2.1.1 Fish on Medieval Menus

Within the broad dietary pattern, medieval western Christians, who seem to have lacked anything resembling the modern concept of ‘protein’, were well aware that fish functioned as a meat substitute or supplement. In their consistent differentiation between a ‘flesh day’ and a ‘fish day’ when meat foods were culturally taboo (‘lean day,’ ‘fast day’), people continually voiced this understanding.Footnote ² Tenth- and eleventh-century monastic reformers, aiming to restore St. Benedict’s ban on meat for monks, compensated with larger rations of cheese, eggs, and fish.Footnote ³ Later Latin and vernacular literary battles pitted allegorical armies of fleshy foods – roasts, lard, pheasants, sausages, hams – under the gluttonous ‘Lord Carnival’ against gaunt ‘Lord [sometimes Lady] Lent’s battalions of herrings, trouts, crayfish, carps, haddocks, eels, oysters, porpoises, and minnows.Footnote ⁴ Market ordinances from fourteenth-century Kraków and popular ditties from Paris drew the same distinction.Footnote ⁵ So did medieval cookbooks: the oldest surviving Franco-Latin manuscripts from around 1300 and the first printed German Kuchenmeisterei from 1490 grouped recipes and menus for flesh days and for fish days; an Italian tradition gave alternate ingredients for each dish.Footnote ⁶

Dietary practice carried through the idea of substitution, too. In minutely itemized kitchen accounts at late medieval Westminster abbey – where the Rule was once again bent – the share of calories provided by fish rose in direct proportion to staged restrictions on meat, dairy, and eggs (see Figure 2.1). At Carpentras in Provence, when Lent forbade meat eating the business of butchers collapsed and they closed their shops, while fishmongers’ sales multiplied.Footnote ⁷ From a modern dietary point of view, the equivalence is not complete, for compared to an equal weight of red meat (beef) fish provide about 15–20 percent more protein but about a third as many calories and a tenth as much fat.Footnote ⁸ What difference that makes to an individual eater depends on the rest of the diet.

Figure 2.1 Contribution of different foods to the energy value of the diet of monks at Westminster, c. 1495–c. 1525.

Fish were not just a theoretical or occasional dietary option, but are repeatedly verifiable in different settings and types of evidence for what medieval people actually ate. In remains of human food from numerous well-excavated archaeological sites the significant presence of fish in actual medieval diets is plain, though not susceptible to measured comparison with meat consumption.Footnote ⁹ A few examples might be selected for wide geographic, temporal, and social variety. In cisterns filled with soil from late Roman Carthage some 3,000 fishbones indicate human food waste of thirteen marine fishes and one from freshwater, all taxa common to Mediterranean in- and nearshore habitats.Footnote ¹⁰ Just a few centuries later both the inhabitants of Eketorp village on Öland in the central Baltic and others south of that sea at a fort and suburbium later called the ‘Mecklenburg’ were tossing onto garbage heaps the leavings of their tables: each group had eaten a dozen and more kinds of fishes, half of those the same local north European varieties, but where the coastal site favoured herring, cod, flatfishes, sturgeon, and pike, the more inland Mecklenburgers ate mostly pike and cyprinids.Footnote ¹¹ Three well-excavated communities have large collections of discarded fish remains of mainly tenth- and eleventh-century date: in the 13,842 identified fishbones from the Viking entrepôt at Haithabu, herring, perch, and pike are most common; at the Slavic–Magyar village of Zalavár on a wetland beside Lake Balaton people ate catfish, carp, and pike-perch; late Anglo-Saxon Hamwic, the seaport precursor of Southampton, consumed mainly marine and migratory fishes, notably herring, flatfishes, and eel.Footnote ¹² At York the many contexts from before about the year 1000 contain almost exclusively the bones of freshwater varieties, while those dating to the eleventh century reveal a great increase in marine species, especially herring, and by the years around 1100 growing numbers of cod.Footnote ¹³ About the same time inhabitants of the Castello di Manzano, a fortified village built shortly before 1014 in the northwestern Italian piedmont and abandoned in 1243, who ate many kinds of wild and domestic animals, included tench, chub, and perch in that diet.Footnote ¹⁴

Large-scale archaeozoological studies compile fish remains from several regional centres. As illustrated in Figure 2.2, at the emerging urban sites of medieval Flanders, into the thirteenth century freshwater fishes commonly made up the largest proportion of consumption remains, although by about 1000 inshore marine varieties had a significant presence (≥20 percent). The latter share further increased by and after 1200. During later and post-medieval times (roughly 1300–1550) inshore marine species dominate and remains from possibly more distant seas (i.e. cod) gain significance equal to or greater than those from fresh water (≈20 percent).Footnote ¹⁵ In contrast, at the collegiate church of Saint-Pierre-Lent in Orleans 15,004 fish remains were identified from a latrine filled with food waste dated to c. 1490–1568: here fifteen marine taxa contributed about 40 percent of those bones, with cod at 23 percent, and herring, flatfishes, and rays each at about 5 percent; fifteen diadromous and freshwater species made up about 60 percent of remains, but bones of common carp were just over half of the total, followed by 5 percent other cyprinids, 2 percent perch, and mere traces of all other taxa.Footnote ¹⁶ (More cases in Supplement 2.1.1.)

Figure 2.2 Fish varieties in remains recovered from medieval and early modern urban sites in the Scheldt basin of Flanders.

(with thanks to Dr. Anton Ervynck, Flemish Heritage Agency)

Detailed financial records compiled by medieval authorities – and so chiefly artifacts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – do show the share of fish in food a household or institution consumed or purchased. In an exceptionally early example, during 1296–1297 the household of Joan de Valence, countess of Pembroke, spent on staple fish (herring, salt fish, and stockfish) 39 percent of the kitchen budget or 9 percent of the total for food and drink.Footnote ¹⁷ A leading burgher of late fourteenth-century Köln, Hermann Goch, more market-oriented than the countess, spent on fish as much as he did for meat, each taking 15–20 percent of his household’s outlay on food.Footnote ¹⁸ During 1403–1405 fish also comprised 17 percent of the food expenditures of the Polish royal court.Footnote ¹⁹ (More household accounts with fish are in the Supplement.)

Written sources also confirm fish as a distinct element in the ordinary diets of people who were not members of the elite. Twelfth-century Parisian teacher Alan of Lille said herring “relieved the hunger of the poor,” which was exactly how King João II of Portugal (1481–95) spoke of sardines.Footnote ²⁰ Some public artistic representations of calendars in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France and illuminations in contemporary English manuscripts (Figure 2.3) show peasants eating fish.Footnote ²¹ Residents in the papal almshouse in Rome were served fish on 117 days during accounting year 1285–1286.Footnote ²² By that time, and on into the 1430s, peasants who received meals for compulsory work in the Norfolk harvest were getting 3–5 percent of their calories from fish worth 7–25 percent of the total cost of their feeding.Footnote ²³ Household servants at the royal Polish castle in Korzyn got fish on every meatless day in 1405–1408. Two generations later this was also the experience of municipal workers at Basel and servants of the duke of Bavaria.Footnote ²⁴

Figure 2.3 Fourteenth-century English commoners grilling fish.

As depicted in the Holkham Bible Picture Book, BL Ms Add. 47682, fol. 37r. Garbed as English commoners, Christ’s disciples grill fish they just caught and serve them to the risen Christ. Reference is John 21: 1–14, the miraculous catch of 153 fish from the Sea of Galilee following instructions of the risen Christ. Sharp-eyed observers will notice that the fish look very like Atlantic mackerel, a species not known to be resident in the Sea of Galilee or the eastern Mediterranean, but common along English coasts.

Reproduced with permission of the British Library.

2.1.2 We Are What We Ate, and So Are Our Remains

Written and archaeozoological sources convincingly imply medieval Europeans eating fish, only recent advances in human bioarchaeology have begun to offer some quantitative indications of the fish protein these people actually ingested. The technique analyzes stable isotopes in protein recovered from human skeletal remains. The chemical characteristics of foods we (and other organisms) eat leave traces in the composition of the consuming body. Many chemical elements naturally occur in molecules of more than one weight. The relative proportions of stable isotopes of certain elements taken in over a decade or a lifetime are reflected in the consumer’s own tissues.Footnote ²⁵

In particular the isotopic ratios of carbon (¹³C vs ¹²C) and of nitrogen (¹⁵N vs ¹⁴N) in the body’s proteins reflect those ratios in the foods consumed during life.Footnote ²⁶ The ratios can be measured from the bone protein (collagen) which often survives in even millennia-old human and animal remains. Carbon isotopic ratios differentiate between terrestrial and marine-based food webs: in temperate climates like medieval Europe the bone collagen of humans who ate foods of terrestrial origin shows δ¹³C values around −20 permil, and that of individuals getting their protein from marine sources has δ¹³C of −12 permil (so less negative).Footnote ²⁷ Nitrogen isotopic ratios signify the trophic level from which protein is consumed: the share of ¹⁵N rises by 3–5 permil at each step up a trophic pyramid. The longer food chains in aquatic systems (see Chapter 1) result in higher δ¹⁵N values for individuals with water-based diets. Typically persons with purely terrestrial diets display δ¹⁵N values around 8–10 permil and those getting protein from aquatic sources go as high as 20 permil. As depicted in Figure 2.4, then, low (large negative) δ¹³C signals terrestrial, not marine-based, dietary protein, and high δ¹³C (though still negative) a significant proportion of seafoods. (δ¹³C values for freshwater fishes may be lower because much of the nutrients in fresh waters comes from terrestrial sources.) High (positive) nitrogen values (δ¹⁵N) register consumers at the top of a (long) aquatic food chain and low those individuals whose protein was built from that of plants or herbivorous animals.Footnote ²⁸ Ideally the stable isotope values of human remains should be compared to those of plants, herbivores, and several levels of carnivores in the same ecosystem, but this benchmark is not always provided.Footnote ²⁹

Figure 2.4 Typical stable isotope values for human diets from terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

Certain caveats must be kept in mind. The threshold for either δ¹³C or δ¹⁵N values to reflect significant consumption of ‘fish’ is about 20–25 percent of the individual’s intake of protein. Even a regular weekly meal of fish will likely not detectably affect that individual’s isotopic signature. Nor are the fish species consumed or a mix of freshwater and marine organisms to be determined by this means. Protein obtained from diadromous fishes registers where the animals ate (adult eel in freshwater; adult salmon or shad in salt), not where they were captured during migrations. Nevertheless, this analytical method will identify consuming individuals and populations for whom marine protein sources were a regular dietary component and, perhaps less surely, those eating significant amounts of freshwater fish. Lacking corroborative evidence, however, the absence of an isotopic signature cannot be taken to mean people ate no fish at all. Further caution is advised because so far most publicly available results of such isotopic tests remain limited to relatively small samples of individuals from geographically biased regions of medieval western Christendom. Nevertheless the findings do point to some regional chronologies and sociocultural groups with distinctive patterns of fish consumption.

Where, then, can physiologically significant medieval consumption of fish protein be confirmed? Answer: only in certain groups, localities, and periods. Into the eleventh century few Europeans ate enough fish of any kind to register in their remains,Footnote ³⁰ but exceptional people and communities did. Corporeal relics of St. Waldetrudis (d.688), a noble monastic founder and abbess in Hainaut, clearly signal her consumption of freshwater, not marine, organisms. So do bones of two eleventh-century bishops of Tournai.Footnote ³¹ Among early to middle Anglo-Saxon villagers with terrestrial diets certain high-status burials stand out for high δ¹⁵N values from aquatic food chains, those on the coast have high δ¹³C from seafoods and those at riverine sites the low δ¹³C indicative of fresh water.Footnote ³² By 800 or so, inhabitants of a manor house in Uppland, Sweden, and some in coastal Dalmatia also ate enough fresh- or brackish-water fishes to register relatively high δ¹⁵N against low δ¹³C.Footnote ³³ More pervasive use of seafishes is indicated at scattered coastal sites in eastern Britain and in the Mediterranean on Balearic and Greek islands then under Byzantine rule. Norse coastal societies, however, more generally consumed marine protein, as is visible at eighth- through eleventh-century Haithabu, on ninth- through twelfth-century Gotland, and in the remains of a band of Viking raiders who perished in tenth-century Wessex.Footnote ³⁴

Detectable marine dietary components increase in frequency during and after the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The most robust and so far earliest indications of transition come from Anglo-Norse and early Anglo-Norman York, where approximately one in three burials in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had consumed significant amounts of protein from marine sources. By and after the thirteenth century food from the sea was a regular part of most diets in York, though some men ate a lot more than did their neighbours and women in the community averaged somewhat less.Footnote ³⁵ In other northern English sites remains of late medieval people across spectra of gender, social rank, and settlement types all show δ¹³C around −19.5 permil and δ¹⁵N over 12 permil, which the analysts interpret as signaling diets with aquatic foods both freshwater and marine.Footnote ³⁶ Equally cogent findings of general large use of fish are rarer elsewhere and mainly associated with coastal sites. Late medieval inhabitants of Portmahomack on Scotland’s east coast clearly did eat fish from the sea, and so too most at Gandia in Valencia. Their contemporaries buried in and beside the Cistercian abbey church of Ter Duinen in coastal Flanders did so as well, perhaps along with freshwater fishes.Footnote ³⁷

Elsewhere isotopic evidence again identifies in late medieval populations minorities who obtained protein from long aquatic food chains but ambiguity or diversity between its freshwater and marine origins. At the Christian cult centre of Whithorn in southwestern Scotland, six twelfth- to fourteenth-century bishops, senior clerics, and high-status lay benefactors buried inside the cathedral had consumed significantly more fish than the lower-status laity buried on its periphery. Just three men among the twelve male and twelve female skeletons tested from a mainly peasant cemetery near Poznań show traces of marine protein. In contemporary Tuscany certain castle dwellers and townspeople also stand out for high δ¹⁵N despite δ¹³C values indicating low marine intake.Footnote ³⁸ The same pattern occurs in seven of the thirty-six bodies of plague victims buried in a Roman neighbourhood about 1480.Footnote ³⁹ On the other hand, the isolated individual men with high-status burials at riverine and urban locations among eight cemeteries of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Asturias more likely had eaten freshwater fishes, and so, too, the few people with signs of significant fish consumption from twelfth- through fifteenth-century burials at the poorhouse in Regensburg.Footnote ⁴⁰

From the perspective of dietary protein, then, the contribution of fish in general to human metabolisms in medieval Europe was limited, not absent, but surpassing the threshold of detectability only in certain social and regional circumstances. Elites as opposed to commoners, men in contrast to women, the religious compared to lay, and urban more than country people were at least marginally more likely to eat a significant amount of fish. Where so signaled, an increased consumption of marine fishes plausibly spread from Scandinavian and coastal British and continental areas toward the east and south, starting already around 1000 and continuing into early modern times. Stable isotope analysis of human remains cannot, however, itself now discriminate between consumption based on northern or on Mediterranean habitats, nor can it alone date the process or chronology which resulted in significant consumption of marine protein at sites some distance from salt water.Footnote ⁴¹ Throughout the period people at places across Europe continued to eat organisms from fresh waters. For the present, however, despite the limitations of stable isotopes, use of this method confirms that, from the earliest to the latest Middle Ages, at least some Europeans ate enough fish to provide 20–25 percent or more of their protein intake.

2.2.1 Religious Taboos on Meat

The dominant religious orthodoxy of the medieval west, Latin Catholic Christianity, imposed severe restrictions on eating meat. The prohibitions normally applied on all Fridays and Saturdays (and/or, in some dioceses, Wednesdays), the days before major religious festivals, four quarterly ‘ember days’, the three days before the feast of Ascension, four weeks before Christmas, and the forty days of Lent during late winter and early spring before the high feast of Easter.Footnote ⁴³ Abstinence from the eating of animal flesh was rooted in ancient Jewish traditions of purity and in ascetic practices of dietary deprivation which developed among late Roman Christians. Periodic observance had come to define normative Christian behaviour by the time of Charlemagne, whose Capitulary of Paderborn in 785 ordered the forcibly baptized Saxons under pain of death to observe the Lenten fast.Footnote ⁴⁴ Lenten and Friday ‘fasts’ were the essential marks of membership in Latin Christendom during the Middle Ages. Monastic communities, for whom symbolic separation of spirit from flesh had fundamental importance, practiced abstinence still more regularly, and even permanently.

The rules and distinctions of dietary abstinence had considerable consistency in medieval cultural terms, if not in those of today. Though commonly called a fast (jejunium), the practice was rather to refrain from eating certain foods. Whether for monks and nuns or ordinary laymen and -women the operative ban was on the flesh of terrestrial quadrupeds, a classification not wholly congruent with the modern class of mammals, warm-blooded animals without feathers and with glands to provide milk for their young. The terms were classically set in the sixth-century monastic Rule of St. Benedict (chapters 36 and 39), which absolutely barred the meat of four-footed land animals to all monks but the sick. Several centuries ensued before Benedictine practice became the accepted standard across the Christian west.

Several ramifications gradually followed. ‘Meat’ itself had to be defined, and the practice gradually evolved to include a prohibition during Lent of all so-called fleshy foods, animal products such as cheese, eggs, and lard.Footnote ⁴⁵ On the other hand the rules of abstinence were more than once modified in practice, both as a pattern of ‘abuse’ in socially too well-integrated monasteries of the post-Carolingian period, and by stepwise relaxation of the letter of the law during the later Middle Ages. In the latter case, what was banned from the refectory might be taken in the infirmary or a midway ‘misericord,’ and a papal decree from 1366 let this pass so long as half the monks ate in the refectory for each meal and all obeyed the letter of the Rule on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, four weeks of Advent, and eight weeks of Lent. Pope Alexander VI loosened the Lenten prohibition of butter in 1491 and encouraged purchase of indulgences exempting the buyer from other restrictions. Layfolk had long before learned to break the fast with a ‘light’ evening meal or to turn penitent austerity into a feast of elaborate dishes from permitted ingredients.Footnote ⁴⁶

Nevertheless and most importantly, the ban on meat actively encouraged the eating of fish. As Ekkehard IV at mid-eleventh-century St. Gallen cleverly phrased his scholar’s Latin, Omne natans trinus licitum benedicat et unus (“The Three and One blesses as permitted all swimming things”)Footnote ⁴⁷ – having just imagined dining on a list of ‘fishes’ including whale, crayfish, and fiber piscis, ‘beaver fish’. Rooted in Hebrew scriptural classification of animals by habitat, definition of all aquatic creatures as ‘fish’ was the (entirely sensible) standard throughout medieval times, from the Etymologies of sixth-century Isidore of Seville, through the scholastic encyclopedists of the mid-thirteenth century, up to and including the sixteenth-century pioneers of scientific ichthyology, Pierre Belon, Gillaume Rondelet, Conrad Gessner, and Ulisse Aldrovandi.Footnote ⁴⁸ Early Greek-speaking Christians had associated fish with Christ, seeing IXΘΟΣ as an anagram for the initials of “Jesus Christ, God, Saviour,” and the earliest evolution from ascetic fasting to penitential abstinence more or less willingly accepted fish in lieu of flesh.Footnote ⁴⁹

Charlemagne considered fish the typical ‘Lenten fare’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Later more reform-minded ascetics in ninth-century Frankland, tenth-century England, and among early twelfth-century Cistercians were less enthusiastic, eschewing any hint of expensive quasi-carnivorous luxury for sparse almost vegan diets. But, in a pattern common to many revolutionary movements, over time occasional modest ‘treats’ (‘pittances’) were rationalized as harmless.Footnote ⁵¹ Abbots hoped to wean perhaps reluctant brethren from clandestine defiance or to celebrate special events in their community. Donors reinforced annual remembrance with an extra but licit dish. By the twelfth century old-line reformed Benedictines (Cluniacs and their English and German counterparts) were defending their piscivorous practices against censorious Cistercians … whose houses themselves were a century later everywhere accepting analogous gifts of fish.Footnote ⁵² Ordinary laypeople were more likely to grumble about seasonal loss of meat, butter, and eggs than be troubled by the acceptance of fish.

Much later what had become standard western Christian practice was given systematic ex post theological grounding by, for instance, Thomas Aquinas.Footnote ⁵³ Fish was less ‘fleshy’ and so thought less to incite sexual passions, a point which Isidore had made some 600 years before.Footnote ⁵⁴ Fish plainly did not copulate, so were thought not to reproduce by seed (a sexual act) in the manner of humans, terrestrial animals, and birds, giving them a ‘pure’ quality already noted by St. Augustine but later also by dualist heretics. Avoiding the meat of animals was a reminder of the Edenic state of sinlessness and peace between humans and animals. Indeed as God had spared fish in the Flood, they could be thought free of sin. Lacking the fatty mouth-feel of meat or butter, fish fit the penitent attitude of denying luxury.Footnote ⁵⁵ And, finally, fish provided a practical alternative for meat.

Indeed fish did. Medieval Christians were never obliged to eat fish (no, not even monks), but for a third and more of the days every year, fish were the best substitute for taboo flesh, and the eating of fish openly demonstrated adhesion to the norms of Christian society. A review of the liturgical calendar shows about 135 ‘fish days’. This could vary. Edward IV’s household managers specified fish service on 168 days in the 1470s, but the contemporary bishop of Speyer observed only 130. At one extreme, the ostentatiously orthodox crusading knights of the Teutonic Order in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Prussia observed abstinence on about 250 days of the year and the monks of Westminster on 215, at least in their refectory.Footnote ⁵⁶ At another extreme, a poor widow eating barley gruel or pease porridge added no more fish on Friday than she did meat on Thursday. The kitchen office of French king Charles VI (1380–1422) replaced all purchases of meat or poultry during Lent with a long and diverse list of fishes. In 1469 Siena’s communal government contracted with that of Perugia for annual shipment of 200,000 pounds of fish from Lake Trasimeno, 120,000 pounds during Lent and 80,000 pounds over the rest of the year.Footnote ⁵⁷ Religious culture thus strongly encouraged medieval Europeans to consume fish in lieu of meat, it did this throughout the year and more so at certain seasons, but ideology itself never compelled anyone to eat fish.Footnote ⁵⁸

2.2.2 Medieval Concepts of Health and Diet

Both learned and popular ideas of how food affected well-being likely did motivate some medieval Europeans to adjust their eating habits. Such concepts certainly sustained an extensive dietary literature. Learned medieval physicians, their well-to-do patients, and the chief cooks of at least the greatest of the latter understood physiology and nutrition in terms of the ancient Greco-Roman theory of humours (Figure 2.5), given medical substance especially by the Roman Galen (129–200/216) and his later Arab followers. Humoural theory conceived the physical world as a mixture of the elemental polarities hot–cold, wet–dry, expressed in the human body as the humours blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Personal character and health were determined by the balance of these qualities, while illness, conceived as the imbalance of humours, was to be avoided or cured by readjusting the balance, often by consuming foods of appropriate humoural quality.

Figure 2.5 The medieval theory of humours.

Not surprisingly, medico-dietary theory identified fish as cold and wet. These qualities of a food interacted with an individual consumer’s basic character (temperament) and momentary medical condition but could be balanced by cooking methods and by serving the food with appropriate sauces.Footnote ⁵⁹ Fish were thus by preference to be fried (cooked hot and dry), and to be followed in the menu by a service of nuts (also hot and dry). The more ‘gross’ or ‘bestial’ the flesh of the fish, the more it needed a ‘warm’ and ‘sharp’ dressing: relatively ‘gross’ salmon and trout – fishes with oily, often coloured flesh – demanded pepper and saffron sauce but red mullet or gurnard – white and dry meat – only a simple and mild one. Some Italian physicians simply advised against eating tench, carp, lamprey, and eel as being too ‘glutinous’, that is, slimy.Footnote ⁶⁰

Hence dietetic handbooks or sections in a guide to health (Regimen sanitatis) were among the earlier texts to draw practical distinctions among fish varieties.Footnote ⁶¹ A late but notably clear example comes from the cookbook prepared in the 1430s by Eberhard, chef for the duke of Bavaria-Landshut:

Eberhard took his ideas and many of his very words from early fourteenth-century physicians Conrad of Eichstätt and Maino de’Maineri, a Milanese who worked in the Low Countries, and from the wise twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen.Footnote ⁶³ But the same concepts of fish, of diet, and of the different needs of people had been equally present in the advice on eleven fish varieties which Greek physician Anthimus gave his sixth-century royal Frankish patient Theodoric, son of Clovis. The doctor recommended fresh salmon, but after a few days it became bad for the stomach, while salted salmon caused bad humours.Footnote ⁶⁴ This kind of advice eventually went back to Galen himself. Hildegard, however, showed more influence from scriptural ideology when she argued against eating eels on grounds their flesh resembled pork.Footnote ⁶⁵

Doctor Anthimus further advised that sole, which he would cook in oil with a little salt, was notably good for sick people, and sturgeon for the healthy.Footnote ⁶⁶ Comparable distinctions, if less theoretically integrated than the choices of species, preparation, and sauce, also reverberate through the medieval medico-dietary literature. One of the oldest recipe collections now known to survive, the late thirteenth-century Tractatus de modo preparandi et condiendi omnia cibaria (“Tract on means of preparing and seasoning all foods”) alludes to but fails to detail the special needs of the sick.Footnote ⁶⁷ While Hildegard had been especially concerned that the ill not consume eel, at the same time she found its gall bladder useful for treating those with failing vision. By the fifteenth century a more popular German-language tradition of “fish doctoring” taught that

Sir Henry Stafford, son of the Duke of Buckingham, was likely ignorant of that German text, but when he suffered a long illness in summer 1501, pike were a feature of his therapeutic regime. Contemporary peasants in Upper Austria even complained that private and commercial possession of what had been open fisheries deprived them of fish they needed in times of sickness.Footnote ⁶⁹

As remarked by the Bavarian chef Eberhard, preserved fish had a bad reputation. Physicians thought them hazardous food for humans. The regimen by Thomas of Wrocław, a mid-fourteenth-century English-born and French-trained clerical physician, strongly advised fresh over brined or salted fish.Footnote ⁷⁰ Thomas thus echoed other medico-dietary writers from the influential school of Arnald of Villanova and his follower Conrad of Eichstätt, whose manuscript treatises circulated widely in central and eastern Europe. Teaching that “truly, in no way are salted fishes for eating” ultimately derived from such influential Arab physicians as the learned eleventh-century Baghdadis, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Ibn Butlan.Footnote ⁷¹ Such articulate medical laymen as sixteenth-century Swedish cleric Olaus Magnus likewise favoured the health and food value, as well as the taste, of air-dried fishes over salted ones, but ranked all preserved forms below fresh fish.Footnote ⁷²

Similar criteria also took seasonal form. Thirteenth-century physician Aldobrandin of Siena thought cold, wet fish more healthful to eat in summer than in winter, but more than 100 years later a Parisian who compiled a housekeeping manual for his young wife drew closer distinctions: round fish from the sea were better in winter and flatfish in the summer, but no marine fish were good in rainy and damp weather.Footnote ⁷³ Later advisories often specified varieties best for each month, always with much local diversity. For instance during April: St. Gallen cleric Johannes Schencklin (see Introduction) liked trout, dace, and minnow;Footnote ⁷⁴ a sixteenth-century English report on “the Seson and Seu(er)alte of all ffysses in tymes that they ben fresshe” recommended lampern and lamprey;Footnote ⁷⁵ and variant texts along the upper Rhine advised salmon (adult and parr!), dace, trout, burbot, and “The gudgeons are good in February and March and April until May. But the young gudgeons are good with parsley all the time.”Footnote ⁷⁶

For a time early Renaissance physicians and dieticians reverted to a strict reading of Galen himself. Extreme aversion to fish and dairy foods is reported to start with Marsilio Ficino’s De vita triplici of 1489 and remained fashionable into the mid-1500s.Footnote ⁷⁷ Advocates mainly repeated medieval worries about cold and watery humours, sliminess, and ‘cold’ pathologies of phlegm and respiratory inflammation, and again stressed the importance of water quality as a criterion for selecting fish to eat. But the medical consensus remained that food preparation would correct the harmful properties. Reformation debates over abstinence resulted in Protestant regimes banning fish days as a Catholic practice, but some later restored them to encourage maritime employment or mitigate meat shortages. Diet was but one consideration.

Plainly medieval ideas about food and about health so intertwined that recipes and advice are often ill-served by modern distinctions between the culinary and the medicinal.Footnote ⁷⁸ To untangle them here is moot. Nutritional assessments were certainly not uniform but the variations of time, place, and cultural background remain to be mapped out. More important is the presence of learned theory – and surely folk beliefs, too – to guide medieval Europeans in deciding which fishes were preferred food and, if natural constraints as well as access to socio-economic power allowed, in choosing what fishes they would eat.

2.3.1 Fish to Mark High Status and Honour

Several sorts of evidence and incidents suggest medieval awareness that fish on the table, indeed even certain kinds or qualities of fish, were a social marker (Figure 2.6). Much-prized sturgeon are already familiar. Early medieval Italian elites, whether warriors at a castle on Lake Como or the archbishop of Ravenna, reserved for themselves the largest species (trout, pike, and eel) or just the biggest of the day’s catch from waters they controlled. Fish eating was an acknowledged mark of elite lay and monastic status among late Anglo-Saxons. But Christianity was no prerequisite: notably large or rare specimens of mammals and fishes were offered for sacrifice and consumption at the tenth-century pagan Slavic ritual complex at Arkona on the Baltic island of Rügen.Footnote ⁸¹ Eleventh-century monk Ulrich of Cluny, who compiled that house’s sign language dictionary, interpreted the sign for salmon or sturgeon (made with the general sign for fish, an undulating hand, followed by a fist with an erect thumb on the chin) as “signifying pride, since the very proud and rich are accustomed to have such fish.”Footnote ⁸² Indeed, great prelates feasting on salmon and pike became a stock image for high medieval commentators.Footnote ⁸³

Figure 2.6 French nobles dine in luxury on fish.

An elite fish banquet as depicted in an eleventh/twelfth-century French manuscript.

Redrawn by D. Bilak for R. Hoffmann from a reproduction in Alfred Gottschalk, Histoire de l’alimentation …, vol. 1, p. 341 (Paris: Editions Hippocrate, 1948), who provides no further reference than “Festin princier sous les premiers Capétiens (d’après une miniature de l’époque).”

Lay magnates took no second place, with numerous references to sumptuous winter banquets where pike and sturgeon were served. Material corroboration might come from Boves castle in Picardy, where tenth- to thirteenth-century kitchen wastes contain both those varieties as well as eel, perch, and some trout or salmon.Footnote ⁸⁴ In that very cultural terrain romance writer Chretien de Troyes (c. 1135–1183) imagined the court of legendary King Arthur, unsurpassed for its chivalry, at a Saturday dinner of pike, perch, salmon, and trout. Probably just a few years after the literary event, the young William Marshal, gaining celebrity status as a champion on the tournament tour of northern France, earned for his prowess on one field a trophy “pike of more than two and a half feet,” which earlier that day great princes had exchanged as a token of esteem and courtesy.Footnote ⁸⁵ As a later German proverb put it, “Wildbret und Fisch gehren auf der Herren Tisch” (“Game and fish belong on the lord’s table”).Footnote ⁸⁶ From a trophic perspective in the words of Flemish archaeozooologist Anton Ervynck, castles held “the top-predators of the feudal system.”Footnote ⁸⁷

By around 1300, however, the sturgeon and other big freshwater varieties once distinctively eaten at the count’s castle in Namur had been replaced by carp, cod, haddock, whiting, plaice, and flounder, while ordinary folk in the town below were eating herring and various small freshwater fishes. This pattern predominated in late medieval northern France as well, where seigneurial establishments enjoyed fresh coastal fishes and several kinds of cods but lesser urban households just the occasional herring. In late medieval and sixteenth-century Holland rich people thought carp the best among fish from fresh water and stocked up on haddock and cod for their Lenten dining.Footnote ⁸⁸ In northern Italy, however, Lenten weddings at Piacenza followed a different festive custom keyed around fish. First on the menu came drinks and sweets, then figs and almonds, followed by a ‘large’ fish in pepper sauce. Next a spiced rice and almond milk soup with cured eel, and then fried pike in vinegar or mustard sauce, washed down with mulled wine. Nuts and fruits finished the repast.Footnote ⁸⁹

Gifts of fish were meant to honour the recipient. Back in the sixth century Avitus of Vienne commonly exchanged fishy presents with his fellow Gallo-Roman landowners.Footnote ⁹⁰ English King Henry III (1216–72) presented to bishops, barons, and courtiers the live pike and bream from his ponds at York and other manors.Footnote ⁹¹ When Charles VI visited Amiens in March 1386, the town council offered their king thirty-eight big carp, forty pike, and forty eels.Footnote ⁹² Soon thereafter the city of Kraków and its suburban municipalities were habitually giving distinctive fishes, sturgeon, pike, and salmon, to win the favour of visiting dignitaries, high officials, and their king Władysław IV Jagiełło. So likewise did Tortosa, which offered its celebrated sturgeon, shad, and lamprey from the Ebro.Footnote ⁹³ The ambitious merchant of Prato, Francesco Datini, and his astute wife Margherita sent prized sturgeon, tench, and other fishes to friends and business or political associates.Footnote ⁹⁴ A highlight at the banquet the Duke of Milan gave for his daughter Bianca’s wedding to Emperor Maximilian was the salad of pike – Milanese salads were famous – surrounded with effigies in marzipan of members of both courts.Footnote ⁹⁵

Several recent interpretive perspectives bear on the way medieval elites so eagerly and publicly devoured fish. One view emphasizes the consequent diversion of elite consumption away from the meat of domestic mammals and the product of arable lands, especially as supplies shrank towards the end of winter.Footnote ⁹⁶ Other students stress how the variety of species and preparations encouraged display of the unusual, expensive, and, therefore, almost self-signifying. For Count Robert of Artois (1250–1302) and his daughter and successor, Mahaut, serving diverse fishes from their artificial ponds was but one way they used the park Robert had built at Hesdin to show off their wealth, rank, and power.Footnote ⁹⁷ Count and countess would surely have admired the party piece chef Eberhard of Landshut later described: an entire pike, still whole, prepared in three different ways, poaching the head and middle in two different sauces while simultaneously roasting the tail. This corresponds with the mid-fourteenth-century culinary invention of entremets, elaborated dishes such as gelantines de carpe or mock sturgeon from veal, which served as diversions between regular courses.Footnote ⁹⁸

2.3.2 Scales of Value

Distinctions between ‘ordinary’ fishes and those for luxury consumption may be reflected in some of the price differentials which began to be recorded. Late twelfth-century authorities in Venice priced sturgeon, trout, turbot, and pike at three denarii per pound, another dozen varieties at two, and tench and “other fresh- and saltwater fish” at one. The king of Castile thought trout worth 25–50 percent more than barbel of the same size, and officials for the count of Flanders in 1187 valued a plaice the same as ten herring.Footnote ⁹⁹

Comparable ratios persist in later records. We already observed big fresh local fishes (pike, carp, bream, tench) during the Council of Constance at a premium of 25–30 percent over whitefish; imported preserved herring or cod cost double. In estate accounts from inland Staffordshire in 1461, pike, bream, and tench were all worth more than dried cod, and eel three times as much as plaice. Those prices were for live fish; dead ones went at a heavy discount.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Big urban markets around the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea rated salt tuna, eel, and tuna roe the most valued fish products, which also got top price from consumers on the Atlantic side of Spain in Cordoba. But the latter still offered a large premium for fresh inland fishes over marine varieties, while preserved forms of either were much cheaper. In contrast, to the north in Navarre salmon and dried conger both normally went for twice the price per pound of fresh conger or hake, while herring had an intermediate value.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Regional differences are plain, yet all local cultures placed special value on certain fishes, most often fresh specimens of large varieties. (Further in Supplement 2.3.2.)

Some preferences were plainly matters of taste and social fashion. Two deserve special mention. For one, many late medieval elites despised herring, especially in its most common preserved form, ordinarily the least expensive way to obtain culturally approved fish protein. Bishop Matthias von Rammung of Speyer left no doubt in his 1470 kitchen ordinance: “Herring shall not be considered a fish dish, [for] one can in no way make them acceptable,”Footnote ¹⁰² and his contemporaries at Westminster Abbey strongly endorsed that view, refusing all but the best fresh-smoked red herrings at the peak of their season.Footnote ¹⁰³ As agreed by commentators from Alan of Lille in the 1160s to Burgundian ducal counsellor Philippe de Mezieres in 1389 and beyond, herrings were a dish for the poor, not for kings and nobles.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In this context medieval poverty could be voluntarily ascetic – as reflected in the herring served with exclusive regularity at eleventh century Benedictine Fleury – or truly material – as dispensed to poor Parisians by the king’s almoner or purchased singly in 1440s Coventry for one-sixth the price of an eel.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ French literary imagery came to portray herring in a firmly negative light, using the phrase ‘not worth a pickled herring’ to describe an object of no value.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Finds by French and English zooarchaeologists clearly reflect this disdain in long-term trends of less herring at elite sites and increased association with middling urban and, later still, poor rural households.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Deeper inland, however, the more exotic import retained some of its cachet.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

While herring fell from fashion, at least some medieval elites actively developed a taste for carp. As early as 1300 Count Robert of Artois was presenting carp as honorific gifts. A century or so later the household of William II (1365–1417), duke in Bavaria and count in Holland, Zeeland, and Hainaut, ate during one thirty-nine-week period (including Lent) 10,757 carp, 542 pike, and a few dozen each of several other species.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Cluniac monks at La Charité sur Loire replaced their eclectic fourteenth-century diet of native local fishes with almost exclusive reliance on carp by the late fifteenth. Since 1439 Cistercians at Altenberg in the Rhineland enjoyed a special annual memorial feast which began with herring and stockfish, but continued to a dish of peppered carp, and then to a main course of roast carp and salmon.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Town notables at Tours in the 1480s gave their policemen rations of salt herring and the occasional dried hake, but themselves dined on fresh carp, pike, and lamprey. A roast carp of three to seven pounds gave mid-sixteenth-century Italian physician and autobiographer Girolamo Cardano his favourite dish.Footnote ¹¹¹ The notion that carp tasted ‘mossy’ or ‘muddy,’ though hinted by Hildegard of Bingen and grumbled by some monks at Tegernsee – whose alternative was whitefish from the Alpine lake at their doorstep – gained no widespread assent in France or Germany until quite late in the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹¹²

In sum, then, serving and eating the freshest, largest, and most elaborately prepared fish publicly asserted high social standing. For a long time a special cachet attached to sturgeon, salmon, and pike, that is, to large species from clear and cold waters, two of them diadromous in their habits.Footnote ¹¹³ Where the seacoast was accessible, big fresh cod or conger might have comparable significance. Preserved fish, also the object of physicians’ warnings, had distinct associations with poverty, whether real or culturally assumed, as by some ascetics.

2.4.1 Costly Food at Any Level

For much of the Middle Ages direct expression of the high cost of fish took the form of incidental complaints or acknowledgements. Tenth-century Anglo-Saxon monks worried over excessive luxury and their counterparts at St. Gallen griped about the high cost of fish from their own lake fishery; in the early twelfth century Abelard thought fish so dear he advised Heloise to serve them to the Paraclete convent only three times a week.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Recognition by the Tractatus cookbook of the late 1200s that fish belonged among “food for the rich” was echoed in numerous especially German literary sources.Footnote ¹¹⁷ But inland Poles reported in surprise from early twelfth-century Pomerania that “you can buy a whole cartload of herrings for a penny.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ So how did that compare to pork, beans, or porridge?

It is long difficult to move beyond anecdotal records or comparisons, but eventually both price-fixing legislation and prices actually paid establish the consistent pattern that, relative to other foodstuffs, fish were a high priced commodity on the market. The best evidence allows comparing prices by weight or what a given sum could buy at a specific time and place. Venetian market regulations in 1173 set fish between 1 and 3 denarii (d) a pound while a pound of prime beef was 2d and standard beef just over 1d.Footnote ¹¹⁹ A few human generations later in the 1260s at Rouen, Normandy, one salmon commanded half the price of a pig and much later in the 1410s, twice the price of a pig.Footnote ¹²⁰

Late medieval examples abound. While fourteenth-century popes lived at Avignon, a pound of fresh eel at 12d cost a labourer’s daily wage and three times the price of a pound of meat; the 6–8d asked for a pound of salt eel could instead buy a dozen eggs or six loaves of bread.Footnote ¹²¹ By that same century’s end in Kraków, seat of the Polish monarch, a cask (roughly 272 liters) of herring or eel at 100 local groszy (gr) was worth more than an ox (60gr) and 40 groszy could get the buyer either a salmon or a pig.Footnote ¹²² During the council at Constance 14 local pfennig bought a pound of preserved herring, and less of fresh carp, tench, or pike, but as much as 3.5 lb. of pork, 4.7 lb. of beef, or sixteen loaves of ‘good white bread.’ Meanwhile the median price in England for a fresh pickerel (small pike) or a salted cod, 8 pence, would otherwise buy thirty-two loaves of bread or 8 gallons of ale.Footnote ¹²³ And by the early 1500s in Old Castile, fresh fish in the range of 6.9–9.1 maravedis (mvd) the pound came to half again and more the price of mutton at 4.5–5.7 mvd.Footnote ¹²⁴ (See more in Supplement 2.4.1.)

Fish did not generally provide cheap calories in medieval Europe. Poor people with empty stomachs were unlikely to buy fish to fill them. When peasants, the urban poor, or even landowning families and institutions did obtain fish, they may not have used the market at all. Indeed the mechanisms which came to determine prices of fish will need study below both for their organizational forms and for their evolution from the predominantly non-market arrangements which served earlier medieval consumers of fish.

Medieval European demand for fish modulated general human metabolic needs according to characteristic medieval cultural representations and programs. Demand for a meat substitute was ubiquitous, with seasonal features arising from its ideological basis and with some selectivity regarding fish varieties. People in the earlier Middle Ages ate fishes more or less indiscriminately, though favouring the large pike, salmon, and sturgeon which lived in or migrated through fresh and estuarine waters. Some regions began around 1000 CE to alter their eating habits, so that a portion of the population eventually obtained from fish a significant share of their nutrition. By the thirteenth century effective demand, which is demand backed up by purchasing or coercive power, had clearly stratified: the wealthy wanted costly fresh fish in great variety and commonly from fresh water; the poor turned to less expensive salted or dried fishes. Fish on the market, however, were no cheap source of calories and only exceptionally of animal protein.

2.4.2 Fishing for Subsistence, Sale, or Play?

In pursuit of culturally defined purposes, medieval Europeans intentionally intervened in aquatic ecosystems, diverting through the work of fishers some portion of the natural flows of energy and materials. Fishing as an economic activity is ultimately driven by demand for fish. Efforts to meet the predominant patterns of effective demand refract through socio-economic institutions to distinguish what modern fisheries managers and historical vocabulary alike conceive as three organizational types of fisheries: subsistence, commercial, and recreational.Footnote ¹²⁵ The labels identify different relations among consumer, catch, and fisher. In a subsistence fishery most of the catch is meant for consumption by the fisher’s household and/or the household of the fisher’s superior. It is useful in studying medieval subsistence fisheries to distinguish further between fishing for the fisher’s own household consumption, here called direct subsistence, and fishing done by servants or subjects for use by a master or employer, indirect subsistence.Footnote ¹²⁶ A commercial fishery involves catching fish for market sale to the eventual consumer, whether as the household enterprise of an artisan or at larger capitalist or industrial scales. Consumer and fisher may deal directly and personally or be separated by a long chain of intermediaries. A recreational fishery may also involve consuming the catch, but its purpose is more to satisfy a need for leisure pastime than for fish to eat. Recreational fishing in medieval Europe lacked evident economic or environmental significance and thus further relevance to this discussion.Footnote ¹²⁷

Real life blurs the tidy classification when servile fishers work for a lord who makes a practice of selling much of their catch or when those who control fishing rights claim for their own tables the “best” from what the fishers carry to market. Some form of subsistence fishing was, however, the overwhelmingly predominant response to most European demand for fish in the early Middle Ages and to a still considerable part of that demand for much longer. That human work to make aquatic organisms satisfy human wants is the topic of the next chapter.