Fish were an important source of dietary protein and fishing a significant economic activity in France throughout the Middle Ages. Miraculous drafts of fishes met the prayers of Merovingian saints. Charlemagne ordered estate managers to improve fish stocks, while contemporary monasteries employed their own fishers. By then, most observing Christians were emulating the monks in abstaining from meat more than one day in three. Technological inability to fish offshore, to preserve, and to transport fish made the saltwater fishery less important than local freshwater stocks, which came under intense exploitation.
Depending on the size of the watercourse, rights over freshwater fisheries belonged to the king, territorial lord, or local landowner, who managed them as part of his domainal economy. Use of the fishery for substance by ordinary peasants was limited, tacit, and, in the later Middle Ages, ever more restricted. Lords allocated fishing zones (piscaturae) to specialized craftsmen in return for payments in kind. The varieties and seasons of local fishes called for various capture techniques: at bridges, mill dams, and sluices, permanent palisaded traps and wicker enclosures took migratory salmon and eels; bow nets, seines, hoop nets, and dip nets, as well as a number of angling methods are commonly recorded. By the 12th century, Norman coastal fishers were sending herring, cod, and various flatfishes to Paris from the English Channel and the North Sea. Their inland counterparts caught trout, pike, bream, and, by the early 1200s, the exotic carp.
People carried eastern European carp westward, for this fish’s ability to thrive in the artificial fishponds slowly developed from the impoundments made since the 9th century to power mills. By the mid-13th century, complexes of ponds were being constructed purposely for fish culture in, for instance, Burgundy, Sologne, and Forez. After the fish put on two to four years of growth, the pond was drained to harvest them, seeded to grain for a year or so, then refilled and restocked with fry. Full-grown carp or pike could grace a lord’s table or, as those from the many ponds of the last Capetian dukes of Burgundy, yield rich returns from sales to bourgeois merchants or the popes in Avignon. The same pressure of commercial demand caused overfishing of French fish stocks. In 1289, Philip IV initiated royal regulation of fishing gear, seasons, and the size of a legal catch. Probably as effective in changing the role of French fisheries, however, was the late-medieval expansion of the sea fishery, especially after the Dutch learned better ways to preserve herring for shipment inland.
Richard C. Hoffman
[See also: FOOD TRADES; HUNTING AND FOWLING]
World History
