The fisherman's catch – the ‘harvest of the seas’ — was subject to unique conditions quite different from those which governed the harvest on land. In many ways it resembled the reward of the hunter rather than that of the farmer; unlike the farm land of Europe, the areas of the great fisheries were subject to occupation, not by tenure depending on law or custom, but by the skill of the fisherman backed, if need be, by force. Their product was subject to natural fluctuations even more complex than those affecting the grain harvest. Commercial fishing required capital equipment – boats, nets and fish houses and salting houses on shore; it also required skills which ordinary seamen did not possess. It was therefore subject to many of the pressures felt by early modern industry. Moreover, being basically a maritime industry, dealing with a highly perishable product, it needed intimate links with shipping and merchant interests.

This chapter concentrates on elucidating the general relationships and constraints which moulded the fishing industry and the fish trade, and the general fortunes of the cod and herring industries, rather than technical considerations (nets, ship design etc.), important though these were. A priori, one might have expected a rapid expansion of this source of food during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a response to population pressure, expanding urban markets, the growth of new marketing techniques, and a symbiotic relationship between the mercantile economy and the fishing industry. In so far as these failed to materialize to their fullest extent, the reasons lay in formidable constraints which hindered the development of the fishing industry.