The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (30 page)

None of this was good for fish like salmon
that depend on fast, clear streams, but there was another obstacle which made things
even worse. To turn all that grain into food required mills, usually watermills. Each
had a reservoir of still water made by damming a river or making a weir, so there was
always enough water to release into the
buckets at the top of the millwheel and make it turn. A
one-metre dam and gate and raceway could back up two metres of silt and gravel; it did
at one twelfth-century dam on the Derwent in the English Midlands. It also blocked those
fish that need both sea and fresh water, which breed in one and mature in the other:
sturgeon, salmon, trout and shad. Along with herring, these were the staples of royal
feasts – Henry III of England had them all for Christmas in 1240 with a dish of lampreys
as well – but their spawning habits and the cycle of their lives were being blocked by
dams and heavy millwheels and still, deep pools.

The effects were obvious. The draining of
the Rhine delta for farmland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries meant dikes in the
way of flowing water, and the sturgeon population collapsed. The great fish came back
only after violent storm tides broke the barriers around 1400. To save the salmon, the
Scots made laws so that all dams would have an opening for the fish, and all barrier
nets would be lifted on Saturday; the law, under the early-thirteenth-century King
Alexander II, demanded that ‘the stream of the water shall be in all parts so free
that a swine of the age of three years, well fed, may turn himself within the stream,
round about, so that his snout nor tail shall not touch the bank of the
water’.

The hungry towns were a problem in
themselves: Cologne dumping its cesspits into the Rhine just downstream of the city, the
garbage of Paris making the Seine downstream ‘infected and corrupted’ by the
early 1400s. The pollution was compounded by work: the process of rotting raw hemp and
flax to get out the fibres, the slaughter of animals with the blood and guts tipped into
the river. People noticed what was happening, but not what had happened before: the
shortage of fish, but not the various causes. Instead they chose to blame fishermen.
Philip IV of France made rules in 1289 for the size of nets, for the size of fish that
could be caught and the months when fishing was legal and outside the spawning season.
He complained that ‘today each and every river and waterside of our realm, large
and small, yields nothing due to the evil of the fishers and the devices of their
contriving and because the fish are prevented by them from growing to their proper
condition.’

Freshwater fish may have been more scarce, but until the
world turned colder around 1300 sea fish also had their difficulties: neither herring
nor cod like water to be too warm. Besides, people still ate freshwater fish, even if
the balance was shifting towards a greater consumption of the salt-water kind. In
Schleswig in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the bones left behind show a taste for
perch, pike and bream as well as cod; for the next two centuries, the cod bones are
heavily outnumbered. Around the Louvre in Paris, the richer gentry ate more sea fish
after 1500; but before that they ate salmon, trout, whitefish and sturgeon until the
supplies ran out.
¹⁹
Sea fish from far away was cheaper, and local fish from fresh
water became a luxury; but a luxury makes a market.

It also creates a challenge. To keep fish
when fish stocks were declining was to show that man could keep control of the world
around him. To make the fishponds showy was a statement of power, and a kind of
privilege: to be able to eat the fish that kings and bishops ate. The mundane business
of raising fish that thrive in still water and the shelter of weeds became a noble
ambition.

A great family could remake the ground all
round their tower, house or castle, and then boast, as did the twelfth-century Gerald of
Wales about his family castle at Manorbier, that they had the biggest, the deepest ponds
of all. The more obviously artificial, the more difficult to make, the better. The first
pond built after the Norman conquest of England, the ‘King’s Pool’ at
York, was a full assault on the town: it required the flooding of farmland, taking down
mills, changing the run of roads. It was an imposition. Fishponds were proof you were
separate from ordinary people, which is why they were so often built at the edge of an
estate or just within the fences and walls. They were meant to be seen on either side of
the causeway that swept up to the main gate at Rothwell in Yorkshire, a bonus of
grandeur; they were little lakes with walkways round them at Hopton in Shropshire, a
decorative indulgence. Nobody could think they were natural.

The voracious pike, a greedy carnivore
capable of taking anything from a swan to a minnow, was kept in separate ponds; the
Bishop of Lincoln had a sizeable pike pond on the side of his other fishponds at
Lyddington.
²⁰
That sounds
practical, just a way to stop the ‘waterwolf’ eating the other stock; but it
also showed that the bishop owned a very special kind of fish, not only good eating but
important for the marks on its head, which looked almost like the nails, whip, cross and
thorns of Christ’s Passion. He didn’t just want to sit down to the great
dishes of pike, like the
chaudumé
that Taillevent’s famous cookbook
suggested (pike pieces grilled with a sauce of saffron, ginger, white wine and sour
verjuice all mixed with bread that has been soaked in the liquor from cooking peas
²¹
);
gastronomy was not the point. He wanted to show he was great enough to eat the great
fish.

The fish were like the fallow deer and
rabbits, newly introduced into England, which were kept closed in hunting parks; they
should never have been there. Deer had ‘hovells’ for shelter in the Bishop
of Durham’s park; fish had artificial ponds. Deer had forests planted for them,
fish had willows along the banks of their ponds so they could shelter between the roots.
Deer had nothing to do with feeding the household, but they were very carefully tended
and managed; they were the designated prey in a dream of chivalric slaughter, an ersatz
version of old forest legends.

Hunting had its own elaborate etiquette,
fixed enough to make a metaphor in pictures and poems, so serious that the stag at bay
could stand for Christ in extremis; it took place between the true wild and the
perfectly civilized, between the woods and the castle. It required thought. A true hunt,
par force de chiens
, meant singling out the strongest deer for the hounds
to chase all day, followed by hunt servants and the grand hunters on horseback, until
the huntsman could kill the exhausted beast with a sword to the heart. That was not what
happened in the parks; there was no room and, besides, fallow deer have poor stamina and
they like to run in herds. The best the park could offer was a shadow of the show, the
deer herded into nets or towards stands where archers were waiting for them.
²²
The
audience had to suspend disbelief, as in a theatre.

The walls and fences of the hunting parks
were to keep the uninvited out as much as to keep the deer in; poaching raids, as at
Somersham Park in 1301, both broke and burned the boundary fences
before taking away deer and hares, as though the boundary
was itself an affront. Inside it, hunting was a spectacle both very showy and quite
private, proving the essence of a knight’s skill and his social standing in front
of his friends. The animals were players in a staged show, the woods planned carefully
to allow a horse to ride fast and freely after game, the prey always available.

Outside the boundary, the prey counted as
food. The peasant uprisings in England in 1381 were followed by a decade of bloody and
violent raids on the show and the privilege of the parks.
²³

The ponds of great estates were not fished
for sport; domestic fish were caught by draining their ponds, ideally every three years
or so, a sluggish end for slow creatures. The sport lay in rivers and lakes, where fish
were taken with hook and line and another small fish for bait; we know this from
Chrétien de Troyes’s
Perceval
, his great story of the Holy Grail, which
was written around 1190, in which the knight Perceval sees on the river the Fisher King,
wounded so badly in the thighs that he cannot ride to any other kind of hunting.
Evidently Chrétien saw fishing as a proper, royal substitute for chasing deer or flying
hawks, but only in extreme circumstances. According to the minstrel Blind Hary, long
after the event, fishing was what the Scots hero William Wallace chose to do when
‘on a tym he desyrit to play’. He went out with a small cone-shaped net to
be dragged on the river bed and a long pole which ‘the Wallace’ found most
useful for clubbing any Englishmen who strayed.
²⁴

The fishponds were not about food. The
bishops of Winchester had four hundred acres of ponds but used barely a tenth of the
fish they could produce. Their fish were for show, like their deer. English kings bought
freshwater fish for their feasts despite all the fish they bought to stock their
fishponds, as though the show of the feasts and the show of the new landscape were
entirely different things. It seems the best return a great man expected from his
fishponds was not to eat the fish or sell them but to give them away to a monastery in
return for their prayers; this happened often enough for monks to have a quite
unjustified reputation as pioneers of fish farming. The fishpond was part of an idea,
not a budget.

In the Renaissance the revival of Roman
gardens, with statues,
meaning, gods and
heroes, made it clear that men were imposing ideas and ambitions on the landscape. In
earlier years, in the time of the fishponds, people meant to do the same thing but we
may have a little difficulty in recognizing it. Put up a statue of Minerva in a garden
and you have a classic goddess of wisdom, and at once there are obviously abstract ideas
among the trees. Put a fence round a new woodland and fill it with deer, and the park
seems practical, or even trivial, an afternoon amusement for the rich. Build a fishpond
and you assume people wanted to eat fish, not think about them. And yet the park and the
ponds made great claims: for the theatre of chivalry and all kinds of knightly ideals,
for the social standing of the owner and most of all for the idea that man can control
and design the world around him, or at least a few acres of park.

Fish were also business, which complicates
matters: business somehow taints all those lovely metaphors in poems and those coloured
ideas in pictures, in a way that mirrors the later English snobbery about
‘trade’.

The Fens in the east of England were fished
day and night in the twelfth century, all through the year, and still the waters
produced fish to sell. In the early fourteenth century, rich peasants in the Forest of
Arden in Warwickshire had fishponds and at least some of their fish were sold. The
London waterfront at Southwark had ‘stews’, which meant fishponds before it
meant brothels, from the 1360s; a merchant named John Tryg had a pond there for
‘feeding and keeping fish’ worth 13s 4d a year. The ponds were entirely for
fattening fish for the market, as practical as a cowshed, but some of them were still
wrecked in the 1381 uprisings because they looked very much like someone’s
privilege.
²⁵

The English were used to eating bream and
pike, sometimes perch, often tench, roach, dace: bony, slow-growing, muddy-tasting
fishes. The great commercial change arrived in barrels, probably off a boat from
Flanders: live carp, an exotic which survived the Ice Age far down the Danube, now being
brought to England as a new crop. The king’s kitchens knew where to find them in
the fourteenth century, and the Duke of Norfolk was certainly raising them by the 1460s.
They were ready to harvest in three
years instead of the eight it took to raise bream; carp were bottom feeders who could be
encouraged to grow by a diet of grain, blood and chicken guts. Above all, when fish was
money, they were more difficult to steal than other kinds. The carp, Thomas Hale
explained later, ‘is so shy that it preserves itself from common enemies’.
He writes that ‘They will not readily bite at the hook when grown to a size in
rich ponds … they plunge to the bottom upon the first notice of any
disturbance in the water and strike their heads into the mud. The net draws over their
tails, without laying hold of them.’
²⁶

The carp was the ruin of fishponds with
meaning. By the fifteenth century, they were just larders for food, nothing like the
vast shimmering expanse they had once been: not the kind of lake a gentleman would want
and no proof at all of riches. Tastes changed. Parks began to look far too wild and
uncontrolled because now there was peace; a house could have a garden that was formal
and complicated and deliberate in the expectation that it would never have to be
defended against attack and there would always be enough labour to maintain it. The
owners of great houses wanted straight and knotted lines, boxes of plants between neat
hedges: diagrams and maps, not wilderness. The artificial ponds and canals and parterres
were there merely to fill the gaps between the lines.

Gardens and parks no longer made some vast
general claim about man’s ability to dominate and remake the world around him.
They made smaller, local statements about their owners, with an inordinate amount of
heraldry in the shaping of stones and beds to proclaim names, ancestry, rank and
connections. They were like the detail of a clever machine.

On the shoreline life was tough and it was
conditional; however much the sea was used and known, it was still wilderness.
Fishermen, pirates, seamen knew about the arbitrary force of winds and storms at sea,
they lived on coasts which could be blown over with sand or washed away or broken up by
surges of tide and waves; so they did not expect permanence. They did a great deal of
praying, and a fair amount of pilgrimage, because when a great storm or tidal surge did
come, the effects were devastating. In
their wake, though, they left another kind of force to change people’s lives: new
kinds of economic reality. The people of the shoreline could never feel in control of
either.