have been less stable than those caught closer to shore. Price data alone cannot discriminate between changes in supply or demand. But plainly some short-run variability in the market for at least some fresh marine varieties was fairly common.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Insofar as longer-term trends might be ascertained, a much larger set of price series will be explored in following chapters.

Price fluctuations of any sort sparked public worry. In anticipation or response, authorities made price fixing a common feature of supply management on medieval urban fish markets. In this fish followed precedents set even since Carolingian times for grain, wine, and other dietary essentials. While using diverse mechanisms and criteria all such regulatory efforts rested on fundamental scholastic teachings of a ‘just price’.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

Later medieval English authorities watched over the price of fish in situations less extreme than that at early fourteenth-century York. Although Parliament occasionally passed statutes, more often local officials intervened to prevent individuals or sudden events from violating what a supervised market had established as ‘reasonable’. The clearest known cases, like Colchester fishmongers John Chancellor and John Crene, respectively prosecuted in 1404 and 1451 for the same offence of selling four fresh herrings per penny when others were selling five, postdate the economic troubles of the mid-fourteenth century, but the institutional infrastructure was in place much earlier.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Edward I had confirmed a London ordinance that “neither for anger nor for spite, shall any vendor hold his fish too dear; and if the vendors do so, the Mayor and reputable men shall assign proper persons to assess the same.” By the 1380s London authorities were negotiating official prices for fish in advance of sale, a practice generalized as legislation in or before 1416.Footnote ¹⁸¹

On similar grounds Venetian magistrates responsible for the fish market imposed maximum prices from before 1172 until well into the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸² Fifteenth-century Roman statutes set the price for white sea bream and those in Florence for sturgeon.Footnote ¹⁸³ The precedent set in Cuenca’s late twelfth-century royal charter was emulated in such subsequent, highly detailed municipal ordinances as from Valencia, Tortosa, and Madrid.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ At Paris and in the Low Countries the task was more often left to market officials.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

With some exceptions controls on the retail price of fresh fish in the Empire may have become the norm only in the inland south and from the fifteenth century. An ordinance for Innsbruck from 1470 established price levels for freshwater fishes sold alive or more cheaply dead, and the maxima set for all Tirol in 1493 were lower in the principal Inn valley than in communities at higher elevations.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Certainly some kind of price fixing was an expected feature of medieval markets in such a basic consumable as fish.

All these real, generally demonstrable, but in most particular cases ill-specified forces – natural and cultural seasonality, the intersection of scarcity and taste, heavy market demand from certain social groups, political intervention – do make systematic comparisons across space and time among a bewildering variety of fish sales in medieval Europe a hazardous venture. Nevertheless, pending further research, the limited serial data and more that is anecdotal or incidental can probably sustain and help explain two general but significant findings, namely the comparatively high and the probably rising but volatile price of fish as food.

4.4.2 Buying Fish

Viewed as a market commodity the fish artisan fishers and fishmongers had on offer were commonly too expensive to serve basic dietary subsistence needs across even medieval urban society, much less broader social strata. Long before quantitative sources let today’s historian verify this, Peter Abelard, the twelfth-century professor whose fame helped build the scholarly reputation of Paris, made his views clear in advice to the abbess Heloise, his separated and cloistered wife. Meat, he wrote, had lower cost (minores expensas) than the many expenses for various dishes of fish (multis expensis diversa piscium fercula). Furthermore, said he, fish were more difficult for the poor to obtain.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Market records now confirm this. Early fourteenth-century Parisians paid twelve denier for a piece of fresh eel, same as for a dozen loaves of bread and three times that for a pound of beef.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Some generations later, shopkeepers in Prato were retailing eel and brined tuna at 4 soldi the pound, but pork meat and pork sausages at 2–3½.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ When, as in 1449, a policeman at Namur was paid each day only twice the price of a carp and half that of a small pike, his table saw little of those animals.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Compelling reasons thus made fresh market fish ever more, in the words of fifteenth-century German satirist Heinrich Wittenwiler, “ein herren speis.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ Persons of wealth claimed preferred access to it. The fish market provided limited sustenance for the poor.

A caveat may, however, be in order. Remains from those diverse ‘little fishes’ rated at the cheapest price points in records from Normandy to Valencia or the Danube commonly occur in meticulously excavated urban waste deposits. An early fourteenth-century latrine in Einbeck, a small town in southern Lower Saxony, yielded about 20 percent bones of herring and smelt but twice that share of small locally caught cyprinids. Freshwater fishes, cyprinids, perch, sculpin, and trout, all less than ten centimeters long, are numerous, sometimes almost half the total, in twenty latrines of eleventh–seventeenth-century date in towns along the Rhine from Schaffhausen to Basel.Footnote ¹⁹² How much demand for inexpensive little fishes was latent among high medieval urban workers?

High prices for fresh fish compared to meat signal strongly that cultural (ideological) motives for fish consumption much exceeded the nutritional. No one was compelled to eat fish and only a minority did eat so much as to register in their own protein. So in some sense fish were no dietary staple for medieval Europeans. Nevertheless the non-caloric drive to consume fish was strong enough that authorities regularly engaged the market to ensure supply and moderate prices. The market for fish sustained artisans, fishmongers, and the attention even of the king of France. Consumers’ desire for fish – now manifest, with whatever extra-market distortions, by price –was a (the?) dynamic element projecting human numbers and wealth (not just coercive force) on to the fishery and hence on Europe’s aquatic ecosystems.

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The emergence and spread of commercial fishing, even at small local scale, incrementally shifted relations between consumers and the fish they ate. Urban-based consumers provided a principal impetus for growth of fish consumption and fishing efforts since about 1000 and more generally by around 1200. Those buyers were rarely present at the capture of the fish. The market structures just explored intervened between catch and consumption.

Fish markets are distinctively urban sites, a point of sale separate from those of capture or landing. The latter became more a space for wholesale merchants and brokers, especially in maritime locations. Even if not so separated, the very urban setting where fish passed from fisher or fishmonger to buyer can be recognized as a step toward perceiving the animal less as something of nature and more as a cultural creation. Set on the stones or in a basket rather than at the waterside the fish takes on qualities of an artifact. While the northern Italian illuminators and editors in the 1370s of a new manuscript edition of Tacuinum sanitatis, a widely distributed guide to health, depicted men catching ‘fresh fish’ from a watercourse, ‘pickled’ and ‘salted’ fish came from shops.Footnote ¹⁹³ (See Figure 4.4 and compare Figure 8.5.) Even if treated with care, at such inland locations as Paris, Liège, Kraków, or Milan, the sellers handled a perishable local product. Parisian poissoniers de la mer pressed against the limits of that technological envelope. And even dealers in fresh fish at maritime towns like Tortosa, London, or Lübeck confronted the brief longevity of their wares.

Figure 4.4 “Fresh fish” in northern Italy, c. 1370.

Procuring ‘fresh fish’ in the manuscript of Tacuinum sanitatis illuminated for the Visconti court at Pavia, c. 1370. Note keep net in the water and a storage tub on the bank. ÖNB Cod. vind. ser. nova 2644, fols. 82r ‘pisces recentes’.

Reproduced with permission of the Austrian National Library.

Artisan fishers worked within limits and occasionally reveal awareness of limits. So, too, did their mainly local customers. This understanding, however amorphous, lay behind guild- and market-focused measures to promote conservation of fish stocks. But as demand increased the limits were also contracting around them. Already artisan fisheries of the medieval commercial revolution felt larger ecological consequences of an expanding European economy and, in all likelihood, of more natural forces of change.