This book ends where most histories of fisheries begin. It has sought to explore how medieval Europeans interacted with their aquatic ecosystems in a world of natural and cultural change. The conclusion returns briefly to the two historical perspectives inherent in this book. Drawing on the line of fisheries pulls up common and diverse features of medieval Christendom’s evolving relations with the natural world. Needs and experiences of medieval people patterned their evolving expectations and models for dealing with creatures from the water. Sharing cultural norms of religious and social practice, medieval Europeans knew and adapted to their diverse aquatic environments. Some of those adaptations enabled long-sustained use of resources. Others damaged both natural and human conditions. Some portion of this history happened to take late medieval Europeans to an unknown New World.
As one story ends, another begins. Certain of the medieval approaches spread around the globe in the wakes of Columbus, Cabot, and their successors and emulators. Many other practices continued to shape European diets, working lives, waters, and life forms. Some of the latter eventually also had belated influences elsewhere. Working from a medieval historianʼs perspective has identified and narrated some elements of Christendomʼs millennial coevolution with its fisheries resources, whether those were grasped by contemporaries or are accessible only in retrospect. To the extent that purpose has been accomplished, historical findings can also inform a novel view of the global fisheries crisis in the incipient Anthropocene and the remedies being offered at the turn from the second to this third millennium.
9.1 Fishing in the Medieval Encounter with European Nature
Other than assiduously vegetarian ascetics, nearly all medieval Europeans came occasionally or regularly into contact with fish. To recapitulate and to recall some illustrative details provided earlier, many fish tales arise from the multiple forms of medieval experience and related cultural understandings of fish and fishing. There was a narrative flow and more lay below.
9.1.1 Story Lines
Historical retrospect enables this book to compile a millennial tale of interactions between aquatic nature and medieval Europeans’ use of it for culturally defined purposes. The central flow of overlapping narratives here traced played out within the larger evolution of Europe’s post-Roman political economy, though with strong cultural constraints and local/regional variability arising from the sub-continent’s distinctive aquatic ecosystems. The hybrid story of many fishes started from the natural diversity of those ecosystems providing living space for certain fish species and interspecific dynamics (Chapter 1) and from the several cultural understandings which shaped medieval uses of fish for food (Chapter 2). Spreading conformity to Christian religious strictures encouraged consumption of fish protein in weekly and seasonal rhythms. Markers of social and political status said much about who ate how much and which fish.
At least some consumption of locally available fishes occurred everywhere across post-Roman Europe (Chapter 3). The role of direct subsistence fishing by poor people likely varied greatly from place to place, while their obligations to provide by various means fish for elite consumption is manifest wherever verbal or material records survive. Both direct and indirect subsistence fishing survived with diminishing importance throughout the Middle Ages. Seasonal abundances could even encourage preserving catches for later use. Whether inland or along the coasts, these workers’ experiences in nature grounded local and traditional ecological understandings of aquatic life.
Some elements of mercantile exchange had persisted throughout early medieval centuries, but vanishingly little then involved such basic bulk consumables as fish. Where nodes of non-agricultural populations did exist, however, such as in parts of Italy and around large ecclesiastical or secular establishments elsewhere, subsistence fishers might find people willing to pay for any surplus catch (Chapter 4). The incremental emergence of artisan fishers from the tenth century onwards aligned closely with markets in small but growing towns across widening regions of western Christendom. Urban-centred consumption drove small-scale commercial fisheries in natural local ecosystems, fostering some degree of regional economic integration, and much later extension to artificial and distant waters.
Social and natural networks surrounding high and late medieval subsistence and artisan fishers become tangible in their shared toolkits and evident selection of methods apt for taking particular varieties at identifiable times and locations. While habitats and habits of local fishes shaped fishers’ work experiences, these evolved within larger economic and social contexts. Relations of subordinated fishers to their lords differed only in particulars among the Chiana valley in the ninth, the Loire or Humber in the late eleventh, or the Odra in the mid-thirteenth centuries. Certain capture techniques used along the twelfth-century Rhine also took fish off fourteenth-century Liguria, and along late fifteenth-century shores of Lake Constance and the Baltic, but the artisans who then handled those gears were subject to the markets they supplied. As members of village or town communities, artisan fishers gained access by common right or private licence. Their family enterprises exploited local resources under village bylaws, guild, or municipal statutes meant to minimize conflict, reassure consumers, and perhaps maintain prospects for future catches. Lords’ servants or free artisans and their respective consumers were all vulnerable to environmental variation, whether or not then recognized as such.
As demographic and economic expansion spread across high medieval Europe, so too did total fish consumption, fishing activity, and fish markets. Elaborate regional networks supplied consumption centres. Environmental effects of intensified agricultural and urban development stressed aquatic ecosystems and beyond certain thresholds threatened sensitive species (Chapter 5). Intensified fishing pressure and even modest natural environmental dynamics could also raise the vulnerability of local or regional fish stocks. Other species reciprocally gained living space. Fishers adapted their practices and fish sellers their prices. Less prestigious but more abundantly accessible fishes gained regional dietary importance. Some people along Channel, North Sea, and Baltic coasts less often ate salmon or sturgeon; they and their neighbours consumed more herring and eel. Inland areas found the latter and cyprinids more palatable when salmonids or pike perch were less to be had. Some traditional freshwater and migratory fisheries, perhaps also some local coastal stocks, approached limits or perceptibly declined.
Awareness, fear, or perhaps just an amorphous worry for shortages of culturally valued fish to eat underlay changes in European fisheries from the thirteenth century on (Chapter 6). The particular measures taken differed with regional ecosystems, economic relations, and access to resources. Some programs had the effect (and were meant) to limit or ration access to existing fish stocks; others claimed to protect and maintain the same for the common good. When well informed and enforced, both approaches had their successes with, probably, dissimilar social effects. Two distinctive late medieval innovations fractured pieces of the established pattern and, by seeking to enlarge accessible supply, triggered wider and longer consequences. Purposely building and managing artificial ponds for domesticated carp created new local colonized ecosystems (Chapter 7). Europeans’ routines and expectations on such hybrid socio-natural sites differed from those on natural waters. Fish became a human artifact. The second new vector, extending human predation on wild fisheries to hitherto unexploited marine regions and species, called forth new technologies and organizational structures to preserve the catches and convey unfamiliar foods to distant consumer markets (Chapter 8). Natural boundaries seemed overcome. Yet neither enlarged form of anthropogenic influence over fishes and ecosystems could really free fisheries from natural impacts and constraints. Dutch herring, Czech carp, and salt cod from Iceland or Newfoundland remained hybrids, each a biological parcel wrapped in cultural layers to serve human wants and needs.
9.1.2 Undercurrents
Narrative lines link up much evidence and depict successive, often overlapping, waves of stability, adaptation, disruption, and change. But the narrative approach elides some important elements underlying encounters of medieval Europeans with other life forms in their aquatic environments and thus components for a present-day grasp of those encounters. These involve problems of knowledge and of identifying drivers of this history.
What are we now capable of knowing about fish and fisheries in the medieval past? Traditional written and pictorial sources had real but constrained value. For much of the Middle Ages the written record was long dominated by a small literate elite more concerned with inherited Christian and classical texts and interpretations than with contemporary material experiences and observations. Religious intellectuals legitimized fish as an acceptable substitute for animal flesh in times of abstinence and used certain cultural constructs of fish to critique or promote human behaviours. Writings on dietary rules, estate management, and legal claims over property and people sometimes yield glimpses of aquatic nature and work being done there. Literate interests slowly expanded from the twelfth century, especially in mercantile contexts, but remained fragmentary, occasional, and unsystematic. Every text or illumination calls for critical assessment of its value and deficiencies as historical evidence. So other angles of enquiry have been pursued: archaeology and notably archaeozoology unearthed material evidence of some technologies and at least samples of the fish remains which identifiable communities had discarded from their work stations and dining tables. Ichthyology reports the biology and habits of modern species, and aquatic ecology their relation to habitats, all essential to understanding the behaviour and environmental thresholds for fishers’ quarry. Various palaeosciences, notably historical climatology, climate history, and historical geography but also hydrology, soil science, oceanography, and dendrochronology, help reconstruct past environmental conditions. This book has continually searched for consilience, asking whether independent sources of information yield compatible, hence reinforcing, understanding and if not, why not. Inter alia, the poor survival rates of salmonid bones in archaeological contexts help explain the small representation of what written evidence shows to have been a culturally important fish variety. Long-term shifts in the chemistry of the Baltic somehow connect with the oscillating balance between herring and cod in those waters. The result has enabled our best grasp at what was going on at medieval socio-natural sites of various sorts, including aspects outside evident medieval awareness.
But medieval awareness of the aquatic realm is itself part of this history: what did medievals know about fish and fishing? As already indicated, the written record of medieval Europe rarely and at most in fleeting glances conveys how the vast majority of people perceived their natural surroundings and their various encounters with what was extracted from their waters. This veils traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of fish (and other material practices) present among the illiterate majority. What at least some of those people knew of what mattered locally had to underlie successful capture, preservation, and culture of the particular species they or more often their social superiors consumed. TEK must be recognized as a signal of adaptations resulting in specialized gear, seasonal practices, and evidently conservation-oriented regulations. But medieval TEK blends historically into the infamous realm of ‘known unknowns’, important but its substance nearly always only to be inferred from scraps of peripheral records and material remains of the work itself. At many points in the Middle Ages medieval fishers, property managers, mercantile entrepreneurs, and even consumers knew more about their own aquatic world than any present-day historian, archaeologist, or scientist can. But we now also know much the medievals could not imagine. The Catch has offered consilient evidence to reconstruct situations, including medieval views we now think were quite wrong (‘the king of the herring’). We know what medieval people did and sometimes the outcomes, but are commonly unable to ascertain their precise motives. There are no a priori grounds to assume our thoughts were theirs.
Forces driving change or sustaining historic stability recur in our stories. The principal variables differ and take different configurations over time and space. Even persistent biological and basic cultural pressures could have varying effects. Aspects of biology/ecology always mattered, both regarding fish and humans. As noted in Chapter 1, threshold parameters such as salinity, temperature, current speed, and sometimes special requirements for spawning success and juvenile survival set limits on each species’ range and stock density but can change over time, whether the animals in question are subject to human predation or not. Human organisms need calories and protein, so human numbers strongly affect total demand for food. European populations went through demographic swings from low numbers in early medieval times to a long period of increase during the tenth through thirteenth centuries. Doubling the population to perhaps seventy million by 1300 drove landscape changes affecting inland and coastal waters as well as multiplying the mouths seeking, under various circumstances, fish to eat. The abrupt generational crash of the early to mid-1300s (due to famine and plague) initiated a century and more of reduced total numbers until renewed growth after the 1450s, first local or regional, then general. If humans in some ways topped the trophic pyramid, their shifting pressures for calories affected organisms all the way down, not least the balance between cereal production and acquisition of animals to eat.
Religious and social practices exerted steady pressure on medieval relations with aquatic life. Christian dietary abstinence from meat promoted but did not require consumption of fish as a substitute. Initially a pious ascetic practice, its impact grew only generations after conversion with general acceptance as a mark of Christian identity. It is telling that both the English ‘fish remains horizon’ and purposeful construction by lay and religious lords of artificial fish ponds in Poitou and Berri coincide with a well-known eleventh-century surge in observant religious practice across western Christendom. Some degree of fish eating had become ubiquitous, attuned to weekly and seasonal rhythms, but long much more common among socio-economic elites, who could display their superior status with the approved costly food for themselves and the cheapest varieties for their households. Reformist twelfth-century prelates and religious orders might reluctantly add pious donations of penitent herring to their bean-rich diets but some centuries later their successors followed a token herring, if herring at all, with a fine dish of pike, salmon, halibut, or carp. Overall, however, fish on Friday and fish during Lent were the acknowledged norm among medieval Christians and this culturally shaped demand for fish solidly grounded diverse fisheries, markets and trade in fish, and eventually concern for those supply chains on the part of authorities. While the taste of inland elites for fresh fish, not least as objects of social display, drove construction of storage tanks and eventually artificial fish culture facilities, successful design and operation of the latter derived from the needs and attributes of a natural organism, the common carp.
If natural conditions, human needs and numbers, religious ideology, and social display jointly and in different local proportions moulded Europeans’ engagement with fish in early medieval centuries and also thereafter, urbanization and the concomitant medieval commercial revolution became major driving forces from about 1000 CE onwards. An exchange economy based in concentrations of non-agricultural people included fishers and dealers in fish almost from the start, for their neighbours relied on the market for their food supply, fish included. Whether in English fictions or the earliest charters to sell fish in Ravenna or Worms, artisan fishers found their customers in cities. Urban consumers soon included wealthy people, who at least occasionally shared tastes and demand with other elites. To such buyers local fishers gladly offered fresh salmon or sole, turbot or pike-perch, but peddled as well smaller, cheaper varieties to ever-growing numbers of the less well-to-do. Both economic strata depended on regional supplies. Londoners and Flemings could easily get fresh eel or ‘herring of one night’, Lisbon, Barcelona, and Venice found mullet or sardines on their waterfronts, but inhabitants of Basel or Prague might make do with eel, perch, or small cyprinids … until over time merchants developed ways to get preserved fish to those eager mass markets. Urban governments gave much attention to supply, sanitation, and dealings on their fish markets.
The interplay of basic biology with market relations becomes clear during the demographic slump of 1350–1450, after mass mortalities left smaller numbers of Europeans in possession of the same total material wealth and newly scarce labour gained in value. Fewer mouths meant less demand for cereals and greater per capita income left survivors with more discretionary choices. Demand for fish held up better than that for bread, so fish prices continued to rise. Hence Norwegian cod fishers enjoyed a ‘golden age’ when in 1400 stockfish exports only half those of 1300 gained in exchange half again more in wealth or imported goods. More generally the growth and operation of late medieval markets widened distribution of fisheries products and encouraged technical innovations to raise the harvest and improve commercial durability. Cases in point famously include first the Baltic, then the Netherlanders’ North Sea herring fisheries, but should also recognize Bothnian and Prussian strekfusz and the mackerel and pilchard of Breton and English West Country fishers. Markets for cultured carp broadened consumption while weakening the rationale for self-sufficient production on elite estates.
Medieval towns likely concentrated local pressures on fish stocks and habitats while commerce spread this more widely, but human impacts originated in rural settings too. Direct human predation (fishing pressure) likely shrank longevity and average size of Baltic sturgeons already in the eleventh–twelfth centuries, of plaice and flounder along thirteenth-century northern French coasts, and in the fourteenth century all but extirpated whitefish from a lake near Salzburg. Agricultural clearances for permanent arable, subsequent farming practices, and water-powered grain mills together reduced migratory salmon stocks in Normandy and in headwaters of the Rhine system, likewise shad in tributaries to northern Italian lakes. Waste from dense urban populations and craft production polluted fish habit nearby and downstream. By and since the mid-1200s awareness of limits and fear of shortages in this culturally essential food motivated governments at all levels to issue protective regulations of diverse sorts. French monarchs imposed size limits and English kings set seasonal restrictions on fishing conger around the Cotentin; republican Florence banned certain methods for catching trout and the count of Holland protected vegetation where pike sought their forage. But not all environmental change was anthropogenic.
While natural tolerances, habitats, habits, and life cycles of fish species provided opportunities for but could constrain success of human predation, changing climates and other environmental fluctuations forced fish and people to adapt. Riverine and coastal landscapes and habitats were subject to natural dynamics, as when siltation obliterated the once-productive bay of the Somme and others on the French Atlantic shore while marine incursions created new and well-documented fisheries in the Zuider Zee and elsewhere along North Sea coasts. Those local changes stemmed from local events but also from long-term variability, notably in climate. Europe’s MCA seems fairly benign, with warmer temperatures facilitating expansion of the carp and possibly the herring-dominated regime prevalent in the ninth- to thirteenth-century Baltic. Inception of the LIA with erratic weather and a cooling climate provided the setting for breakdowns of long-exploited local herring stocks and a longer-term shift to salinity and temperature conditions favouring a cod-dominated Baltic. Allowing for lags in fish life cycles, decadal-scale weather patterns coincided with short-term fluctuations at the herring–pilchard boundary in the outer Channel and Celtic Sea and in the apparent abundance of herring stocks further north. In terms of technology and practice the chill provided impetus to improve arrangements in carp culture and several key innovations in the North Sea herring fishery.
It is, however, difficult to trace to any environmental shift the conflicting ideas that on the one hand natural limits called for protection against overfishing and habitat loss or on the other that humans held dominion over aquatic nature and its bounty. Both cultural positions evolved throughout the late MCA and early centuries of the LIA. Perceptions of domestic scarcity certainly lay behind conservation measures on Lake Constance and elsewhere. A contrasting sense of frontier abundance in present rather than retrospective terms was voiced from 1200 (Saxo on the Øresund) to and beyond 1500 (Caboto et al.) but almost exclusively ‘out there’, where the natural limits feared inland seemed to evaporate.
In sum, only in the rarest or most vaguely general way can any single cultural or natural condition be seen to determine the inception, operation, or fate of medieval European fisheries. Circumstances of their interactions mean medieval people and their societies set their own courses for good or for ill. Their lives were not led to prepare for modernity or the post-modern.
9.2 In a Longer Haul: Medieval Legacies in a Present Global Fisheries Crisis
One emerging late medieval perception, the notion that humans could determine the presence, absence, and productivity of fish and, by extension, the operation of nature, may then have been confined to tightly focused managers of fish culture enterprises, who did create local ecological revolutions. The idea of actual human dominance, however, essentially a kind of cultural determinism, would subsequently form the intellectual core for one aspect of modernity. With adequate scientific and engineering know-how humans could transform the Earth to their liking. At the same time a possibly contradictory understanding proliferated on the maritime frontiers and there long held sway: this was the conviction and operating assumption that untouched resource abundance was always to be found over the next horizon, whether geographic or technological.
Driven by cultural needs and fear of shortage, the search for abundance propelled innovation all around late medieval maritime frontiers. That Zuan Caboto and his successors had fortuitously found those ‘infinite fish’ in the northwest Atlantic took a human generation to grasp. Then the cod fishery exploded into massive growth amidst a rapidly changing sixteenth-century climate and a new economic setting, to which it surely also contributed. Cod became the first material object of European plundering of New World nature and this direct transfer of biomass meant for Europe the potential dietary equivalent of ‘ghost acreage’, a virtual expansion of Europe’s resource base.Footnote 1 This acquisition coincided, moreover, with the Spanish plundering of New World cultures which directly increased European silver supplies and contributed to inflation. Both new inputs joined a demographic surge already underway in Europe to call up rising demand and prices for cereals and to reverse those late medieval price ratios which had favoured ‘luxury’ meat and fish over grain. If Cabot triggered an ecological revolution in the northwestern Atlantic after 1500, as seen from Europe this was but a part of larger processes of change which increasingly distanced late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and environmental relations from those of 1500. While Cabot, Columbus, and their contemporaries can usefully be understood as late medieval Europeans, not so their heirs.
Left unchanged in the medium run were Europe’s (and general humanity’s) utter dependence on short-run flows of solar organic energy and Europe’s understanding of frontier hyperabundance. The now presumed absence of natural limits opened all to a competitive scramble and the conviction that new virgin resources always lay just over the horizon. Indeed Cabot’s Grand Banks confirmed this very assumption and so repeatedly would later technological and spatial expansions of the northwest Atlantic fisheries.
As much a part of modernity as the expectations of distant waters’ unlimited abundance and as rooted in elements of late medieval fisheries revolutions is belief in human managerial dominance. “If there are no fish in a pond ask who took them out” voiced the converse of the engineered manipulation of nature which had put the pond and the fish there in the first place. Both cultural constructs set the active human agent against a passive nature there for the taking. This mentality may have seemed more plausible and convenient to consumers ever more distanced from aquatic nature.
A catch here is that these were not the only lessons learned by medieval fishers. Pushed aside or left behind by fish farmers and frontier fishers alike were recognition of natural limits, human environmental degradation, and the common good, which together had grounded the stewardship inherent in both regulatory measures and some evident concern for what might now be called sustainability. Diverse voices going back through the master fisher at Constance in 1531, petitioners to the English parliament against bottom trawls in 1377, to even Philip IV of France in 1289 had long articulated these precautionary positions.
Thus briefly to return with historical perspective to current situations. By the end of the Middle Ages essential elements for present-day global fishery crises were in place in European waters. The intervening half-millennium has spread those elements around the world into other economies like the Japanese, East African, or South Pacific, and to the limits of one aquatic ecosystem after another. Official statistics for the world’s declining fisheries of the most recent half-century again confirm the joint role of elite and subsistence demands in driving environmental change and exploitation. Expanding agriculture, forestry, cities, and industry curtail and transform aquatic habitats. Exotic species brought in to solve nature’s or mankind’s earlier errors have their own unforeseen effects. So, too, have climate fluctuations. As since the high Middle Ages, even groups who fiercely protect, regulate, and manage their own local ecosystems, nevertheless wage their ‘fish wars’ to plunder insatiably those beyond the horizon. Information about these convergent environmental and social predicaments is familiar to fisheries specialists and drawn from published sources, but the historical underpinnings have hitherto gone unrecognized.
Seen from the Middle Ages, the processes of today’s fisheries destruction are not new, but in a deep historical sense derive from the circumstances and choices of European fishers who pioneered the open Atlantic. Overexploitation, habitat destruction, selective predation on large or prestigious species, and human competition without regard for the resource were all part of medieval experience. The modernist assumption of infinite fish over the horizon, open competition, commodification, and alienation of consumers from the living organism or native ecosystems might all be thought relics from what Europeans carried across marine frontiers opened up by late medieval fishers. Other medieval approaches to aquatic systems they abandoned on the foreshore. If a complex set of arrangements – heavily capitalized commercial fishing in distant waters – had its highest development potential when just beginning its growth, the Atlantic marine fisheries for herring and cod plausibly set long-lasting and much emulated precedents. Once established, a path-dependent trajectory excludes other initial alternatives, here notably those of Mediterranean, inshore, and inland waters.
Fishing pressure is demand-driven, whether for subsistence or elite fashion and power. It affects not only the target species or stock but cascades through entire ecosystems. Habitat destruction more often originates outside the fishery, whether from ignorance of consequences or from low priority granted aquatic life in particular or nature in general. Political and economic power at national and international scales structure institutional arrangements of fisheries. Awareness and priorities shape the unintended consequences.
Present-day responses to perceived shortage of fish also have medieval precedents. Rising demand brings price increases which encourage further commodification of the product and stratification of consumers. Privatization of fishing rights has like effects on the resource itself, sometimes destructive, sometimes protective, and often socially disruptive. Results of regulation depend on its purpose (allocation or protection), appropriate local knowledge, and consent of affected parties. Local knowledge and stewardship of resources can keep exploitation within sustainable levels and even repair and enhance key habitat, but greater cultural distance puts whole natural systems at risk. Sustainable management loses its raison d’etre if fish are thought infinite. The history of modern capture fisheries is iterative expansion from depleted to virgin stocks, which are then depleted in turn. Unlike medieval Europe, no virgin stocks now remain.
The legacy of medieval reengineering nature into fish farms may be more ambiguous, as aquacultures are now thought to replace diminishing natural supplies of fish protein, and not only to satisfy elite tastes. This strategy nevertheless again carries heavy intended and unintended environmental and social costs. Colonizing nature more intensely massively replaces complex natural systems with simplified and thus fragile monocultures. The physical transformations of landscapes are similar. But whereas medieval carp culture cycled local terrestrial nutrients through its ponds, present-day arrangements typically impoverish wild aquatic systems elsewhere by extracting nutrients (forage fish and invertebrates) to subsidize the artificial crop and/or damage wild stocks by emitting concentrated metabolic wastes into their surroundings. All farming of plants, livestock, or fish entails destruction of diverse ecological relationships to fabricate something of human invention. Who decides whether to pay the price?
Past experience cannot predict future outcomes but can help identify situations and forces with positive and negative consequences for natural and human communities alike. What courses are likeliest to lead toward resilience on a changing planet? Insofar as even the twenty-first-century present derives key features from European triggering of modernity, medieval experience and handling of nature in general and fisheries in particular left legacies both to overcome and to enjoy. Neither human desires nor natural forces determine environmental outcomes. Recognition and quality of interactions shape the path. That is the biggest catch even in the dawning Anthropocene.
