All was fish that came to net.

The origins of intensive or commercial marine fishing in Ireland are poorly understood, but we can say that it did not start in the fifteenth century. Zooarchaeological evidence has allowed researchers to pinpoint the birth of concentrated marine fishing in England, and the wider European region, to the beginning of the tenth century CE. Around 1000, there was a shift away from freshwater fishing and a rapid increase in sea fishing, an event that has been coined as the ‘fish event horizon’ by researchers. Herring was the first species to be widely exploited in the first millennium; cod and hake fisheries followed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

As yet no detailed zooarchaeological study of fishbones or fish genetics has been conducted for Ireland, but Sheila Hamilton-Dyer has undertaken an overview of the available fishbones evidence from existing archaeological reports. Her analysis shows that the intensity of cod fishing increased throughout the medieval period in Ireland, matching what has been observed in other parts of Europe. However, the presence of larger fish might be overstated in the data, as, for the most part, these assemblages were hand-collected, which means that smaller bones from species like herring could have been overlooked owing to a lack of sieving. Overall, much more research is required before definitive conclusions can be drawn from Irish zooarchaeological evidence. Fortunately, new research projects promise to increase our range of knowledge in this area through the application of cutting-edge methods to the study of Irish archaeological material.

The records of the Irish Chancery are one of the most comprehensive printed documentary sources extant for medieval Ireland. The records run intermittently from 1244 to 1509. These records provide the first quantitative evidence of intensive, commercial marine fisheries in Ireland. However, they also have an inherent regional bias, relating mostly to the areas in which the Norman and then English state had the most significant control following the arrival of the Normans in Ireland in the twelfth century. To balance this, a selection of the most extensive Irish Annals have also been surveyed. Entries from the Annals after 1500 will be covered at greater length in later chapters, but the present discussion includes some consideration of what they can tell us about fishing before 1500.

As an island, Ireland has a deep connection and relationship with the ocean and seas that surround it. Water has visibly and dramatically shaped the island physically and culturally for its entire history. The coastline is marked by towering cliffs, windswept beaches, abundant bays and thriving river estuaries. Some of the stormiest seas on the planet pound against the west coast, while the Irish and Celtic Seas have acted as conduits for ideas, migration, and invasion for centuries. The Atlantic Ocean also makes the country green – the gulf stream brings warm water that tempers the Irish climate; without it, the island would resemble Newfoundland, which lies on a similar latitude but experiences a far harsher climate. Water has brought wealth too. Trade has allowed port towns to flourish and grow, while fisheries have been the lifeblood of many coastal communities from prehistory to the present day. Ireland's fisheries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are the focus of this book. Despite the importance of the marine space in Ireland's story, we know very little about the history of fisheries, and the subject has generated little interest among historians to date.

Ireland is not alone in this lack of knowledge; until recently, the history of the seas and oceans globally has remained largely unknown. There are many studies about things that float on water – ships carrying trade, migrants, and weapons – but few studies have been interested in what lies beneath the surface and how humans have interacted with it. Part of this may stem from older perceptions of the ocean as inexhaustible and unknowable. And while there remain many unknowns, we are very aware today that the oceans are far from inexhaustible and are, in fact, frighteningly fragile in the face of unchecked human exploitation and climate change. The fragility of marine life and ecosystems becomes only starker in the presence of an accurate historical perspective. For this reason, history is vital.

It was the marine scientist Daniel Pauly who first argued for the existence of a ‘shifting baselines’ syndrome, in 1995; he contended that a lack of memory about past ocean productivity often results in managers making decisions that keep fish populations depressed.

This quotation encapsulates the profound changes the seventeenth century brought to the fisheries of Ulster and Ireland as a whole. But without the context of the previous two centuries, we could not possibly understand why it was significant that these fisheries were ‘taken from the Irish’. It is to be hoped that this book has provided that background and shown that fisheries were one of the most important and most productive industries in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ireland. Nor is the growth, decline and dispossession of the fisheries an obscure historical curiosity, only of interest to the specialist; these changes were fundamental elements of Ireland's economic, environmental, and cultural history.

Earlier I quoted Tim O’Neill as saying that the arrival of herring shoals and the subsequent herring fisheries was the ‘greatest single economic event’ of the fifteenth century. Others have made similar claims without substantiation or explanation. In some ways, O’Neill was correct; the growth of fisheries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was highly significant to the development of the Irish economy, but until now the scale and reasons for this growth have not been explored in detail.

In reality, it was not just one factor, such as the ‘arrival’ of herring shoals, that led to the growth of fisheries in the fifteenth century. Rather, it was a confluence of events that created conditions ripe for fisheries to prosper. Raymond Gillespie has written that regarding the economy as ‘socially embedded relationships, rather than mechanistic markets for exchange’ can allow us to ‘bridge cultural worlds and use economic life as an organising principle for describing early modern Ireland’. The same can also apply to fisheries. We have considered the more mechanistic elements of the fish trade, including export volumes and prices, and these are valuable data points for understanding just how much fish was extracted from the ocean. But ultimately, the most important characteristic of fisheries during the period was the relationships built between landowners, fishers, and merchants from across different communities in Ireland and Europe. These facilitated and strengthened fisheries and propelled them to prosperity. The breakdown of these relationships seriously harmed the industry in the later sixteenth century.

This chapter attempts systematically to collect, standardise, and analyse the available data for the fish trade in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ireland, to explore the importance of fish to the export economy. It offers the most complete picture yet provided of the extent and nature of the exportation trade of fish. Appendix 2 contains a full outline of the methods used to generate the data.

The Trade to Great Britain

As we lack any quantitative data detailing the export of fish from sixteenth-century Ireland, we have to rely on records of Irish imports to other locations. This section will examine trade data from England, Wales, and Scotland to see what it can tell us about the export of fish from Ireland. Most of the data will be taken from customs accounts and port books of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It will also focus on several pivotal ports and regions which traded heavily with Ireland and for which there is also data available. The fishers of the English West Country often drew their catch from Irish waters in the sixteenth century. Their most important base was Bristol, one of the major trading ports in the south of England, which had an active partnership with several ports in Ireland, particularly those in Munster. Bristol's customs accounts are some of the most extensive that remain extant for England, but we also have data from other ports in the region, especially Bridgwater. In the north-west of England, Chester was the primary port, trading heavily with the east and south-east of Ireland. Analysis of Chester's trade is facilitated by publication of several of the town's fifteenth- and sixteenth-century customs accounts. Welsh ports were some of the closest geographically to the east coast of Ireland, and available trade data will be examined to see if there was an active fish trade between the two regions. Finally, the fish trade between Ireland and Scotland will be explored. Other ports, like Southampton and London, were considered, but the volume of Irish shipping to these ports was negligible compared to the ports on the west coast.

Oceanographic Change and Fisheries

Marine fish are intrinsically linked to the environment and ocean conditions they inhabit. Changes in sea temperature, currents, and chemical balance, among many other factors, can profoundly affect the abundance and behaviour of marine species and, in turn, impact the fisheries that target these species. Today, human-induced climate change is rapidly altering the state of our oceans and threatening the sustainability and viability of marine ecosystems and fisheries across the globe. Human activity was not the main driver of climate or oceanographic change in the past, but natural fluctuations in ocean conditions occurred in the early modern period and almost certainly had an important influence on fisheries in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ireland.

To understand the full impact of ocean conditions on historical fisheries is not at all easy. This stems in part from the problem of isolating the impact of different anthropogenic and natural variables. As we have seen, fisheries in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ireland were disrupted by many human-related events such as war, piracy, and changing market conditions. Understanding how these events interacted with and combined with natural fluctuations, like changes in ocean temperature, is problematic. It is nevertheless a worthwhile exercise.

The first step is to establish as best we can the trajectory of fisheries over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In other contexts, researchers have been able to generate enough historical data to trace catches over centuries of historical fisheries. In the Irish case, we simply do not have enough data to generate accurate catch-estimates, but by combining quantitative and qualitative data, it is possible to estimate trends in the health of fisheries. This is what is shown in Figure 6.1.

This estimate works on a five-point scale, with a score of one indicating that fisheries were doing poorly in a particular year and a score of five signalling they were doing well. A full explanation can be found in Appendix 3.

The Impact of War

In the late fifteenth century Ireland was a border region of English authority that saw a constant state of low-intensity conflict between and within the English and Gaelic Irish. Despite this, no large-scale wars occurred in Ireland during the fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries until the Kildare rebellion. One of the primary reasons was the tempering influence of the FitzGeralds, earls of Kildare from the 1460s onwards, who largely maintained stability by projecting their power into the Irish and English spheres of Irish politics. The earls of Kildare maintained a balance between the competing factions in Ireland, functioning as enforcers and mediators. For this reason, before the 1530s there was no substantial alteration in the ownership or rights to fishing resources. The control of coastlines and fisheries remained stable. This period of relative peace allowed fisheries to grow and prosper, fish to become Ireland's most important export commodity, and foreign fishing and trade to flourish.

However, from 1534 onwards, this situation changed. In June of that year, Thomas FitzGerald, later the 10th earl of Kildare, popularly known as Silken Thomas, entered into open rebellion against Henry VIII. His revolt marked the end of the Kildare ascendancy and sparked the Tudor ‘reconquest’, culminating with the English taking complete control of the island in 1603. That reconquest was not a cohesive military campaign but rather the slow breakdown of the relationship between the English government and Ireland's native inhabitants. The sixty-nine years from 1534 to 1603 witnessed successive conflicts and increasing violence on land and sea. These conflicts are important to the story of fisheries; they had a severely disruptive and damaging impact on the trajectory of the fishing industry in Ireland.

It is not necessary or possible to discuss every conflict in the sixteenth century within this chapter, but the most significant conflicts regarding their impact on fisheries will be explored, how fisheries factored into English colonial policy and how English attitudes towards the exploitation of natural resources changed over the course of the century.

The defeat of the rebellion of 1534 spelled disaster for the FitzGeralds of Kildare.