Medieval Europeans were well aware of undesirable changes in their fisheries. They commonly articulated those perceptions only when they wanted to explain how they would deal with a situation, but medievalists are well acquainted with many actions taken without recorded rationale. Under pressure from rising consumer demand the dwindling yields of traditional inland and coastal fisheries called up market responses and motivated both proprietary and regulatory measures meant to control human use of aquatic resources. Medieval people thus adjusted the social face with which they confronted nature. (A different kind of response, the adjustment of nature to fit human wishes, will occupy our next two chapters.)
With this chapter the focus thus shifts from the relatively fish- and eco-centric perspectives of Chapter 5 to examine how medieval societies reacted to perceptions of insecurity and shortfall of supply. Rising demand against a limited, even diminishing, resource is a potential trigger for competition. In a market economy price mechanisms allocate scarce goods to demand backed up by purchasing power. At the same time other kinds of power came to bear on traditional fisheries as landowners, producers, consumers, and territorial authorities vied to direct exploitation in their own interests.Footnote 1 Attempts to privatize and to regulate fisheries and fish products helped shape and constrain human environmental impact. The regional quality of habitat changes and fishing pressure suggests social reactions would vary in timing and choices.
6.1 Allocating Fish and Fisheries Resources
Market price and ownership rights provide two cultural mechanisms to allocate use of a good in limited supply. I pay the price and an object is mine to consume. I establish possession of a productive resource and its fruits are mine. Those who cannot pay or maintain access lose out. The former has evanescent temporal scale and possible collective significance over longer time, but particulars of actual transactions and serial records materialize only well after initial phases of the medieval Commercial Revolution. The latter issue can be traced in practice across European landscapes throughout the Middle Ages but local and regional implications of owning fishing rights varied widely.
6.1.1 Trends of Rising Fish Prices
Earlier discussions of medieval fish prices have set contexts for now exploring how they evolved over time. Chapter 2 used anecdotal references from specific locations and dates to show fish were a comparatively costly food throughout medieval times, not a cheap source of calories or protein. Chapter 4 reinforced this feature in the market setting of the high and later Middle Ages, identifying fresh fish of favoured large kinds as notably expensive. Most varieties offered on markets of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries so exceeded the subsistence budgets of poor people that elite demand drove their commodity value. Herring, sardine, anchovy, and small cyprinids may have been prominent exceptions in certain places and times. Beyond that consistent fact and laid over the natural variety of European fishes, seasonality (of supply and demand), local differences in taste, local shifts in purchasing groups, and official price fixing jointly lend medieval fish prices a baffling diversity and volatility. Identifying long-term changes in price levels calls for continually commensurable information scarcely heard of before the Middle Ages end. Simply few records were kept of selling and buying fish in a bewildering diversity of names, sizes, measures, and preparations; even fewer have hitherto been studied in a systematic way. Still the evidence of some temporal evolutions is compatible with market demand exceeding supply from the 1200s to around 1400.
In all likelihood the amount of coin European consumers paid for fish rose from the eleventh century until about 1400, so arguing for steady pressure of demand against supplies on the market. But given literate scribes’ long disinterest in humdrum mercantile matters, prior to about 1200 the assertion of price increases rests on complaints about costly fish, not sequentially comparable data points.Footnote 2 Lack of anything resembling genuine price series before the mid-thirteenth century and limited availability for the next 150 years prevents thorough testing of the proposition that human population growth, urbanization, natural limits, habitat destruction, and depletion preceded and accompanied the incremental replacement of freshwater with marine fishes in northwestern Europe. Consilience and compatibility among data sets is the better hope.
Historians in northern Europe have, however, recovered or pieced together serial records of fish prices which begin in the mid-thirteenth century and become more grounded from a century later. Inland sources lag and potential records from Mediterranean Europe remain essentially unexplored. Nevertheless the cumulative evidence prior to 1400 from several places identifies continual increase and some informative anomalies. (Chapter 8 will follow what look like different trajectories thereafter.)
So far the earliest extant fish price series are for lightly preserved salt herring, the “fish of the poor” which kept for some months during the cool season when shipped from the Channel and North Sea beaches to urban Flanders and Brabant, northwestern France, and England, a market then still plausibly regional in quality. The early-standardized herring (all of a size and sold by the thousand) provides the oldest quasi-anecdotal series of medieval fish prices modern scholars have assembled. In Figure 6.1, compiled from financial accounts of English institutional consumers, mainly hospitals and colleges,Footnote 3 the mean annual price per piece for “herring” climbs throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, so the nominal value by 1400 reached four times its starting point. Calculated in silver the price tripled, reflecting debasement of the coinage. Anomalies in the rising trend are temporary price peaks during the notoriously hungry 1310s–20s and in the 1350s, which began in plague and a serious crop failure. Could herring have substituted for the failed grain harvests and meat from diseased livestock?
Figure 6.1 English herring prices (per piece), 1201–1420, indexed.
Herring prices in Scotland, although but sparse from the 1260s to 1360s and then complicated by shift from dry salted to barreled product, exhibit a similar long-term increase into the early fifteenth century.Footnote 4 So, too, do those anecdotally reported from bulk sales at a production centre, Calais, where herring reportedly went for 15 sols the thousand in 1268, doubled to 30 sols by 1300, and then more than doubled again to 75 sols by 1342. An average daily wage in northern France bought twenty-three herrings around 1300 and nineteen a generation later.Footnote 5
More tenuous evidence lies behind published assertions that domestic prices for dried cod in Norway and Iceland went up by two-thirds from the late twelfth century to the mid-fourteenthFootnote 6 and claims of a twelve-fold increase between the 1260s and the 1410s in what Norman salmon got at Rouen. In the latter, a fish not worth one pig had 150 years later become worth two or three.Footnote 7 Likewise, impressions of ever higher prices for trout, pike, and carp in thirteenth-century France are compatible with but not fully grounded in the most convincing sources.Footnote 8
Further south but still on Europe’s Atlantic face, genuine price series compiled from institutional sources in Navarre begin shortly after 1350 (Figure 6.2).Footnote 9 Such locally procured staple varieties as brined sardines and both fresh and dried hake exhibit the same rising late fourteenth-century trends as did herring further north, doubling and tripling by the century’s end. Prices of fresh sardines, however, follow no such pattern and were much more volatile year to year.Footnote 10 If the steadier trend was driven by demand pressing against supply, rapid fluctuations suggest forces other than demand could also be at play. In any case, unless incomes rose proportionately, some purchasers may have found fish financially less attainable, while others retained access to the desired but scarce commodity.
Figure 6.2 Fish prices in late medieval Spain: Navarre, 1358–1450.
Price crystallized the value medieval markets placed on fish, the product of fisheries where human action was applied to a natural ecosystem and its inhabitants. The scarcity and value of the product were thus inherently linked to the producing natural resource, lucrative but, as seen in Chapter 5, also potentially endangered. Although high and rising prices should have encouraged fishing pressure on the most-desired fish varieties,Footnote 11 barriers to market entry and expansion in turn curtailed it. Those same rising prices also reflected the increasing scarcity and income value of control over the resource itself, a possibly limited source of supply.
6.1.2 Privatization of Fishing Rights
The long-term tendency in medieval Europe to transform the right to fish from a common or public good to private property is an axiom of the legal literature.Footnote 12 Fishing rights derive economic value from demand for fish and limited opportunities to obtain them (only certain waters, sites, and seasons are productive) and not always from an absolute shortage of fish or decline in their numbers. Even in a subsistence economy fish flesh on the bank has scarcity value, use value, and value derived from at least the opportunity costs of human effort expended in its capture. So too, in prospect, have fish in the water. Privatization of traditional fisheries allocated not merely an output, fish, but control over the productive process, infrastructure, and things of Nature itself. Fishing rights thus conveyed prestige value beyond any direct correlation to the condition of fish stocks.
At the start of the Middle Ages jurisdiction over water and what was in it or done on it pertained to public or royal authority, while uncaught fish belonged to no one (res nullius). Sixth-century Emperor Justinian’s long-standing codification of Roman law established both points in its scenario of public rivers where all could fish and take ownership of what they caught.Footnote 13 The Germanic political order then spreading over most of western Europe preferred more personalized authority; it understood kings to be the legal possessors of waters and undeveloped or unowned land. Likewise later-emerging central European polities (Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, etc.) held the prince to own all unallocated resources. The same prevailed by right of conquest in Norman England, southern Italy, and much of Spain.Footnote 14 People who used, for instance, the fish did so more by sufferance and custom than by explicit right. In that sense, were there ever open access to medieval fisheries, it was a soon-disappearing relic of “unlorded” land or it emerged much later on offshore frontiers (see Chapter 8). The medieval regime was one of property, permissions, privileges, and liberties, not generic “liberty.”
This situation came about because two intersecting trends in property rights and jurisdiction characterized the greater part of the Middle Ages: one was the establishment by the powerful of personal lordship over land and the people on it, which eventually crystallized in the seigneurie; the other was the devolution and fragmentation of public right into private hands, a condition now often called “feudalism.”Footnote 15 As applied to the right to fish, the first meant that real estate, including the waters in, on, and bordering it, became an object of property rights which included authority over people living there, a power the French sources would call ban.
Especially in early medieval times the absorption of fishing rights into landowning had as much to do with formation of lordship as with controlling a productive resource.Footnote 16 Lords with long-standing or newly conceded property rights over land were reluctant to allow trespass by means of water and, by grant or appropriation, incorporated waters into the property itself. For a church in Ponticello, for instance, Duke Romuald II of Benevento declared in 711 that none might enter the church’s woodland in order to fish the river Calore without permission of the incumbent priest.Footnote 17 Further south in Italy Byzantines considered coastal and lagoon fisheries private, so alienable as rights or incomes: in 1038 the shoreline at Termoli was given “with its fishery” (cum piscatione sua). Some generations later, Norman conquerors put all aquatic space in the hands of seigneurs, so fishing, like pasturage, went for a share of the take. Fishing rights were part of donations to twelfth-century churches, although an 1122 gift to La Cava abbey was limited to shallows.Footnote 18 Early medieval Germanic law codes and dozens of ninth-century charters, from, for instance, the region of Frankfurt am Main, concur in cataloging fishing and fisheries among the normal rights of a landowner.Footnote 19 In Berry inclusion went from tacit to explicit: early tenth-century gifts of watermills to Deols abbey mention no fish, but after Pope John XI specified “you have right of exclusive fishing” (licentiam piscandi soli habeatis) in a protective bull of 937, all subsequent donations used the same phrase.Footnote 20 Eventually late medieval Austrian customals went so far as to specify “the fish in the water” as part of what was owned. In Iceland riparian landowners then possessed even the marine fishery as far out as the depth of a twenty-mesh seal net at low tide, but their counterparts in the older societies of mainland Scandinavia controlled coastal fishing rather through ownership of essential shore-based facilities.Footnote 21
In the second trend early medieval rulers give favoured supporters public jurisdiction over un-owned real estate and navigable waters, with or without the land itself. When few written records were being kept in France and Germany the process is especially visible in some Italian sources. For example, users of public ponds in the Riete valley acknowledged royal authority with regular payments of “pisces publici” until 816, when Emperor Louis the Pious gave those to the abbey of Farfa and thus provided grounds for its subsequent recognition as lord over the fishers and owner of the fishing rights. So, too, the monopoly over the Ticino which fishers at Pavia held about 1000 derived from regalian rights of former Lombard kings.Footnote 22 In a later famous Dutch counterpart, the church of St. Martin at Utrecht claimed one-sixth of the fishery at the mouth of the Rhine as a grant from one Gerulf, probably a late ninth-century Carolingian count. Extending amorphous claims of Anglo-Saxon landowners, Norman kings of England enfeoffed their tenants in chief with rights over fresh- and saltwater fishing and allowed subinfeudation.Footnote 23 The abbey of Lerins rested its claim to the marine fishery between the mainland and its isle on an explicit 1298 concession by the count of Provence.Footnote 24 Private control over access to fisheries thus became a strand in the mesh of remunerative rights being assembled into lordship over land and men.
Assimilating fishing rights to private landownership and privatizing public jurisdictions over fisheries followed neither identical nor simultaneous trajectories across western Christendom. Lac Leman (Geneva) could be thought one regional paradigm: rights long remained regalia of Burgundian kings and emperors until they were gradually parceled out to riparian landowners and public officials. Bishops of Lausanne claimed one zone on grounds of King Rudolf’s granting the County of Waadt in 1011, and the archbishops of Besançon received the fishery to mid-lake from Emperor Henry III in 1043. By the thirteenth century comparable offshore rights were the acknowledged possessions of lay lords at Rolle and Prangins on the northwest shore and of the bishop of Sitten’s estate at Montreux on the eastern end. Across the Alps fishing in the Bavarian and Swiss lakes, including Lake Constance, early appeared in the hands of shoreline owners, often quite without special royal concession. Equally undocumented are the legal origins of collective rights there, whether exclusive – as exercised by fishers of Constance off city beaches – or shared – as among residents of the Lindau shore.Footnote 25 In the Basque region, informal recognition of communal property rights in marine fisheries has also been traced back to the thirteenth century.Footnote 26
In Atlantic coastal France lords’ right of “wreck” (varech) gave ownership over whatever came on to the beach, so also all shore-based fishing activity. Every shoreline belonged to someone’s lordship and that authority projected offshore as dominium aquae. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the fishing along much of the Norman coast was accepted as the possession of Fécamp, Conches, and other large monastic estates. At the same time, private holders of public office alienated royal jurisdiction over coastal waters, as Count Guillaume of Poitou’s 1017 donation to Cluny of half his dues from fishers on the Île de Ré. As late as 1500 the right of wreck was acknowledged to underlie the dues artisan fishers paid shoreline seigneurs in the Seine estuary.Footnote 27 Clear territorial definition of rights over the fishing in estuaries along the Gulf of Lions emerged with eleventh-century intensification of a legal regime dominated by local castellans. Already tenth-century Catalan charters for coastal seigneuries included “with the sea itself, with its ports and its fisheries” (cum ipso mare, cum suos portos et suas piscatorias), but otherwise fishing along that coast required licence from the prince.Footnote 28
Contrasting with fisheries based on a lord’s private ban were those of landowners in crusader Prussia, whose rights rested wholly on regalian grants. The Teutonic Order there built an entire social order on imperial and papal concession of full sovereignty over whatever it conquered from pagan natives. Lay and clerical landowners established by the Order could fish on their own properties, but only by sufferance of the Order, which retained superior jurisdiction plus full ownership of all other fisheries.Footnote 29
Despite important regional nuances, about the year 1200 the legal status of fishing in western Christendom may be thought effectively encapsulated in Sachsenspiegel, an influential private compilation of north German legal practice. In principle, especially navigable waters were free: “every stream of flowing water is common for travel and for fishing; the fishers may also use the land up to a full stride away from a boat at the legal shoreline.” But the theory must be understood in terms of the preceding clause that “whosoever … fishes in another man’s natural waters owes three shillings damages under law.”Footnote 30 The general norm everywhere was private possession – whether conceded or usurped – of the right to fish in inland and inshore waters. Fishing rights (habitually but not invariably called piscatio) were so commonly associated with riparian landownership that both an unofficial compilation of legal customs along the lower Loire, the so-called Établissements de Saint Louis, and the thoroughly royalist Siete Partidas assembled for King Alfonso X of Castile, thought worth remarking only the requirement that the landowner suitably publicize his forbidding others to take fish.Footnote 31
On occasion some individuals did hold legal title to fish waters in another’s acknowledged lordship, so the right could be separate from land ownership, usually through an owner’s or sovereign’s special grant. Sometime around 1070, after servants of St. Marcel priory “illegally took prisoner and broke the boats of fishers from Chalon” who were using a reach of the Saône, Count Hugh made a pious gift of those rights to St. Marcel. Cistercians at Merci-Dieu in Poitou had exclusive fishing rights on their lands along the river Gartempe given them by the founder, Eschivard of Preuilly, in the early 1150s. Then in 1235 Eschivard’s heir and grandson, Geoffroi, donated the further right to use waters on his own properties.Footnote 32 In the last two medieval centuries the Guzmán family of magnates gained private monopoly over tuna fishing in the Gulf of Cadiz by incremental grants from Castilian kings.Footnote 33 Likewise the more rare instances of collective rights also derived from concession by a prior holder and evidently not simple survival of a primeval condition. Both sorts of multiple claims raised questions of exclusive fishing or mere shared access to it: in 1179 Morimondo abbey asserted its sole right to fish the Ticino at Pavia against claims of privileged town fishers, but a compromise recognized the shared rights of both parties; arbitration in 1247 also settled disputes over the Moere between the abbey and town of St. Omer.Footnote 34
From the thirteenth century two distinct and divergent issues vexed the proprietary regime and dominated its further evolution. One concerned the fishing permitted in practice and the other the (re)assertion of regalian or (quasi-)public jurisdiction over it. Assessing actual medieval practice calls for distinction, if possible, among the ‘public’ authority to regulate a fishery (see this chapter below); the ownership of piscatio, the legal right to take fish and authorize or forbid others to do the same; and actual usufruct (exploitation) of the resource (fishing). Unified exercise of all levels on the model of modern ‘private property rights’ is all but unknown in medieval Europe.
Seigneurial ownership and control of the fishing was but the legal precondition for the actual capture of fish. Very few late medieval owners of fishing rights actually fished. Seen from below, the process pitted seigneur against “commons”, whose loss of subsistence rights Chapter 3 has explored. On the other hand, owners of the water often allowed local subjects, inhabitants, or citizens access to resources providing fish for their own use. Whether tacit or contractual, the practice legitimized much of the subsistence fishing seen to continue through the later Middle Ages.Footnote 35 This was not always easy. As earlier remarked, a mid-eleventh-century subject of Marmoutier abbey had to pass an ordeal by hot iron to defeat claims of a local seigneur and vindicate the right of local people to take fish for family consumption, but not sale.Footnote 36 Where positively documented – as, for instance, in a court decision at Fontaines in Valois in 1270 or in fifteenth-century customals from Hainaut and Weistümer from southern Germany – the usufruct rights of ordinary villagers were ordinarily confined to small gear used personally to supply a resident household. Restraints on locations and times (seasons, days) to fish were also the norm. The “common fen” where peasants at Downham-in-the-Isle (of Ely) could fish excluded certain designated “fisheries,” which were subinfeudated to individuals.Footnote 37 Similar conditions applied where municipal governments possessed the fishing rights. Burghers of Frankfurt am Oder could fish a half mile of that river for their own tables and those of Hamburg wade – but not use boats – in the Elster. At Toul all citizens could fish in the Moselle and, for a small licence fee, place one trap in a local tributary. In 1307 one of the first ordinances of the newly established town on the Rhône estuary now called Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer allowed citizens to set a new type of net in all its waters, but only for one night at a time.Footnote 38 In the long run, then, direct subsistence use of local aquatic resources – which means the fishes naturally present in western Europe’s ubiquitous streams and small rivers – was surely curbed under the increasingly enforced proprietary regime.
Even limited common access contrasted with the more or less exclusive exploitation of a fishery by the owner’s employees or a contractual tenant, which turned the catch to indirect subsistence, artisanal, or maybe even larger commercial purpose. Chapter 3 established the prominence of indirect subsistence fishing during the early Middle Ages and followed some interesting cases into early modern times. But during later medieval centuries private owners of fishing rights notably conceded leases or licences for others to exploit these remunerative resources, so moving them, too, toward the status of market commodity.Footnote 39 The transition could, as earlier observed, result for a time in arrangements like those at Klosterneuburg about 1300: full-time fishers remained abbey dependants but owed the prior for their craft only first refusal rights on large fish, a share of the catch made with abbey equipment, and fixed money dues.Footnote 40 But some generations earlier, landowners all around western Europe were already letting out fisheries to specialists on fixed terms for annual money dues or, more rarely, a share of the catch. The practice could be lucrative: during 1282–1335 the prior of Ely received more from leased fisheries at his fenland manor of Lakenheath than he did from tenant rents; in Picardy revenues from fisheries exceeded those from equal areas of arable. Especially after the Black Death of 1347–1351 leases everywhere became the norm and continued steadily to rise in value.Footnote 41Various sorts of fishers thus gained operational control over fisheries through local variants of leasehold tenure. In 1266 parcels of the River Avon at Stoneleigh, Warwickshire, were taken for life by Gilbertus piscator and Normannus piscator, whose annual dues of twenty-five and eight shillings respectively echoed the rents of neighbouring farmers. On the Lago di Bientina outside Lucca, however, the abbey of Sesto charged individual fishers fixed cash fees for delimited area licences good for three months to four years. Contracts for exclusive use were provided only to corporate groups, an arrangement also encountered at Namur.Footnote 42 Along the Atlantic beaches of Aunis and Saintonge seigneurs leased fishing access (called courtinage) to specialist entrepreneurs. In the 1480s one Jehan Souchet paid 100 livres for a league of shoreline close to Aytré. His exclusive access conflicted with the local custom of fishing on foot, so after finding thirty to forty people from Aytré taking fish from his nets in 1491 Jehan demanded legal redress. Not far away the offshore fishers from Les Sables-d’Olonne had since the 1100s to pay for access to the harbour a fifth of their catch to the castellan and more to local religious houses.Footnote 43
As late as the fifteenth century an ongoing process of privatization emerges from judicial records in the Crown of Castile, often revealing complex interplay among municipalities (concejos), corporate religious landowners, and assertive territorial aristocrats (grandes). One such tale may be told of the upper Luna valley in León, where Cistercian nuns of Santa Maria de Otero, a powerful local branch of the Quinones clan (named counts de Luna in 1462), and two rural concejos, Luna de Suso and Luna de Yuso, tangled repeatedly over access to rich stocks of trout, barbel, and eel. After a long slog through the courts the valley municipalities had in 1438 successfully vindicated their right to fish in their own territories for subsistence or sale free of any dues to the Quinones, longtime high royal officeholders. Then shortly before 1493 the convent sued four residents of Canales, a hamlet in the valley, for 50,000 maravedis damages for having used nets in Río Luna without permission. The lawyer for the concejos argued the Luna was río publico and free for inhabitants of the municipalities to fish. After appeal, in 1495 the royal chancellery sustained and declared specific boundaries within which the abbey’s servants had exclusive fishing access from 1 April to 30 September and peasants were otherwise restricted to fishing for subsistence only with rods or small traps, not nets. The next year the countess de Luna leased her rights to one Juan Alvarez and some partners, who then sued communal residents for unlicenced fishing, fishing at night, and other violations.Footnote 44 Historian Maria del Val Valdivieso and her students have made a strong collective case that such conflicts constituted a clash between peasant economic interest in catching fish and great lords who saw fishing rights as just one component in consolidation of their private territorial authority.Footnote 45
Essential aspects of private control are restricted access, profitability, and the conservation – or destruction – of the resource. What record had medieval private ownership? As regards the risk of depletion, many private wild fisheries were evidently exploited at sustainable levels for centuries. As regards the risk of environmental destruction, however, landowners handled resources in terms of their relative awareness of value. The fishery of Lago di Bientina, indeed the whole one-time aquatic ecosystem there, is no more because from at latest the twelfth century the abbey of Sesto and other riparian landowners actively promoted drainage, reclamation, and conversion of their lake into rentable farmland. The same reasoning caused landowners with private fishing rights to sponsor medieval drainage projects in the Dutch and Tiber marshes.Footnote 46 In what might be called a ‘Tragedy of the Private’, survival of the resource and the natural environment was always at the mercy of the owner’s larger interests. When the new abbot of San Pedro de Gumiel in 1509 needed to settle a dispute with the count of Miranda, he traded away his grange at the hamlet of Milagros with water rights on the Río Rianza, an upper tributary of the Duero, depriving local people of their traditional subsistence use of its fishes.Footnote 47
Few of the deprived could expect the marvel that antiquarian William Worcester (d.1482) related of the river Axe flowing from the Wooky Hole cave on the outskirts of Wells in Somerset. Townsfolk had long enjoyed its diverse and abundant fishes until Bishop Thomas Beckington (1443–1465) appropriated it for exclusive use by his own kitchen. Immediately the fish vanished and for two years neither bishop nor anyone else had any. But when the bishop opened fishing to the common and country folk, the fish multiplied and were again abundant.Footnote 48
Private ownership and more tightly limited access to medieval fish more often threatened to call up a broader social animus against the aquatic resource itself. Chapter 3 showed how peasant groups closed off from fisheries made them targets of social protest. Such acute aggression likely posed less environmental danger than did what might be called ‘hostile neglect’. Late medieval privatization by appropriation or exclusive leases extinguished the concept of ‘res publica’ on Castilian rivers and alienated rural and urban communities from their watercourses and the fish for which they had once cared.Footnote 49 Certainly the constriction or loss of common access to local fishes left members of peasant communities other than the ‘lord’s fisher’ or leaseholding ‘master fisher’ less generally solicitous of their aquatic environment and more prepared to countenance loss of habitat as well as illegal and destructive fishing. Consider the endemic (as opposed to openly rebellious) use of poisons, night lines, and other unlawful methods.Footnote 50 Medieval poachers with herbal and chemical piscicides or underwater explosives to stun the fish had little incentive to spare what they had no right to take.
Had privatization itself demonstrable long-term consequences for the maintenance of viable and productive aquatic ecosystems? Or did it simply reallocate resources among human groups? The latter it surely achieved and, by moving effective demand for fish toward the market and toward the wealthy, lent in many places an increasingly luxury cast to especially the inland fishery.Footnote 51 Fish as herren speis probably lowered total fishing pressure against freshwater biomass while raising that on favoured, increasingly rare, varieties. But the bewildering diversity of tenurial regimes lends no historical support to the superior sustainability or economic viability alleged for particular forms of private or common property in fisheries. Plainly called for is precise comparative study of local legal regimes and their long-term relation to actual fishing in particular ecosystems. In all circumstances, however, shores, waters, and the fish varieties they sheltered became during the western Middle Ages ever less things of an autonomous Nature, valued and open to all, and ever more clearly, even in coastal waters, defined as possessions of identifiable human cultural agents.
Private ownership of fisheries evolved before, during, and after the period of steady medieval demographic and economic expansion, but the aligning of fish and traditional fisheries resources with market values certainly coincided with the growing impact that commercial development had on European environments. Rising prices for fish and fishing directed scarce goods in certain social directions. But markets were not the only means through which medieval societies responded to change. The reassertion of princely and public jurisdiction over fisheries was the basis for regulatory regimes as typical of the later Middle Ages as was private ownership
6.2 Public Regulation of Fisheries
Beside exchanges at market value and private rights in fisheries, public regulation constituted medieval Europeans’ third response to rising pressure against fish supplies. Previous chapters have already made familiar communal self-regulation on the part of direct subsistence fishers and through corporate actions of organized artisans. Fisheries protection also occasionally came into measures meant primarily to secure market supplies of fish. With the high and later Middle Ages, however, such acts of participants in the fishery itself were steadily absorbed, extended, and superseded by those of rulers and other public authorities. Proclaiming a more general interest in what were said to be resources under threat, the incipient state asserted control over the operation of European fisheries
The complex medieval mix of jurisdictions generated seigneurial, communal, territorial, and royal measures which from time to time reflected restricted or more general ‘public’ interest in fisheries. A grey area between property management and resource regulation was coloured by characteristic interpenetration of private right and public authority. On the salt ponds of coastal Languedoc in 1173 the lord of Villeneuve-les-Maguelonne forbade a new fishing technique called “batendo et bolegando”, beating the water and scooping stunned fish with a net. Such by then frequent seigneurial enactments as the count of St. Pol’s 1225 ban on trammel nets reveal ambiguous concern for the lord’s private supply or profit as well as for conservation and common use.Footnote 52 Narrowly bounded but distinctly ‘public’ agents proclaimed comparable rules. For example, the Cumberland county assizes of 1278 imposed a closed season and oversight committee to protect salmon stocks, and statutes codified in 1322 for the Florentine commune forbade fish poisons and taking young fish. Madrid’s thirteenth-century charter already made similar provision for municipal watercourses.Footnote 53
6.2.1 Authority
‘Public’ fisheries regulation asserted an authority over waters and fishes not deemed to be owned or even overriding private ownership rights. (Both traced in law or by imitation back to Roman imperial authority.) Perugia rested its jurisdiction over L. Trasimeno on an 817 imperial grant to Pope Paschal I and subsequently that of Innocent III to the free commune in 1212.Footnote 54 Alfonso VIII of Castile set rules for fishing municipal waters of Cuenca in the code he issued shortly after capturing the city in 1177.Footnote 55 Kings of France claimed imperial authority within their own domains, so Philip IV in 1289 and all his successors asserted the right to legislate for public (i.e. large navigable) waters and gradually extended this over private uses of other natural water bodies (artificial ponds were not included).Footnote 56 The oldest known Scottish regulations came as a precedent-setting judgement of King William I (1165–1214) sitting as the country’s top feudal lord, but subsequent rules took the form of parliamentary statutes.Footnote 57
Institutional articulation of fisheries regulations depended to some extent on regional governmental/administrative practice, including incremental development of literate record keeping. This evidently occurred earlier in French, British, and some Hispanic monarchies, as well as Italian city states, than in the principalities of central Europe or Scandinavia. But as already here observed in one introductory fish tale, on Lake Constance in 1481 it was two cities, two church corporations, and a secular count which together established the first interstate fisheries protection treaty, an arrangement which would evolve into the nineteenth century.Footnote 58 The long-term trend for fisheries was part of a larger expansion of public, princely, or state intervention in all sorts of environmental and resource issues.Footnote 59
Authorities asserted that legislative intervention would serve their communities by resolving evident practical problems in their fisheries. In managing fisheries, as in woodlands, flood control, or questions of pollution, regulation was increasingly justified by reference to collective benefit, the ‘common good’ / bien publique, as greater than mere private profits. Philip IV in 1289 and generations of his successors asserted that excessive and improper fishing caused “no small loss to the rich and poor of our realm.”Footnote 60 After consulting with the fishers’ guild, in 1365 Wrocław’s town council set rules for fishing the Oder “for sake of common utility” shortly before a much larger city, Venice, did likewise for fishing in Lake Garda “for common benefit and abundance of fishes.”Footnote 61 King and Grand Duke Ferdinand also grounded his 1537 Fischfangordnung for Upper Austria in “common usefulness” (gemainen nutz).Footnote 62
And what problems called for intervention? Concern for public safety led London and Austrian authorities alike to ban fish weirs as hazards to navigation in the Thames and the Danube, while Florentine councilors did likewise because of such structures’ role in the Arno flood disaster of 1333.Footnote 63 Continually from 1287 Venice tried to limit the seasons and locations of valli de pesce on grounds they blocked tidal flow and contributed to siltation in the lagoon.Footnote 64 Guild statutes and municipal ordinances in particular – at Zürich, Madrid, and along the upper Rhine, for instance – directed attention to conflict and disorder in their fisheries and provided rules and institutional mechanisms to avoid or settle them.Footnote 65
The most generally articulated reason for regulation was fear and perception of fisheries depleted from overfishing. Philip IV blamed fishers taking fish too small for French rivers “yield[ing] nothing.”Footnote 66 Albrecht V of Austria in 1412 found “the waters everywhere in this land have become almost desolate and fishless” because no fishes therein could ever reach their proper growth. In the middle of the fifteenth century governments of Strasbourg and Florence shared that opinion, blaming on overfishing the remarkable declines of fish in the Rhine and in all Florentine territories. Patterned on earlier Castilian codes, the 1526 “New Charter” (Fuero Nuevo) for Vizcaya regulated fishing to prevent “all the rivers in Vizcaya from being destroyed and depopulated of fish.”Footnote 67
6.2.2 Measures
Medieval regulations typically established protected and open seasons for fishing, set minimum legal sizes for specified fish varieties, and restricted capture techniques. Some even worried about habitat. All measures converged in major enactments like those perhaps pioneered by thirteenth-century French authorities. Already in the 1260s it was the king’s prevôt who compiled rules for fishing the Seine and Marne at Paris: fishers had to be licenced and observe ‘customs’; barbel, eel, carp, pike, and tench had to be larger than would sell at four to the denier; fishing was closed for spawning roach between mid-April and mid-May; use of saimes and hoop nets was controlled along with the size of mesh in the nets.Footnote 68 King Philip’s ordinance of April 1289 then applied to all waters under royal jurisdiction. To combat depletion from improper fishing royal officers were to seize and publicly burn illegal gear, impose fines, and turn contraband fish over to the poor. The king outlawed a dozen specific nets and barrier traps, and use of two more during April and May, when many river species spawn. Legitimate netting gear had to have mesh larger than a gros tournois, a coin of about 2.5 cm (1 inch) diameter. The closed season for roach now covered two whole months, and size limits were tailored to the varieties affected – eel at a quarter-denier, barbel and carp a half-denier, and pike at two denier. One central official was named to oversee local enforcement. Later redactions transferred oversight to the royal Master of Waters and Forests, occasionally modified the vocabulary of prohibited gear, and extended the system of size limits by setting 5 inches for dace, chub, and roach.Footnote 69
As precocious and energetic as French monarchs was the communal government at Perugia in taking charge of the fishery on L. Trasimeno. Already from 1260 cryptic references suggest fish were being stocked in the lake, and with a series of ordinances and statutes from 1276, 1279, and thereafter, the commune set up a regulatory regime that lasted until a new papal governor took over in 1568. Laws set minimum mesh sizes, restricted use of enclosure traps made from reeds, and banned netting of tench in September. The most important local fishes, pike, tench, eel, and southern roach, were protected from May 1 to August 31, though not the less-valued chub. Tench below four ‘ounces’, roach below one, and small eel had to be returned to the water unharmed. First mentioned in 1275, the “seeding of pike, eel, and crayfish in the lake of Perugia” became an annual enterprise, carried out in February, March, September, and October, the latter two months especially with small eel procured from the river Chiana. Since 1279 lakeside settlers were obliged every third October to reinfrascare the lake with bundles of reeds and branches to shelter spawning and overwintering fish. A government-appointed cleric supervised the stocking and habitat improvement work; a special communal fisheries overseer, the tencarame, saw to enforcement. Violators could be fined as much as 500 lire.Footnote 70
Venice, too, wished to defend its fisheries, but had to juggle worries over supply with the peculiar social and biological features of the valle di pesca (see Chapter 4 above) and existential fears over siltation of the lagoon. A regulatory regime established towards the end of the thirteenth century was later periodically reinvigorated, notably after 1400.Footnote 71 The reed fences used to enclose the valle slowed currents in the lagoon and encouraged deposition, so in 1284 the Grand Council banned their use in public waters. Soon resistance from fishing and consumer interests led to incremental easing of the ban, mainly licencing senior fishing masters to enclose specific areas during Lent so long as they left spaces between valle and used no site more than two years running. Decades of vacillation between enforcement and licencing ensued.
New fears of overexploitation and fish shortages emerged in a fifteenth-century setting of growing urban populations and state authority. A 1424 Senate enquiry heard even fishers blame the fences and use of certain nets for declining lagoon stocks. Worried over loss of supply, the Senate did prohibit the suspect techniques but only close to shore, which still reduced catches and supply to the Rialto market. Further fears of siltation as the fences again multiplied provoked a general ban in 1474 on fences and valle alike in public waters across northern reaches of the lagoon and in 1485 extension of the ban to other structures across a larger area. Violation drew higher fines and leaders of the Nicoletti were made responsible for settling conflicts. The Venetian government thus faced not only tension between regulators and traditional fishers, but also between its own aims to sustain supply and to stabilize the lagoon environment. Constraints on the fishery might prevent overfishing and deposition of silt, but exacerbate concern over insufficient fish on the market. Distinctive as well is Venetian focus on fishing structures, with little if any attention to particular fish varieties.
Relative latecomers to the story, Habsburg princes of Austria who undertook to govern fishing on the Danube and its tributaries also met opposition despite their efforts to bring fishing interests into the process. In 1418 the governor of Upper Austria confirmed in his prince’s name regulations for the Traun which had been set by consensus of its thirty-two vischmaystern, privileged experts on a river with a complex hierarchy of operative rights. They declared three traditional types of seines and traps hazardous (schendlich) to the resource and banned their expansion or further use in the main river channel. None were to fish with baited set lines or at night with torches and spears. Only persons with full fishing rights could use artificial flies (vedersnuer), baited traps, set nets, or weirs which extended across the river. The latter were further limited to one in each designated reach, operated without hindrance to navigation. Only between St. Koloman (13 October) and St. George (24 April) might nets have small mesh; at other times they had to meet a larger standard. Summer regulations closed all fishing for small grayling (a regional delicacy) and required the release of those trout, pike, and huchen which might sell for less than a pfennig. Nor were any river side channels to be blocked and drained before 8 September, “so as not to damage the seed of the fish in the water.” Violators suffered a heavy fine of sixty pounds pfennig to the duke and thirty-two pounds to the governor.Footnote 72 What began as collective self-regulation in the Traun fishery was being assumed by the prince’s officer.
After some holders of fishing rights resisted regulations for two ensuing generations, in 1499 the duke of Upper Austria, Emperor Maximilian, had his governor intervene directly, “so that the fish resources in the Traun do not become barren.”Footnote 73 The official now sought advice of the master fishers but issued a revised and strengthened ordinance on his own authority. Meanwhile Maximilian’s father and predecessor, Frederick III (1452–1493), had himself set out a general ordinance (which does not survive) for fisheries across Upper and Lower Austria. In ensuing decades monarchs themselves declared revised fisheries regulations for the Traun and for both provinces and appointed a royal Fischmeister to enforce them.Footnote 74
While Venice tried to manage fisheries in the framework of its lagoon policies, French, Perugian, and Traun river regulations establish general patterns and point at the importance of local particulars in each pronouncement.Footnote 75 In a broader sampling of the medieval record, seasonal restrictions visibly worked the interlaced calendars of fishes’ natural reproduction and vulnerability and of human fish consumption. French kings closed fishing for roach during their April and May spawning time. At Ivrea and on Lake Garda fishing for (fall-spawning) trout was closed during October and November, while a 1472 law on the Swiss Bielersee protected sculpin (bundollen) after Easter, when demand for fish fell off and this species was spawning.Footnote 76 Fishing for conger off the Cotentin peninsula was closed from Easter to John the Baptist (24 June) and already in 1307 Piran closed fishing in its part of the Gulf of Trieste from Michaelmas to the start of Lent. The Teutonic Order in Prussia established seasonal fish sanctuaries off the mouths of rivers to coincide with important runs of migratory fishes and, since 1426, applied a general closure during spawning.Footnote 77 During the summer dry season up to 29 September no one was to fish inland waters of Sardinia.Footnote 78 In the 1250s Alfonso X of Castile closed fishing during spawning and growing seasons especially for the sake of small salmon, and centuries later his successor Carlos I (Emperor Charles V) banned taking madrillas (Iberian species of nose) in March and April, barbel during April–May, and salmonids during November–December.Footnote 79
Size limits might protect juveniles – “inrudines” in the Florentine statutes, “alevins” in Lorraine’s Loi de BeaumontFootnote 80 – or in other instances, as already seen, measure more precisely. French ordinances first set a minimum size by market price and later measured in ‘inches’ (pouces). Brescia eventually required a minimum weight for pike, tench, and trout. At Nice mullet and sea bream were legal at a ‘half foot’ (semissa) and trout in Pedraza, Castile, at a quarter of the municipal ‘yard’ (la quarta de la vara de concejo).Footnote 81 A Douai ordinance of 1391 set pike at ten ‘inches’. To avoid ambiguity Bavarian and Austrian rulers since the mid fifteenth century had used special illustrated documents, followed by printed posters to show the varieties in question and the smallest legal size for each from the Danube and its navigable tributaries (Figures 6.3 and 6.4).Footnote 82 On bag limits or quotas directly limiting kill, however, medieval sources seem mute
Figure 6.3 Emperor Maximilian’s Patent instructing his Vischmeister to negotiate regulations for the Danube fishery, 1506.
Illustrated with distinctive coloured images of eight fish varieties (pike, carp, barbel, huchen, burbot, catfish, trout, and, in the left margin, a species of Zingel), each about 20 cm long, plus a gauge to measure mesh of a net. All fishes are native to the middle Danube and, except for the Zingel, named in the Patent as objects of official concern. Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Hauptarchiv Urkunde Nr. 5825 (A).
Figure 6.4 Fisheries ordinance for Bavarian waters, 1528 (see also Supplement 6).
Printed Vischordnung for Danube and tributaries issued jointly by the four Wittelsbach co-Counts Palatine and Dukes of Bavaria. The last article shows the minimum legal sizes in printed bars measuring from 42 cm for huchen down to 18 cm for ide and bream. Surviving exemplars include München, Bayerische Hauptstaatsarchiv, Ältere Bestände, Staatsverwaltung, Bd. I:2, rot 1612d and Generalregister Fasz 444:1, 18v–19ar and Fasz 444:2, 374–380.
Capture techniques could be regulated in several ways. As earlier noticed, a minimum legal size of mesh gave an easily verified index of selectivity for small fish. London’s 1279/80 legislation demanded two inches for the ‘peternet’ used in the Thames estuary.Footnote 83 A Scottish statute of 1318 had the same means to protect “little salmon or smolts or fry of other kinds of fishes of the sea or fresh water” and such provisions became the norm in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century regulations from German-speaking lands. Officials along the north slope of the Alps carried a locally standardized gauge called prittlmas to measure the openings (bottom right in Figure 6.3).Footnote 84 The duke of Brittany, who claimed royal jurisdiction up to thirty leagues offshore made his tax collector in Nantes responsible for inspecting mesh.Footnote 85
Other measures targeted named forms of weirs, traps, or nets, forbidding them entirely or sharply restricting them to certain seasons, waters, or privileged users. The fuero for Cuenca allowed no seines or trammel nets within nine paces of a mill or in a channel, and in 1444 the queen regent of Aragon ordered Tortosa’s municipal council to control certain nets which were harming the run of shad in the Ebro.Footnote 86 The town of Cannes refused to licence more than four boats to use the lamparo technique of netting by torchlight in coastal waters and Villa de Mar ordered removal of mid-channel traps in the Rhône’s estuarine marshes in the spring when fishes entered the salt ponds to spawn.Footnote 87 The large niewod seine of the Baltic littoral was often banned outright – as to town-based fishers in fourteenth-century Poland – or used only by special licence of the sovereign.Footnote 88 Governments across Mediterranean Europe outlawed piscicides, led by Frederick II’s Sicilian legislation of 1231, Madrid’s municipal charter a generation thereafter, and continually reiterated enactments at Florence and other places.Footnote 89 A variant strategy specified what was permitted, as the ‘pridenet’ on London waters in 1279/80 during eight days only of the autumn season between Michaelmas and Martinmas, the angling or simple basket traps conceded to townsfolk at Toul, or the baited hook, rod, and horsehair line used at Vercelli.Footnote 90
In some instances protective measures extended to fish habitat. As earlier remarked, Perugia obliged shoreline residents every third October to ‘refresh’ shallow-water fish cover in L. Trasimeno. Madrid banned private diversion channels and the assembled Traun fishers required summer maintenance of flow in them, in both cases to ensure survival of juveniles. As count of Holland, Philip of Burgundy ordered full protection of riparian vegetation in the Haarlemmermeer and other waters north of Leiden, hoping this cover would harbour enough forage fish to keep pike in those waters and sustain the value of Leiden’s fishery.Footnote 91 Habitat and forage mattered to the city of Narbonne, too, when in 1227 it barred from its lagoon a bottom trawl or seine, the bourgin:
because such a net takes away from the whole pond [and] lays waste all types of nourishment for fishes both large and small, and thus the pond would be emptied out and desolate of all fishes, and not any fishes would be found there and it would be sterile and yield nothing.Footnote 92
The damage such trawls caused in coastal waters provoked concern in the north, too. Fishers from Essex petitioned the English parliament in 1377 against a device called the ‘wondyrchoun’, said to
strike so evenly and hard against the bottom being fished that it destroys the living slime and the flowers of the ground under the waters there and also the young of the oysters, mussels, and other fishes on which the large fish are there accustomed to live and be nourished.Footnote 93
It is hard not to see clear reference to ideas now thought as ecological. The same fears engaged some Dutch fishers in 1540, who appended to their complaint to Emperor Charles V a clear watercolour and actual sample of the device they would ban from the Zuider Zee (Figure 6.5).Footnote 94
Figure 6.5 Illustrated complaint to Emperor Charles V about damage caused by bottom trawl in Zuider Zee, 1540.
Coloured picture of a Dutch fishing boat and sample of the trawl net sent to the sovereign in a petition against overfishing of the Zuider Zee by fishers from Amsterdam. Österreichische Staatsarchiv/Haus-, Hof,- und Staatsarchiv MEA RTA 59-1, fols. 309–312. Reichstagsakten, Supplikationen 2. Teil.
Not so far seen, however, are restrictions on the quantity of fish taken and only most rarely the designation of protected areas where all fishing was forbidden.Footnote 95 It is also the case that some gear restrictions applied only outside the Lenten season. When religious practice forbade most other protein-rich foods, people who could afford fish ate them eagerly, and fishers and governments alike were pressed to maintain supply.
Nevertheless, medieval fisheries regulations were no mere expressions of pious intent. Madrid named inspectors to check for legal tackle and Namur made it the job of a municipal official.Footnote 96 Charged to enforce French ordinances were royal officers or, as on the Seine near Paris, subordinates of those who held royal rights in fief. Princes along the upper Rhine appointed “Counts of the Rhine” (Rheingrafen) to investigate and judge violations and disputes in that heavily exploited resource. In 1490 Perugia placed an armed galley on L. Trasimeno to patrol the fishery.Footnote 97 Surviving judicial records show some success. London authorities in 1320 seized and burned sixteen illegal traps from locations along the tidal Thames and in 1444 jailed a local brewer for using illegal gear.Footnote 98 In autumn 1460 their counterparts in Florence caught Buono di Francesco Beroni poisoning fish.Footnote 99 At Paris in 1422 royal officials arrested Pierre le Nourrissier and his three crewmen for fishing in the city moat with illegally small mesh and catching the fry of protected varieties, which the officers then confiscated, precipitating a judicial wrangle over boundaries of public waters.Footnote 100
6.2.3 To What End?
Like modern regulatory regimes, medieval ones projected tension and incompatibility between professed and tacit purposes of each measure and their evident effects. Laws hoped variously to secure consumer supply, conserve sustainable populations of desirable fishes, or allocate a productive resource among interest groups, but had trouble balancing those priorities.
Concern for cheap abundance of fish to eat justified Philip IV’s size regulations and rules for capture methods in 1289 and the outlawing of piscicides at Pistoia in 1378 and Florence in the 1450s,Footnote 101 just as the same dietary rationale elsewhere motivated rules to open market access and force quick sale of well-conditioned fish (see Chapter 4). The Castilian Cortes meeting in Madrid in 1435 even reiterated laws against use of quicklime and other toxicants on grounds they killed trout and could poison consumers.Footnote 102 Florentines occasionally may have aimed further to benefit specifically “those fish which are called trout, and noble fish they are indeed, … that therefore the said kind of fish might be better preserved.”Footnote 103 With such words legislators transcended simple provision of a dietary commodity to voice a conservation ethos allowing desired species to reproduce and grow. The city on the Arno could claim no priority in this perception. Edward I closed fishing off the Cotentin “for the salvation of the congers,” and his subjects in Cumberland controlled exploitation to protect salmon stocks.Footnote 104 Indeed the sole thrust of Scottish fisheries legislation from the late twelfth into the early sixteenth century was to protect the salmon.Footnote 105
Broad conservation intent was most often concretized to issues of reproduction and recruitment. Thus since at latest 1414 the seigneurs of Void set mesh regulations on the Meuse “for the sake of the little trout,” while city authorities at Strasbourg in 1434 justified new rules on grounds that it was “harmful to catch all those young fish called salm [i.e. juvenile salmon] and unspawned fish, so that the fishes and the fishery have almost vanished.”Footnote 106 Castilian municipalities protected spawning channels and forbade consumption of salmon eggs.Footnote 107 English parliamentary statutes in 1489 outlawed certain nets and ‘engines’ for similar reasons and so did Emperor Maximilan, who explained his intervention in 1506 because of population losses due to the destruction of young fish.Footnote 108
Regulation of catch techniques – responding, for instance, to complaints about weirs on private riparian sites or relatively well-capitalized seines or trawls – could, however, slide ostensible conservation into actual diversion of resources from one user group to another. Only occasionally is the context still plain enough to see. Although in 1321 on grounds of harm to public interests officials of the bishop of Agde could imprison local fishers for using the long-prohibited heavy trawls to damage benthic habitat in the Étang de Thau, this effort to protect the resource fell on deaf local ears; by 1328 the citizens had gained from regent Philip of Valois a renewed right to use the equipment.Footnote 109 Likewise men of Woolwich, Erith, and Barking, vills along the tidal Thames below London, violently resisted London’s efforts to enforce the ban on weirs.Footnote 110 On the other hand, the abbey of Lagrasse did manage in 1376–1377 to win a hard-fought victory against townspeople who had begun to fish the river Orbe with trapping gear allegedly so non-selective that the river “was at all points depopulated of its fish.”Footnote 111 Avowed concern to protect the resource justified exclusive licence regimes on inshore marine waters under municipal authorities at Marseilles, Calais, and Tréport in Normandy,Footnote 112 and that also in fact enjoyed by the handful of ‘full fishers’ under princely jurisdiction on the Traun. A 1533 agreement between the archbishop of Salzburg and the duke of Tirol curbed the gear and opportunities for peasant fishing “so that the Ziller is not depleted like before.”Footnote 113 From historical distance it is next to impossible to test the differential impact of such restrictions on the aquatic resource, but perhaps easier to see how regulations favoured some users over others.
In the long term from about 1200 rulers increased intervention in fisheries ‘for the common good’, often but not exclusively in response to perceived depletion. Whether driven by ecological, sociopolitical, or other variables, the particulars of regulations reveal great local and regional diversity, but share close familiarity with each immediate situation and, as study of their content reveals, parallel problems and repertoires of potential remedies.
Laws arguably indicate the probable (or at least then traditional) presence of named taxa in local waters. With exception of the invasive carp all the fishes mentioned were indigenous to the watersheds and habitats involved.Footnote 114 Seasonal and technical particulars suggest drafters of the regulations did not rely on learned texts but had access to considerable expertise about local fishes and methods of capture. Huchen but not eel are present in the Austrian Danube and the reverse is true for the Rhine, Seine, central Spain, and central Italy. Coregonid whitefishes occur in Alpine lakes. Of course the converse is not true: important local species such as sturgeon in the middle Danube and salmonids in the Seine system simply do not appear in the laws.
So the fisheries regulations do not reflect local aquatic ecosystems alone, but also some kind of ‘political’ significance. The named species and methods had to matter to some influential group or individual. Each had acquired some sort of cultural, commercial, or economic value in a regional medieval society. Legislative concern for Scottish salmon has directed research attention to their export value and surprisingly extensive fiscal records of their delivery to the late medieval Low Countries (see Chapter 8 below). Perugia’s diligence in preserving and enhancing diverse species in L. Trasimeno for the sake of sales to larger towns has not. The ubiquity of pike in ordinances across its range surely bears some relation to this fish’s potentially impressive size, aspect, and mythic reputation – though that might shrink in view of minimum legal sizes set as low as about thirty centimeters. Put simply, if medieval authorities thought certain varieties worth special treatment in their laws, lack of commensurate presence in other written and archaeological sources likely deserves closer investigation (taphonomy? ambiguous nomenclature? more prestige than economic value?). Fisheries protection was one of several priorities for legislative action. As epitomized in Venice, medieval governing elites were not ignorant of the need for preservation and wise use, but other considerations might have greater weight.
Many medieval lawmakers and their advisors were thus well aware of threats to their fish stocks and of measures to reduce or mitigate those threats, whether affecting particular species or stocks in general. In that sense they could be said to seek what is now called sustainability. But taken as a whole, the ‘common good’ sought by fisheries regulation was primarily secure and affordable local supply of a culturally desired commodity and secondarily maintenance of a certain social order among fishers and between the fishing industry and a larger society.Footnote 115 Fish stocks came further down the list of priorities. The latter were, however, a genuine concern for would-be rulers over inland and inshore fisheries, though not on the open sea.
Hence medieval authorities purposely exercised a wide range of oversight and regulatory control over fisheries, employing both means and reasoning still familiar today. They directed and compensated for the social need for fish exceeding traditional supplies. Public proclamation and distribution of the ordinances reveal deliberate intervention of the late medieval state in the aquatic realm. The understanding of the regulators grasped, however, only the impact of overfishing: Philip IV knew “the evil of the fishers” was to blame in 1289. Whatever the actual intent, medieval fisheries legislation shaped patterns of human relations around the fishery as much as did the handling of fish as a market commodity or the assertion of exclusive fishing rights. The law’s necessarily selective protections, moreover, also blended into semi-conscious human encroachment into natural relationships between favoured and disfavoured organisms. Yet neither environmental changes induced by human activity outside the fishery nor those of natural origin then entered into lawmakers’ awareness. Nor could they see behind the greed of the fishers to the demand which drove the fishing economy. The catchers, not the eaters, were held responsible for past damage and future hopes in the fishery.
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As means of handling the impact of population growth and economic development on a renewable resource, market adjustments, property rights, and public regulation all essentially take Nature as given and limited; humans adjust or adapt their own behaviour to fit the perceived limits. Another approach was to engage Nature differently, whether by modifying known Nature better to meet human needs or by satisfying wants from new, hitherto unexploited, parts of Nature. In both alternative strategies, under conditions of demand exceeding traditional and damaged sources of supply, high and later medieval Europeans began to extend their takings of fish beyond their natural local ecosystems. The final two chapters examine those innovative developmental responses and their consequences within western Christendom and on its resource frontiers.
