I.1.1 Observations and Inferences: The Long Demise of the Atlantic Sturgeon

The sad yet curiously complicated tale of the European Atlantic (or sea) sturgeonFootnote ¹ begins in distant times, for this family displays many primitive physiological features. Reaching four to six meters and living sixty to a hundred years these creatures of coasts, estuaries, and large rivers consume bottom organisms and small fishes. Spawned over river gravels, the young live for a time in estuarine shallows before slowly growing up to 400 kilograms, making them the largest fish in western European fresh waters. Sturgeons first reproduce after age twelve and thereafter only every few years. They lack bony skeletons, but their backs and sides bear horny plates called scutes which endure in archaeological settings. And sturgeon flesh was historically prized. Roman luxury demand had by the first century CE seriously depleted once abundant stocks in the Rhône estuary. They took centuries to recover.Footnote ²

Early medieval elites continued to enjoy eating sturgeon. A Byzantine physician at the court of Frankish king Theodoric (511–534) recommended it for diners in good health. Centuries later Prüm abbey in Luxembourg required serfs from its Rhine delta manors annually to haul an eleven-foot (three-metre) specimen some 200 kilometers overland or upriver for the monks to eat.Footnote ³ Finds from seventh- to ninth-century high-status sites along the southern Baltic coast suggest that sturgeon there provided up to 70 percent of the weight of fish consumed, results corroborated from more recently and precisely excavated tenth-century Gdańsk.Footnote ⁴

Already by the twelfth century surviving records indicate fishing pressure and drainage projects were reducing the frequency, relative share, and size of harvested sturgeons. In the same south Baltic sites just mentioned, their share fell below 20, even to 10, percent of recovered fish remains. The average size of sturgeon consumed at Gdańsk fell from the tenth to thirteenth century.Footnote ⁵ Declines in the North Sea drainage were similar. From the river Ems the sturgeon present up to the thirteenth century had vanished by the next. Written records from the Low Countries mark further losses among coastal stocks from the eleventh through the fourteenth century. The genus then disappears from food waste at the castle in Namur and also from archaeological finds at Schaffhausen, the probable upper limit of its range in the Rhine.Footnote ⁶ Thirteenth-century French and English kings claimed exclusive rights to all sturgeons taken in their realms. Throughout coastal Atlantic waters, by late and post-medieval centuries these mythic fish had become a rare and sometimes newsworthy catch. Some chefs even then developed recipes “to make sturgeon from veal.”Footnote ⁷ Surviving wall paintings at several English parish churches further reflect the continued cultural resonance of sturgeon, as its distinctive form stands out among the fishes commonly depicted in waters through which St. Christopher carries the Christ Child.Footnote ⁸

Medieval sturgeon populations in the western Mediterranean, notably Italy, may have been more resilient – or just longer adapted to humanized landscapes and human predation. Tenth- and eleventh-century prelates and local potentates laid claim to specimens pulled from nearby rivers: the archbishop of Ravenna, for instance, had preemptive rights over any storionem greater than six feet taken from the Padoreno, a now obliterated tributary of the Po.Footnote ⁹ The fish were deliberately pursued in the late medieval Po, Arno, and Tiber. The latter seems the best studied. Rights to take sturgeon in permanent weirs and traps at Rome’s bridges were distinguished from rights to shad and other migratory fishes. Catches from the delta were valued as well.Footnote ¹⁰ Regulations issued for Rome’s fish market in 1405 make special mention of selling portions cut from a sturgeon, about the same time as quantities appropriate for retail sales appear in financial accounts of small merchants in Prato.Footnote ¹¹ A few decades later the master chef to the duke of Savoy named sturgeon as a major import to the court and a dish appropriate for luxury dining. Maestro Martino de Como, a Lombard cook in the following generation, included in his recipe collection two for sturgeon which famous Renaissance chef Platina later copied.Footnote ¹²

Even in the south yields hint at limited availability. Moralist preacher San Bernardino of Siena in 1425 ranked eating sturgeon among the worst signs of a luxurious path to perdition, and humanist Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini become Pope Pius II (1458–1464) celebrated in his Commentaries the seven “much prized” sturgeons up to 250 ‘pounds’ from the Tiber delta given to him on a visit to Ostia.Footnote ¹³ Papal courtier and humanist Paolo Giovio’s erudite but observant 1524 booklet on the Roman fish market, De romanis piscibus libellus, also celebrated at least the literary reputation and memory of sturgeon from the Tiber.Footnote ¹⁴ Perhaps under long-standing preindustrial conditions Italian sturgeon stocks had stabilized at a level still sufficient for consistent elite use.

The medieval tale of sturgeon thus rests on verbal and material evidence of luxury demand and consumption, which led fishers to seek this large and impressive trophy. Actual medieval capture methods and biological knowledge are unrecorded, though plainly effective enough when accompanied by damage to habitat that stocks everywhere diminished. The downward trend appears across the medieval record. This is not to assert local, much less general, extirpation, but that quantitative evidence from the nineteenth century was unlikely to reflect a pristine stock. Present-day palaoscience, however, reveals diversity previous consumers or fishers could not know.

Giovio and Piccolomini both referred to sturione, employing the vulgar Latin and cognate old Germanic root stur/stor rather than Pliny’s elite Greek-derived acipenser. Their usage followed learned and vernacular nomenclature for all sea sturgeons across western Europe. But Latin writers around the late medieval Baltic applied an originally Celtic (Gallic) vernacular for salmon, isox/esox, to several unrelated but notably large fishes. In Poland, for instance, these included the sturgeon documented prior to 1400 in the native Slavic vernacular as jesiotr.Footnote ¹⁵ Until the present century this taxonomic peculiarity remained a mere antiquarian anecdote, as naturalists and after them fish scientists long understood the entire western European sturgeon population from the Baltic to Italy as a single species, European Atlantic sturgeon. In 1758 Swedish biologist Linnaeus gave it the scientific name Acipenser sturio.Footnote ¹⁶

Early twenty-first-century techniques to extract ancient DNA, however, tell a different story: genetic markers indicate that even by the start of the Neolithic the American Atlantic sturgeon, Acipenser oxyrinchus, had colonized northernmost European coasts. The closely related American species is now thought to have arrived through North Atlantic drift currents during one or more of the cold periods which punctuated transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, roughly 12,000 years ago. A. oxyrinchus spawns successfully in temperatures some degrees colder than does A. sturio, and by the Middle Ages was dominant in populations from the North and Baltic Seas east to Lake Ladoga. More balanced sympatric (multi-species) stocks formed along the French Atlantic coast.Footnote ¹⁷ Most of the sturgeon eaten by early medieval Slavic princes and some of those claimed by French and English rulers were thus of long present but invasive origin. Both human and natural forces could shape the evolution of medieval fish and fisheries. Might what looks like the greater adaptability of Mediterranean sturgeons to human predation even have a genetic basis?

Genetic diversity could not, however, ward off post-medieval pressures on sea sturgeons in European waters. Ongoing human predation, pollution, and physical modifications to rivers have since the nineteenth century continued to suppress sturgeon numbers and the size and age of individuals across its range, resulting in incremental extirpation everywhere. In 1991 people took, killed, and proudly ate the last known specimens of A. sturio from both the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The last recorded on the Atlantic coast of Iberia was served in a restaurant in 1992 and the last from the North Sea met a like end the following year. One spawning population may still survive in the Gironde, where, however, the last known success was in 1994, although a juvenile with that genetic marker was taken and released in 2007. Nor do wild American sea sturgeon survive in Europe, as the last in the Baltic was taken in 1996 and in the British Isles in 2005. Of the twenty-five species in the sturgeon family (Acipenseridae) worldwide, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN ) rates nineteen as endangered or worse and only one as “least concern” for extinction.Footnote ¹⁸

The separate views of medieval commentators, modern archaeozoologists, and recent geneticists trace the fading trail of a fish of impressive scale, once a key component in estuarine ecosystems, but long coveted by the rich and powerful, so fatally vulnerable.

I.1.2 Communities, Culture, and Sustained Fishing on Lake Constance

While sturgeons never passed the Rhine falls at Schaffhausen, a millennial tale of fishing in medieval Lake Constance (German Bodensee) traces evolving sociocultural approaches to diverse freshwater ecosystems in western and central Europe’s third largest natural lake.Footnote ¹⁹ Now bordered by Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, and thus once near the geographical centre of medieval Latin Christendom, the lake’s two principal basins, Obersee and Untersee, are joined at Constance by a two-kilometer strait sometimes called the ‘Lake Rhine’ (Seerhein). With cold depths to 252 metres plus extensive shallows, Lake Constance now supports at least fifty fish species, while two endemics, a whitefish and a char, are extinct. Yet this tale is more about humans learning to live with their aquatic neighbours. The evolving significance of the lake’s fisheries for medieval contemporaries and for present-day observers exemplifies key source genres and issues for wide-ranging enquiry into fisheries throughout western Christendom.

Remains of Neolithic pile dwellings along the lake shore and a passing comment from Pliny (Nat. Hist., IX, 29) confirm pre-medieval fishing in Lake Constance, but the story really begins with sub- and post-Roman Alemannic (Swabian) settlement and arrival of Christian missionaries and monastic foundations during the seventh to ninth centuries. By around 800, traditional accounts made much of the fishing by Gall, a companion 200 years earlier to the wandering Irish monk Columbanus. While the party of exiles lived in the dilapidated Roman town of Bregenz, Gall made nets and fished the lake to supply monks, visitors, and local people alike. When the group left for Italy, illness kept Gall behind. After Gall’s recovery he and a skilled local outdoorsman, the deacon Hiltibod, traveled up the little river Steinach to establish a hermitage and there, too, Gall’s skill with his nets and some miraculous assistance again delivered the necessary rations.Footnote ²⁰

From local oral tradition later scribes at two great monasteries beside the lake wrote down the Life of St. Gall. A century or more after the holy man’s death a Benedictine house had been founded on the presumed site of his hermitage. By the mid-ninth century royal Carolingian patronage made this abbey of St. GallenFootnote ²¹ a major cultural centre and rival with the bishop of Constance over fishing rights on much of the south shore of the Obersee. Meanwhile since 724 what soon became another great Frankish royal abbey had been established on the island of Reichenau in the Untersee. Monks from the communities of St. Gallen, Reichenau, and the twelfth-century Cistercian foundation of Salem on the north shore of the Obersee provide most of the surviving information about use of the lake’s fisheries into the thirteenth century.Footnote ²²

Knowing that St. Gallen possessed extensive fishing rights in the lake barely ten kilometers away at Rörschach, mid-tenth-century prelates arriving for an inspection assumed the kitchen had ample supplies of fish. This the monks denied, asserting the lake produced few fish at great expense, and hoped thereby to excuse their eating meat.Footnote ²³ Two generations later the learned Ekkehard IV (c. 980–c. 1060), who retrospectively reported that tale, was himself well aware of local/regional fishes and their at least occasional presence on monastic tables. Although Ekkehard’s Benedictiones ad mensam (“Blessings at table”) surely emulated not an actual menu but the fish list Isidore of Seville had provided in his sixth-century encyclopedic Etymologiae,Footnote ²⁴ the Swiss monk named twenty-four ‘fishes’ (including four synonyms) in a mix of Latin, Latinized German, and local dialect.Footnote ²⁵ Ekkehard thus provides the oldest known verbal sign that people around the lake recognized distinct fish varieties, from pike, trout, and char to gudgeon, perch, and chub. Most of them were indigenous to Lake Constance, including its distinctive char (“Rubelga”, dialect Rötel), and one of the whitefishes (“Illanch allemannia” reflecting dialect “rinanke”, most likely modern so-called Blaufelchen, Coregonus wartmanniFootnote ²⁶).

About the same time as Ekkehard at St. Gallen was cataloging and at least thinking to eat many fishes from the lake,Footnote ²⁷ over at Reichenau a contingent of fishers, specialized abbey servants, were among the few non-monks permitted to live on the holy island. Their situation, and thus that of people who actually worked at the fishery, becomes clear at some point in the 1140s–50s, when Reichenau set out procedures for its cellarer’s office, the agency responsible for the abbey economy.Footnote ²⁸ Growing hemp to make rope for fishing nets was an obligation of all peasant tenures, while manors along streams tributary to the Untersee were to build boats and provide annual cartloads of stakes and willow branches for making fish traps. Four fisher’s tenures located on the mainland where the modern causeway leads to the island were to fish each morning for the abbey and receive their midday meal when they delivered the catch. In cold seasons they ran the seine through the mouth of the Rhine channel (where prized whitefish then spawned) but after Easter they worked shoreline reed beds. The labour of servants and subjects with traditional local knowledge served the culturally determined dietary needs of the monks

But the economic autarky of the old abbeys was fading. While Cistercians were established in 1138 at Salem, about as far inland from the northwestern arm of the Obersee as St. Gallen was from the south shore, only a century later do the newer abbey’s archives exhibit active interests in the lake fishery. In 1260 a share in a site to pull a seine net near Constance was yielding annual dues of 2,000 whitefish. When the monks acquired from a local knightly family full control over this site in 1290, it alone annually gave them 15,000 “dried fish which are commonly called gangfish” (piscium aridorum, qui vulgariter dicuntur gangvische).Footnote ²⁹ These were not, however, the product of specialized servants, but caught and processed by independent leaseholders (legally termed ‘fief-holders’).

While voices of the religious dominate the lake’s early record, less articulate, literate, or durable lay lords and lakeside communities also acquired fishing rights from the crown or by simple undisputed exercise. Common rights of use in the Obersee extended over areas not in the recognized private possession of individuals or urban communities. This comprised all the offshore waters of the main lake basin. While some ordinary citizens of Constance possessed their own private fisheries, the city limited use of its municipal waters to recognized fishers, who had also the right to fish elsewhere in the lake.Footnote ³⁰ From at latest some time in the 1200s these artisans sold their catch at a public market on the shore, where archaeologists have turned up remains of pike, carp, and unidentified members of the carp family (Cyprinidae sp.) older than 1350. Material from this site was not sieved, so whereas large bones of large fishes are identifiable, not so the smaller and less durable remains of whitefishes and other species of potential interest.Footnote ³¹ Both the documents of traditional history and the material remains of archaeology are somewhat skewed samples calling for critical assessment to provide a partial view of people and environments in past time. By the late thirteenth century, pressures from concentrated urban demand called up local measures to regulate fishing and fish sales in the interest of consumers and subsequent formation of self-governing fishers’ guilds under town supervision. Guilds in Constance and Lindau emerged as leading voices respectively in the west and east ends of the lake. Ever more people and interests were engaged with the lake’s fisheries.

Several late medieval developments and events impinged on human relations with the lake. As elsewhere, growth of even fairly small urban populations concentrated flows of organic effluents into nearby waters. Between the thirteenth century and the sixteenth a lagoon-like shoreline at Constance gradually filled with town wastes. From layers of those deposits the remains of plants native to clean waters gradually disappear, replaced by a filamentous algae closely associated with strongly eutrophic or polluted conditions.Footnote ³² Consumer doubts about sharp business practices on the waterfront surface in a satirical dialect poem from about 1400. In Des Teufels Netz the devil explains how he drags off to hell in his net sinners of all sorts: fishers and fishmongers end up there for taking both small and large fish, keeping the catch too long in their boats, and splashing dead fish with water to appear fresh on the sale table. Honest dealers, though, evade the devil by smoking the dead ones to make the dried fish good to eat.Footnote ³³

Then in 1414 a council of the western church assembled in Constance to resolve, among other matters, the competitive presence of not two but three rival popes. Some 600 prelates, princes, professors, and ambassadors plus untold servants and hangers-on streamed into a town with probably closer to three than five thousand inhabitants. Many visitors stayed for almost four years. Their dietary needs likely tested even the honest fishmongers and the entire lake-based ecosystem. According to eyewitness burger Ulrich Richental, a joint commission of church and town councillors so managed markets and prices of victuals, notably including fish, that neither inflation nor supply shortage marred the council sessions. When bread went for a pfennig the loaf, and beef at 3pf the pound, the lake supplied pike, carp, tench, bream and the larger whitefish called felchen at 12–20 pf the pound and several small species such as gudgeon or dace at 24–27pf the ‘measure’. But the ganckvisch, salt or fresh, had no set price. Imports were necessary: salt sturgeon from Lombardy; large and small stockvisch, meaning air- or salt-dried headless cod from Norway, Iceland, or shores of the North Sea; brined herring; and from Verona the big Lake Garda trout preserved in oil.Footnote ³⁴ If not earlier the case, the council brought fishing and fish consumption around Lake Constance into a western European network of trade in preserved fishes from widely scattered aquatic ecosystems.

Whether triggered by the council or not, ensuing human generations around the lake undertook precocious vernacular writings on local fishes, both when to eat them and how to catch them. Already in 1416 Johannes Schenklin, a cleric at Wil, managerial centre of the St. Gallen abbot’s estates, glossed into a liturgical manuscript a Nota de piscibus, calendaring the two best to eat in each month. Of the two dozen varieties, all named in dialect, one cannot now be identified, three (huchen, salmon, and eel) were not native or present in Lake Constance but available nearby, and the remaining twenty all indigenous, five in genus Coregonus. In ensuing decades Schenklin’s list was at least twice recopied into other St. Gallen manuscripts.Footnote ³⁵ A choir monk, Gall Kemly, was more original, writing up in 1469 and again shortly before his death in 1477 a catalog “On varieties of fishes and the time for eating them” (De piscium generibus et tempore comestionis ipsorum) with seasonal and culinary advice about twenty-seven locally available fishes.Footnote ³⁶ Compared to Ekkehard some four centuries earlier these independent texts share much greater familiarity with the lake’s diverse taxa and local vernacular taxonomy.

An anonymous mid-century townsman whose dialect and references indicate he lived near the lake’s outlet considered the other end of the cultural processes which transformed fishes from swimming organisms to a diner’s plate. This fellow assembled a memorandum of twenty-nine recipes of baits “Vische zů vahen” (“to catch fish”). Into a loose collection of household information he included instructions for baits to put on hooks or in traps, for attracting fish by olfactory or quasi-magical means, and for making a snorkel.Footnote ³⁷ Like similar fifteenth-century textual objects elsewhere, this manuscript brought into a literate cultural sphere knowledge hitherto transmitted orally among professional and household fishers. At the end of our period Gregor Mangolt, a Protestant bookseller exiled from Habsburg Constance in 1548, assembled both the capture and the cooking of the lake’s fishes into a single Fischbouch.Footnote ³⁸ This illustrated and soon printed handbook brought the regional fishery into the sixteenth-century discourse of an emerging scientific ichthyology.

Intensified contemporary concern for regional fish supplies manifested itself in several ways. Ulrich Rösch, abbot of St. Gallen 1463–1491, is credited with restoring the abbey’s long-neglected governance and economy, so laying the foundation for its early modern survival as a religious community and lordship. His regard for fisheries was reflected in acquisition and revindication of fishing rights on the lake and close supervision of the fishing ‘fiefs’ let out for annual rents in fish or cash. Sadly, the internal management records which would reveal the operation of abbey fisheries during his tenure as abbot or earlier as cellarer (1453–1463) survive only in fragments. The kitchen ordinance Rösch instituted about 1480 called for fish in the regular weekly round of meals on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. His kitchen master was to buy herring and stockfish as needed and serve the latter at least once a week.Footnote ³⁹ Seeking more secure and ample supplies of fresh fish, in 1483 Rösch undertook to move the entire abbey to lakeside Rörschach (for barely five years until angry townsmen tore down the still half-built structure).Footnote ⁴⁰

The abbot further sought to increase fish supplies by constructing ponds (Weiher) on many abbey properties, some of them meant to rear carp. Other Swiss landowners since at latest the 1460s were obtaining juvenile carp from Lake Constance to stock their own ponds.Footnote ⁴¹ Financial records from Salem covering 1489–1530 likewise document not only extensive fishponds but regular purchases of dried cod and brined herring as well as heavy Lenten consumption of the lake’s own gangvisch and felchen.Footnote ⁴²

Persistent and widespread concern for fish supplies in the growing and prosperous region around fifteenth-century Lake Constance provided context for an accelerating shift from open exploitation or local guild and municipal control of fisheries to collective joint management of the lake for sake of sustainability.Footnote ⁴³ Having established their own regimes to protect consumers and reduce disruptive conflicts among fishers, towns and guilds began in mid-century to impose rules protecting young fish, bleak, perch, and whitefish, by seasonal closures and bans on specific kinds of nets. Minimum sizes and maximum legitimate catches ensued. With so much of the main lake open to common use – though effectively accessible only to well-equipped professionals – individual jurisdictions had, however, limited effect. Multilateral agreements among urban and seigneurial powers curbed competition and eased enforcement. Constance, Überlingen, and the principalities of Salem, Mainau, and Heiligenberg entered into a regulatory treaty in 1481. The parties’ enlarged agreement of 1536 was emulated for the lake’s eastern end under Lindau’s leadership (1537). Abbey lordships did likewise, with Reichenau setting rules for the Untersee about 1450 and refining their terms at decadal or shorter intervals. St. Gallen turned its own regulations into a treaty for the entire south shore in 1544. This regulatory regime lasted into the nineteenth century and then only gave way to an international joint commission.

As early as 1531 the master of the Constance fishers’ guild clearly articulated in a letter to his counterpart in Überlingen the rationale underlying all the regulatory measures: “Were all other fishers to hold to such an ordinance and spare the young fishes, this lake would again be as rich in fish as it is otherwise almost emptied [of them].” Pointing out that one winter’s protection of young perch yielded fishers of Thurgau many more adults the next summer, he continued, “A like idea also applies to the juvenile whitefish and other fishes. A pail of juveniles left uncaught would a year later give a heap of gangvisch.”Footnote ⁴⁴

For more than 500 years medieval residents around Lake Constance saw ideological and economic value in its fishes. This motivated their cultural interest and institutional structures to exploit this resource. People of the lake were familiar with various fish varieties, knew how to catch them, and ways to get that catch from the water to consumers both promptly and in preserved form also for later use. By the last medieval centuries, if not before, they were aware of their own effect on the resource. As well as considering substitutes reared in artificial ponds or imported from afar, these medieval Europeans devised methods to sustain natural wild stocks. The latter strategy even transcended competition between different groups among fishers and among consumers. While challenged by human impacts in subsequent ages, Lake Constance remains a viable fishery a half-millennium later still.

I.1.3 From Fish to Commodity

Unlike sturgeon or whitefishes, cod are probably familiar, at least on the dining table, to many present consumers – or would be if more fisheries still survived and marketers less pirated the well-known name to apply to more or less distantly related white-fleshed fishes from elsewhere. Atlantic cod is a marine creature, so fitting the modernist misapprehension of most consumers and writers that fish of economic significance always come from the sea. Atlantic cod are bottom-oriented open ocean apex predators in a range along shorelines and continental shelves spanning cold North Atlantic waters.Footnote ⁴⁵ Without here going into detail, historically important stocks include those off arctic Norway, around Iceland, in the North Sea, and on the oceanic banks between Newfoundland and Cape Cod. Where abundant, cod are considered keystone species, as their predation shapes relationships among other animals in their ecosystem. Recent research has shown cod to be highly sensitive to temperature fluctuations and other environmental stresses. Diners can enjoy the delicate white flesh of cod for the same reason it can easily be preserved by drying or salting: fish of the cod family (Gadidae, gadids or gadoids) store energy as oil in their livers rather than muscles (unlike, for example, tunas, mackerels, and salmonids).

The deepest history of cod fishing and consumption belongs to arctic Norway, where seasonal nearshore spawning concentrations of large cods and frigid but dry late winter conditions enabled coast dwellers since the Bronze Age to produce stockfish, the board-like slabs of cod dried without need for salt. Up to modern times fishers took cod with baited hooks sunk to the bottom, whether on individual hand lines or long lines with many hooks. Processing into stockfish leaves middens of skeletal remains (heads, anterior vertebrae) which identify a key subsistence good and the store of capital behind Iron Age chieftaincies there. Ninth-century Norse settlers in Orkney and Iceland carried with them the same pattern of resource use.Footnote ⁴⁶ Europeans elsewhere then made no significant efforts to exploit inshore stocks of smaller cod.

The Viking Age (c. 800–1080) initiated a southwards expansion of taste for cod, followed by export of northern stockfish to societies in northwestern Europe.Footnote ⁴⁷ Tenth-century trash heaps where Scandinavians settled in eastern England and northern Scotland held remains of headless cods (i.e. stockfish), but ensuing generations at York and London substituted local catches of cods and other gadids from the North Sea.Footnote ⁴⁸ By sometime in the twelfth century fishing for cod had become ubiquitous in those waters, with at least some of the take salted down for future consumption or commerce.Footnote ⁴⁹ Norwegian exports grew simultaneously. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries large shipments of northern stockfish passed regularly through Bergen to consumers in England, north Germany, and the Baltic. Traders from the Hanse towns of northern Germany handled the greater share, followed by the English, but as the one legal point of exchange Bergen grew into Norway’s chief urban and commercial centre. All of these fisheries and trades achieved their highest volume in decades around 1300, when human numbers also reached their medieval zenith. Even so, fishing and eating cod were less common in the high and late medieval Low Countries, where inshore waters supported good concentrations of other gadids (whiting) and flatfishes.Footnote ⁵⁰ On more southerly tables cod would be hard to find before roughly 1350.

During late medieval centuries consumption of cod deepened in some western regions and spread haltingly eastwards and southwards into places where no such fish ever lived. Origins and features of the product changed as well. Consumption of Nordic cods at London and York peaked in the early 1300s, when stockfish from Iceland first entered the market. After some post-plague generations of diminished demand, English consumption of northern catches, now mainly of Icelandic origin, revived only briefly in the mid-fifteenth century. Much more salt-dried or even wet-salted cod from stocks around the British Isles more than took up any slack, since about 1400 this species surpassed herring as the principal source of fish flesh in English diets. Boat owners in both eastern and southwestern England replaced crews working on shares with individually hired hands. As DNA analysis of cod remains from the Mary Rose (sank 1545) has brought home, after 1500 large cod of Atlantic origin supplemented regional sources of supply. Across the northern European mainland, too, fifteenth-century markets and tables came to hold cod in different preserved forms from various distant and local sources.Footnote ⁵¹

After centuries of lag, from around 1400 cod did begin to penetrate more southerly markets and diets. This growth relied as much on use of salt to preserve catches from coastal stocks as it did on expansion of the dried stockfish industry. In interior central Europe, stockfish were among the victuals with managed prices during the Council of Constance, but the Alsatian chef there hired by the council’s elected pope reported they were for Thuringians, Hessians, and Swabians, not the French or Italians.Footnote ⁵² An occasional stockfish recipe crops up in fifteenth-century Bavarian and Austrian cookbooks, but no such traces in their kitchen middens or even their kitchen accounts. Further to the south and west the prevalent preserved white-fleshed fish was hake, the resident bottom-oriented predatory gadid in the Channel Approaches and Bay of Biscay. Historical confusion reigns when incautious modern writers translate merluz, merluccio, and like words as ‘stockfish’, not the distinctly smaller hake taken and salt-dried by fishers from Cornwall and Brittany south to Galicia and Portugal.Footnote ⁵³ In Spain and Italy, as in France, salt-dried cod were a new product characteristic of the sixteenth century. Papal courtier Paolo Giovio, whom we met praising the sturgeons of Rome, may epitomize the ambiguity and transition to a stiff and headless commodity:

Even in 1524 the fish of far northern origin remained alien to native Romans. An age of baccalà was yet to come. In any case, this commodity was far far away from any living fish elsewhere called cod.

Even as Giovio wrote the cod tale was changing. In a story less widely known than it deserves, a Venetian navigator financed in part by Bristol merchants whom Hanseatic competition had squeezed out of the Bergen market and Icelandic fishery found his way to a bonanza of cod in the western Atlantic and back to England to spread the news. One of Zuan Caboto’s English crewmen in 1497 told a Spanish intelligence agent of unimaginable abundance off the “New found land,” which would free English mariners and markets from dependence on Iceland. The Cabot circle would later speak of “infinite fish.”Footnote ⁵⁵ First to exploit the hitherto untouched Grand Banks were Portuguese (1506), Normans (1508), Basques and Bretons (1511). Yet within a generation relations between humans and fish in the northwest Atlantic were transformed.Footnote ⁵⁶ Soon French, English, Spanish, and eventually American boats and fleets would compete for those rich schools through a half-millennium. By the late sixteenth century European markets, diets, coastal settlements, and fisheries politics felt waves of the revolutionary disruption radiating from the epicentre off Newfoundland. Salt-dried cod went to markets in Spain, Portugal, Italy, southern France, and eventually to Caribbean plantations as rations for slaves. The English colony become Commonwealth of Massachusetts would make a sculptured golden cod a symbol of its autonomy, but what reached distant consumers were hard, headless, salt-encrusted slabs.

Fast forward five centuries: environmentally aware consumers now think of cod fisheries in terms of competition and collapse. While fisheries experts and contemporary historians continue to debate the relative roles in the cod debacle of the late twentieth century of overfishing, of mismanagement, and of environmental change (regional fluctuations in water temperatures),Footnote ⁵⁷ in a longer view all this was ‘new’ only in scale. Since documented European discovery of the banks between New England and Newfoundland, the prevalent cultural regime has sought to satisfy as much demand and to fish as intensively, as available technologies for capture and preservation would allow. Perhaps already by 1600 and surely in the late seventeenth century and again from the mid-nineteenth, shortfalls in catches caused some local observers to worry about disruption of aquatic life and future depletion. But each time new technologies and practices (long multi-hook lines, nets and trawls, steam power, factory ships), new fishing frontiers (further offshore, further north, longer seasons), and a shared desire for wealth and prosperity pushed the catches up, changed the sense of normal abundance (what ecologists call the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’), and let both decisionmakers and fishers set aside all doubts.Footnote ⁵⁸ The ever greater distance of investors, managers, and consumers from the waters and from the live animals made decisions easier, too.

The sorry tale of late twentieth-century cod is a reasonably clear progression from the late fifteenth-century arrival of medieval Europeans in the western Atlantic and its ‘infinite fish’. But what lay behind this evolution? Had it anything to do with European experience of the cod and, by reasonable extension, other fisheries during the previous medieval millennium? How and why the parallels between the long demise of the sturgeon and the collapse of the cod in one-third the time? What had fishers of Lake Constance been able to learn and others not?

I.1.4 Telling Tales in Time and Space

Whether centred on a natural organism, human groups, or the natural and historic settings of their encounters, our three fish tales offer glimpses of medieval Europeans interacting with surrounding aquatic nature. Sea sturgeons swam at the centre of a story of human desire to possess and consume an impressive, very distinctive fish. Common people worked in the natural world so medieval elites of wealth and power could enjoy this increasingly rare trophy. Attributes of the animal itself framed human efforts and impacts on aquatic ecosystems as well as the response of sturgeon populations to those pressures. The tale of Lake Constance revolved around medieval communities living beside a particular water body and turning to it for important corporeal and cultural needs. They successively adapted techniques and skills to exploit diverse fish stocks within their evolving sociopolitical structures – subsistence, lordships, urban markets – and their cultural understandings. Aware of pressures on resources, leading elements in regional society responded in several practical ways.

Even in the cursory form given here the three-act story of cod covered the longest time and widest stage. Millennia of local subsistence use anchored the narrative and even some of its durable technical features off northern coastal Norway. Across five subsequent medieval centuries northern fishing evolved into commercial production of a standardized commodity for long-distance trade even as its methods came to be emulated by regional societies elsewhere in the fish’s range. Better access to resources (salt) let late adopters develop superior (or at least cheaper) techniques for preservation and thus commerce. Fishers but especially traders in cod early helped build a European network of interregional trade later joined by, for instance, the Lake Constance fishery. The end of the Middle Ages initiated a new five-century global expansion of cod which widened the gap – spatial, economic, perceptual – separating the animal and its fishers from the commodity and its consumers. Competitive conflicts meant dominant interest groups (nations, investors, traders) responded to successive waves of depletion with separate, even contradictory, technological and finally reluctant regulatory measures.

Every historic aspect, attribute, and evolution in these fish tales will recur in the wider exploration of western Christendom’s encounters with its aquatic environments. Different habitats affect biodiversity and the resources accessible to local human communities. Economic institutions evolved differently across Europe’s many regions. Species characteristics and consumption patterns shaped potential for innovation in catching, preserving, and marketing fish. Some themes can be seen as shared across broad areas, but the particulars will differ. Medieval fisheries are not all one story. The tales simply indicate some patterns and variations.

Each tale has further been informed by a confluence of methods and data sets. These few pages have drawn upon ichthyology and ecology of present experience with fishes as well as the methods and findings of archaeozoology which can make sense of recovered remains of fishes long dead and (mostly) eaten. In the traditional historians’ written record critical readings of various documentary types and genres indicated something of past writers’ purposes, perceptions, and unintentional assumptions, even ignorance, regarding the natural world in general and fishes in particular. Integrated with these anthropogenic remnants of the medieval European past are the findings of palaeoscience, the present-day recovery of natural features such as ancient DNA, climate proxies, trace elements, and stable isotopes unimagined by medieval people. The interdisciplinary approaches deployed as opportune in the fairly simple fish tales will help call up a more diverse but interwoven understanding of people and fishes across western Christendom’s medieval millennium and something of the legacy their experiences, actions, and consequences left for their future, which is our present.

From northern Norway to Sicily and Ireland to the Danube, European habitats held a multiplicity of aquatic creatures. Medieval regional vernacular cultures knew equally variegated vocabularies for those animals and for the means by which people caught them. Though acknowledging both the biogeographical integrity of European waters and the cultural unities of western Latin Christendom, most studies of fish and fisheries and nearly all of those with historical or antiquarian intent have (understandably) been local, regional, or at most national in scope. Yet only rare highly localized species are confined to a single country, and many European watersheds and coasts encompass several modern (and medieval) polities.Footnote ⁵⁹ National, regional or single-species studies – Danish herrings, Norwegian cod, English fishers, etc. – neglect competitors on the water and in broader markets as well as other species of some regional importance. Customary separation of fisheries studies into freshwater and marine pools simply violates the commonalities of aquatic life and of terrestrial humans engaging with creatures from another medium. Most medieval Europeans lived far from the sea and, as will appear below, medieval fishing long remained a primarily inland and coastal activity carried out within sight of land. For all these reasons, this book attempts European, not territorial or salinity-based, coverage. As a work of environmental history it aims to explore and tell tales of a thousand years of encounters between the cultural community of western Christendom and the animals and ecosystems of waters flowing through and washing the bounds of that community.

I.2.1 Interactions: Nature and Human Culture, People and Places

An effective environmental history can avoid a priori assumptions of environmental, material, or cultural determinism by starting from the palpably human constructs of ‘Culture’ and ‘Nature’ as identifying two autonomous realms of identity and causation.Footnote ⁶⁰ The former comprises the means by which humans comprehend and communicate their own being and the world around them. Such communication creates human knowledge, beliefs, institutions, and purposes. Everything from divinely ordained dietary rules to seigneurial authority and markets to metaphysics is a learned element of culture. The latter, ‘Nature’, refers to the material universe, living and non-living, and its operations free of human (or evident supernatural) wishes or cultural preferences. ‘Laws of Nature’ describe, among other things, how flows of energy and matter (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.) link living organisms to one another and to their surroundings in networks now called ecosystems. For each living thing, those flows constitute its metabolism. Humans and their societies have metabolisms, too.

In terms articulated by a group of social ecologists in Vienna, the realms of culture and nature interact in the actual world. Human bodies, artifacts, and societies necessarily function as hybrids of nature and culture, possessing both symbolic and material attributes. Figure I.1 attempts to visualize this condition. Material actions of humans are subject to natural forces, while the realm of nature enters human perceptions only through cultural forms, notably language. When, however, humans interact with the natural world, they modify it, intentionally, knowingly, or not. Changed flows of materials and energy result in new ecosystems, not purely natural but ‘colonized’ for human cultural purposes (Figure I.2). Yet in even the most humanized of circumstances, natural forces remain, sometimes giving human interventions unintended results. Our fish tales have already illustrated this.

Figure I.1 Humans and Nature: an interaction model – society as hybrid.

Figure I.2 Humans and Nature: biophysical structures as ecosystem compartments linked to symbolic culture.

Two further aspects of this interactive or metabolic perspective help organize data and thinking in environmental history in general and about medieval fisheries in particular. First, relations between the natural and the cultural spheres are reciprocal and cumulative, driving but not determining change in both realms (Figure I.3). When people experience their physical environment, they make sense of this experience as a cultural representation, which then becomes an object of processes within the cultural sphere. So long as those processes remain symbolic, even if they become coherent programs to do something in material life (such as make a net to catch fish or erect a temple), they lack environmental effect. Whether driven by moral values or what might be called economic concerns, cultural programs enter the natural sphere through human physical work, which both changes and is itself subject to the natural sphere. Subsequent human experience with this new colonized nature (the net catches fish but destroys habitat, so driving other fish away; the new cathedral removes large trees for miles around) results in new representations. Over time nature and culture co-adapt, resulting in the co-evolution of both.

Figure I.3 Humans and Nature: connecting experience, thought, and action.

Second, it is soon apparent that the heuristics of ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ are themselves cultural constructs, generalized concepts free from time and space, by which we try to make sense of our experiences. What rather occurs in a ‘real’ world of human behaviour is that (potentially) identifiable individuals or groups with specific culturally defined purposes and practices pursue these in specific places with their own natural features: a Genoese fisher setting out to catch sardines in the Tyrrhenian Sea is not the same as a Swedish miller with salmon traps in the mill leet. The ‘hybridity’ and ‘co-adaptation’ of theory are thus but labels for what people and some things of nature do at particular ‘socio-natural sites’. Historians’ generalizations about, for instance, the construction of weirs to take migratory salmon, shad, or eel and the effects of these structures on the runs of fish are therefore assembled from what specific men and women did at particular times on (then) identifiable reaches of the Blackwater, the Humber, the Dordogne, or Rhine, each understandable as a socio-natural site. The same applies at larger scale to the waters and shores of the Danish Øresund, where thousands of men and women assembled each summer in late medieval centuries to catch and cure herring. The concept of socio-natural sites reminds present-day historians and their readers that actions in the natural world are by individual, named, people at places with distinctive features. Medievalists can rarely see the personal side of ordinary peasants, fishers, or even seigneurs. Environmental histories often treat only policymakers or collectivities. So individuals who do appear in relevant sources here will often be remarked. So will the specific places engaged by those people. The abbey of Cluny and its priory of Paray le Monial are but fifty kilometers apart, each on a river in southern Burgundy draining from the Massif Central. The former sat beside the Grosne, a tributary of the Saône and thus of the Rhône, the latter on a minor affluent of the Loire. Monks or their servants at Paray could exploit migratory Atlantic salmon at their doorstep, but not so those at the mother house.

Fishing is simultaneously an ecological and a cultural (economic, symbolic, social) act. This book attempts to ascertain the people, practices, and installations intended to take fish under certain conditions from identifiable medieval waters and put those fish to human use. Even fragmentary knowledge can help establish human experiences, programs, and work with consequences for natural and social systems alike. If and when such actions and impacts reach a scale sufficient to transform an entire socio-natural site (or collectivity of such sites) into something quite different we can speak of an ‘ecological revolution’ or a ‘regime shift’.Footnote ⁶¹ The ability of a defined system (social and ecological) to persist under such pressures is a good working definition of ‘resilience’.Footnote ⁶² In shifting scale from site to socio-economic structures to ecological revolutions we also go from individual human experience to large collective generalizations which may lie beyond contemporary awareness.

I.2.2 Interrogating What Remains

Historians habitually borrow concepts and theories from other disciplines – supply and demand from economics, queering from sex and gender studies – to test if these ideas help them understand conditions, events, and developments in the past. Medievalists are likewise familiar with employing multiple tools to squeeze meaning from scattered and skewed fragments from a largely illiterate and long-gone culture. The inherent interdisciplinarity of environmental history was already manifest in introductory fish tales, where use of saint’s legends might surprise fisheries ecologists, references to ancient DNA and water chemistry may have caused some medievalists to blink, and ecological concepts lent meaning to data. Environmental history often ranges widely not only for concepts but for empirical methods to obtain critically credible data about the past.

Despite different media and sometimes analytic vocabularies, traditional history, conventional archaeology, and the zooarchaeology heavily used in this book have similar needs and ways to establish the identity of an object, its likely relationship to a particular past, and (the limits of) its ability to provide information about that past. The textual and [icono]graphic objects [sources] commonly examined by historians and other humanist scholars were once created with some kind of communication (or memory) in mind, though sometimes a new viewpoint can reveal information other than that intended. For instance, that it took a miracle to provide Thomas Aquinas, dying in 1274 at a monastery on the road from Naples to Rome, with his desired dish of herring (transformed from sardines)Footnote ⁶³ unknowingly provides a good sign that the widely traded Atlantic fish had not reached Italy before 1300. The hybrid quality necessarily imparted to fish from their capture through eventual consumption is obvious, and more so if marketed in the process. Records of prices thus indicate points of plausible consensus between supplier and purchaser/consumer on the value of this object at a particular time and place. At several points in this book historically retrieved fish prices serve to shed light on the relative value of different fish varieties, both biological species and forms of processing; on the value placed on fish compared to other foodstuffs, wages, or other quantitative social markers; and eventually on some changes over time in price series. Supplement I.2.2 online treats critical distinctions among sources of price citations and the constraints this places on inferences from them.

Traditional archaeologists recover material artifacts and structures, objects rarely created or deposited with communicative intent. Having, like a historian, established the character and date of the object, the archaeologist can infer the purpose and evident abilities of its makers. Patterned finds of large stones and beams in what once were river gravels can indicate a fish trap and, if enough of the structure is recovered, its orientation in the flow shows whether upstream migrant salmon and shad or downstream migrant adult eel were the quarry. The structure alone neither identifies the builders or operators nor reveals when it was used (but see below).

Zooarchaeologists work with what some call ‘ecofacts’, pieces of the natural world modified and commonly deposited by humans. In the present context this means fish bones which a skilled analyst can identify to the level of family, genus, or species. An individual bone may indicate the animal’s presence and likely ecological origin – preferred habitat, range, etc. – but say little of its sociocultural significance. An assemblage produces a calculation of relative taxonomic abundance, and perhaps a pattern in the size of fish or in the presence or absence of certain skeletal elements indicative of butchering techniques.Footnote ⁶⁴ But now there comes into play what archaeozoologists call ‘taphonomy’, considering what happens to organisms after they die and leading to reconstructing site formation and recovery. The process is always somehow selective. While all fish bones are less durable than those of domestic mammals, those of some varieties, the salmonid family in particular, decay more rapidly and completely than do others. Large bones of large fishes are sturdier and more easily recognized than the small bones of small species. Excavation strategy becomes critical: presence of pike-perch or cod in a sample only hand-picked is convincing, but absence or low representation of eel, whitefish, or sardine says little if the context was not sieved. Yet similar critical reasoning applies to the most traditional historical sources: monastic cartularies retain the charters where the house gained, not those recording an opponent’s victory. An artist’s observation or convention may or may not replicate distinctive features of a fish or of a capture device. Basket traps (pot gears) are commonplace in medieval illustrations, nets shown deployed from boats rarely comprehensible, and major barrier traps simply invisible.

In words of archaeozoologist László Bartosiewicz, “It [taphonomy] may be seen as the common denominator between archaeological, iconographic and textual data within the context of reconstructing life during the Middle Ages.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Taphonomy provides a paradigm for systematic analysis of selective and differential loss and preservation/recovery of remains from the medieval past and hence, whatever the discipline associated with a particular medium, the variety of source materials comprising the historical record for medieval Europe. This book follows such a holistic critical approach to evidence of people and fish.

Finally, the practice of environmental history in the early twenty-first century draws increasingly on findings from palaeosciences, recovering information about the past from materials and features outside any realm of past human awareness or purpose. In certain circumstances those recovered logs from fish traps are datable by analysis of tree rings and/or radiocarbon. Certain stable isotopes extracted from collagen in fish remains can indicate the region where the fish were taken – so far notably to discriminate among cod bones of Baltic, North Sea, Norwegian, or New World origin.Footnote ⁶⁶ Other stable isotopes in protein from human skeletal remains can signal significant consumption of marine organisms during at least the last decades of the individual’s life. Marine sediments provide proxy indicators for water temperature and datable river deposits for pollution by heavy metals. Most of what is now known about climate and its changes in Europe’s medieval millennium comes not only from textual references to weather but from tree rings and from isotopes and volcanic ash in ice cores from glaciers and sediment cores from deep seas and lakes.

The operative mode of enquiry underlying this book is shared among disciplines, namely critical assessment of relations between specific relics of the past and the way each has reached the present. Historical texts call for source criticism, archaeological materials for taphonomic analysis, and palaeosciences for the processes and calibrations which make certain observations convincing proxies for past environmental conditions. All procedures ask what statements regarding a specific past this data can support, which it would negate, and where it is mute. Just as failure to sieve means no information about consumption of small fish, lack of literate interest in techniques of capture does not mean none were being used. The goal is consilience, a concordance of evidence from independent, unrelated sources, or good reasons for its absence.Footnote ⁶⁷

A further epistemological problem is negotiating matters of scale. How to get from an individual set of market regulations, the archaeological context of a single bone-filled kitchen midden, or an individual socio-natural site to infer cultural norms, trends, or the historic range of a fish species? Truly quantitative or quantifiable source materials and comparative methods have limited applicability for the Middle Ages. In what follows, this issue shall call for documenting multiple cases and variants across spaces and/or times: authorities labeled fish traps hazards to navigation in the sixth-century Po, thirteenth-century Thames, and fifteenth-century Danube; in one early medieval site after another across Europe all the fish identified, though of different species, ranges, and habitats, were recognizably native to nearby waters. Beyond hopefully representative examples in the text, more often appear in the online Supplement. The Catch thus aims to piece together fragments of information to reveal what medieval people said, what they seemed to know and do without telling, and what those contemporary witnesses could neither know nor comprehend about their encounters with Europe’s aquatic life. Of course when even present-day environmental consequences seem to hover at the edge of human awareness, none should be surprised to find here occasionally hypothetical reconstruction from an exiguous and commonly unplanned medieval record. Scraps of historical information are patterned by known ecological relationships and processes or by known cultural mechanisms linking extraction of fish from their habitats and distribution to people who ate them.

A well-conceived environmental history offers perspective in time for current dilemmas and responses. It can sustain this first comprehensive interpretation of preindustrial European fisheries from an environmental and not simply economic point of view. It further recognizes the dynamism and resilience of the non-human in shaping the long-term encounter of aquatic nature and medieval Europeans. This permits historically and biologically knowledgeable tracing of antecedents for a present environmental crisis back before the most recent centuries and to roots of dominant paradigms for market-based development and resistance to it.