The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  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 peas21); 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.

  The sea gave the village of Walraversijde a living. The towns of Ghent and Bruges wanted herring and had rules to make sure it was always fresh; the counts of Flanders wanted new kinds of business from the people on their lands; the new floating nets made it possible to catch herring close to the shore and even in deep waters. Walraversijde obliged. From the eleventh century there were ‘herring fishermen’, piscatori de harenga, along the Flanders coast. They needed settlements where they could beach their boats and make a life. They lived on the shore because fishing was a constant process of going away, again and again, even if it did not involve being far out at sea.

  The fishermen were just across the dunes from great sheep farms, which had once been more than enough to support a family; but the farmers were brought down by taxes they paid for works to keep the water off their land, and the division of land into smaller farms to raise food for the towns. Their homes were now, in tax returns, just ‘the places where they live’, no more than shelters. Such men needed work: fishing, digging peat, burning peat to get out the salt to preserve the fish. They were lucky that in the twelfth century the tug of the tides had shifted the sandflats and exposed the peat below and given Walraversijde something to mine.

  That was, however, where their luck ended. By 1394 they were living in the wreckage of a civil war, they could see that war and overuse had weakened the sand dunes so that sand was drifting, and they had every reason to be afraid of flood and storm. On St Vincent’s Day, 29 January, in 1394, the sea came in like armies and the whole village, streets and houses, found itself on the sea side of the dunes.

  There was no money for the works needed to repair what the sea had done to the land. All around tenants were late with the rent, or unable to pay at all ‘given the poverty of the people’ as the accounts of the Abbey of St Peter say. The village had to be rebuilt on the safe side of the dunes, but the people were pushed to the sea to make a living. At least herring was still in demand, and a herring boat needed twenty men. The ships were partnerships, with each man bringing his own net as his investment, and taking a share of the profits at the end: shareholders in a company. When there were no fish, there was peat to dig on the shore, so saline that it could be burned and the ashes washed to produce a commercial quantity of salt. There were also fleets passing by, wide open to pirates striking out from the shore; the fishermen were enthusiastic raiders, a little too enthusiastic for the Duke of Burgundy when they stole from ships that were not, at the time, enemy ships. The aldermen of Bruges had to warn that ‘nobody should set sail to sea to plunder or damage ships, unless if ordered by our redoubtable lord’.

  All this time the water pulled back at each low tide to show the broken square foundations of the old village houses, the outlines of the old peat pits in the sand: a reminder of impermanence. On the margins, only the present mattered.

  Fishermen were known for being violent, for being away from home too much and not always following the law, not being properly settled and landed like farmers and landsmen. They lived with terror out at sea, carried crosses and wore amulets against water demons and sea devils, built a chapel so holy bells could ring out to drive off storms, and went to shrines of the Virgin Mary to pray for protection or thank Her for it. The settled rhythms of the land were not where their minds played. They, or rather the women they left onshore, had no fields or gardens, no stables, none of the things that seemed essential inland. Instead they had pigs to gobble up the prodigious quantity of fish guts spilled in the business of cleaning and preserving plaice and herring. They had weapons – crossbow bolts, daggers and cannon shot – to steal other people’s ships and keep their own from being stolen. More than anything, they had their work: the ground was scattered with cork floats for the nets, weights to make them hang in the water, wooden needles for mending them, which were often carved with the owner’s sign or name.

  They also had games when they came back to shore, not just dice but also an early form of golf; the butt ends of the clubs survive. Sailors carried the game all around the North Sea, so that even now the old great courses are usually close to shore. They had spectacles with frames of bone, and styluses for writing and booklets made of wood: they could read and they could write.

  Their village, by the thirteenth century, was already much more than a seasonal camp because it had distinct streets. By the fifteenth, thanks to herring, theft and peat, it was a proper settlement. The houses were made of brick, some of it glazed green from the peat and laid to make patterns in the floors and walls, plastered over inside and sometimes outside. There was glass in the windows; some of the houses even had brick latrines. At night the close-packed houses, a hundred of them with no great differences in size, must have looked like a town waiting for the sea, the candles and oil lamps glinting in the windows.

  There were all the amenities of a town: a brewery, a chapel and a brothel. Inside the houses there were even luxuries. Everyone ate meat because they had the money to get it, and only a little fish; they could always fall back on fish if they had to. They had curtained beds and wooden chests. There were fishwives eating pomegranates and figs, one of them had gold velvet from Genoa, they used the fierce red melagueta peppers in their cooking and they had dishes, plates a
nd cups of Spanish majolica, painted brightly and glazed to look like porcelain. Fishermen travelled, after all, and they could bring back tastes. Pirates found such things on ships coming up from Spain to ports at Bruges or Ghent; and it seems things fell off ships as easily as once they fell off lorries onto the stalls of some London markets.

  The village knew the advantages of being marginal; it never tried to be official. There was a chapel with three aisles and family monuments and a solid, monumental tower, but Walraversijde was never a parish in its own right. It was not even an independent village because it was always subject, in theory anyway, to the farming hamlet of Middelkerke. It was a place for people who needed nothing more. Their real world was the water, in the open sea, off the coasts of England and Scotland where they went to fish. Water and the shore made them valuable; towns like Bruges needed them to pilot ships in and out of the rapidly silting estuary of the Zwin and for the salt they had to have to preserve their fish.

  It was a balance more delicate than anyone could know. What storm had started a century earlier the market now finished.

  When fishermen started heading far out into the North Sea, to the Dogger Bank that lies between Jutland and England, they needed more capital for stronger, larger ships. To get the money, they ran up debts with the fish merchants in town, and quite often they could not pay and they lost their ships; or else they had to take jobs on the ships owned by the fish merchants. In Walraversijde only those locals who dealt in salt and peat, the van Varssenare family, had the money to run ships of their own. Everyone else had to stop being the great man he once thought himself to be. Captains became contractors, crewmen were no longer partners in the business but working for a wage. Fishermen who had once been their own financiers now depended on financiers in the towns.