7.2.1 A Benchmark: Advanced Traditional European Fish Farming

The history of aquaculture in medieval Europe may best be approached by establishing as a benchmark the profusely documented methods used at the close of the Middle Ages in East Central Europe, then acknowledged as leading this field.Footnote ³¹ Unprecedented contemporary didactic manuals describe the ‘state of the art’ management and techniques used by Czech, Polish, and Austrian fish farmers. First published was De piscinis (“On Fishponds”), which future Moravian bishop Jan Dubravius composed in the 1530s for mining capitalist and landowner Jakob Fugger. The work achieved wide circulation, with the first printing in Wrocław in 1547 (Figure 7.2), another in Zürich in 1559, and by 1600 also translations into Polish and English.Footnote ³² Olbrycht Strumieński’s 1573 Polish book on ponds gained authority from the author’s experience as a professional manager.Footnote ³³ Recently identified manuscript instructions of slightly earlier date in Czech and GermanFootnote ³⁴ augment the printed sources. Older handbooks are nowhere recorded.

Figure 7.2 Title page for the first published instructions on carp culture: Jan Dubravius, De piscinis. In Wratsliavia [Wrocław]: Andreas Vinglerus, 1547.

Jan Dubravius, De piscinis. In Wratislaviæ [Wrocław]: Andreas Vinglerus, 1547. Public domain.

Image and reproduction rights courtesy of the Zeeland Library, Middleburg, Netherlands.

Operational records from contemporary central European fishpond enterprises corroborate what the instructional literature advanced as normal and best practice. There are surveys of Polish royal estates near Kraków in 1564,Footnote ³⁵ complete operating accounts from pond enterprises in the southwestern Polish duchy of Oswięcim-Zator during the 1510s–30s,Footnote ³⁶ rich working archives from holdings of Bohemian magnate families Rožmberk and Pernšteyn,Footnote ³⁷ and widespread if piecemeal documents of practice from lesser Polish, Czech, Austrian, and Franconian noble and monastic producers.Footnote ³⁸ All these show the same procedures for an integrated production system.

At the end of the Middle Ages the best-reputed fish farmers in Europe produced fresh fish primarily for well-to-do regional consumers, both landowners and patrons of urban markets. They reared mainly common carp, with a side-crop of pike and sometimes a few bream or crucian carp. Cold-water fishes such as trout and grayling lacked importance. Cultural methods emphasized full control over water and fish through each stage of production (Figure 7.3).

Figure 7.3 Traditional European carp culture.

Reliably continual output required coordinated management of multiple ponds, each equipped to adjust the inflow, outflow, and level of water, from fully filled to partly empty or entirely dry, without undesired entry or exit of fish. Overland drainage (surface runoff and streams) from arable and pastures supplied the preferred nutrient-rich water. Ecological integration occurred at the landscape level by throughput of used water and sometimes removal of decomposing bottom sediments for use as fertilizer for the fields. Experts laid out ponds according to the terrain, preferring broad to deep ones even if the former required longer dams. Engineering skill predetermined the area to be flooded. In valleys a sequence of ponds, ideally with bypass channels, could feed one another downslope. Dams and dikes of beaten earth, sometimes with internal timber frames, were armoured against erosion by turf, wicker, wood, or stone sheathing. Wooden or metal grates and gates controlled passage through sluiceways made from the same selected materials.Footnote ³⁹ Large aquaculture enterprises had use for tanks only a few dozen meters square and for regulated lakes up to 500 hectares (just over two square miles), such as Bezdrev pond built at Hluboka in southern Bohemia in 1492. The view in Figure 7.4 is well beyond what most medievalists or modern observers imagine as a ‘fish pond’.

Figure 7.4 Bezdrev Fishpond, Czechia.

A view across Bezdrev Fishpond near Hluboká nad Vltavou, constructed 1490–1492 on the Hluboká estate of Vilém of Pernštejn. Second largest fishpond in Czechia at 520 hectares (2.008 square miles). Few medievalists have any idea of the scale of such enterprises. This artificial lake is half again larger than New York’s Central Park, 20 percent greater than London’s Hyde Park plus Kensington Gardens, and 2.5 times the Principality of Monaco. Some fishtank!

© R. Hoffmann.

Managers bred the fish from selected stock, though not by artificial means,Footnote ⁴⁰ and moved them as a uniform age group (year class, cohort) through a sequence of special-purpose ponds. As the water in a shallow and vegetated spawning or fry pond (Figure 7.5) warmed enough in late spring the pond master introduced chosen ripe adult carp to emit and fertilize eggs in their natural way, then removed the parents. A summer in those protected and warm conditions grew the carp larvae into tiny fish by the time they were moved en masse to deeper waters for the winter.Footnote ⁴¹ The cohort of young carp were left another year or two in a fry pond where they would reach ‘stocker’ (setzling) size of a hand’s span, before being set into a much larger, recently refilled, and otherwise uninhabited finishing pond to grow big enough to harvest. Their numbers were calibrated to pond size and experience of its productivity.

Figure 7.5 Fry ponds at Rožmberk Fishpond, Czechia.

Fry ponds built at sixteenth-century Rožmberk pond, near Třeboň, Czechia (seen to the rear of a twentieth-century generator station).

© R. Hoffmann.

Carp eat mainly small invertebrates they find on water plants or grub out of the bottom sediment and crush with the teeth in their throats. Nutrient-rich waters offer more natural food, so if necessary managers promoted growth by adding manure or channeling runoff from animal or human wastes into their ponds.Footnote ⁴² They also learned to concentrate the carp biomass into harvestable adults by introducing piscivorous pike to eat any fry bred by precociously mature members of the class. Depending on local temperature and climatic conditions, the carp reached a standard table size (commonly 40–60 cm (15–20 inches) long, weighing about a kilogram (2.2 lb.)) by year four, five, or six. By 1550 Polish records suggest two distinctive quick-growing domestic races of carp had evolved, ‘mirror carp’ with a few large scales and entirely scaleless ‘leather carp’.

Demand-focused harvest took place in weekly stages during Lent when the market reached its annual peak, sometimes even where this meant breaking ice to get nets into the pond, or in a single push in the fall, when the crop not needed for Advent consumption could be stored alive in tanks for the Lenten season. Aquaculture made fresh fish available to fit a human, not nature’s, calendar. In cool weather carp survive some days wrapped in damp cloths or straw for overland transport; portable tanks and boats with live wells also sometimes served. Water in the big finishing ponds, which had been designed with large warm, shallow, biologically productive areas at the periphery and a much smaller deep central channel, was lowered to concentrate the fish (Figure 7.6). When all were netted out (Figure 7.7) the flow of water was, if possible, entirely diverted and the pond site left to dry. Best practice called for the bottom to be plowed up, seeded with oats or barley, and then the grain used to pasture livestock through the summer. This fallow season or year readied the finishing pond for another cohort of young carp.

Figure 7.6 Munický Fishpond, Czechia, lowered for harvest.

Munický Fishpond (117 ha) lowered for harvest. Constructed for Vojtěch z Pernštejn at Hluboka nad Vltavou (then called Podhrad or Frauenberg), completed 1514.

© R. Hoffmann.

Figure 7.7 Harvesting a fishpond.

Harvesting a fishpond with a seine net, a view from Swabia. As illustrated in Bidpai, Buch der Weisheit der alten Weisen, fol. 44v. Ulm: Lienhardt Holle, 1483.

Woodcut image and use with permission of Newberry Library, Chicago.

Productive operation of a late medieval fishpond enterprise thus called for integrated management of some tens or dozens of ponds and, exclusive of breeding stock, some half-dozen year classes of carp. In the first half of the sixteenth century these methods sustained, for instance, annual shipments of some 1,500 tonnes of live fish from the ponds of Upper Silesia (chiefly Oswięcim-Zator) to Kraków.Footnote ⁴³ Enterprises in Czechia may have doubled that. But the integrated system was unknown in central Europe before the mid-fourteenth century and remained rare there until enterprises using it proliferated in southern Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland during the late fifteenth century. Having learned the characteristic multiple ponds, water control, selected breeding, and management by year classes of the mature system, we can detect their development some centuries earlier and further west. As Chapter 5 described, introduction of the exotic carp there capped cultural evolution of practices already being worked out with pond fishes native to Atlantic drainages.

7.2.2 Emerging Technologies: Engineering, Practices, Fish

Now recognizable even at historical distance, the process which resulted in traditional European aquaculture involved transition from live storage to long-term rearing of fish plus design and construction of infrastructure capable of manipulating the water and the fish for consistent growth and production. The new kinds of hydraulic engineering being installed in central France during the eleventh and twelfth centuries now deserve closer attention than Chapter 5 provided.Footnote ⁴⁴

Certain disputes over water rights and flooding indicate the construction and rhythmic operation of pond systems without earlier counterparts elsewhere. Recent radiocarbon research dates the oldest such structures in Berry to the late tenth and especially eleventh centuries.Footnote ⁴⁵ Even property inventories from that region mention no ponds until the eleventh century, when charters dated to the 1050s, 1081, and 1092 treat them as novelties.Footnote ⁴⁶ In written records from around 1080 St. Vincent of Mans and other lay and religious lordships in Maine and Poitou, such as the lords of Laval at Marennes, undertake to excavate and build dams for multi-pond projects.Footnote ⁴⁷ Monks at Ronceray complained in 1141 to Count Geoffrey IV of Anjou and canons of Bourges in 1160 to Count Étienne of Sancerre because the counts’ new ponds had flooded properties of the religious.Footnote ⁴⁸ While the original twelfth-century ponds at Citeaux provided water supply and drainage, with fish an afterthought,Footnote ⁴⁹ Cistercians at Châalis in the Valois initiated complex pond systems shortly after 1160 and Burgundian nobles and monasteries began to do likewise between 1184 and 1206.Footnote ⁵⁰

Some charters hint how these facilities were run. A pond built by St.-Père of Chartres flooded land of a neighbour named Aucher: sometime between 1101 and 1129 the parties agreed that when the pond was filled, water and fish belonged to the abbey, but when it was dry, land and crop were Aucher’s. Because some ponds on a Norman watercourse belonged to a knight and others to the monks of La Trappe, in 1215 the parties arranged to coordinate their draining and later refilling (Figure 7.8).Footnote ⁵¹ By 1263 the knight Pierre de Palluau had his ponds at Ograis in Berry emptied and dried every three years, while new constructions along the eastern edge of the Paris basin in Champagne came equipped with a full set of sluice-gates and drains.Footnote ⁵²

Figure 7.8 Étang de Chaumont, La Trappe, Normandy. The Étang de Chaumont, probably of twelfth-century origin, at La Trappe abbey is and was one among the dozens of medieval ponds constructed along the little river Iton, a headwaters stream of the Eure, a tributary of the Seine.

Photograph by Terryl Kinder. Used with permission.

Some of the same sorts of landowners were then also handling fish with forethought. Duke William of Normandy and monks of St.-Benoit-sur-Loire agreed in 1067 to share the fish taken regularly from one of the ponds at St.-Jacques de Beuvron.Footnote ⁵³ Surviving scraps of financial records kept for the Count of Champagne in 1217 indicate systematic stocking of his ponds,Footnote ⁵⁴ and the 1235 ordinance on fiefs of King Louis IX assumed that fishponds had a five-year production cycle.Footnote ⁵⁵ These anonymous fish were probably natives, most often bream, the variety most consumed at La Charité-sur-Loire at this time.Footnote ⁵⁶ In England, where after 1066 an ethnically and culturally French elite possessed pond systems wholly like those of their continental cousins, Henry III’s own fishponds commonly supplied “fat mother bream” (bremas matrices et grassas) and pike for stocking his other ponds and those of his favourites.Footnote ⁵⁷ A late thirteenth-century guide to estate management, Fleta, explicitly recommended bream and perch for ponds.Footnote ⁵⁸ And even in 1299 French royal officials were putting hundreds of bramis into ponds in Auvergne.Footnote ⁵⁹

Shortly before 1240 the English-born, Paris-educated Franciscan encyclopedist Bartholomaeus Anglicus described the ponds to which his contemporaries were accustomed:

‘Hard’ engineering would manage water for fish or other purposes, but the handling of the ‘wet ware’, living fish, remained somewhat haphazard.

Chapter 5’s discussion of carp as an invasive species in medieval western Europe sets the stage for its purposeful management and domestication (recall Map 5.1). To reiterate, from an ancient native range confined to the Balkans, between the sixth and eleventh centuries carp spread west and northwards to the middle Odra and Elbe and into right-bank tributaries of the Rhine. By the mid-twelfth century the newcomer had reached the main stem of the middle Rhine, but not likely further. Only in the mid-thirteenth century does evidence of carp’s presence explode across northern France and the Low Countries. Paris-based scholastic encyclopedists in the generation after Bartholomaeus associated the wild fish with slow rivers and still waters. Contemporaries around 1260 themselves named carp and other species as being stocked in ponds in Brie Champagnoise and sold on the Paris market. Consumers discarded the bones into waste heaps near the Louvre where modern archaeozoologists identify the same taxa. Until that time the carp’s westwards expansion had looked like an unintended consequence of human activity under favourably warm climatic conditions: across the heartlands of Latin Christendom whatever bodies of water people used or built to store live fish or for other purposes proved well suited as habitats for a hardy, omnivorous, and adaptable warm-water fish. Uneaten survivors could be transferred or simply escape and start new wild populations.

Hence with the 1200s seigneurs and their estate managers with experience handling stocks of native fishes in controllable multi-pond systems could identify and turn to the more fecund newcomer. Especially those mid-century encyclopedists confirm a new contemporary awareness of carp in the French heartland. Thomas of Cantimpré, Vincent of Beauvais, and Albert the Great, respectively sons of the Low Countries, northern France, and near Augsburg, spent much of their careers in Paris, where between the mid-1240s and early 1260s each compiled Aristotelian observations on natural history which then circulated widely. All three describe carp as a fish of still waters adept at evading nets. Thomas and after him Vincent appealed to popular knowledge (“Opinio vulgi est…”) in relating how this fish spawned in water weeds, its young liked warm shallows, and the sickness they suffered in stagnant August conditions was cured by fresh river water. Albert added that carp spawn in certain waters and grow large in others, the best having clay bottoms seeded to wheat and plowed over before flooding.Footnote ⁶¹ All this highlighted features of carp aquaculture. With carp’s entry into these widely distributed reference books, after the 1260s mere learned mention is no longer evidence for local presence of the species, but other signs of purposeful management proliferate.

From the Paris basin to Burgundy and from Hainaut to the middle Loire, by the turn of the thirteenth century carp seem almost ubiquitous – carp growing in ponds, little carp for stocking, big carp for breeding, carp in elite kitchens and on elite tables.Footnote ⁶² On most elite estates – royal, aristocratic, monastic – those fish lived in habitats equipped for full control of water supply and levels.Footnote ⁶³ Agents for the count of Namur inventoried his dozen ponds in 1289 and specified each was stocked with carp for harvest on a four-year cycle.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1319 the pond at Millançay in Sologne was fished every two or three years followed by one dry year before restocking.Footnote ⁶⁵ Already in 1285 the Count of Champagne’s pond at Chaumont was producing carp by the thousands, and in both 1339 and 1345 the duke of Burgundy’s Saint-Seine pond at Laperrière-sur Saône yielded about 16.5 metric tonnes of adult carp and of other varieties only a fraction of that.Footnote ⁶⁶ While most of those big carp from Saint-Seine were destined for live storage and the duke’s palace table at Argilly, output from fish farms belonging to the king, to the queen dowager, and, it appears, to the abbey of Citeaux was also sold in varying proportions to local merchants and some with Parisian connections. Other large numbers of small fish (norriens, alevins) went to restock the owner’s own or neighbours’ recently refilled ponds.Footnote ⁶⁷

Transfers of juvenile carp obscure the extent of selected breeding then carried out by these enterprises. In 1347 managers of the queen dowager’s ponds in Brie returned 100 of the 900 large carp harvested from the Parc pond near Coulommiers in order to repopulate it.Footnote ⁶⁸ Sixty years earlier assessors on the count of Namur’s estate found the pond Huve near Tavier exclusively dedicated to “large carps chosen to restock the other ponds.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Did selective breeding also imply specialized spawning/fry ponds? Such facilities may have existed before 1350 on the Citeaux estate, where they are recorded by the end of that century, while on properties of the duke of Burgundy and neighbouring princes they occur, along with specified ‘mother carps’ (carpes meres) only shortly after 1370.Footnote ⁷⁰ Despite the sparse early evidence of reproduction control, well before the Black Death of 1348–1351 marked a secular turn in Europe’s economic climate, clerks for great and lesser lords in northern Francophone Europe were surveying and keeping account books for carp-rearing enterprises closely resembling those in Bohemia or Poland two centuries later.Footnote ⁷¹

Not so across the Channel. English pond managers also kept fine accounts in the thirteenth century, but they never once mentioned a carp. When King Edward II and his wife Isabelle of France visited Paris for the knighting of her brothers in 1313, her father, Philip IV, provided the couple with the food for a banquet to thank their hosts. The gift included 200 large and 40 small pike and 160 carp.Footnote ⁷² Yet the species leaves no trace in the British Isles before the very end of the fourteenth century, and well into the sixteenth was there acknowledged a rare and recent introduction (also the date of the earliest credible bone finds).Footnote ⁷³ Delayed entry of carp to England contrasts with Anglo-Norman or Angevin introduction of exotic fallow deer, rabbits, and probably peafowl, all for the sake of elite luxury food and entertainment.Footnote ⁷⁴

7.2.3 Diffusion of Innovations

Well-evidenced signposts on the continent mark the subsequent spread of the entire integrated aquaculture system (multiple ponds used in rotation to rear chiefly carp in segregated size groupings) from northern France across other regions of transalpine Europe. One vector went east from ducal Burgundy into Franche-Comté – where production accounts dating 1338–1383 report all the now-familiar featuresFootnote ⁷⁵ – and down the Saône/Rhône (or up the Loire) into Dombes, Forez, and west into Brenne. The latter regions experienced two waves of pond construction. Early initiatives in the 1230s were emulated on a large scale only fifty and more years later, when lords invested in pond systems as one form of market-linked agricultural improvement. Further purposeful flooding after the mid-fourteenth century commonly tried to get some use out of abandoned farmlands by serving regional demand for fish. Large-scale market-oriented carp production by a wide range of social groups became central to regional economies – though the best operational records are, of course, for the nineteen large and more small ponds of the count of Forez and the equivalent estates of the lords of Thoire-Villars in Dombes and the duke of Savoy in Bresse.Footnote ⁷⁶

While aquaculture in Hainaut and Brabant seems participant in the French experience, its more tenuous spread further north in the Low Countries is so far better traced through the proliferation of carp in food remains and customs schedules.Footnote ⁷⁷

The trail of aquaculture spreading eastward into central Europe might see one signpost at Heilsbronn, a Cistercian monastery located about twenty-five kilometers southwest of Nürnberg on the Schwabach, a headwaters stream in the Main–Rhine drainage. This lordship roughly midway between France and Bohemia can stand for a whole belt of ponds in Upper Franconia.Footnote ⁷⁸ During the 1260s Heilsbronn, already more than a century old, began acquiring first natural, then artificial ponds in its general environs. By the 1340s the monks were buying and rearing stocker carp for a multipond enterprise which extended to more than thirty kilometers from the convent and still mainly served their own consumption needs. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, and eventually as a state-managed foundation, Heilsbronn’s large output joined that of many neighbouring landholders who invested in aquaculture to supply urban consumers, especially in prosperous Nürnberg.Footnote ⁷⁹

Adjacent to Upper Franconia are the Czech lands, where pond construction for aquaculture first surged under the auspices of Emperor Charles IV (r.1347–1378), who also had family and personal connections in France. Charles is even reputed to have urged pond building not only “to hold fish for people’s food and to drain water from swampy areas,” but also to retain rain and snow melt for flood protection.Footnote ⁸⁰ Dwarfing all known earlier hydraulic works in the region, at least eighty-seven new projects are known before the Hussite revolt in 1418 seized Czech attention.Footnote ⁸¹ Though late fourteenth-century pond masters there favoured hill country, which made for cheaper short dams but less productive deep ponds, some built the oldest large ponds (100 ha plus) which still survive, installed elaborate sluices and valves, populated ponds with age-class stockers, and selected fish for breeding. Their output went to towns in Bohemia, Germany, and Austria.Footnote ⁸² Czech politics calmed again after 1450 – when the Rožmberk estate at Třeboň already had three large ponds covering 700 hectares and seventeen smaller ones – and gave occasion for more large engineering works in both southern Bohemia and the flat lands of the upper Labe (Elbe) basin. Then the Pernštejns, for instance, improved their Hluboka estate with the huge Bezdrev pond (see Figure 7.4) and master Štĕpánek Netolický secured stable water supplies for Třeboň, which he managed from 1516 to 1530, by diverting a river through a forty-five-kilometer artificial canal, the Zlata Stoka, ‘Golden Drain’.Footnote ⁸³ Such were the enterprises familiar to Jan Dubravius.

Fish culture facilities were being built in central Silesia, then a dependency of the Czech crown, even during the difficult 1430s and 40s,Footnote ⁸⁴ and by the 1450s comparable ones had come into the principalities of Oświęcim-Zator, at the low divide between the upper Odra and Wisła basins where Bohemian and Polish influence intersected. As earlier observed, carp from here supplied Kraków in the early sixteenth century. That territory also probably transmitted state of the art techniques still further farther east and north in Poland to the zone between Kraków and Sandomierz and the region of Kalisz-Sieradz, where production grew after 1550.Footnote ⁸⁵

So what socio-natural implications had this four century wave of local aquacultural innovation?

7.3.1 Demand: Live Fresh Fish for Inland Elites

The segment of consumption demand which medieval aquaculture served shaped its character and structured its impacts. Fish farms provided live fresh fish for inland Europe’s well-to-do. When the duke of Burgundy was in his titular principality, his pond masters delivered thousands of carp to his castles. When the ducal family went to Bruges in coastal Flanders, they ate fresh seafood, but a two-day journey inland put the pond fish back on their menu again.Footnote ⁸⁸ Thirteenth-century English ponds delivered fresh bream and pike to the king and other magnates as did those of the Polish king in 1420.Footnote ⁸⁹ At Horn castle in Lower Austria, kitchen accounts from 1444 to 1446 show the resident von Puchaim family buying live carp during winter and Lent for up to twice what they paid for the ordinary ‘river fish’ eaten in other seasons.Footnote ⁹⁰ When the ponds’ product went on the market it was not cheap, even for fish. At Namur in 1356 a hundred carp for a wedding feast came at twice the price of a cow.Footnote ⁹¹ During the Council of Constance (1414–1418) a pound of carp cost the same as four pounds of beef or twenty loaves of bread.Footnote ⁹² Throughout this period fish from the ducal ponds in Burgundy sold as luxury items on regional markets. Late fourteenth-century carp averaged 1.5 gros and pike two to three, which matched the daily wages of pond workers (fishers, carpenters, earth movers). On the fifteenth-century market in Dijon, 100 carp went for four to twenty francs (48–240 gros) and single pike for 1.5–10.5 gros (30–210 denier), when a fat capon cost 3 gros (60 d) and a skinned rabbit 30d.Footnote ⁹³

Medieval fish farming acquired strong regional features. It belonged especially to interior Europe. From upper Poitou and the great arc of the middle Loire all the way to central Poland, zones famous for fish culture (Map 7.1) appeared inland of the roughly 150 kilometers across which medieval transport technology could safely haul fresh marine fish (compare Map 3.1). Resource endowments and consumption centers played further locational roles. Where large natural lakes offered ample and tasty competition, few fishpond enterprises endured.Footnote ⁹⁴ Nor was all inland Christendom equally inundated. Areas distinguished for pond culture share impermeable soils and abundant water supplies. In Franconia, Burgundy, and Lorraine springs seep from discontinuities between porous and solid strata on valley slopes, while southern Bohemia, Dombes, Brenne, and Sologne rely on surface runoff and locally disordered drainage.Footnote ⁹⁵ Natural potholes and intermittent wetlands made good sites for ponds. But for fish as for medieval commercial viticulture,Footnote ⁹⁶ concentrated demand affected those suitable landscapes most accessible to it. Princes in Burgundy, Forez, and southern Bohemia and such monastic establishments as Citeaux, Maulbronn (Württemberg), and Halesowen (Worcestershire) created pond systems to supply their large domestic needs.Footnote ⁹⁷ The papal household at Avignon sent special agents up the Rhône and Saône to buy and ship the output of Burgundian ponds.Footnote ⁹⁸ Good-sized towns concentrated a well-off clientele: Lyon bought the fish of Dombes, Poitiers those of Brenne, and Brussels the carp grown in periurban waters of the Senne.Footnote ⁹⁹ Nürnberg, Bamberg, and other south German towns were supplied by Franconian ponds but also by those of southern Bohemia – insofar as the latter had surplus from the demand of local elites, Prague, and Vienna. Greatest consumer of all, Paris drew on the Seine basin (Valois, Champagne) and the Loire (Berry, Sologne). Medieval fish culture is associated with special resource endowments accessible to inland concentrations of wealth.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Map 7.1 Major regions of carp culture in late medieval Europe.

7.3.2 Exercise of Elite Power

Aquaculture was shaped and spread in medieval Europe by exercise of elite power, the same agent then contesting customary access to wild fisheries. Regional elites satisfied demand for fish by imposing a new aquatic regime on reluctant neighbours and subjects.

Fishponds were private property. Most belonged to lords of the land. They were expensive investments. Assembling the acreage for a finishing pond at Massileux in Forez cost 1,000 livres and as much more to build it. Work for the pond made at Chomutov, Bohemia, in 1408/9 cost two or three times the owner’s annual receipts from an entire agricultural village.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The standard production system promised no returns for two to five years, and thereafter also continuing costs of operation and maintenance.Footnote ¹⁰² Nevertheless under the right conditions the returns could be lucrative. In 1520 the seigneur of Mèziéres, leading landholder in Brenne, sold to a local merchant the entire output from ponds Piégu and Picadon for 1,600 livres, more than twice what building the latter pond had cost in 1494/5.Footnote ¹⁰³ In those same decades around the turn of the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries lords in southern Bohemia and Lower Austria who had invested heavily in pond construction also enjoyed very high returns.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Dubravius attributed to Vilém of Pernštejn (1449–1518), who had created the large aquaculture enterprises at Hluboka and Pardubice, a boast that all his great wealth flowed from his ponds.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Yet beyond the prospect of domestic fish supplies and returns on sales, men of power built fishponds to show off their social superiority. Ponds were an essential feature of the estate park Robert II, Count of Artois, created at Hesdin in the 1290s to display by artifice and exoticism the gulf setting him above all lesser folk. Here the regular production cycle was rescheduled to entertain a royal visit and drainage postponed lest a bare and muddy expanse offend the eye of the countess. Robert’s daughter and heir, Mahaut (1302–29) reveled in the luxury of eating fish from her own estate and watching her people work on the pond.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The symbolic function of ponds in Brenne confined their construction to seigneurs with high justice and the right of warren, a privilege still being enforced in the fifteenth century. Size mattered, too: in 1455 the Seigneur de Mèziéres began constructing what he called ‘la Grant Mer de Brenne’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ His contemporary, John Howard, first Duke of Norfolk, paid close personal attention to the management of his ponds, even though he sold none of their output.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Wherever the local innovators and owners of aquaculture enterprises are collectively identifiable, they prove to be a socially representative sample of regional landholders and not especially the monks of modern myth. In Dombes, for instance, lay owners of fishponds always outnumbered clerics by more than two to one and were in all centuries after the thirteenth a majority among known builders of new ponds.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Surviving German documents likewise first associate ponds with religious houses and prelates, but from the 1200s noble landowners and both town citizens and corporations came to the fore.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Fourteenth-century Czech chronicler Beneš of Veitmíle was fully aware that the monarch, Charles IV, personally promoted pond construction and was then emulated by high aristocrats, lesser nobles, churchmen, and commoners alike.Footnote ¹¹¹ A century later the post-Hussite burst of activity began with middling barons like Vilém of Pernštejn at Pardubice and Hluboka nad Vltavam and quasi-royal potentates like the Rožmberks around Český Krumlóv and Třeboň, but also attracted municipalities such as Česky Budejowice and Vodňany. Charles, at least, reputedly made plain his intent to transform landscapes, ordering construction of fishponds “to drain water from swampy ground and for the sun and warm winds to evaporate water from stagnant areas, which will benefit plants thereabouts.”Footnote ¹¹²

Waters manipulated for lords and their fish threatened the interests of others. In a litany of power, tropes of conflict and compensation run everywhere through detailed records. In mid-twelfth-century Berry, local seigneur Hervé Guitier took offence when Knights Templar of Villefranche made their dam so high they flooded the houses and roadway of Hervé’s men, while the cathedral canons of St. Étienne at Bourges complained to Count William of Sancerre that his dam at Beaulieu had drowned their land.Footnote ¹¹³ Across the Channel a generation later Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmunds stirred up resentment in and outside the abbey when he raised the dam of his fishpond at Babwell and inundated meadows, pastures, orchards, and arable of neighbours and other monks alike.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In upper Saxony the abbey of Altzelle was continually at odds with its small-town neighbours in Roßwein, whose lands Altzelle flooded; with a convent at Nimbschen, whose woodland Altzelle drowned raising a pond in 1495; and with another nearby town, Grimma, whose own pond washed out the abbey’s mill.Footnote ¹¹⁵ When Ješek of Kosovy Hory, lord of Lomnice, built Dvořištĕ pond in 1367, the waters drove peasants off more than 300 ha of arable. By the early 1370s more places in southern Bohemia were described as “drowned by the pond”. New constructions around Krumlóv in 1479–1484 inundated one-fourth of the estate’s own village Radošovic – where the tenants received an equivalent rent reduction – and all of neighbouring Hummo – for which the Cistercians of Vyšší Brod got two villages in return.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Where aquaculture became a major interest, normal practice encouraged entrepreneurs to flood first and deal with local objections later. Unauthorized constructions were confirmed retroactively, not removed. Seigneurs in much of central and southeastern France enjoyed a recognized customary droit d’inonder (d’inondation): they could build dams on their own land at will and then compensate neighbours for what the pond flooded, “for the construction of such a pond provides more benefit to the builder and the community than the inconvenience of neighbours whose properties are drowned in the flooding of the water.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ The legal regime divided ownership of the waters and fish from that of the flooded land. Barring other compensation involuntary victims thus retained only the crop from years the pond was dry and the right to collect shoreline vegetation. But cases from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Dombes, for example, show pond builders offering neighbours cash, land, or a share in the yield of fish.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Some flooded Czech peasants were compensated by their lords, but practicing aquaculture at peasant expense was also one way lords wielded authority in east central Europe around 1500. To take but one example from a court book of the Kraków cathedral chapter, villagers at Choczianowice who complained in 1502 that the lord’s fishpond “frequently damages their fields and floods their meadows,” blamed the local administrator for having raised the dam and, in preparation for another pond, cut down the local woodlot.Footnote ¹¹⁹ On another lordship near Sandomierz already in 1405 the lord’s steward was conceded “the right to make fishponds wherever he wishes”.Footnote ¹²⁰ Protest was vain. Peasants undoubtedly suffered when their superiors turned land into water. As one disgruntled Czech put it in 1508, “what was left after wars, fires, and plague is now mostly inundated by ponds”.Footnote ¹²¹

7.3.3 Adaptive Economic Structures

Depending on surrounding economic institutions, medieval fishpond enterprises operated in the customary economy, the market economy, or in east-central Europe, the newly coercive economy of neoserfdom. These cultural contexts shaped the supply of labour, but not the need for expertise, and constrained a lord’s choice among indirect subsistence, market sales, or ending direct management in favour of leasing out individual ponds or even entire enterprises.

Whatever the setting, fish culture called for both heavy labour and, on the part of managers, high technical skill and environmental knowledge. Around 1300, tenants at Gressenhall manor in Norfolk were obliged to perform labour services ‘facient stagnum’ or, in the 1315 English-language survey, ‘damyng’. At the same time their counterparts on the count of Bar’s Lorraine estates did compulsory service carting fry to stock ponds.Footnote ¹²² Workers were later turned out to harvest fish from ponds for Ebrach, a monastery in Upper Franconia, as a thoroughly old-fashioned obligation on certain peasant tenements, limited to the specific task and with equally customary remuneration of meals and two fish.Footnote ¹²³

While expert monastic managers are curiously hard to identify,Footnote ¹²⁴ a long catalog could be assembled of lay specialists, some employed on limited-term contract, others as long-time, high-ranking salaried servants with titles like ‘pond master’ or ‘fish master’. We have already met Štępánek Netolický building the Zlata Stoka at Třeboň for the Rožmberks in 1516. Having learnt the craft in years assisting his predecessor, during his own fifteen-year tenure he designed and supervised construction of nine large and thirty-seven small ponds, traveled to advise the archbishop of Salzburg and the count of Salm, and for one tough engineering problem called in as consultant his counterpart from the Podĕbrady estate. At a time when contract pond masters in Bohemia were getting 3 grosz a day the Rožmberks were paying Netolický 2,400 grosz a year. His retirement house still stands in a suburban part of Třĕboň.Footnote ¹²⁵ But such experts can be tracked just about as far back as detailed records of fish culture go. A team run by the clerk Colard de Coilly and bailiff Hugues Bernard stocked, harvested, and maintained ponds for the count of Champagne in 1258–1259 and ‘Master Nicholas the Fisherman’ toured southern England for at least eighteen years (1244–1262) for sake of the bishop of Winchester’s ponds. During the 1330s–60s Reynaud le Tarroillon had charge of work on many ducal ponds in Burgundy.Footnote ¹²⁶

Wage labourers evidently did much of the physical work to multiply and maintain fishponds in key areas of late medieval France. Reynaud and his successors in ducal Burgundy recruited locally for construction and for harvesting the fish, but eventually came to rely on regional pools of workers. The duke’s officers paid by the task or a daily rate, food and lodging plus 12 denier to 1¼ gros in the fourteenth century and 2 to 3 gros in 1450.Footnote ¹²⁷ The same daily rate then went also to the local peasants whom Citeaux abbey hired for fishing its ponds, while using permanent servants and independent craftsmen for more skilled tasks.Footnote ¹²⁸ Czech pond-builders worked for a wage, too: one grosz a day in the late 1300s and as much as two grosz a century later. But by that time forced labour service was becoming a norm in east-central Europe, also for heavy fishpond work. Account books for estates of Teutonic Knights and Hospitallers at Jindřichův Hradec often record forced labour (robot) on the ponds.Footnote ¹²⁹ A survey of the Kraków chapter estates in 1531 made this obligation plain for villagers of Dłotów: “furthermore, the aforesaid men are bound to work at the fishing in the fishpond, however often it is demanded of them, and likewise on the repair of the dam of the fishpond and hauling the fish to the manor house at Pabianice, however often it is demanded of them.”Footnote ¹³⁰

Cultured carp and other fish from the ponds might likewise be delivered in kind to the lord’s household – a more dependable form of the indirect subsistence fisheries familiar in the earlier middle ages – or sold by auction or prior contract to merchants from town. Like elite claims on wild catches (see Chapter 3) primary household consumption often coincided with reliance on servant and obligatory peasant labour during early regional development of aquaculture. But relict practices persisted. Recorded shipments from thirteenth-century English ponds went almost exclusively to the king’s, bishop’s, or lord’s residence, while during 1345, with the duchess of Burgundy dwelling in Argilly castle, more than 11,000 large carp arrived there from the St. Seine pond. Much later in 1522 the Polish king’s ponds at Oświęcim put 32,640 carp and 6,045 pike into their master’s kitchen.Footnote ¹³¹ As with wild fisheries, monastic establishments with large and localized demand for fish long retained this autarchic strategy: fifteenth-century monks at Citeaux ate nearly all of their own production and so did those at Heilsbronn and Chaalis. But lay lords of ponds in late medieval Brie Champenoise also favoured direct household consumption.Footnote ¹³²

Commercial sales of cultured fish are apparent in western Europe before 1300 and thereafter gained importance and spread eastwards. Coincident with the first artificial ponds in Berry, bream appear in 1100 as the only obligate freshwater fish in market regulations for Bourges.Footnote ¹³³ Later ponds sent mainly carp and pike. Financial accounts kept under Philip IV for the nine royal pond complexes within 100 kilometers of Paris show varying divisions between supplying the court and markets: over a three-year period the western ponds run by Jean Harenger [!] gained 61 percent of their income from Parisian merchants. Managerial expectations are suggested by accounting for fish transferred to the king’s hotel or other royal households in the same way as for sales elsewhere.Footnote ¹³⁴ Every three to five years between 1386 and 1422 one pond at Saix in Dombes yielded daily sales in quantities like 200 carp, 515 carp, 975 carp and 12 pike, 650 carp, etc.Footnote ¹³⁵ Carp from Burgundy supplied the papal court in Avignon and towns along the way. One sale at l’Eperviére-sur-Saône handled 3,400 carp and 190 pike, representing about 60 percent of that pond’s harvest for 1353.Footnote ¹³⁶ Historian Corinne Beck found in the annual accounts of Burgundian castellans a change of priority in the 1390s: henceforth most ducal ponds were managed for commercial production and sale, even of those fish designated for the court but left unused. This coincided with the duke’s diminished presence in his principality.Footnote ¹³⁷

A mixed model of domestic consumption and market sales became the norm for central European pond enterprises from perhaps the fourteenth and indubitably the fifteenth century. Quantitative evidence lags. Dubravius had Vilém of Pernštejn brag that he made more from sale of fish (alone) than the entire wealth of ancient Roman senators; his Hluboka estate shipped to Prague and over the border hills to Bavaria and Austria.Footnote ¹³⁸ As early as 1522 Silesian noble landowners around Wrocław were complaining to their king Louis of Bohemia that city officials interfered with “our fish on the fish market… which we ship there” (unseren Fyschen vff dem Fyschmargkt … dy wir hynein furen…). In 1534 the Polish king’s Oświęcim ponds sold 26,100 carp, only 20 percent less than went to the royal household.Footnote ¹³⁹ Land tax assessments from Lower Austria a generation later do indicate some lordships getting up to a quarter of their annual cash returns from sales of cultured carp.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Historians of early modern east-central Europe equate fish culture with more widespread local brewing monopolies and commercialized production of cereals for export sales as examples of ‘landowner capitalism’ or ‘market feudalism’.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Market conditions writ large thus affected the economic viability and even survival of regional aquacultures. Carp farming appeared and expanded where inland elites with access to land, water, and cheap labour demanded fresh fish for their own consumption and became aware of urban markets willing to pay for any surplus. When these conditions failed, princes and other large estate holders phased out their own participation and administrative documentation. Where the ponds then survived, their operation and management become more difficult to track.

The inland principalities of Brabant and Hainaut, centred around Brussels, provide a case in point. Aquaculture on ducal and other estates there expanded dynamically from the late thirteenth into the mid-fourteenth century. Elite investment met landowner needs and local market opportunities for fresh fish. Strong commercial involvement – investment by urban merchants, multi-purpose use of moats, specialized fry and storage ponds, markets in carp fry, etc. – continued for another generation or two. But about 1400 big pond owners were experiencing labour shortages, rising labour costs, and a greater supply of marine fishes competing for consumer choice. Burgundian succession in 1430/32 deprived most towns of resident courts and their business. By about 1500 large lay landowners, especially around Brussels, could supply their tables from the market and had shut down or leased out their ponds. Marine fish supplanted freshwater varieties in regional diets. Many ponds reverted to marsh or meadow. Fish culture became an affair of religious houses and poorly documented professional urban fishmongers.Footnote ¹⁴²

While leasing out arable demesne lands is a familiar trend across most of high and late medieval western Europe, short- or long-term leases of aquaculture enterprises appear related to establishment of stable market supplies of fish accessible to consuming households. Costs and reliability of labour for stocking, harvest, and maintenance also played a role. Leasing cut the landowner’s administrative expenses, lowered risk, and promised a reasonably steady return on investments. The latter might or might not include continued supply of fish for household needs. Yet how much, if at all, did leasing out of big pond systems actually change the production system? Comparatively small private ponds had likely existed all along and eighteenth-century records reflect practices very like those of the fourteenth.

In certain interior parts of France late medieval economic and political changes eroded the importance of large princely fish farms, leaving the sector a thinly recorded commercially oriented activity of lesser seigneurs and urban-based dealers in fish. In Forez the comital enterprise lost its raison d’etre with the 1430 move of the family to Moulins, 150 kilometers and a different drainage basin from the ponds. The management office atrophied and in a generation all the count’s ponds were out on lease. Urban interest in aquaculture already dated back a generation or more. In the 1480s an influential merchant of Montbrison, Pierre Cochard, held a nine-year lease on the main water bodies.Footnote ¹⁴³ In ducal Burgundy by the late 1300s the resource office (gruerie) faced rising logistical problems – labour costs, shortage of nourriens, unstable weather, erratic output – and ever more frequent absence of the princely household. Some individual ponds were out on lease before 1400. In 1442/3 Duke Philip let the entire resource base go for twelve years to a private consortium of ducal officials. When the term expired the lessees had lost money and failed to maintain fish stocks. From 1454 then, ponds went out in smaller units for longer periods to groups of local urban merchants and lesser seigneurs with earlier ill-documented experience in local fisheries and markets.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Brenne, in contrast, was a land of smaller seigneuries (and hence no surviving financial accounts) where a slow fourteenth-century increase in pond leases became more general after 1400. Most were taken up by town-based partnerships which by that century’s end even invested in new pond construction. The student of Brenne’s pond-filled landscape, Renaud Benarrous, even refers to a ‘democratization’ of pond ownership.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Institutional variability at the ownership level and even in the disposition of the fish produced likely more affected contemporary and surviving documentation than it did material interaction between a human technology and the things and forces of nature it sought to manage. Once technologies for fish culture and markets for its product had been established, changes at the managerial level little affected the broader consequences. Despite differences in social stratification the landscape of Třĕboň replicated the paysage piscicole of Brenne and human relations with those landscapes had close similarities.

7.3.4 Colonized Ecosystems

Hence technically advanced aquaculture could meet elite demand for fresh fish in late medieval interior Europe along a spectrum from old-fashioned seigneurial self-sufficiency to up-to-date commercialization. At all points, however, this response to wants backed up by power and wealth set off localized and small-scale but numerous and widespread ‘ecological revolutions’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Medieval programs and work to colonize nature for fishponds drove environmental change at numerous inland socio-natural sites. By transforming ecosystems aquaculture produced winners, losers, and changes in human experience.

Medieval fish culture purposely furthered and locally intensified the changes medieval economic development in general was perpetrating on European watercourses (recall Chapter 5). Investors aimed to multiply formerly uncommon eutrophic stillwater habitats. Ponds sustained ecosystems unlike those of earlier running streams or seasonal wetlands. Stillwater organisms – rooted water plants, midges, mosquito larvae, perch, pike, roach, tench, bream – gained living space and notably those of moving water – gravel-loving invertebrates, gudgeon, grayling, trout, barbel, various migratory fishes – lost. The scale of transformation is impressive, for the fish culture regions acquired vast numbers of ponds. Careful local experts concur on the order of magnitude: 25,000 ponds in Bohemia and 22,000 in upper Franconia; 25,000 hectares of ponded surface in upper Silesia; 40,000 hectares in central France.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ With ample evidence of modern drainage of medieval ponds in areas as far apart as France and Poland, it is hard to dispute Robert Delatouche’s guess that the historic province of Maine, for instance, had contained at the end of the Middle Ages twenty-five times more ponds than 500 years later.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Principal intended immediate beneficiary of this transformation of aquatic habitat was the carp. Fish culture meant the large-scale human introduction of an exotic animal across large areas of western Europe where it had not previously lived. Just the surviving written records from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries count hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of small carp going into ponds. Pond masters saw to their food supply, protected them from predators, and arranged their reproduction.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ As objects of controlled monoculture these fish were becoming domesticates. Select domesticated races of carp certainly had emerged in Europe by the sixteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Yet more telling, physiological features symptomatic of domestication remain visible in all wild-living European carp populations west of the middle Danube.Footnote ¹⁵¹ In other words, even the ‘wild’ carp of central and western Europe are feral descendants of domesticates. Given a start, carp themselves became a dynamic natural element, colonizing wild habitats so promptly that astute medieval observers soon recognized them in nature. Both late thirteenth-century French fisheries regulations and the first Polish writer on fishes, Stefan Falimirz in 1534, grouped carp among wild fishes of the river as well as cultivated ponds.Footnote ¹⁵²

Together and separately the ponds and the carp worked wider change on the larger environment. Some of this followed an intentional cultural program: like other agroecosystems aquaculture is meant to control and simplify environmental variables so biomass concentrated in one desired species. But then this exotic animal ‘went native’ with what are now predictable – if historically undocumentable – consequences for the aquatic ecosystems receiving it.Footnote ¹⁵³ Biologists watching the carp spread into new continents during the late nineteenth century found it unusually quick to colonize temperate still-water environments – which medieval economic development was proliferating – and to disrupt relatively simple fish populations which were already under stress from overfishing and environmental change – like the native cold-water fishes of medieval Europe. In wild ecosystems carp behaviour harmed native species by accelerating changes to habitat and biomass.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Had French king Philip IV, for instance, a freshwater research station, historians could now hope for more than just proliferating documentary references to carp.

More visible is the environmental impact of the ponds themselves. Medieval records let modern scholars see the eastern edge of the Paris basin (Champagne–Lorraine) and the valley lands of Sologne and Brenne transformed from seasonally flooded woods to arable and ponds, permanently open water where there had been little or none. Shaded springs and trickling streams became sunny or mist-shrouded expanses of water and reeds. Czech archaeologists provide copious evidence of how late fifteenth century pond construction changed drainage and vegetation patterns in southern Moravia. Around Třeboň thousands of hectares of heath drowned beneath the Rožmberk ponds alone.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Like other aspects of medieval economic development this multiplied eutrophic still-water habitats in regions where they had been rare. Pond ecosystems differed from those of streams or seasonal wetlands. Inhabitants of still water gained living space and those of moving water lost. Organisms adapted to slow annual oscillation of water levels now encountered flooding year-round, occasionally punctuated by the artificial drought of a pond drained for harvest. Silt accumulated behind dams on the river Allier.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In Brenne the ponds themselves raised the water table and fed newly emergent wetlands.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Charles IV himself reportedly testified (p. 300 above) to the ponds’ humidifying effect on microclimates, but this minimizes the change. Landscapes had been simplified and reordered at large scale. Ten percent of the surface in five rural communes of central Brenne is still submerged and a late seventeenth century map shows water covering more than 25 percent of Třeboň lordship.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Folk culture in Brenne comprehended the change by populating the ponds with beings inimical to humankind: the Grande Bissexte reared its upper body out of the water to seize unwary humans, drag them down, and devour them; a white doe chased and drowned those who attempted a nocturnal crossing along the dam of Mer Rouge, the region’s largest impoundment.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Later more enlightened observers would deplore the insalubrious damp of the pond-filled regions. Dombes, Sologne, and Forez in particular had by the nineteenth century well-deserved malarial reputations, a disease later learned to spread not by ‘bad air’ but by mosquitos bred in standing water.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Lakes and ponds are, moreover, ephemeral landscape features always fated to fill with sediment and revert to dry land. Like all artificial impoundments, each pond had to be maneuvered between that risk of deposition and normal biological succession on the one hand and the opposite hazard of erosion downcutting the barrier dam to restore running water. Without continual upkeep dams crumbled, sluices decayed, vegetation encroached, and many artificial fishponds ceased to be functional still-water ecosystems. Annual maintenance and decade-scale rejuvenation projects permeate Dubravius’s list of necessary tasks and likewise records of practice since those of Philip the Fair’s Norman ponds.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Managers also knew that organically enriched water from densely stocked ponds could inhibit growth of fishes downstream, and set up their water systems to reduce that threat to their crop. Even more than agriculture in general, lacking regular inputs of labour and materials, aquaculture was dubiously sustainable.

Aquaculture transformed human experience of the natural world. After 1292 residents of Hesdin, Artois, no longer lived among suburban fields and meadows but saw or had to work in ponds and woodlands as key elements of a landscape created for luxury display. Across Brenne the river Claise and other streams with vegetated banks where Merovingian St. Cyran (Sigiramnus) had sheltered to fish and high medieval countrymen pastured their livestock,Footnote ¹⁶² sank beneath permanent water bodies in the rising waves of the late fourteenth century and then the 1450s–1550s. The seasonal wetlands along the Lužnice where in 1379 men of Třeboň still paid for licence to fish,Footnote ¹⁶³ began to vanish. A century later it took only one or two generations to turn the valley into a network of more than fifty interconnected artificial ponds, some small, some immense, and a share of which were at any given time barren dry beds. We have already seen the new pattern of ecological knowledge and physical work required to operate the ponds.

Long-term social effects were destabilizing, too. Besides the professional pond masters, some ordinary rural people did find opportunity in the fishpond sector servicing large producers or small local markets. Fishers and fishmongers who had worked for or with princes in Burgundy eventually took leases on fragments of the former estates.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Wider social circles acquired ponds just in time to drive the post-1450 expansion in Brenne. In Silesia, Poland, and south Germany village notables prominently appear in possession of one or two small ponds. On big estates this could add up. When Himmelskron abbey was secularized in 1547, eighty-two ponds were inventoried on its peasant tenements. Twenty villages in the Pszczyń district of Silesia had in 1536 seventy-one peasant ponds with capacity to produce almost 100,000 juvenile carp.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

But for understandable reasons peasants’ resistance to aquaculture did not abate. It rather intensified their familiar opposition to privatized natural fisheries. The twelfth-century writer Wace was sure that Norman peasant rebels back in 997 wanted not the generic water rights reported in his source but in particular “to seize the fish from the fishponds.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Against theft of fish from an artificial pond laws customary and written made special provisions – Sachsenspiegel, for instance, set fines ten times higherFootnote ¹⁶⁷ – and lords posted special guards, especially when water was lowered for harvest. Who watched the watchers? In Franche-Comté two guards, Fourquon Boison and Jehan Beire of Dampierre, hired in 1371/2 to protect the count’s pond, instead themselves broke the dam and caught the fish. A few years later tenants were refusing to work harvesting carp and others to cart norriens between ponds.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Complaints about illicit and clandestine removal of fish from ponds are a commonplace of court records. Some labourers beat up Pierre de l’Aleu in April 1387 when he tried to stop them fishing in his pond at Neuvy-en-Sologne.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ In Dombes, Jean-Claude Schmitt has argued, thirteenth-century peasant anger against widespread flooding sublimated into legends where evil emanated from the lord’s pond. In 1388 and 1440, however, rebellious peasants there just publicly broke the dams.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Collective fishing and destruction of ponds followed by common public meals of the lord’s fish are well known from the German Peasants’ War – where the social content of such acts is blatant – but also from feuds between Staffordshire factions in the 1530s.Footnote ¹⁷¹

Finally thousands of localized ecological revolutions coloured general cultural style and expectation. The magnate offering ‘fish from our own ponds’ asserted social power with at least tacit environmental implications: people and nature were both subject to human control and turned to private purpose. Sellers and buyers of pond-reared fish dealt in a standardized commercial product. Dubravius discusses regional customs of selling carp by measure (volume) or by count, favouring the latter to avoid dispute “where carp of equal size are sold.”Footnote ¹⁷² As the Moravian described, so the Polish and the Austrian pond masters behaved, selling their carp and pike in units of sixty (kop, schock, sexagena).Footnote ¹⁷³ Earlier French fish farmers counted by hundreds. Nature had become a unit of account.

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Fish farms served an elite segment of medieval demand for fish. Medieval aquaculture intentionally transformed fish and landscape to fit human ends. Colonizing interventions in the environment achieved intended results and others not intended as well. What nature failed to provide was remedied by altering nature, in this instance by establishing artificial ecosystems to domesticate a useful animal and introduce an exotic life form into still-natural surroundings. Neither environmentally nor socially neutral, the aquaculture response – intensified development – to rising European demand for fish modeled an expectation that fisheries in particular and nature in general were subject to human authority and invention. The ponds created in Brenne, around Třeboň, and elsewhere in late medieval paysages piscicole remain strong human imprints on regional landscapes, now so distinctive as to be protected natural parks and UNESCO biosphere reserves. Again, an east-central European source articulates what cryptic western charters and account books can only suggest had been going on since the high Middle Ages: an inspection team touring lordships of the Kraków cathedral chapter in 1533 was instructed “if there are no fish in a pond, ask who took them out.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Fish are present or absent by human agency. It encapsulates a fundamental assumption of the modernist managerial mind.Footnote ¹⁷⁵