3 Take and Eat

Subsistence Fishing in and beyond the Early

Middle Ages

As peasants once told the tale along Baltic shores and in Black Sea
watersheds, God created the fishes intending to provide them the pro-
tection of many legs, defensive weapons, or a habitat high in the trees like
birds. The foolish fishes refused, trusting, said some, in their slippery
speed, and, said others, in the watery depths.1 God conceded but at a
price: If the men catch me alive, so also shall they scrape my scales off
alive, cut me up alive, and cook me.2 Popular wisdom running back
plausibly, if unprovably, into the Middle Ages grasped an essential old
relationship between humans and fish, capture of local populations for
prompt consumption as food.
This chapter first establishes that the fishes early medieval Europeans
ate came from their own neighbouring waters. The same would remain
true for at least some of their descendants. The peasant majority them-
selves fished to supplement cereal diets with whatever aquatic foods they
had the time, opportunity, and ability to catch. They valued their access
to common resources. Sometimes ordinary peasants and, more import-
antly, a few select individuals almost everywhere also laboured to set fish
before their lords, wealthy men and women of rank and power in the
area. Regardless whether the actual fish-catchers or their social superiors
topped the local food web, from the beginning medieval subsistence
fisheries relied on small-scale, often passive, capture techniques well
suited to limited and seasonally accessible local resources. Technical
expertise derived from the long experience of ordinary people in
their local environment. Simple means of preservation extended the
use people made of recurring surpluses. Social and technical features of

1
Birds and fish were created on the same day. Learned medieval authors observed that fish
were quick and slippery like the water where they lived (Glass, “In principio”; Zahlten,
Creatio Mundi, 187–191). Peasants concurred.
2
Dähnhardt ed., Natursagen, 3:178–179, provides four variants from Romania and what
was then “West Prussia.” Another tale from the Upper Palatinate said fish were butchered
alive because they had played merrily in the water while Christ hung on the cross (ibid.,
2:226).

89

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 90 The Catch

subsistence fisheries tended to stabilize their effect on participant com-

munities, human and natural.

3.1 Local Supply

Medieval Europeans exploited the fish populations of all nearby waters,
no matter how small. Indeed, fish from local resources predominated
through much of the Middle Ages and remained significant past the
period’s end. Essential to understanding of medieval fisheries is the sheer
ubiquity of this activity and, especially in the early Middle Ages, of its
economic role.
Surfacing all over the written record of charters, cartularies, and estate
surveys, for all its fragmentary and unrepresentative quality, are words
like piscatio, piscatoria, piscatura, or piscaria, terms of legal art and regional
but rarely wider precision for “fishing right,” “fishing place,” “fisheries
installation,” or the financial returns from the same.3 Other texts just
mention weirs, fishers, or renders of fish. Early medieval Europeans had
no speedy overland transport and few ways to preserve fast-spoiling fish
or to acquire them in trade. Most people lived away from the sea and so
had to rely mainly on inland, rather than even coastal marine resources.
When the most elaborate preindustrial shipping facilities, commercial
infrastructures, and strong government support could during the
thirteenth–eighteenth centuries just barely get fresh fish in an edible state
the 150 kilometers from the Norman coast to Paris, medieval Europe’s
richest concentration of consumers (see below, Chapter 4, pp. ***–***),
that distance can be thought an effective limit for any regular movement
of fresh fish (Map 3.1). For most of Europe, then, regular fish eating
would mean using local freshwater or diadromous varieties.

3
In a “technical index” Perrin, Seigneurie rurale, attempted precise and abstract legal
definitions, though these lacked clear consistency even in his texts from ninth- to
twelfth-century Lorraine and plainly failed to encompass the usages in, for instance, the
English Domesday survey of 1086 (Darby, Domesday England, 279–286). Squatriti, Water
and Society, 104–105, and Lampen, Fischerei und Fischhandel, 29–32, encountered
comparable ambiguities. In common medieval use such words derived from pisc- (and
vernacular equivalents) normally marked an activity and not the type of water in which it
was practiced. On the other hand the Latin term piscina, nominally ‘fishpond’, could, as
thirteenth-century scholar Bartholomeus Anglicus acutely remarked, denote at times
“gathering of waters without fish, … contrary to meaning, as Isidore says” (Trevisa tr.,
On the Properties of Things, ed. Seymour, 1:661–662). Legal and technical particulars are
explored below and in future chapters; the point here is the widespread presence of what
were recognized as fisheries resources.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 91

Map 3.1 A 150-kilometer range for delivery of fresh marine fish.

The result is manifest in specific remains recovered from human food

waste and in verbal records of the fishes which identifiable human groups
ate or meant to eat. At sixth- through eleventh-century socio-natural sites
across Europe people of all ranks consumed animals naturally present in
waters near them and not exotic varieties from other ecosystems.
There are collective overviews. Meta-analysis of published results from
sixty-five medieval Baltic sites and forty-five on the North Sea identified
local fish fauna as the principal feature of sixth- through twelfth-century
assemblages.4 Similar review of finds from a score of eighth/ninth- through
thirteenth-century settlements in present-day Austria and Hungary reveals
ubiquitous dominance of four taxa, sturgeons, catfish, carp, and pike, all
common to still and running waters of the Danube system from the Alps
and Carpathians to the Iron Gates. Among the several thousand identified
medieval fish remains in this composite sample, a single herring bone was
the sole trace of a fish from elsewhere.5 An archaeological survey of early

4
Enghoff, “Fishing in the Baltic,” and “Fishing in the southern North Sea.” Lõugas,
“Fishing and fish trade,” emphasizes entirely native fresh and brackish-water species
throughout Viking and early medieval times at even coastal sites from Sweden to Estonia.
5
Galik et al., “Austrian and Hungarian Danube.” The gross pattern is as true of the mainly
sieved Austrian sites as of the unsieved ones from Hungary, but closer examination notes
the migratory beluga sturgeon upstream into Austrian waters, while the resident sterlet
was being consumed only below the Danube’s inland delta. Austrian sites, moreover,

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 92 The Catch

medieval coastal communities along both sides of the southern North Sea
and English Channel found them full of locally caught inshore varieties,
notably small gadids, flatfishes, eel, and herring.6
Findings from particular sites varied with ecological circumstances,
as early medieval people used their own regionally distinctive aquatic
communities. Select examples show this irrespective of date, watersheds,
and consumers’ status (more cases are in Supplement 3.1).
Near the centre of Merovingian Frankland, the founding generation of
eighth-century aristocratic nuns at Saint Irminen convent in Trier left in
their garbage almost a thousand identifiable fish bones from eight taxa,
just over a half of them cyprinids, one in five catfish, and one in twenty
each pike or salmonids. Small numbers of perch, eel, and shad confirm
the whole assemblage, freshwater and diadromous alike, came from the
Moselle. Marine species were not to be found.7
At ninth-century San Vincenzo al Volturno, equidistant between Rome,
Naples, the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian seas, Benedictine monks did
consume mullets, sea bass, and some sea bream from Adriatic lagoons,
yet 78 percent of the fish bone in their trash was tench and other cyprinids
from the limited fresh waters of central Italy.8 The whole reflected a
general post-Roman shift of Italian fish consumption from marine to
inland and inshore varieties.9
Eighth- to tenth-century high-status Anglo-Saxons resident at
Flixborough in the floodplain of the river Trent about eight kilometers
inland from the Humber estuary may have shifted between secular and
monastic foodways, but little varied the fishes they ate. The twenty-eight
taxa identified from this wet-sieved site were dominated by only seven,
all freshwater or diadromous: eel, smelt, flounder/plaice, pike, small

contain remains of cold- and/or faster-water fishes such as salmonids, perch, and
rheophilic cyprinids which are absent from the waters of the Pannonian plain. The
same exclusively local consumption pattern prevailed further down the Danube at the
southern frontier of the medieval Hungarian kingdom, an area not included in the
composite study (Bartosiewicz, “Pontes”).
6
Loveluck, Northwest Europe, 186, 193, 198–200, 202, 207, 211, 250–252, and works there
cited. Holmes, Animals in Saxon and Scandinavian England, 47–52, saw only local
freshwater and inshore species at all types of early and middle Saxon sites.
7
Heinrich, “Fischresten aus St. Irminen.”
8
Marazzi and Carannante, “Dal mare ai monti.”
9
Montanari, Culture of Food, 28–29; Donati, “Dal mare al fiume,” 26–27; and Squatriti,
Water and Society, 102–105, concur that an early medieval (sixth–tenth-century)
preference for freshwater fishes differed from Roman times, with the latter offering
several cultural as well as security reasons for the shift. Relying more on recent
archaeozoological evidence Salvadori, “La pesca nel Medioevo,” 300–303, and Varano
et al., “The edge of the Empire,” agree.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 93

cyprinids, and salmonids were all readily accessible in nearby waters.

Even the incidental species conform to the norm of local use.10
Food remains from late Saxon (tenth–eleventh-century) London show
an evolving but similar pattern: of twenty-eight taxa identified in more
than four thousand bones from a half-dozen separate sites, nine were
freshwater, five diadromous, and fourteen marine organisms, notably
herring, but most of the bones came from eel and all varieties frequented
the Thames river, estuary, and inshore coastal waters. The rise in English
marine fish consumption around 1000, dubbed by zooarchaeologist
James Barrett the “Fish Event Horizon,”11 there meant mainly an
increase in herring, followed by a slow rise in local cod from the southern
North Sea.12
Research on the Viking Age (eighth- to mid-eleventh-century)
entrepôt Haithabu/Hedeby, on the Baltic estuary of the Schlei but with
easy access to the North Sea, recovered and identified 13,842 fish bones.
These included twenty-six varieties, but 39 percent were herring,
25 percent perch, and 11 percent each pike and native cyprinids (roach,
rudd, tench, bream). Only a few thinly represented taxa were not then
available in and near the Schlei, being brought, perhaps by visitors, from
the North Sea.13
Like dwellers beside Baltic waters those who lived scores of kilometers
inland at sites now well excavated with rich early medieval fish remains
consumed the occasional herring but mainly relied on stocks native to
their own estuaries, rivers, and lakes. Sieved contexts from the eighth to
tenth centuries at the princely stronghold of Ostrów Lednicki midway
between Gniezno and Poznań contain 30–57 percent bones of sturgeon,

10
Dobney et al., Flixborough, 36–58 and 199–212. Sykes, Norman Conquest, 56–58, finds
early–mid Anglo-Saxons generally to have eaten a lot of eel, salmon, pike, and small flat
fishes, with major consumption of herring postdating the mid-ninthth century.
11
Barrett et al, “‘Dark Age economics’ revisited.” Sykes, Norman Conquest, 56–58, points
out that rise in English consumption of marine fish initially accompanied an increase in
freshwater varieties as well, trends which neither began nor changed with arrival of
the Normans.
12
Locker, “Middle Saxon” and “Peabody Site,” 150: “These results confirm a general
picture for the Middle Saxon period, both at this site and others in the Lundenwic
settlement, that the fish consumed were largely the result of local fishing in the
Thames, with some exploitation of inshore marine waters, but no deep-sea fishing of
any sort.” Orton et al., “Fish for the city”; and Orton et al., “Fish for London,” 207,
further refine the mass of data from London.
13
Lepiksaar and Heinrich, Fischresten aus Haithabu, 119–120. For similar proportions in
later finds from the harbour, see Schmölcke and Heinrich, “Tierknochen aus dem
Hafen,” 220–233.

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 94 The Catch

followed by tench, pike, and cyprinids from local waters.14 While estuar-
ine and river sites in this region favoured sturgeon and pike-perch, people
on lakes from interior Wielkopolska west to the Grosse Ploner See in east
Holstein ate more perch, pike, and catfish, species of lentic habitats.15
Returning to the post-Carolingian west, the oldest fish remains
recovered from the Scheldt basin in Flanders are from emerging urban
ninth/tenth-century Ghent (review Fig. 2.2). More than 90 percent are
species taken in fresh water and the few marine species primarily coastal
flatfishes. During the ensuing two centuries the share of flatfishes more
than doubled and that of herring – also then taken along Flemish beaches –
rose to 20, then 30 percent. Up to 1200, other marine varieties totalled less
than 10 percent. Meanwhile fish from fresh water dwindled proportion-
ately, though still contributing more than four remains in ten.16
About the year 1000 a community of what modern researchers have
called ‘peasant knights’ settled on a shoreline shelf beside Lake Paladru
in the Isère valley some way north of Grenoble. Two generations later
rising waters inundated the site, driving the settlers to higher ground and
leaving their farmsteads to be studied by modern submarine archaeolo-
gists. Besides fishing gear (see Figure 3.1) they recovered 421 identifiable
fish bones and more than 8,000 scales. Ninety-five percent of the bones
were perch and just under 4 percent still-water cyprinids, with bare traces
of pike and a salmonid. Ninety percent of the scales, however, were
cyprinid, suggesting different taphonomies and thus original handling
of the two principal taxa. All species taken and consumed by the settlers
still inhabit the lake.17
This brief tour might end with the written record of late eleventh-
century Cluniac monks in Burgundy and the Black Forest. Ulrich of
Cluny’s initial 1079 dictionary of their sign language named six taxa, five
of them native to the Rhône and upper Loire (some fifty kilometers
away); the only exotic was cuttlefish. A few years later William of
Hirsau, who carried Cluny’s reforms to his community east of the
Rhine, reworked Ulrich’s list and raised the number of fishes to fifteen:

14
Makowiecki, Hodowla oraz użytkowanie, 40–41. Similar finds at contemporary through
mid-twelfth-century Szczecin are summarized in Rulewicz, Rybołówstwo Gdańska,
72–88.
15
Requate, “Jagdtier in den Nahrungssytem”; Kaj, “Szczątki rybne,” 74–75; Iwaszkiewicz,
“Szczątki ryb,” 306. General discussion in Makowiecki, “Early medieval aquatic
environments in Poland.”
16
Neer and Ervynck, “Rise of sea fish,” 159–161.
17
Colardelle and Verdel, eds., Les habitants du Lac, 116–120, and their more popular
Chevaliers-Paysans, 38–40. Fish remains were analyzed by Jean Desse and Natalie Desse-
Berset. Note the trophic pyramid from cyprinids to carnivorous perch capped by
predatory trout and pike.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 95

Figure 3.1 Eleventh-century fishing equipment from Lac Paladru.

Gear recovered from the settlement of ‘peasant knights’ included (left
column) floats (top) and weights (bottom) for nets; a bronze hook, c.
3 cm (centre), and two iron fish spears (right). Selections from a
photograph in Colardelle and Verdel, Les Habitants, 320, of a museum
display at the site. Redrawn for R. Hoffmann by D. Bilak.

now thirteen were migrants or residents in the upper Rhine watershed

and six of the additions cyprinids from there; the only non-natives were
Ulrich’s original squid and herring, conceived as salted.18
Commonality of diversity has been the point of the past few pages. For
the first half and more of the medieval millennium peoples of Latin
Christendom ate a great variety of fishes, but in each location from the
more limited biota of their own nearby natural aquatic ecosystems.
Fresh, brackish, or salt, still or flowing, warm or cold habitats made no
detectable difference to consumers. Rich people and poor alike ate the
familiar fishes of neighbouring waters. Well into the high Middle Ages
residents in even large urban centers still relied on these local sources of
supply. In most localities that meant native freshwater varieties and
elsewhere those available as residents or migrants from estuaries and
nearshore marine waters. How were these food resources procured?
For a long time mainly by efforts of consumers or their servants.

3.2 Direct Subsistence Fishing

Consumers can cover their own demand without a market. Economic
actors assess their wants and direct the natural resources, land, and

18
Ulrich, “Consuetudines Cluniacensis,” lib. 2, c. 4, in Jarecki, Signa loquendi, 122–124
(translated in Bruce, Silence and Sign, 177–178); William’s Constitutiones Hirsaugienses,
lib. 1, c. 8, in Jarecki, Signa loquendi, 165–168.

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 96 The Catch

labour at their command to satisfying them. In that case the catching and
the eating went to the same economic account. Such self-sufficiency
nevertheless still involves implicit choices allocating scarce productive
factors to one priority or another. People of unequal wealth (access to
productive factors) also have different patterns of effective demand, for
those who more easily obtain basic food and shelter can turn surplus
energies at their command to other kinds of wants. Rich or poor, fully
self-sufficient consumers must be generalist producers to obtain the
variety of goods and services they need.
Early medieval society may usefully be thought to comprise two socio-
economic orders, the powerful and the poor. Direct subsistence is an
affair of the latter, people whose economic capabilities depended on the
working capacity of simple family households. Most of them we can call
peasants, for they lived from their own mixed farming and in some kind
of subordination to people of power who, with or without some cover of
legality, regularly seized a share of the peasants’ productive capacity.
Direct subsistence fishing was one part of a survival strategy for people
trying to meet basic needs from the relatively meager human and material
resources they controlled. Later in the Middle Ages rural- or town-
dwellers with other occupations but access to aquatic resources also
occasionally covered their own demand for fish. Like most activities of
ordinary folk in early medieval society, direct subsistence fishing rarely
attracted the eyes or pens of literate groups. As a result, while early
sources establish the prevalence of subsistence fishing, only later texts
convey more of its technical particulars and organizational context.

3.2.1 Fishing “for Their Own Table”

People plainly catching their own food and eating their own catch none-
theless appear surprisingly often in the sparse and cryptic early medieval
record. Incidental references in the seventh century Life of sixth-century
St. Columba depict a peasant farmer who used a spear and Irish ascetics
who operated nets and traps to take salmon to eat. Gall’s fishing in Lake
Constance (see Introduction) followed that template.19 So, independ-
ently, did his younger contemporary Sigiramnus (St. Cyran, Siran,
d.655), who fished to feed his monasteries in the river-laced “wasteland
of Brenne” (in saltu Brionae). When monks complained that Sigiramnus
was too able a fisher, “for one became nauseous from eating them every
day,” the saint departed to live as a solitary and so feed himself and those

19
Adomnan, Life of Columba, ed. Anderson, 364–366, 413–415, and 534; Krusch, ed.,
“Vita Galli,” 289–294 and 365–367 (Joynt tr., 72–81 and 103–105).

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 97

who took him in.20 On the other side of the Alps early tenth-century
tenants on at least two estates of St. Giulia, Brescia, paid dues from both
farming and fishing; the operator of a layman’s property near Ferrara
could keep one-fifth of his take in fish and game.21 Perhaps those hold-
ings resembled what excavators found at the Thames-side village of
Wraysbury, Berkshire, where most farmsteads held fish bones, notably
of eel but also resident freshwater species plainly taken from the river. Far
to the east at Drohiczyn on the Bug, peasant houses, dated like those at
Wraysbury to the ninth–twelfth centuries, also held scattered remains of
locally procured fish and, one, an iron fish hook.22 By that time fishing
was also recognizably a seasonal secondary occupation of farmers
and pastoralists in Bohemia, Norway, Iceland, and coastal lagoons of
Languedoc and Tuscany.23
More forthcoming later records often treat peasant fishing for house-
hold use as a normal activity. This was certainly the case when the
administratively precocious Teutonic Order of crusading knights estab-
lished control in once-pagan Prussia. The charter they issued for
Chełmno in 1233 became the prototype for the rights of their subjects:
each household could catch its own fish by any means except the great
seine net called niewod. After generations had followed those provisions,
Grand Master Conrad von Jungingen specified in 1406 that the right
meant fishing with “small gear” such as hand-held nets, baited hooks,
and basket traps, and even with weirs and fish-fences which did not fully
block streams, “but not otherwise than for their table.”24 Catching the
very essence of direct subsistence, the phrase “for their table” in a
1342 customal had also described how established peasant tenants could

20
“… acsi piscator peritus de amne ad litus extraens pisces, non solum ad eorum supplendam,
necessitudinem caperet, verum ad nausicam cotidie comedentibus usque deferret” (Krusch, ed.
“Vita Sigiramni,” cap. 15 and 19–22). Benarrous, Grande Brenne, 318–329 and
338–342, deploys written, charcoal, and palynological evidence to show early medieval
Brenne was covered by woods and meadows drained by many streams but lacked its later
famous wetlands and ponds. Monks at eighth-century Stavelot fished the Meuse for food
(Miracula S. Remacli, 3:23–24 in Acta sanctorum, Sept., I, p. 701).
21
Castagnetti ed., Inventari altomedievali, 60–61 and 64–65.
22
Coy, “Fish bones”; Iwaszkiewicz, “Szczątki ryb w Drohiczynie.”
23
Graus, Dĕjiny venkovského lidu, vol. 1:97–98; Ebel, “Fischerei und Fischereimethoden,”
and works there cited; Perdikaris and McGovern, “Codfish and kings,” 199–203;
Bourin-Derrau et al., “Littoral languedocien,” 382–387; Garzella, “In silva Tumuli e in
Stagno,” 145–147.
24
“kleyne gheczow, … yo nicht anders wen cz irme tissche,” Benecke, “Beiträge zur
Geschichte,” 307, with selected earlier grants on 301–305 and later at 308. Willam,
“Fischerei des Deutschen Ordens,” 78–85 and 95, and Kisch, Fischereirecht, 160–168.

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 98 The Catch

fish at Alrewas, Staffordshire.25 Back in the mid-eleventh century, a man

of the abbey of Marmoutier in Berry passed the ordeal of hot iron to
vindicate abbey subjects’ right freely to fish for their own use on waters
claimed by the seigneur of Château-Renault; only fish taken for sale need
pay a seigneurial tax.26 Holders of tenements beside the lake of Monte
Sorbo, Lazio, could fish if they turned half the catch over to their lord. An
Alsatian rental from about 1160 allowed only local villagers, subjects of
Bouzonville abbey, to fish at Offwiler and Obermodern.27
Peasants fishing legitimately for domestic consumption remain visible
in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century records from Iberia to the
Carpathians.28 In the Vercors, Haut Dauphiné, a 1449 charter confirmed
the free fishing which inhabitants of four villages had long enjoyed: those
seeking their own food were unregulated but those who sold fish had to
pay for an annual licence.29 Along the meandering rivers of the late
medieval Hungarian plain, fishing was a peasant by-occupation. As water
levels dropped each summer, village communities joined to block the fok,
narrow channels cut between oxbow lakes and the main river, and while
releasing small fish to grow, held the large ones for local consumption.30
The Portuguese Cortes recognized river fisheries as open commons,
which in practice meant nominal dues to the crown. Subsistence fishing
there was associated with the cooler seasons and fish taken by angling
were exempt from tithe.31 All these common folk plainly had access to
fisheries resources.

3.2.2 Mutual Regulation and Local Ecological Knowledge

To a modern viewer medieval fishing for direct subsistence is often
obscure. It neither much engaged relations between lords – whose own
dealings created records of property rights and political obligation – nor
passed through markets where traders and tax-collectors could count it.
It was rather an object of long-unwritten custom which in fact if less often
in law recognized commoners’ access to fishing waters for the needs of
their households. In the unlettered medieval countryside the old and

25
Dyer, Standards of Living, 157. Thirteenth-century tenants on Eden and Derwent
estuaries had common rights to fish (Winchester, Landscape and Society, 111).
26
Querrien, “Pêche et consommation … en Berry,” 432–433.
27
Vendittelli, “Diritti ed impianti di pesca,” 427–428; Perrin, Seigneurie rurale, 728–729.
28
LeRoy Ladurie, Peasants of Languedoc, 18; Ambros, “Zvieracie zvyšky”; Beck, Eaux en
Bourgogne, 232–233.
29
Sclafert, Le Haut-Dauphiné, 145–146.
30
Mákkai, “Economic landscapes,” 28–31; Zatykó, “Fishing in medieval Hungary,”
402–404; Rácz, Steppe to Europe, 56–58 and 185.
31
da Cruz Coelho, “A pesca fluvial,” 81–84 and 89–95.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 99

customary called for no documentation.32 Later urban and territorial

administrations were more apt to call attention to these uses if only, as
in Piedmonte, by exempting subsistence fishers from the licences and
regulations they imposed on commercial fishing. Fifteenth-century
Venetian authorities publicly proclaimed the fishery of Lake Garda “to
be common to all.”33 Statutes of the Perugia fishers’ guild from 1296 had
simply conceded that locals caught fish which did not enter the market.34
When people sensed limits to the resource and wanted to protect it,
common access to direct subsistence fisheries in no way prevented
mutual regulation. The council of newly formed Villa de Mar (now
Saintes-Marie-de-la Mer) on the Rhone estuary’s Petit Camargue in
1307 consulted the citizens before allowing conditional use of a new type
of net in the salt ponds, marshes, and channels under town control. In
1341 they agreed with the archbishop of Arles to close all fishing during
the spring spawning run.35 Lake Garda’s fishery for lake trout and
cyprinids was closely regulated “to establish the common benefit and
the multiple abundance of the aforesaid fishes.”36
Through ubiquity and persistence the direct subsistence fishery shaped
and transmitted dietary, technical, and environmental knowledge in peas-
ant society. Irish archaeologist Aidan O’Sullivan has made a strong case
that the families who built and rebuilt, sometimes since even long before
the Middle Ages, the hundreds of riverine and estuarine fish weirs still
detectable around the British Isles “passed down lore of place and practice
through the generations.”37 Fish spears collected from country people in
early twentieth-century Pomerania go back in design and markings to
early medieval prototypes. In England, Spain, and the German-speaking
Alps the oldest known instructions for making and using fishing baits and
basket traps come directly from the medieval vernacular.38 French
rural culture drew a plain distinction between indigenous freshwater

32
Birrell, “Common rights”; Cahn, Recht der Binnenfischerei, 61–70; Montanari,
L’alimentazione contadini, 280–282.
33
“ut piscatio in dicto lacu esset comunis omnibus,” Butturini, “La pesca sur lago di Garda,”
147–149; Nada Patrone, Il cibo, 320–324.
34
Scialoja, Statuta et ordinamento, 863.
35
Amargier, “Pêche en Petite Camargue,” 334–336 and 338.
36
“ad comune beneficium et copiam piscium praedictorum multiplicem conditum fuisse,”
Butturini, “La pesca sur lago di Garda,” 147–149. On Hungarian peasant practices
see: p. 98 above.
37
O’Sullivan, “Place, memory and identity,” 463. See also ibid., 451 and 461, with
emphasis on transmission of learning gained through work in the natural world. For
labour on such weirs see pp. 104–105 below.
38
Nowakowski, “Rybackie narzędzia kolne”; Hoffmann, Fishers’ Craft, and “Haslinger
Breviary fishing tract.”

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 100 The Catch

organisms, known and used by generations of peasants, and the cultivated

fish of intensively managed artificial ponds.39
Chance survivals from scraps of oral folklore reflect dense empirical
familiarity with local ecosystems. Those who handled many pike knew
the complex markings on the creature’s head: legends from France and
Brabant, Swabia and Austria, Elbe Slavs and Prussians associated the
shapes with the instruments of Christ’s Passion; Latvians saw in them the
fisher’s own tackle.40 Coast dwellers from Pomerania to Flanders and
Scotland shared tales explaining the twisted mouth of flatfish (plaice,
sole, flounder) from its sneering complaint after losing a swimming race
to determine the king of the fishes. In the nearly fresh eastern Baltic the
pike was the envied winner and elsewhere the more marine herring.41
Even long before the folklore collectors, some popular knowledge of
fish anatomy, behaviour, and seasonal life cycles had at the very end of
the Middle Ages already precipitated from oral vernaculars into surviving
written texts. While Chapter 2 observed popular views of dietary value,
late medieval vernaculars also marked behavioural and physiological
features of fish species. One folk compendium from the upper Rhine
valley connected food preference to spawning seasons: “Bream and nose
are good in February and March [just before they spawn] and at their
best when the willows are dripping wet.” Another likened the predatory
pike to a robber, living by what he grabs; the nose is a scribe carrying his
own ink [a black swim bladder]. Collectively both texts accurately catalog
riverine fish communities in the upper Rhine and not elsewhere.42 An
independent English tract gives spawning times and occasional biological
comments for twenty-six freshwater and inshore marine organisms then
living in southern Britain.43 None of that came from learned or scientific
texts. Written records were for people without experience.
Ordinary people possessed unwritten traditional ecological knowledge
shaped by generations of catching and eating their own fish from nearby

39
Bertrand, “Pour une histoire écologique,” 66–68. But why have we recovered no
instructional texts from France?
40
Dähnhardt, ed., Natursagen, 2:226–227 and 3:491.
41
Ibid., 4:192–196. The herring’s royal rank was in places contested by the ribbonfish or
giant oarfish (Regaleus glene), a 3–8 m monster with a red crest on its head that
occasionally appears among the plankton-eating schools (Heinrich, “Information about
fish,” 18–19, and Jagow, “Hering im Volksglaube,” 220–221).
42
Hoffmann, Fishers’ Craft, 32–33 and 92–97, treats and reproduces the versions printed in
1493 but connects them to older and more recent analogs handled in Schultze, “Ein
mittelaterlicher Fischkenner,” and “Ein Strassburger Handschrift”; Wickersheimer,
“Zur spätmittelalterlichen Fischdiätetik,” 412–414; and Gessner, Historia animalium,
vol. 4, pp. 26, 594, 705–706, and 1206.
43
BL MS Additional 25238, fol. 56r–v.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 101

aquatic environments. For most Europeans in the early Middle Ages and
later still especially for the rural poor, those were the only fish they ate.
Direct subsistence fishing is the historical background and sociocultural
context for all other fisheries in medieval Europe. Cryptic early medieval
signs of its presence are fleshed out from later records of practice.

3.2.3 Defending Fisheries Commons

But there was a catch. In an ironic twist, the genuine “tragedy” of the
medieval commons was piecemeal loss to private interests of common
access to many fisheries.44 Like other customals written down in the later
Middle Ages for many south German villages, the one from Kitzbühel in
Tirol confined peasant fishing to but a few days a year and to angling or a
hand net. At Stams they were forbidden any use of the local brook.45
Chapter 6 below returns to the context, motives, and environmental
ramifications of such privatization. Salient now is peasant response,
which should signal their concern for the fishing. In fact, European
peasants long and bitterly resisted what they saw as lords’ usurpation of
their own proper use of local waters.
Collective and violent action against landlord control over fisheries
reverberates across medieval centuries. Popular resistance to the early
medieval trend of Italian inland fisheries to exclusive private rights is
especially visible in the good Carolingian records from around 800.
Subjects of Duke Guinichis of Spoleto assaulted the piscaria of Farfa
abbey, “and they tore the nets of the monastery and took the fish and beat
its men,” while a generation later groups of fishers near Reggio Emilia
and Piacenza went unsuccessfully to court against claims by Nonantula
and San Fiorenzo abbeys, in both cases failing for lack of documentary
proof. Royal officials could themselves suppress common rights, as men
of Istria complained of their own duke’s behaviour “in the truly public
sea, where all the people fished commonly, [so] now we scarcely dare to
fish, for they [duke’s men] beat us with sticks and cut our nets.”46 The
source closest to a revolt of Norman peasants c. 1000, William of

44
Not, of course, a problem peculiar to fisheries commons (see Hoffmann, Environmental
History, 247–263).
45
Stolz, Geschichtskunde der Gewässer, 366; Lindner, Deutsche Jagdtraktate, 146. Cahn,
Recht der Binnenfischerei, 61–70, clarifies the important distinction between access (use)
and legal ownership of fishing rights.
46
Detailed discussion and documentation in Squatriti, Water and Society, 111–113.

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 102 The Catch

Jumièges, writing about 1070, emphasized their demands for traditional

access to waters and woodland.47
Among the richest expressions of this sentiment came at the close of
the Middle Ages in events now understood as presaging the German
Peasants’ War. An agitator at Niklashausen in Franconia, where the
Tauber enters the Main, called in 1476 for common possession of all
fish and game,48 and restive villagers in 1502 at Untergrombach, a
Neckar valley lordship of the bishop of Speyer, would revoke all private
rights over woods and waters “so that each countryman could hunt and
fish, where or when he wished, without interference or prohibition at any
time or place whatsoever.”49 A programmatic statement the peasant
army at Memmingen issued in March 1525 argued that to stop common-
ers taking fish from running waters violated the Creator’s grant to all
mankind of power over beasts on the land, fowl of the air, and fish in the
water. Christian charity would let everyone fish.50 By late April ideas had
become deeds. To rebel against the lord of Schleiz villagers from
Liebengrün and Lubeschitz, Thuringia, smashed the equipment of his
private fishers and themselves waded into the river Saale to catch and eat
a salmon. The whole community of Neustadt on the Orla, a Saale
tributary, twice paraded with pipes and drums to go fishing and returned
with the booty for a public feast.51
Local reactions best show how loss of access hit home and those could
occur far from the famous general revolts. Altzelle abbey received fishing
rights and lordship over the Mulde at Roßwein from the Markgraf of
Meissen in 1293 and refused access to members of the community. This
the people opposed for ninety years before a court decision let them fish
from the town fields every Monday and Friday morning and any time the
river flooded.52 Not all were so patient. On Sunday 25 February 1408, a
few days before the start of Lent, a half-dozen named men from the isle of
Mersea, Essex, invaded the fishery called Seward’s flats (“Sywardesflete”)

47
Van Houts, ed.,“Gesta Normannorum ducum,” vol. II, pp. 8–9 (William lib. 5, cap. 2).
Dating and authorship are in vol. I, pp. 3–7 and 82–94. Further discussed in Arnoux,
“Classe agricole,” 45–58, and Gowen, “996 and all that.”
48
Franz, ed., Quellen, 66. The authoritative study is Heimpel, “Fischerei und
Bauernkrieg.”
49
“ut cuique rustico liceret venari atque piscari, ubi et quando voluerit, sine impedimento vel
prohibitione cuiuscunque omni tempore et loco” (Franz, ed., Quellen, 76). Complaints by
Styrian rebels in 1515 remained pragmatic: landowners’ tighter control over fisheries had
harmed the well-being of tenants and commoners (Benecke, Maximilian, 76).
50
Franz, ed., Quellen, 177; Heimpel, “Fischerei und Bauernkrieg,” 354. Like attitudes in
Upper Austria are in Zauner, “Die Beschwerden,”114–115.
51
Heimpel, “Fischerei und Bauernkrieg,” 367–368.
52
Beyer, Cistercienser-Stift Alt-Zelle, 25, 418–420, and 569.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 103

of Bartholomew Bourgcher, knight, and there took fish and forty quarters
of oysters; before the court they asserted this was in tidal waters and thus
“from times beyond memory … all lieges of the lord king had common
fishery there.”53 In 1490 rebellious subjects of the abbey of St. Gallen –
more than a half-millennium removed from that original hermit’s hut –
ripped out the weirs and traps with which their lords obtained the fish
prohibited to them.54
The long history of overt struggle against loss of access itself confirms
that medieval peasants continued to value fishing as a way to supplement
their usual foodstuffs. The same conclusion may be drawn from the
many widely but still rarely documented incidents of illegal individual
use of local fisheries resources, which is to say poaching of fish.
A lawyer’s model dated from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth
century of pleas for an English manorial court envisioned a poor peasant
swearing
how I went the other evening along the bank of this pond and looked at the fish
which were playing in the water, so beautiful and so bright, and for the great
desire I had for a tench I laid me down on the bank and just with my hands quite
simply, and without any other device, I caught that tench and carried it off; and
now I will tell thee the cause of my covetousness and my desire. My dear wife had
lain abed a right full month, as my neighbours who are here know, and she could
never eat or drink anything to her liking, and for the great desire she had to eat a
tench I went to the bank of the pond to take just one tench; and that never other
fish from the pond did I take.55
Premeditation or sudden inspiration? An experienced steward might
have some doubts, for tench are dark-coloured bottom dwellers with
notably slimy skin, hard to spot or to grab. Thirteenth-century abbots
with monopoly fishing rights on the then Gulf of Arras, in an oxbow of
the Marne near Meaux, and to L. Bientina beside Lucca all struggled
with local poachers.56 Big visible fish like pike or spawning salmonids
could be speared or netted: a Prussian peasant caught spearing pike in
the Teutonic Knights’ waters in 1453 sparked a political crisis when his

53
London TNA Plea Rolls (KB 27/588 (Pasche 9H4) m 44 Essex (with thanks to Stuart
Jenks and Suzanne Jenks).
54
Müller, ed., Rechtsquellen, 272–273.
55
Maitland and Baildon, eds., Court Baron, 54–55. An earlier item from the same text (pp.
37–38) suggests this defendant already had a record for poaching fish. Ibid., 75, has
another model precedent from a tract written at Oxford in the 1270s/80s, and actual
cases from a Cambridgeshire court of the bishop of Ely dating from 1316 to 1318 (note
peak famine time!) are on pp. 122–124. Bennett, Life on the English Manor, 270, cites
more cases elsewhere.
56
Coopland, Abbey of St. Bertin, 59; Endrès, “Un vivier naturel”; Onori, L’abbazia di San
Salvatore, appendix p. 14 (a pledge exacted from three illegal fishers).

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 104 The Catch

landlord broke him out of jail.57 In some present-day situations prag-

matic poaching is part of a continuum, with destructive exploitation and
even attacks on the resource itself following local alienation due to loss of
subsistence access.58 Might some unusually articulate set of late medi-
eval judicial and financial records reveal the same response from dispos-
sessed peasants?

3.3 Indirect Subsistence Fishing

Medieval elites did not work. Work was for common people. The power
of demand joined to the power of command over resources and men
produced indirect subsistence fishing. Fish on the tables of the powerful
came by effort of the poor, whether they worked as occasional forced
labourers, as part-time servile specialists, or as full-time estate servants.
The predominant means of satisfying elite wants in the early Middle
Ages, concerted fishing by subordinates of great lay and clerical house-
holds, persisted in some circumstances into much later times.

3.3.1 Obligated Peasant Workers

Even the comparatively skimpy sources of the first millennium occasion-
ally reveal peasants obliged to regular or seasonal work in their lord’s
fishery. Prüm abbey in Luxembourg listed among its properties in
893 two fish weirs on the Moselle and three on the middle Rhine.
Tenants on the Prüm estate had to maintain and operate those instal-
lations. Besides agricultural work and produce a fellow named Eurihc
(sic) from Mötsch owed for this purpose a hundred poles like those for
fences and a day’s labour at the weir. Free tenements at Rheingönheim
(now overrun by Ludwigshafen) provided some posts for a weir and had
to transport two salmon to the abbey 150 kilometers away.59 Eurihc’s
Anglo-Saxon contemporaries at Bewdley, Worcestershire, had likewise
to “make a hedge to capture fish.”60 Tenants on several mid-tenth-
century properties which the bishop of Verona had along the Po owed

57
Burleigh, Prussian Society, 98–99, skips some of the report in Berlin PKB, OBA 11871,
but the case has clear parallels elsewhere. See Supplement 3.2.3.
58
Jacoby, “Class and environmental history.” The mass of known medieval fishing
violations better conform to this model, including its form of public destructive
protest, than to the elite feuds which Manning, Hunters and Poachers, found in hunting
crimes of Tudor–Stuart England.
59
Schwab ed., Prümer Urbar, 182 and 250–255. Two other Rhine villages owed stakes but
not carrying service.
60
Salisbury, “Primitive British fishweirs,” 76–77.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 105

“week work in the fishery” (opera ebdomada … in piscatione), some of

them alternating between that and the hay meadows and others paired off
with neighbours who did the latter job.61
In certain settings elite exaction from ordinary farming households of
prototypically servile payments in kind and in work for the lord’s fish
lasted into the central and even later Middle Ages, though not always
without challenge. Folk living on the Ile d’Aix off the mouth of the
Charente owed the castellan of Chatelaillon a one-third share of their
take in fish and seabirds.62 Forced labour in the fishery helped spark a
1440 revolt against Ermland’s cathedral chapter, whose claims even
noble arbitrators found too harsh.63 But in 1453 the steward at
Żarnowiec convent in Royal Prussia assigned specific peasants to fish
Lake Dobre under supervision of expert fishers, and in Westfalia those
waters which Marienfeld abbey had not leased out were harvested by
labourers whom the fisheries manager had conscripted from seven servile
farms.64

3.3.2 The Lord’s Expert Servants

So far this chapter has seen part-time, occasional, at most seasonal,
fishing by people recognized as agriculturalists or with some other occu-
pation. The last two examples, however, identified some fifteenth-
century individuals as ‘fishers’. In fact, specialists whose sole or principal
productive work was in the fishery were present throughout the Middle
Ages. The fisher Tatwine so well knew the miry Lincolnshire fens that he
could lead pious and fearful Guthlac (d.714) to a secluded hermitage.
Skilled household servants built the fish trap saintly Hubert, second
bishop of Tongres-Maastricht, wanted in the Meuse.65 Before the end
of the eighth century, Charlemagne was warning his stewards to be sure
there were able fishers and net makers on the royal estates.66 In 832 his
son Louis had thirty-two families of fishers on the Weser alone.67 Until
about 1000 these artisans were occupied primarily with indirect
subsistence fishing.

61
Castagnetti, ed, Inventari altomedievali, 102–108.
62
Forquin, “Le temps de la croissance,” 393.
63
Burleigh, Prussian Society, 22–24 and sources there cited.
64
Dąbrowski, Rozwój wielkiej własności, 87; Vahrenhold, Kloster Marienfeld, 129.
65
Colgrave, ed., Felix’s Life, 87–88; Vita Hugberti, c. 8 (MGH, SrM, 6, 487–488).
66
“bonos habeat artifices, id est … piscatores, … retiores, qui retia facere bene sciant, tam ad
venandum quam ad piscandum sive ad aves capiendum.” (Cap. de villis, §45, Boretius, ed.,
Capitularia, #32).
67
Cahn, Recht der Binnenfischerei, 92.

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 106 The Catch

Non-agricultural specialists posed a problem for the early medieval

economy. Time is needed to develop skills and knowledge, to prepare
equipment, and to do the work. But preoccupied specialists had little time
to get cereals, fibers, and shelter for themselves. Markets allow exchange of
specialized products – metal, pottery, even fish – for basic consumables but
neither surplus everyday items nor an exchange of them were then depend-
ably available. People of power, whose wealth left something over after mere
survival, offered the only significant source of effective demand for most
specialized output. Medieval elites and their unusually skilled subordinates
worked out in practice a mix of ways to support specialists. From the
consumers’ point of view they could either take certain specialized products
as dues from selected otherwise generally self-supporting dependent house-
holds or they could themselves provide direct support to specialists who
exercised skills for them. At one extreme bird-catchers or leather-tanners,
even warriors, could live from an endowed peasant farmstead and work
part-time on their specialty for the lord; at the other end of the spectrum a
goldsmith or potter might be kept as a servant in the lord’s household and/
or receive a stipend in kind or cash to procure his own food. Like other rare
non-agricultural specialist producers then, fishers worked for lords as obli-
gated part-timers or as full-time professional servants or employees.
Whatever mix of land, goods, or salary sustained them, specialist fishers
earned their keep by supplying their catch to the lord who employed them.
Reasons why medievals organized any given indirect subsistence fish-
ery in a particular way are almost never known to us. The outcomes of
such choices and accommodations are merely uncommon. Demand
structures and distribution of the resource look to have played off against
regional habits of economic organization.
During and after the Carolingian age most Italian church corporations
with well-documented fisheries associated their exploitation with certain
dependent tenures from which the lord claimed a share or, more often, a
fixed quantity of the fish taken. In 813 Nonantola abbey received half the
catch of everyone who fished the river Mincio in the county of Mantua.68
Monasteries with estates in the lake district used them for fish: ten of
S. Giulia of Brescia’s fifty-eight tenements at one place on Lake Iseo
payed 1,200 fish a year; Bobbio’s property on Lake Garda yielded trout
and eel.69 Further down the peninsula in the marshy Rieti basin servile

68
Mira, La pesca nel medioevo, 5.
69
Castagnetti ed., Inventari altomedievali, 57–65 and 138. Squatriti, Water and Society, 115,
points out that some of these catches were surplus to the lords’ needs and sold either by
them or by fishers who had then to pay dues in cash. Chapter 4 below discusses further
this ragged transition to commercialized arrangements.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 107

fishers attached to domainal units of Farfa abbey paid dues in kind. The
bishop of Lucca received fish weekly from at least two nearby tenants and
semi-annually from a more distant one.70 Monks and bishops thus left
operation of the fishery to local experts.
Some lords and fishers in France had similar arrangements. In the
early 950s Benedictine monks at Homblières in Vermandois received
from a local magnate a property on the Somme at Frise some thirty-five
kilometers away for the sake of the fish it could supply. At least one
tenement there was later paying a hundred eel each Christmas.71 Troarn
abbey in coastal Normandy then also had one fisher whose tenure
required him to provide a set quantity of fish from his use of nets in the
sea.72 Up to the 1020s a lay landowning family owned a hereditary serf
who fished the Rhône not far from Lyon.73
Meanwhile other fishers worked directly as servants of their lords. As
early as the sixth century, according to Gregory of Tours, Nicetius,
bishop of Trier (c. 535–566), who needed a gift for his king, called upon
his men to get fish. When told a flood had broken their trap he sent his
reluctant servants anyway and they found a wondrously great catch.74
Local fishers supplied ninth-century monks at San Vincenzo al Volturno
with their steady diet of cyprinids, but what their chronicler called
“fishers and sites for taking fish” (piscatori, et aras ad pisces prendendos)
on Adriatic lagoons provided inshore marine varieties.75 Around 1060/
70 servants of the priory of St.-Marcel-lés-Chalon, across the Saône from
the count’s town, violently smashed the boats of fishers from Chalon
whom they accused of fishing illegally.76 Abbey servants (famuli monas-
terii) at Fleury were accustomed to fish in the main channel of the Loire
and, unused to miracles, resisted St. Odo’s advice to try elsewhere.77

70
Toubert, Structures du Latium, 475, 607, and 672, considered fishers the epitome of such
servile specialists; Sardi, Le Contrattazione agrarie, 96–101; Venditelli, “Diretti,”
477–478.
71
“pro commoditate piscium eidem ecclesiae” in Evergates, ed., Cartulary of Homblières, 41–43,
with further references to that fishery at 43–45, 74–75, 95–104, 116–120, and 230–231.
72
Hocquet, “La pêche,” 105.
73
Bernard, Cartulaire de Savigny, 2:669–670. Déléage, La vie économique, 164–166, found
such arrangements the norm in tenth–eleventh-century Burgundy.
74
Gregory of Tours, Liber vitae patrum, XVII, 4 (Lives and Miracles, ed. Nie, 250–251).
75
Marazzi and Carannante, “Dal mare ai monti,” 111–113.
76
Bouchard, ed., Cartulary of St.-Marcel, doc. 12, pp. 36–37. In all likelihood the abbey
fishers themselves operated the 36 m wooden weir found there by archaeologists and
14
C-dated to the early eleventh century with repairs into the thirteenth (Bonnamour,
“Pêche en Saône”).
77
John of Salerno, Vita Odonis 3:11 (PL 133, cols. 82–83). The eleventh-century vita of
Abbot Maiolus of Cluny (c. 909–994) likewise credited the saint’s powers with capture of
a unexpected salmon on behalf of a disciple (Vita brevior sancti Maioli, cap. 23).

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 108 The Catch

When St. Anselm needed a fish dinner, a Norman monk conveyed his
instructions to a fisherman who then netted the biggest trout he had seen
in twenty years’ experience on that river.78 Just as the risen Christ rightly
instructed Peter and other disciples to cast their nets on the other side of
the boat (John 21:3), spiritually gifted holy men had a reputation for
confounding fishers whose knowledge was merely practical.
Large resources in subalpine lakes early excited special attention. Two
noble brothers from the Sundgau reportedly had prior knowledge of the
Tegernsee fishery before founding an abbey there in the 740s.79
Monastic settlement on Mondsee dates to the same period. A century
later Mondsee abbey and its ecclesiastical superior, the archbishop of
Salzburg, heard testimony from an experienced local inhabitant,
Heribald, about the fisheries of the Wolfgangsee (then called Abersee)
in the Salzkammergut. He reported that abbey, archbishop, and local
castellan each ran fishing boats there, but only the first two could legally
take the lake trout during their fall run and the “albuli pisces” (probably
cyprinids) which ran in the spring.80 Such arrangements continued for
more than a half-millennium. Since the 1490s – and earlier records
simply do not survive – abbey and archbishop each paid and outfitted
full-time fishers in ten and five boats respectively.81
A 1023 inventory by Tegernsee cellarer Gotahalm reveals the tackle
such fishers could deploy. Alongside tools for other crafts, he counted
thirty-four basket traps, seventeen nets of various kinds, winding reels,
ropes, lines, and six fishing boats in use by abbey fishers.82 For the next
three centuries and more Tegernsee abbey, with exclusive rights to fish
on the entire lake and its feeder streams, itself equipped fishers who
worked under direct supervision but also claimed large numbers of
whitefish as dues from designated subject tenures. After thorough

78
Eadmer, Life of Anselm, 26–27. A later example of the generic topos had St. Richard of
Chichester (1197–1253, canonized 1262) direct failed fishers for the archbishop of
Canterbury to a fine catch from the river Ouse at Lewes, Sussex (Salzman, “Sussex
Miracles,” 71–72).
79
Passio Quirini §15, Krusch ed. (MGH, SrM, 3:12); compare Weißensteiner, Tegernsee,
13–14. Bowlus, Franks, Moravians, and Magyars, 78, remarks on the attraction of
mountain fisheries to eighth-century Franks and Bavarians.
80
Salzburger Urkundenbuch, 1:907–908 and 914–915; Sonnlechner, “New units of
production,” 32–33.
81
Linz OÖLA Stiftsarchiv Mondsee: Akten Bd. 406, Bd. 407 nr. 1, and Bd. 411, nr. 11;
Handschriften Bd. 282. But a Mondsee rental from 1547 to 1560 (OÖLA Stiftsarchiv
Mondsee: Handschriften Bd. 86) also still shows peasant tenures obliged to pay rents
in fish.
82
Munich BSB Clm 18181, a Latin text with German glosses, was dismembered for
publication in Steinmeyer and Sievers, eds., Die althochdeutschen Glossen, 3:657 and
4:562–563.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 109

religious and administrative reform in 1427 the monastery abandoned

individual payments of fish and firmed up or enlarged its cadre of
permanent servants. From 1443 until secularization in 1803 Tegernsee
employed a team of six, seven, and eventually eight or nine full-time
fishermen on annual and continuing contract with sole license to exploit
the lake. For annual stipends in cash and kind, men from lakeside
families worked in crews of two or three with the abbey’s gear, some of
which they were paid extra to construct, and turned all of their catch over
to the master cook.83
Like monastic houses on alpine lakes, other corporate owners of highly
productive fisheries long retained direct exploitation through their own
servants and subjects. Even at the Venetian epicentre of the commercial
economy, account books of the 1460s from San Giorgio in Alga show the
canons meeting routine fish needs from their own capture and storage
facilities in the lagoon and turning to the market only for Lenten treats of
mackerel from the open sea.84 At the same time institutionalized relicts
of compulsory tenant fishing were supplying Scottish Cistercians at
Coupar-Angus with scores, even hundreds, of fresh salmon from the
river Tay.85
Fisheries were an important element in the organization of services
required by princes in early medieval east central Europe. As patriarchal
states were there created during the ninth through eleventh centuries,
skilled servitors – falconers, smiths, cooks, etc. – were designated to
supply the castle towns where the ruler lived. Along rivers in Great
Poland, Mazovia, and Pomerania traces of settlements providing fishers’
service are fairly common. They housed unfree ducal servants, tied to the
nearby castle, exempt from normal public obligations, and allotted
enough farmland to support their fishing for the prince. Many of those
people now known entered the historical record only as the ruler trans-
ferred them to private, especially ecclesiastical, ownership during the
twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.86 By perhaps surprisingly naming
those individuals many such charters fleetingly lend personal identity to

83
Hoffmann, “Craft of fishing Alpine lakes,” and Hoffmann, “Fishers in late medieval
rural society,” treat fishing in fifteenth–sixteenth-century Tegernsee from technical and
socio-economic perspectives. Fleeting glimpses of earlier conditions occur in Munich
BHSA KL Teg 1; KL Teg 3, fols. 9r–12r; KL Teg 4, pp. 36–37 and 41–50; and KL
Teg 94.
84
Faugeron, Nourrir la ville, 740–748. More on the heavily capitalized Venetian valli di
pesca is in Chapter 4 below.
85
Rogers, ed., Rental Book of Cupar-Angus, items 20, 42, 299, 319 et passim in vol. I,
pp. 118–318, with detailed discussion in Hoffmann, “Salmo salar,” 360–361; Hoffmann
and Ross, “This belongs to us!” 462–463; and Hodgson, “To the abbottis profeit.”
86
Górzyski, Zarys historii rybołówstwa, 14–24.

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 110 The Catch

otherwise anonymous fishers. In a typical instance from 1210 the duke of

Kalisz endowed a new Cistercian house at Przemet: “These are the
names of the peasants we gave them … In Domnik: Radoch, Swiątosz,
Plewna, Nudasza, each of whom ought to give 12 fish of the length of a
forearm three days a week, and further three jars of honey a year; Nowosz
and Radzlaw with their sons should fish every day. … In Dłużyn: Zwan,
who ought to fish every day …”87 More abstractly, place names formed
with the Slavic root rybitw (‘fishers’) also identify service groups. Old-
settled Pannonian Slavs provided enough of a model for the fishing
service organized by conquering Hungarians that the Magyar place name
ribar (‘fishers’) occurs only at those communities. Royal dependants still
fished the Danube in central Hungary in the 1320s.88
Institutions to supply fish to princely courts in central Europe differed
from those further west chiefly in administrative particulars and in a few
centuries’ time lag, which may have produced sources with greater
human detail. Quite analogous structures had been anticipated in
Charlemagne’s 794/5 instructions to estate managers. They echoed still
in the eleventh century at the Italian royal palace in Pavia, where dues on
commercial fishers recalled a time when as many as sixty boats brought
fish from the Po to a resident king.89 A 1220 survey of royal estates in
northern Portugal identified twenty-one of thirty lordships where some
or all tenants owed fishing service; the most general obligations occurred
at inland riverine sites.90 Absent dependable markets supplying fish,
large secular households had to make their own arrangements.
Even in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century west the same kinds of
people continued to fish local waters for elite masters or employers.
Cluny, with more than 400 monks by around 1100 and always many
visitors, served fish on Sundays, Thursdays, and many holidays. Ulrich’s
customal describes the storage tanks along the river Grosne where the
cellarer went each evening to supervise selection and preparation. Some

87
“Hec vero sunt nomina rusticorum quos eis dedimus: … in Dominiz: Radoch, Zvantos, Plefna,
Nudassa, quorum quilibet tribus diebus in ebdomada XIIcim pisces ad longitudinem ulne dare
debet et insuper tres urnas mellis annuatim; Novos et Radzlaws cum filiis cotitidie (sic) devent
piscari; … in Dyznik: Zvan qui cotidie debet piscari; …” (Zakrzewski and Piekosiński, eds.,
CdMP, Nr. 66). Duke Henry of Silesia’s gift to Trzebnica convent of named and
obligated fishers at Kotowice in 1202–1204 is recorded in Appelt and Irgang, eds.,
SUB, nos. 83 and 93.
88
Györffy, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 36–39 and 76–92; Bartosiewicz, Animals in the Urban
Landscape, 65.
89
Capitulary de villis, arts. 21, 44, 45, 62, and 65 (Boretius ed., Capitularia, #32); Brühl
and Violante, eds., “Honorantie Civitatis Papiae,” 20–23 and 60–61; Squatriti, Water
and Society, 97.
90
da Cruz Coelho, “A pesca fluvial,” 81–84.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 111

fish came by purchase or special gift, but a fragmentary survey of Cluny’s

incomes from 1155 noted important resources on at least three estates in
the region: at Beaumont, where the Grosne entered the Saône, seven
fishers with “the office of fishing” (officium piscandi) each owed a
“bundle” or “string” (cordata) of fish five times a year; some fisheries at
Arpayé on the Saône paid a half or a third of the catch from mid-
November to late April and another a “bundle” of fish each week; those
at Montberthoud on the edge of the Dombes had been let to go dere-
lict.91 Across the Channel knight Robert de Ros had the right in perpetu-
ity to send two boats of fishers from his household to Alemar, Yorkshire,
whenever he was in that county. Simon ‘the Fisherman’, who had been
serving the count of Leicester for an annual stipend since at least 1259,
led the men who fished on the count’s behalf during the last two weeks of
Lent 1265.92
Full-time fishers under a lord’s direct authority could meet the continual
need of elite households for fish to eat. Workers in indirect subsistence
fisheries shared the low social standing of their peasant neighbours or fellow
servants, but gained special expertise in exploiting a non-agricultural
resource in inland or coastal waters. In certain well-documented situations
these arrangements persisted into early modern times. More often and by
means the next chapter will trace, they likely provided the structural oppor-
tunity and initial human resources for the small-scale commercial fishing
and trade in fish which had begun by the eleventh and twelfth centuries to
emerge in parts of western Christendom. But for a much longer time
medieval Europe’s direct and indirect subsistence fishers also shared char-
acteristic techniques and gear.

3.4 Compatible Technologies

Careful historians rightly resist the urge to read better-known methods of
late medieval commercial fishers back into earlier centuries and concen-
trate instead on what verbal sources and excavation reports actually show

91
Ulrich, “Consuetudines,” lib. 3, c. 18 (Migne PL, vol. 149, cols. 760–762); Bernard and
Bruel, Recueil des chartes, nr. 4143 and 4132 note (the count of Boulogne’s gift of 20,000
herrings a year); Zimmermann, Ordensleben, 60–61 and 260–262; Bruce, Silence and
Sign, 81–82. Evans, Monastic Life, 71–73, is unaware of the difference between artificial
fish culture (not visible at Cluny) and the capture, storage, and use of wild fish.
Organized exploitation of wild stocks also fed large monastic communities at twelfth-
century Reichenau (Rösener, Grundherrschaft im Wandel, 226–227) and thirteenth-
century Prüm (Schwab, ed., Prümer Urbar, 181, 194–195, 232–233, and 244).
92
Lancaster, ed., Chartulary of Fountains, 2:831; Turner, ed., Manners and Household
Expenses, 16 and 39; Woolgar, Great Households, 121.

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 112 The Catch

of subsistence fisheries during and after the early Middle Ages.93 That
record presents techniques of catching and processing fish which were
compatible with the needs of local consumers and the abilities of local
producers. Both had adapted to their environments and available fish
species. These methods formed the technological basis for medieval
relations with aquatic ecosystems and, of course, for subsequent
developments.94

3.4.1 Small Gears for Household Use

The simplest small-scale methods required little technology but consid-
erable environmental knowledge and skill. Capturing fish with the bare
hands – like the English poacher heard pleading his case95 – often also
entailed substances meant to incapacitate fish en masse without
impairing their use as food.
Poisons and explosives are traditionally associated with clandestine
fishing. Classical authors had known several herbs with piscicidal prop-
erties. More recent ethnography describes whole communities – often
especially women and children – using these methods in, for instance, the
traditional Balkans. Regardless of the active ingredient, piscicides work
best when low and warm summer streams concentrate fish in quiet
pools.96 Among medieval sources, the mid-eleventh-century fairy tale
Ruodlieb, a work of Bavarian provenance, provides a full literary descrip-
tion of fishing with powered extract of Anchusa officinalis (Common
Alkanet, called ‘Ochsenzunge’ and ‘Buglossa’). It is the first record of a
poison later widely mentioned in Latin and German manuscripts.97 Use
for this purpose of ‘taxus’ (yew, Taxus spp., or Great Mullein, Verbascum
thapsus, called ‘tassus’) was banned by Frederick II in his Sicilian

93
Particular examples in what follows are from what look like subsistence, not
artisanal, fisheries.
94
The more extensive inventory of capture techniques found in Hoffmann, “Medieval
fishing,” 343–372, needs little significant revision.
95
Instructions for manual capture are given in Salzburg Universitätsbibliothek Codex
M III 3 [a collection of medical tracts and recipes dated 1439], fol. 291v, and limited
use of the technique was allowed in fifteenth-century village customals (Weistümer)
from Lower Austrian lordships of Anspang, Gutenstein, and Neusiedel Weidmannsfeld
(references to Winter, ed., Niederösterreiche Weistümer, vol. I, pp. 19, 356, and 364,
thanks to Jaritz and Winiwarter, eds., Historische Umweltdatenbank, nos. 77, 146, and
147.)
96
Zaunick, “Fischerei-Tollköder”; Gunda, “Fish poisoning.”
97
Ruodlieb, ed. Haug and Vollman, Fragment II, ll. 1–26 and Fragment X, ll. 1–58;
Zaunick, “Fischerei-Tollköder,” 634–663; Hoffmann, Fishers’ Craft, 44, 87, 171, and
notes. In the Ruodlieb passage, one of the few to describe rather than just ban use of a
piscicide, all of the fish are collected and consumed.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 113

“Constitutions of Melfi” (1231), and then by a long run of Italian and

Spanish laws.98 The oldest references to poisoning fish with caustic
quicklime also go back to thirteenth-century Italy, while subsequent
fish-catching manuals and other evidence confirm this practice else-
where.99 Well before the end of the Middle Ages western Europeans
further knew how to use that substance to detonate a stunning under-
water blast.100 Then about 1500 European popular cultures acquired a
deadly piscicide of East Indian botanical origin, Animirta cocculus [indi-
cus], which quickly replaced indigenous herbal agents.101 These normally
illegal techniques killed many fish indiscriminately.
As quiet as poison and in the right circumstances as lethally productive
was the most primitive fishing technology, the spear. Multi-pronged, often
barbed, fish spears (leisters) of varying design and type are well known
archeologically and in medieval representations.102 Two iron ones were
found at the eleventh-century village site on Lac Paladru in Dauphiné
(Figure 3.1). Indeed a thirteenth-century French poet thought fish spears
common in peasant households, and tenants in the Aveyron did use them
for lamprey each spring.103 Elsewhere spearing eel was commonly accept-
able but less so salmon or pike. The right to spear salmon was assured in
thirteenth-century charters along tributaries of the upper Rhine but night
spearing forbidden as a poacher’s trick on the Traun in 1418.104
If legal doubts shadowed the spear and piscicides, a consensus acknow-
ledged widely acceptable household tackle. About 1060 Sigebert of
Gembloux hailed in verse Nature’s blessings on Metz and turned to its

98
Liber Augustalis, lib. 3, cap. 72 (tr. Powell, 144); Balletto, Genova nel duecento, 188 (a
1274 contract to fish with “erba que vocatur tassus”); Abad Garcia and Peribáñez Otero,
“Pesca fluvial,” 163–164. For illicit later use of piscicides and explosives in
Mediterranean coastal fisheries, see Faget, “Le poison et la poudre,” and Garrido
Escobar, “Anar al petardo.”
99
Crescenzi, Ruralia commoda, 10:30 (ed. Richter, vol. 3, p. 209); Zdekauer, Statutum
Pistorii, 131. Compare Trexler, “Measures against water pollution,” and Sznura,
“Veleni e ‘nobilissimi pesci’,” 271–279. Florentines suspected clerics to be
common offenders.
100
Quicklime sealed with primitive gunpowder into a slowly leaking jar heats in water to set
off an explosion and shock wave. Hoffmann, Fishers’ Craft, 64, 87, and 103–104.
101
Ibid., 323 and 329–330. Further records of use appear in Cocula-Vaillieres, Un fleuve et
des hommes,133–134.
102
Heinrich, “Fischerei und Fischereimethoden,” 132–133; Steane and Foreman,
“Medieval fishing tackle,” 140; Kraskovska, “K otázke lovu,” 151; Wundsch,
“Aalspeere.”
103
Colardelle and Verdel, Les Habitants, 320; Nyström, Poèmes français, 57; Boscus, “Le
fief des Malhols,” 257–258. Crescenzi, Ruralia commoda, 10:30 (ed. Richter, vol. 3,
208–210) also describes use of the leister.
104
Amacher, Zürcher Fischerei, 71; Scheiber, Zur Geschichte der Fischerei, 152. See also
pp. 95–95, 99, and 103 above.

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 114 The Catch

Moselle, where “I fish with the hook, you with a basket, he with nets.”105
Legal, not literary, aims in 1406 moved the Prussian grand master to define
the small gear for household fishing “to be hand nets, scoop nets, gill nets,
dip nets, cast hook, basket traps, catch nets, and the like.”106 Across
medieval Europe hooks, traps, and nets in one or two fishers’ hands were
recognized as the norm for feeding a domestic group.
As today, fishing with hook and line came quickly to medieval minds
(see Figure 3.2). About 1180 the subsequently reputed philosopher of
love, Andrew the Chaplain (Andreas Capellanus), cribbed from Isidore
of Seville to derive amor from the word for hook, [h]amus, and explained
that “just as a skilful fisherman tries to attract fishes by his bait and to
capture them on his crooked hook,” the lover lures a person to his union
of hearts.107 The baited hook was a stock literary conceit and visual
representation of fishing, but clichés lack technical or socio-economic
context. Hooking techniques show many special adaptations in the
Middle Ages.108
Fish hooks themselves came straight or curved (Figure 3.3, also
Fig. 3.1 middle). The straight hook or gorge is a double-pointed cylinder
bound to the line at its midpoint and concealed in a bait. After a fish
swallows the bait a pull on the line jams the gorge across its throat.
Predator species such as pike, pike-perch, cod, or catfish gulp their prey
whole and are well suited for gorge fishing. Wood, horn, and bone gorges
three to ten centimeters long have been recovered from, for instance,
ninth- through twelfth-century strata at Wolin on the Polish coast.109
Curved hooks have a relatively straight shank or shaft, a bend, and a
point, which may or may not be barbed. A curved hook is attached
opposite the bend by binding the line behind an enlarged area or knotting
the line through a hole or loop (eye) in the hook material. Medieval
European fish hooks survive in wood, iron, and bronze; less durable
materials may also have been used. The bronze hooks from Lac

105
“Hamis piscor ego, tu vimine, retibus ille.” Sigebert, “Vita … Deodorici,” MGH, SS,
4:477–479, l. 92. A more elaborate literary inventory of small-scale equipment is in
Supplement 3.4.1.
106
“Wyr halden vor kleyne gheczow. handwate. stoknetze. klebenetze. hame. worfangil. rewse.
Wenczer. [compare Middle High German vencvach, ‘catch net’] und semelichen.”
(Benecke, “Beiträge zur Geschichte,” 307).
107
Andreas Capellanus, De amore, I:3 (ed. Trojel, p. 9; Art of Love, tr. Parry, 31).
108
Hurum, History of the Fish Hook, is too untidy for incautious use on medieval topics, but
see regional discussions in Steane and Foreman, “Medieval fishing tackle,” 142–148;
Steane and Foreman, “Archaeology,” 90–91; Lampen, Fischerei und Fischhandel,
101–103; and Abad Garcia and Peribáñez Otero, “Pesca fluvial,” 162–163.
109
Rulewicz, Rybołówstwo Gdańska, 98; for English examples see Steane and Foreman,
“Medieval fishing tackle,” 142.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 115

Figure 3.2 St. Peter angling with rod, line, and hook from a tenth-
century Anglo-Saxon manuscript.
Matthew 17: 24–27 specifies that Peter was to cast out his hook (Lat.
hamum) to catch the fish, although other representations of the apostles
fishing are with a net. Malibu, California, J. Paul Getty Museum, 85 ms
79, fol. 2r. Getty Museum open content.

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 116 The Catch

Figure 3.3 Medieval fish hooks, straight and curved (predating 1100).
Representative selections of straight (left) and curved (centre) hooks in
wood and bronze and an artificial lure, bronze, c. 8.5 cm (centre) from
Wolin and (right column) of hooks from Great Yarmouth (top) and
London (bottom). Selections from illustrations in Rulewicz,
Rybołówstwo Gdańska, pp. 98, 112–113, and 129, and in Steane and
Foreman, “Medieval fishing tackle,” p. 147, redrawn for R. Hoffmann
by D. Bilak.

Paladru (Fig. 3.1) measure only 2.2–3.5 cm shank length. Other speci-
mens from especially coastal locations (Fig. 3.3) run larger: 5–6 cm
wooden hooks from tenth-century Wolin; iron and bronze hooks of
about 5–7 cm from eleventh–twelfth-century Szczecin and Great
Yarmouth.110 What served for trout or plaice would not for pike or
cod. No actual fishing lines survive, though bits of hemp and other twine
occur in some sites and use of braided horsehair lines by inland anglers is
well documented by the fifteenth century. A hand line mounted on
prototypical wooden winding frame was good enough for Norse god
Thor – as pictured on a tenth-century carved stone from the Anglo-
Saxon church at Gosforth, Cumbria.111 Poor fishers from the French
shore of the Channel used single-hooked hand lines in the 1100s.112 Set
lines anchored to shoreline features or a thrown stone and carrying many

110
Colardelle and Verdel, Les Habitants, 208; Górzyński, Zarys historii rybołówstwa, 37;
Heindel, “Tordierte Haken”; Schmidt, ed., Leips, fig. 34; Rulewicz, Rybołówstwo
Gdańska, 99–130; and Steane and Foreman, “Medieval fishing tackle,” 146–147.
111
Wheeler and Jones, Fishes, 171; Kmieciński, “Spręt rybacki,” had the same design from
twelfth-century Gdańsk.
112
Hocquet, “Les pêcheries médiévales,” 75–76. So too, thought one twelfth-century
artist, did a person fishing in the moat of Hartmannsberg Castle near Salzburg
(Noichl, Codex Falkensteinensis, Tafel VIII, Abb. 3).

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 117

hooks could be a legitimate or poacher’s method. Fishing poles

shown incidentally in many early and high medieval illuminations are
shorter than the people. Purposeful late medieval illustrations of
fishing more often have poles equal to or much longer than the height
of the people, which generally corresponds with advice in contemporary
how-to manuals.113 Reels were unknown in Europe before the seven-
teenth century.
Practical fishing manuals would recommend selecting baits for the
fishes sought, the waters, and the season. Earlier, the seventh–tenth-
century Byzantine estate manual Geoponika had recommended natural
organisms and also baits concocted from animal and plant materials. In
the thirteenth century men from Cotum, Yorkshire, gathered baits from
tidal Guisborough Sands.114 Artificial lures like the fish-shaped wobblers
or jigs of lead, tin, or bronze recovered from early medieval sites in
Poland attracted pike, pike-perch, or inshore cod (Figure 3.3 centre).115
Literary allusions to feathered hooks begin with the thirteenth century
and later these simulated insects were plainly part of small-scale fisheries
in the Alps, England, and Spain.116
Anglers await a fish biting the hook, and trapping gear likewise
depends on a fish voluntarily entering a device which holds it until
removed by the fisher. Some important passive technologies were easily
operated by individuals. As ubiquitious as hooks and lines in medieval
Europe were portable traps or pots, called variously retia, retz, Reussen,
netz, weels, charpagne, verveaux, hoop nets, batrón, armadijo, or the like
(Figure 3.4, also Figures 3.7 and 3.8 below). Funneled openings on
rounded baskets, bags, or cones of wicker, rushes, framed netting, or
other materials allowed entry but no easy exit. Some types relied on a

113
Hoffmann, Fishers’ Craft, 125 et passim and contemporary illustrations in Emperor
Maximilian’s Tiroler Fischereibuch, fols. 3v, 12r, and 26r, and his Weisskunig, fol. 169v
(Musper, ed., plate 43), as well as Jacopo da Bassano’s 1538 triptych of San Zeno in the
parish church of Borso del Grappa near Treviso (Masseini, “Fly fishing in early
Renaissance Italy?”). Peter’s long pole in Figure 3.2 is exceptionally early, while the
frontispiece of Wynkyn de Worde’s 1496 printing of the English Treatyse in the Second
Boke of St Albans shows a rod no longer than the angler, which was by then surely not
usual practice. Artists have different licence than fishers.
114
Geoponika, 20:1–3, 10, 12, 14 (Beckh, ed., 1895, 511–522, and Dalby, tr. 339–348);
Lancaster, ed., Chartulary of Fountains, 1:306, a charter dating about 1229.
Bartholomeus Anglicus, Bk. 18, c. 115, suggested earthworms (Trevisa, tr.,
2:1264–1265).
115
Rulewicz Rybołówstwo Gdańska, figs. 21, 25, and 26. The lure shown in Fig. 3.3 is
8.5 cm long.
116
Hoffmann, Fishers’ Craft, 126. Subsequent discovery of precise recipes for artificial flies
and other baits in an Austrian codex from the 1450s is reported in Hoffmann,
“Haslinger Breviary.” The artificial fly was not a medieval invention, Roman author
Aelian having described its use in third-century Macedonia.

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 118 The Catch

Figure 3.4 Remains of a wicker fish trap (‘pot gear’). Photograph and
permission provided by Dr. Anton Ervynck, Flemish Heritage Agency.

narrow neck, others a one-way entrance of sharp inward-pointing rods.117

Just after 1300 Bolognese agricultural expert Pietro de Crescenzi distin-
guished a wide form for fish attracted by an enclosed bait and a narrow one
for varieties trying to hide.118 In the British Isles distinctive funneled weels,
kidells, or putts – good archeological remains of medieval date have been
recovered from the lower Trent – were set to catch salmon or eel as they
tried to pass up or down through openings in weirs.119 Choice of design
and location depended on the fisher’s knowledge of his quarry’s habits.

117
Brinkhuizen, “Some notes on fishing gear,” 38–50.
118
Crescentiis, Ruralia commoda, 10:28 (ed. Richter, 3:204–207): “… sed duarum formarum
fiunt, una forma est, quod sit interius multum ampla rotunda, in cuius fundo ponitur creta
mollis & grana ei annexa, atque intrant quaedam genera piscium causa cibi, & exinde exire
nesciunt. Alia forma est tota stricta & longa sed in introitu mediocriter aperta, & in medio
ualde stricta, deinde lata, & in cauda strictissima, in quam intrant non causa cibi, sed ut ibi
occulte moretur, nec de ipsa sicut de prima exire sciunt.”
119
Steane and Foreman, “Medieval fishing tackle,” 170–178; Salisbury, “Primitive British
fishweirs”; Jenkins, “Trapping of salmon”; Carville, “Economic activities”; Winchester,
Landscape and Society, 108–110; Cooper and Ripper, “Fishing and managing.”

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 119

Early medieval records highlight the basket traps of lords’ and land-
owners’ indirect subsistence fisheries. Germanic law codes protected this
form of property.120 Eleventh-century Tegernsee abbey possessed thirty-
four of them and twelfth-century subjects of Reichenau had to deliver
cartloads of willow rods to make reussen and stakes to anchor them.121
Later sources confirm peasants using pots both as a legitimate customary
means of exploiting commons in, for instance, thirteenth–fourteenth-
century Lorraine or early fifteenth-century Prussia and as a favoured
and forbidden tool for poaching in the lord’s private waters.122
Woven mesh was an ancient, familiar, and effective tool for capturing
fish. Nets were important to medieval subsistence fishing but precise uses
are hard to pin down. Besides many verbal and visual allusions, actual
fragments of hempen twine, netting, and net-making tools survive from
several northern continental sites. Some such scraps, descriptions, and
representations reveal a distinct technique, others are no longer discern-
ible. This is notably true of images where people in a boat haul a net over
the side (e.g. Figures 4.1, 4.6, and 7.6 below). Medieval writers and
artists were often unaware of the components and operation of complex
fish-catching devices, even though back in the 890s Frankish adminis-
trators had acknowledged the special skills needed to make and use them.
Fishers or their families commonly constructed and repaired their own
nets.123 Many net-fishing methods used a head line of floats and/or a
weighted bottom line (Figure 3.5 and the left column of Fig. 3.1). The
floats (wood, bark) and weights (stone, ceramic, lead) are often enough
recovered from medieval shoreline sites that both English and Polish
archaeologists have established regional typologies and inferred netting
techniques from them.124
Small netting gear certainly aided active pursuit of schooling or indi-
vidual fishes. What would now be labeled scoop or dip nets with a bag or
basket on a handle (truble, pern), lift nets set horizontally on a frame,
circular cast nets to throw over visible fish in shallows, even seines with

120
Rothair’s Edict §299 (Drew ed., Lombard Laws, 111); Pactus legis Salica Title 27 §28
(Drew ed., Laws of the Salian Franks, 91); Tischler, “Fische: Sprachliches,” 138–139.
Compare Cassiodorus, Variae 5:20 (Fridh, ed., 198–199) from Visigoth-ruled Italy.
121
Munich BSB Clm 18181, fol. 118v; Rösener, Grundherrschaft im Wandel, 223–227.
122
Collin, “Ressouces alimentaires,” 43; Benecke, “Beiträge zur Geschichte,” 307.
Compare Blary, Domaine de Châalis, 95–99; Olson, Chronicle of All That Happens,
182–183; Coldicott, Hampshire Nunneries, 78.
123
Cap. de villis, c. 45 (Boretius ed., no. 32); compare discussions in Lampen, Fischerei und
Fischhandel, 103–105, and Steane and Foreman, “Medieval fishing tackle,” 156–170.
124
Steane and Foreman, “Medieval fishing tackle,” 162–170 and 178–180 (although the
many weights recovered from the Thames cannot be dated); Rulewicz, Rybołówstwo
Gdańska, 240–273.

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 120 The Catch

Figure 3.5 Net weights and floats from Pomeranian ports, seventh to
eleventh centuries.
Selected (left) weights in stone, 5 and 10 cm, and lead, 5 cm, from
Kołobrzeg and (right) floats in wood, 10–12 cm, from Gdańsk (top) and
pine bark, 10–15 cm, from Szczecin (bottom). Selections from
illustrations in Rulewicz, Rybołówstwo Gdańska, pp. 142, 161, 190, and
264, redrawn for R. Hoffmann by Donna Bilak.

elongate panels sized so one or two fishers could circle through the water
to corral fish are all encountered often enough in medieval and early
modern illustrations (see Fig. 7.7 below). Vernacular dialect names for
these devices varied from place to place with or without – as remains true
in modern ethnographies – corresponding differences in design, type, or
use.125 Ephemeral in construction and indistinguishable at historical
distance, this equipment, though appropriate only for small-scale oper-
ations, is not easily associated with particular users.
Passive netting techniques also included forms small and mobile
enough for one or two fishers to set and haul. The trammel net (tremaille,

125
Compare illustrations and descriptions in Mane, “Images médiévales,” 244–246, with
Brinkhuizen, “Some notes on fishing gear,” 9–29, Höfling, Chiemsee-Fischerei, 60–62, or
Amacher, Zürcher Fischerei, 55–61.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 121

tramallia, Italian gorro), a distinctive arrangement of three closely parallel

mesh curtains, has a long medieval record since the sixth-century
Frankish Salic code.126 The gill nets essential to large-scale late medieval
herring fishing and to seasonally important whitefish catches in alpine
lakes were special entangling gear for schooling fishes of closely similar
size. Although gill nets for herring have been suggested a medieval
invention, specialized whitefish nets were already present in the
Tegernsee inventory of 1023 and Sidonius Apollinaris described setting
nets at night in lakes of fifth-century Gaul.127

3.4.2 Crew-Served Equipment and Installations

Set or drift nets might still lie within the capacity of a single fisher, but
contrasting active techniques of moving a large net through the water
demand more hands, traction, and equipment. This technology has two
basic forms: a seine surrounds fish in the water; a trawl is drawn through
the water to filter fish from it (Figure 3.6 and the latter also in Figure 6.5
below). Genuine bag-shaped trawls, pulled open-mouthed on a course
through the water, are nowhere visible before the later Middle Ages,
when some were plainly thought innovations in commercial fishing.128
By whatever name, most medieval sagenae (saine, Segen, seine) are
plainly seines. Pietro de Crescenzi described to near perfection a beach
seine, which he called a “scorticaria”: a boat circled out from shore and
back again while paying a long net out behind it; the circle completed,
both ends were pulled to bring the entire loop to the beach.129 It is often
difficult to determine actual examples from early centuries. Later seines
are associated with fisheries in control of lords, such as the sagena Bury
St. Edmunds had on Soham Mere in 1085 or those used in the thirteenth
century to take bream for the bishop of Winchester and trout and charr
from lakes owned by the abbey of Furness. The beach seine with which

126
Pactus legis Salicae, Title 27, §28 (Drew ed., 91); Tischler, “Fischerei und
Fischereimethoden,” 138–139; Crescenzi, Ruralia commoda, 10:28 (ed. Richter, 3:
204–206).
127
Steane and Foreman, “Medieval fishing tackle,” 159; Hoffmann, “Craft of Alpine
lakes,” 310; Brandt, Fish Catching Methods, 358; Sidonius Epistolae., lib. 2, no. 2 (ed.
Loyen, p. 256). Compare Höfling, Chiemsee-Fischerei, 53–58.
128
Compare Bresc, “Pêche et coraillage,” 110, or the “wondyrchoun” of which English
fishers complained in 1376/77 (Given-Wilson, ed., Parliament Rolls, membrane 2:369,
Edward III, 1377 January, 50. XXXIII; further in Jones, “‘Lost’ history,” 204–208).
For medieval resistance to environmentally destructive trawl fisheries see
Chapter 6 below.
129
Crescenzi, Ruralia commoda, 10:28 (ed. Richter, 3: 204–206). The boulieg used in
Languedoc lagoons was similar (Larguier, “Des lagunes à mer,” 197).

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122

Figure 3.6 Schematic illustration of seine and trawl technologies. Drawn for R. Hoffmann by Cartographic Office,
Department of Geography, York University. © R. Hoffmann.
 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 123

subjects of Coupar Angus caught salmon at the Campsie site on the river
Tay measured 33 fathoms (about 57–66 m) long and tapered from
4 fathoms at the centre to 3½ (from 7 or 8 to a bit more than 6 m) at
the outer ends.130 A much-recorded “sagena magna” of the medieval
south and east Baltic was known in indigenous Balto-Slavic vernaculars
as the niewód. This method of choice in the Teutonic Order’s own late
medieval fisheries had earlier been specified in twelfth–thirteenth-cen-
tury Pomeranian charters and, judging from finds of locally standardized
weights and floats from most urban sites along that coast, originated by at
latest the eleventh century. With wings of nearly eighty meters and a
depth of eighteen, the niewód marked an extreme scale for subsistence
fishing.131
Major early medieval fisheries relied greatly on passive techniques
using large fixed installations. More or less permanent structures which
blocked and held migrating fishes should be recognized in many of the
“fisheries” conveyed as appurtenant to landed property. Barrier fishing
called for knowledgeable siting and timing plus sophisticated but simple
engineering. Actual construction, less complex than making nets, was
well suited for unskilled labour, which could also handle regular main-
tenance. Work and wealth spent on construction, upkeep, and annual
operation produced large seasonal yields of favoured fishes, notably
salmon, sturgeon, shad, lamprey, eel, mullet, and herring. Medieval
records do not consistently distinguish between barrier devices (generic
‘weirs’) which concentrated fish and large enclosure traps which pre-
vented their escape.
Some barriers providing important fishing opportunities were natural –
falls, rivermouth bars, etc. – and others built primarily for a reason other
than catching fish. The most widespread barrier fishing took place at mill
dams and so multiplied during medieval centuries in tandem with the
watermill. The downstream migration of adult eel gave each miller – or
his master – a lucrative seasonal opportunity to put basket traps or a lift
net in his sluice. Reforming abbot John of Gorze (960–973) supplied his

130
Bond, “Monastic fisheries,” 81 and sources there cited; Roberts, “Bishop of
Winchester’s fishponds,” 130–135; Winchester, Landscape and Society, 110; Hoffmann,
“Salmo salar,” 360 and sources there cited. Compare indirect subsistence use of seines in
Kempf, “L’économie et la société,” 44; Bertheau, “Wirtschaftsgeschichte Preetz,” 113,
or Hoffmann, “Craft of Alpine lakes.”
131
Willam, “Fischerei des Deutschen Ordens,” 140–142; Seligo, “Zur Geschichte des
Fischerei,” 17–19; Benecke, “Beiträge zur Geschichte,” 307; Łęga, Obraz gospodarczy
Pomorza, 28–33; Rulewicz, Rybołówstwo Gdańska, 252–277. Sixteenth-century
illustrations of the almadraba used in the commercial fishery for bluefin tuna in the
Gulf of Cádiz depict an even larger beach seine (see Chapter 8 and Figure 8.4a below).

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 124 The Catch

Basket traps (‘pot gear’) for fish and eel placed above the mill dam in
the early 14th century Luttrell psalter

British Library Luttrell psalter; add ms 42130, fol. 181r. Used with permission of the British Library

Figure 3.7 Basket traps (‘pot gear’) for fish and eel placed above the
mill dam on the Lincolnshire estate of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, c. 1330.
Reproduced with permission of the British Library.

monks with fish taken at the dams of his newly built mills. Tenth- and
eleventh-century Catalan charters carefully itemized the fishing rights of
mills.132 Mills and eel were closely joined in the English Domesday Book
(1085) and in twelfth-century records of milling partnerships on the
Garonne at Toulouse.133 The early fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter
famously illustrates the local watermill and the basket traps set above the
dam to catch adult eels migrating downstream (Figure 3.7).
Weirs built with express intent of catching fish played a large role for
indirect subsistence. Fish weirs134 across streams, rivers, or tidal chan-
nels, whether permanently built of stone and timber or of hurdles and

132
Tischler, “Fischerei und Fischereimethoden,” 139, cites MGH, SS, 4; Riera i Melis,
“Sistemes alimentaris,” 23–24, with cases there cited.
133
Darby, Domesday England, 279–280; Sicard, Moulins de Toulouse, 118–128.
134
General regional coverages appear in Lampen, “Medieval fish weirs”; Lampen, Fischerei
und Fischhandel, 105–110 and 116–118; Salisbury, “Primitive British fishweirs”; Steane
and Foreman, “Medieval fishing tackle,” 170–176; Went, “Ancient Irish fishing weirs
for salmon”; Jenkins, “Trapping of salmon”; Willem, “Fischerein des Deutschen
Ordens,” 138–140; Rippon, Transformation of Coastal Wetlands, 220–221; and
O’Sullivan, Foragers, Farmers and Fishers.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 125

wattle for a season, could concentrate and funnel migratory fishes to

other trapping devices or just to a place where they might easily be
scooped or speared. Under various temporally or territorially different
names – gurges, vertevolum, venna, banna, wera, obstacula, captura, clau-
sura, exclusa, saepes, fach, wehr, cruive, croha, paxeria, jazy, and more –
weir fisheries had long-standing economic and hydrological import-
ance.135 Already in the sixth century Cassiodorus denounced fishing
with saepes (literally ‘fences’) for endangering shipping in the Mincio,
Ollio, Serchio, Tiber, and Arno rivers. The Frankish laws set compen-
sation for damage to a vertevolum. One venna at a royal estate in the
Ardennes is documented in a charter from 644 and another on the Weser
can be traced in Corvey’s possession from 832 until after 1158.136
Recorded active weirs on the rivers of Gdańsk Pomerania number
thirty-one during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries alone.137
Most such records denoted what early twelfth-century Czech chronic-
ler Cosmas of Prague called an “assembly of timbers for fishing.”138 The
several vennae of Prüm’s ninth-century estate survey were made from
stakes, poles, and large rods provided for the purpose (ad vennam, quibus
venna paratur) by the abbey’s subjects.139 A servant of St. Hubert injured
his hand driving log pilings for a captura piscium in the Meuse.140 In north
Yorkshire around 1200 Robert de Daiville and the Cistercians at Byland
negotiated over a reach of the river Swale with a structure of two or three
bays, each ten feet wide and repairable with beams and nails, available for
fishing with a net.141 Material traces corroborate the verbal. Remains of
securely dated medieval fish weirs have been recovered from the rivers
Trent, Severn, Witham, Charente, Dordogne, Cher, Saône, and several
Swiss tributaries of the upper Rhine. Found in the Trent gravels near
Colwick was a 14-meter double row of oak and holly posts set vertically
into the river bed about a meter deep and a half meter apart, braced on
the downstream side with oblique posts, and filled with panels of woven
hazel twigs (Figure 3.8). Dendrochronology and radiocarbon put

135
Remains of weirs from the Neolithic, Bronze, and early Iron Ages have been found in
Europe and Britain.
136
Cassiodorus, Variae 5:20; Pactus legis Salica, 27:28 (Drew ed., 91); Halkin and Roland
eds., Recueil des chartes, I: nr. 1. In 979 Emperor Otto II settled a dispute over a
gurgustium on the river Hörsel (Sickel ed., Urkunden Otto, no. 209).
137
Łęga, Obraz gospodarczy Pomorza, 19–24.
138
“structuram lignorum ad piscandum,” Cosmas, Chronica Bohemorum, ed. Bretholz, 245.
139
Schwab, ed., Prümer Urbar, 176, 250–255, and 183. The same tasks were required of
unfree tenants on the Tidenham estate of Anglo-Saxon Bath abbey (Bond, “Monastic
fisheries,” 85–86).
140
Vita Hugberti, ch. 8 (MGH, SrM 6, 487).
141
Burton, Cartulary of Byland, nos. 305 and 486–488.

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 126 The Catch

Figure 3.8 Artist’s reconstruction of an Anglo-Saxon fish weir from the

river Trent.
Based on remains of wooden posts in river gravels near Colwick,
Nottinghamshire, dated c. 810–880. From Steane and Foreman,
“Medieval Fishing Tackle,” p. 171. Drawing by C. Salisbury.
Reproduced with permission of BAR Publishing, www.barpublishing
.com.

construction in one season and upkeep through a human generation

between about 810 and 880. One wing of this Anglo-Saxon device –
the other wing has not been found – probably ran diagonally across the
river for some thirty-five or more meters. A nearby structure with radio-
carbon dates of c. 1070–1200 had one long wing and two perpendicular
short ones oriented at 45 degrees to the current, so making a funnel or
‘V’ shape pointed downstream.142 (For well-dated and productive weirs
elsewhere see online Supplement 3.4.2.)
As distinct from generic barriers with associated catching devices or
activities, more specialized large-scale fish traps diverted fish into an
enclosure whence they could not escape. Fishers at Kotowice on the
Odra in Silesia in 1203 used an “enclosure to catch fish” (clausuram pro
capturam piscium) to supply their lord several times a week. The phrase

142
Losco-Bradley and Salisbury, “Saxon and Norman fish weir”; Salisbury, “Primitive
British fishweirs.”

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 127

echoes, too, in eleventh- and twelfth-century charters from Poland’s

other great river, the Wisła.143 Early medieval records depict at least
three specific types, viz foreshore traps, ditches, and labyrinths.
Domesday Book mentions a heia maris (‘sea hedge’) on the Suffolk
coast partly owned by Bury St. Edmunds Abbey. Foreshore traps known
from archaeological and ethnographic evidence are horseshoe- or
crescent-shaped walls of wood and wattles or stone set in the tidal zone
with the open end toward the shore; fishes moving with the ebb are held
for removal at low water. Those in Ireland’s Shannon estuary go back
into deep prehistory and subsequently several groups are clearly dated to
400–800 and 1100–1350.144 Similar constructions of wood and stone in
the coast of lower Normandy have calibrated 14C dates between 580/630
and about 970. Under the name gamboa or camboa such structures were
the oldest purpose-built fisheries installations in Galicia. Before 1200
Breton counterparts served local subsistence needs.145
“A structure commonly called a verra … so constructed that fishes could
enter that ditch but were not able to get out” vexed neighbours of the
Clairmarais Cistercians in 1210.146 Earlier tenth- and eleventh-century
charters from the lower reaches of Seine and Loire refer plainly to “sluices”
(clusa, sclusa) and “ditches” (fossatis piscatoriis) as means for catching fish.147
Complex enclosures of embankments, wooden sheeting, and wood or
reed grillwork blocked the Tiber at Rome and the mouths of coastal
ponds further south in Lazio, supplying sustenance for fishers and
Romans and valued incomes to great churchmen since at least the tenth
century.148 A vast linear array of closely driven stakes still straddles the
mouth of the Schlei at Kappeln, subtly guiding estuary-spawning herring

143
Appelt and Irgang, eds., SUB, 1: no. 83; Górzyński, Zarys historii rybołówstwa, 21, and
sources there cited.
144
Darby, Domesday England, 285; Bond, “Monastic fisheries,” 78; O’Sullivan, Foragers,
Farmers and Fishers; Salisbury, “Primitive British fishweirs,” 77; O’Sullivan, “Place,
memory and identity,” 449–450. Cohen, “Early Anglo-Saxon fish traps,” found as
many as thirty such fish traps in the intertidal zone of the Thames in the London
area, with earlier ones mainly of stone, later more use of timber.
145
Catteddu, Archéologie médiévale, 86–87; Ferreira-Priegue, Galicia en el Comercio, 132;
Mollat, Europe and the Sea, 143; Billard and Bernard, eds., Pêcheries de Normandie.
146
Coopland, Abbey of St. Bertin, 59 note: “apparatus fecerunt qui vulgo verra dicuntur in terra
illa ita dispositos quod pisces intrare possint fossatum illud sed exire non possint.”
147
A 999 charter for Vierzon on the Cher, a Loire tributary, explained “et nos teneamus
exclusam totam sive decursus aquarum, in ea quam longe opus fuerit eam edificandi et
prosequendi et foramina ad piscamentum nostrum in fluminis Cari” (Querrien, “Pêche et
consummation,” 423). See also Brien, “Développement de l’ordre cistercien en
Poitou,” 4–5; Verdon, “Recherches sur la pêche,” 346 note; and Fauroux, ed., Recueil
des actes des ducs, no. 34.
148
Vendittelli, “La pesca nelle acque interne,” 116–121; Vendittelli, “Diritti ed impianti,”
392–399. Squatriti, Water and Society, 116–117, found equally complex structures even

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 128 The Catch

into a chamber they cannot escape. Elements of the present labyrinth go

back at least to the later Middle Ages and its forerunners to a millennium
or more earlier.149 No less elaborate was the maze of ponds, channels,
and more than nine weirs connected to Glastonbury abbey’s Meare Pool
in the Somerset levels, largest wetland in southwestern England. Fish
there taken with nets and traps could be stored in certain ponds and
supplied live to the abbey’s kitchen or processed in the adjoining fish
house and preserved for later consumption.150
Technologies characteristic of early medieval and later subsistence
fisheries were suited to make large catches from seasonal concentrations
of diadromous and other migratory fishes and for smaller continuous
exploitation of resident stocks. Unskilled, even forced, labour could
build and operate fixed devices under expert supervision, but historic
local power relations likely determined how much the latter derived from
the communal tradition archaeologist Aidan O’Sullivan has suggested151
and how much from the hierarchical authority implied by medieval texts.
Certainly it took commensurate environmental familiarity and skills for
consistent success with more mobile gear, especially the small angling,
trapping and netting equipment apt to help feed a simple household.
Direct subsistence fishing required little capital, and that chiefly from the
time spent preparing simple equipment from locally available materials.
Indirect subsistence fishing entailed more investment – the lord’s allo-
cating of his goods and his subjects’ labour – in fixed capital tied to land.
Across the gamut of medieval subsistence fishing, local environmental
knowledge derived from the experience of a Heribald, Tatwine, or Simon
the Fisherman and conveyed through oral transmission was essential to
success. Otherwise it took miracles.152

3.4.3 Saving the Catch for Future Use

In subsistence fisheries the cost of catching and the fish for eating
belonged to the same party. Especially when reliant on local supplies,

in ninth-century Italy, but the evidence fails to support the inference of their use to
rear fish.
149
Radke, “Bemerkungen zum Heringszaunen.”
150
Rippon, “Making the most of a bad situation?,” 119–122.
151
O’Sullivan, “Place, memory and identity,” 461–463.
152
Exploits of Odo, Anselm, and other saints were mentioned above. St. Liudger
(742–809) caught a sturgeon when his Frisian experts said the season had passed
(Diekamp, ed., Vita S. Liudgeri, c. 29, p. 34). The merchant turned holy man Godric
of Finchale (c. 1065–1170) repeatedly confounded servants by his ability to put salmon
and other fish into their nets (Reginald, Libellus S. Godrici, ed. Stevenson, 123–125,
159–161, 206–207, 230–231, and 240–241).

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 129

people who could keep fish edible for even a few weeks or months after
capture greatly extended the usefulness of seasonally large concentra-
tions and eased provisioning for periods of seasonally high fish consump-
tion. As just observed at Glastonbury, the catch might be held alive or the
spoiling of its butchered flesh somehow delayed.
Temporary live storage was especially inviting where captured fresh-
water and coastal marine fishes could be retained in their own habitats.
Tanks and cages made from non-durable materials are obscure in the
early Middle Ages, though they may then have served peasant needs as
they later did those of fishmongers and urban households (see next
chapter).
On elite sites permanent fish tanks measuring up to some hundreds of
square meters go back to the start of the Middle Ages. Cassiodorus
retired in the mid-500s to his family estate of Vivarium on Italy’s south-
ern coast, named for its vivaria, natural rock coves improved for storing
marine fish. The three basins still recognizable there measure roughly
10–12 by 4–5 m and just over 1 m deep.153 Charlemagne’s capitulary de
villis urged regular restocking of wiwariis so a fresh supply was always
available; a generation later the model survey, Brevium exemplum, noted
stocked ponds inside the garden enclosure at three of four (unnamed)
royal estates.154 Structures of this kind and intent remained a feature at
favoured residences. England’s king Henry III (1216–1272) had serva-
toria for fish made or improved at York and in his park at Windsor. His
contemporaries in Champagne, Burgundy, and Savoy just had different
names for the similar facilities they had built for their chefs’ use.155
The steady demand of religious communities supported fish storage
facilities at many monastic sites. Tenth-century reformers Olpert of

153
Cassiodorus, Institutes, I, 29:1 (Mynors ed., 73; tr. O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, 194) and
Courcelle, “La site du monastére,” 287–300. O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, 194–196 and
244–246, points out that this part of the Institutes circulated little during the
Middle Ages.
154
Cap. de villis, c. 65 (Boretius ed., no. 32), and Brevium exemplum in Boretius, ed.,
Capitularia, no. 128.
155
McDonnell, Inland Fisheries, 20–23; Steane, “Royal fishponds,” 39–40. For
contemporary French princes see Nada Patrone, Il cibo, 320–321; Lambert, Du
manuscripts à la table, 222; Bourquelot, “Fragments de Comptes,” 67 and 71–73;
Hoffmann “Carpes pour le duc”; Hoffmann, “Aquaculture in Champagne,” 73. None
of the piscinae and vivaria carefully inventoried from tenth–twelfth-century sources in
Lampen, Fischerei und Fischhandel, 126–129, show the scale or purposeful management
of fish varieties, fodder, or reproduction required for production rather than storage.
Likewise, the famous valle di pesce of the Venetian lagoon neither so much reared fish as
they trapped migratory schools and retained the adults nor did they serve primarily
subsistence purposes (Faugeron, Nourrir la ville, 180–184), so they are discussed in
some detail in Chapters 4 and 6 below.

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 130 The Catch

Gembloux and Odo of Cluny each reportedly arranged a pond beside the
house so monks’ grudging acquiescence in dietary abstinence could be
reinforced with a constant supply of fresh fish.156 Store ponds at Cluny,
which reared no fish during its prestigious eleventh-century apogee, were
set along the Grosne river across from the abbey but easily accessible to
the fish kitchen.157 Elsewhere as in England, “a single stew stocked from
a natural source … is … [the] type of pond to which most documents
generally refer before the fourteenth century.”158 Especially in the early
Middle Ages this temporary storage of captured fish came nowhere near
purposeful rearing of domesticated varieties, but did promise fresh fish
even in seasons when the schools were not easily available.
Early medieval Europeans also knew how to extend the time and space
over which a dead fish could safely be eaten. The principal methods of
preservation delayed spoiling by drying the fish physically or with the aid of
smoke or salt.159 Anaerobic fermentation, brining, or marinating then had
less importance. The choice of technique played environmental resources,
especially climate and fish species, against available economic capital.
Many kinds of fish will keep a long time if allowed to dry thoroughly
and not re-wetted until ready to eat. No additional ingredients are
needed. But the unaided drying of fish calls for a consistent low humidity
available only at Europe’s climatic extremes, arctic winter cold or south-
ern summer heat. And in oil-rich fishes like herring, salmonids, and the
tuna family, the fat quickly oxidizes to make the flesh inedibly rancid.
Codfishes, flatfishes, and pike, however, have less oily white flesh apt for
drying. As observed in an introductory fish tale, since the Bronze Age
and throughout pre-Viking and Viking times coast dwellers in northern
Norway and their North Atlantic island colonies caught and dried local
cods for their own consumption. Mediterranean hakes were parched in
the summer sun.
Dense wood smoke dries fish flesh and induces chemical changes that
deter bacterial action, though hot smoke and cold give different results.
Smoked fish last only days or weeks, not months, but the old peasant
custom was likely known to lords’ cooks and tables. Fish-smoking pits at
early medieval Biskupin, a northern Polish settlement, are accompanied

156
Sigebert and Godescalc, Gesta abbatum, c. 33, ed. Pertz in MGH, SS. 8; John of
Salerno, Vita Odonis (PL vol. 133, cols. 80 and 83; tr. Sitwell, St. Odo, 78–81).
157
Evans, Monastic Life, 72–73; Ulrich, Consuetudines, III:18 (MPL 149, col. 760–62).
Ulrich’s likely model, Bernard of Cluny, “Ordo Cluniacensis,” 1:6 (ed. Hergott,
147–150), specifies aspects of fish service Ulrich omitted.
158
Chambers and Gray, “Excavations of fishponds,” 115.
159
Cutting, Fish Saving, and Cutting, “Historical aspects,” remain authoritative on
biochemical processes but obsolete and Anglocentric regarding medieval history.

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 3 Take and Eat: Subsistence Fishing 131

by bones of pike, perch, roach, bream, and catfish. Written sources hint
at a wider regional practice.160
Most of Europe lacked climate or fish to dry unaided, so extended
storage or transport of dead fish in large quantities called for another raw
material. Salt, which both absorbs water and is itself antiseptic, served all
preindustrial economies as the great preservative. Romans had enjoyed
garum, a sauce brewed of salt fish. Access to salt and fish raised the value
of lagoon and estuary fisheries. But away from southern seacoasts salt
had to come in large and costly quantities from isolated natural brine
springs, accessible deposits of rock salt, or the fuel and space to boil
down sea water. Fisheries in the Austro-Bavarian Alps were exploited in
the eighth–ninth centuries together with the salteries there, and later
those of inland Pomerania. Ninth century Bobbio directed payments
from salt ships to its fisheries on Lake Garda.161
The fish most notably tied to salt was herring: untreated, it spoils in a
day.162 Though herring are a northern, not a Mediterranean animal,
their Latin name alecium (and so also Romance forms like hallec) derived
from an old southern term for salt fish, allec, and ultimately from the
Greek root for salt, hals. Hence early medieval herring fisheries arose
near salt supplies, like those of the then Bay of the Somme, and herring
enter the historical record “dusted” (sapoudre) with salt. Domesday Book
had dues in dry-salted herrings from coastal Suffolk and so did the
Norman fair at Fécamp. Further south in the Atlantic, pilchards or
sardines and in the Mediterranean also anchovies were handled in the
same way, landed and quickly, still with heads and entrails intact, heaped
up into salt-covered piles. Dry-salted herring traveled in bundles, bags,
or baskets and kept some months, though not so long that great quan-
tities reached consumers far inland. That would await methods for
anaerobic brining in sealed barrels unfamiliar to early medieval fishers
and fish-eaters (see Chapter 8).163

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Working in tandem the fish-catching and fish-preserving technologies of
the early Middle Ages could take only limited quantities from even

160
Bukowski, “Uwagi o konserwacji ryb.”
161
Bowlus, Franks, Moravians, and Magyars, 43–44; Rulewicz, Rybołówstwo Gdańska,
345–347; Castagnetti et al., eds., Inventari altomedievali, 138 and 159; and Squatriti,
Water and Society, 114–116.
162
Hocquet, “Les pêcheries,” 48–49 and 79–83; Hocquet, “Des paysans de la mer.”
163
Danes on Roskildefjord ate whole fresh herring in the Viking Age and gutted and brined
only from the thirteenth century (Enghoff, “Medieval herring industry”; and Enghoff,
“Southern North Sea,” 124–125).

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 132 The Catch

abundant and accessible animals and convey those in edible condition to

only a limited range of consumers. Rich and poor had to eat from nearby
stocks and, to a large degree, recent catches. Coupled with relatively
persistent structures of elite lordship over peasant family households, this
tended to stabilize relationships between subsistence fisheries and the
local aquatic ecosystems they exploited. Perhaps the visible pattern was
reinforced by what present-day geologists and climatologists suggest to
have been relatively quiescent planetary conditions during the eighth
through early eleventh centuries.164 Absent external pressures or shocks
of human or natural origin – anything from greatly increased demand or
slow habitat change to catastrophic political or flood events – most
mutual local adaptations were probably more or less sustainable, if surely
not equitable for all participants.
Local people actively exploiting aquatic resources to serve needs of
both peasants and lords were, therefore, ubiquitous throughout the early
Middle Ages. Subsistence fisheries fit well into the stable institutional
structures and the relatively unimpacted environment characteristic of
the second half of the first millennium CE in Europe. While some of
those local relationships would continue long thereafter, most fish,
fishers, and fish-eaters would eventually be caught up in the large-scale
socio-economic and environmental transformation which medieval
Europe experienced after about 1000. Successive chapters follow the
changes, their impacts, and the consequences which rippled from them.

164
Berger and Brochier, “Rapports de la géoarchéologie”; Dotterweich and Dreibrodt,
“Past land use”; and Bradley et al., “Medieval Quiet Period.”

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108955898.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press