Alison Locker

Background: Many freshwater fish species that were earlier appreciated by consumers have disappeared in the central, north and west European foodways. Although they were regarded as healthy and tasty, commercially captured marine species and highly processed products have nowadays replaced these fishes. The global transformations of the food system contribute to the erosion of many local foodstuffs. Habitual tastes disappear.

Background: Fishing is probably one of the oldest economic activities in the history of humankind. Lakes, rivers and streams in Europe are important elements in the European landscape with a rich diversity of fish and other aquatic organisms. Artisanal fisheries have therefore been of great importance for the provision of food, but also animal feed, medicine, fertilizer and other needs. These fishermen had a deep knowledge about the waterscape and its biota. However, ethnoichthyology remains a small topic within contemporary ethnobiology in Europe. Our focus lies within northern Europe in the late medieval to modern period, but encompasses the wider area with some reference to earlier periods where informative. Method: We have reviewed a large amount of literature mainly on the relationship between man and fish in freshwaters from late medieval times (defined here as the fifteenth century) until the early twenty-first century. The main focus is on freshwater (including anadromous and catadromous) fish in northern Europe, the main area of study for both authors, though examples have been included from elsewhere to indicate the widespread importance of these fisheries. The review includes studies from various fields such as archaeology, ethnography, fish biology, geography, linguistics and osteology to map what has been studied of interest in ethnoichthyology. These data have been analysed and critically reviewed. Results: There are archaeozoological studies, studies of specialised fishers as well as artisanal fishing among the peasantry, research of folk taxonomies, fishing methods (including the use of poison) and gear, which are all of great interest for ethnoichthyology. There is also research on traditional preserving methods for fish as food and for other purposes. Of interest is the keeping of fish in wells, ponds and aquaria. However, there is still room for more research within many domains of ethnoichthyology.

Abstract Botanical and faunal remains from a 3rd-4th century AD Roman farm at the modern Great Holts Farm, Boreham have provided a picture of an agricultural system based predominantly on arable production. Agrarian innovation is evinced by the bones of exceptionally large ...

This paper explores the potential of stable isotope analysis to identify the approximate region of catch of cod by analysing bones from medieval settlements in northern and western Europe. It measures the δ13C and δ15N values of cod bone collagen from medieval control samples collected from sites around Arctic Norway, the North Sea, the Kattegat and the Baltic Sea. These data were considered likely to differ by region due to, for example, variation in the length of the food chain, water temperature and salinity. We find ...

Previous synthesis of zooarchaeological remains from English medieval sites has shown that marine fish consumption increased, from a very low baseline, around ad 1000, a phenomenon dubbed the  sh event horizon (FEH) by Barrett et al. (2004a). This change appears initially to have been linked primarily to urban sites, with widespread marine  sh consumption at inland rural settlements argued to be a slightly later development (Barrett et al. 2004b; but see also Chapter 17 regarding near-coastal elite settlements). That early towns and cities led the way in the expansion of marine resource use is perhaps unsurprising, given that urban settlements almost by de nition involve a concentration of food consumers rather than producers and hence require a signi cant hinterland to meet demand. Turning to marine resources is one way to expand this resource base.
Stable isotope provenancing has shown that this FEH initially involved relatively locally caught  sh, with imports from northern waters only becoming common during the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries (Barrett et al. 2011). To the extent that the shift towards marine resources was driven by demand from urban populations, one might also expect expanding cities to have been at the forefront of the eventual development of long-distance trade in  sh. Apart from the increasing strain that must have been placed on local hinterlands (both terrestrial and marine) by growing cities such as London – whose population is estimated to have climbed from around 20,000 in the twelfth century to around 80,000 in the thirteenth century (Campbell et al. 1993, 24) – trade functions were in any case central to medieval urbanism (Astill 2009; Biddle 1976). Indeed, in this context it is worth noting that signi cant consumption of herring (Clupea harengus) seems to have pre-dated the FEH, speci cally at early medieval proto-urban trading centres (Barrett et al. 2004b; see also Chapters 14–15).
London is thus a good case study through which to explore the onset and development of long-distance trade in  sh to England, using cod (Gadus morhua) as our example. Apart from being one of the largest medieval cities in the kingdom, its historic core has also been subject to intensive, high-quality excavation over the past 40 years. Moreover, stable isotope provenancing results suggest that London came to rely on imported cod relatively early, within its southern North Sea context (Barrett et al. 2011), although sample size – and hence representativeness – is ultimately restricted by the practicalities of destructive laboratory analysis.
This chapter presents the results of a meta-analysis of cod remains from 95 sites across London, aimed at detecting changes over time in the contribution of imports, complementing and placing in context the isotopic results. It builds on an earlier publication (Orton et al. 2014), adding assessments of changes in  sh preservation techniques and of the spatial distribution of the bone  nds. Late and post- medieval trends are also given more attention in the present chapter than in the previous study.

The growth of medieval cities in Northern Europe placed new demands on food supply, and led to the import of fish from increasingly distant fishing grounds. Quantitative analysis of cod remains from London provides revealing insight into the changing patterns of supply that can be related to known historical events and circumstances. In particular it identifies a marked increase in imported cod from the thirteenth century AD. That trend continued into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after a short downturn, perhaps attributable to the impact of the Black Death, in the mid fourteenth century. The detailed pattern of fluctuating abundance illustrates the potential of archaeological information that is now available from the high-quality urban excavations conducted in London and similar centres during recent decades. Supplementary material is published online

The spatial distribution of the European freshwater eel (Anguilla anguilla) was very different in historic and prehistoric times in comparison to the present. A database of the spatial and temporal distribution of eel remains in archaeological and palaeontological sites is presented and used to assess the spatial distribution of populations from the height of the last glacial maximum. The results show that the eel was absent from northern Europe until about 11 000 years ago. The reason was probably a southerly displacement of the Gulf Stream carrying the larval migration from the Sargasso Sea. However, additional factors preventing eel populations in northern Europe may have also been the colder temperatures in the Arctic tundra landscape that existed at the time and the extreme distance to the European Atlantic coast along the Channel River. The archaeological record shows that eels were absent from the Baltic Sea until about 6700 cal BC, but there is some indication of an earlier presence during the Yoldia Sea stage at the beginning of the Holocene. Only in southern Europe south of the Gironde river basin were eel populations maintained through the last glaciation. The species may have survived the last glaciation in a relatively restricted area in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast of western Europe. Published palaeontological and genetic information gives important insights into climatic, geologic, and tectonic events on longer time scales. The oldest subfossil remains from Pleistocene sediments in northern Europe are approaching the age of the estimated genetic divergence of the European and American eel populations, and hence the species identity of the oldest subfossil remains may be ambiguous.

The catastrophic impact of fishing pressure on species such as cod and herring is well documented. However , the antiquity of their intensive exploitation has not been established. Systematic catch statistics are only available for ca.100 years, but large-scale fishing industries existed in medieval Europe and the expansion of cod fishing from the fourteenth century (first in Iceland, then in Newfoundland) played an important role in the European colonization of the Northwest Atlantic. History has demonstrated the scale of these late medieval and post-medieval fisheries, but only archaeology can illuminate earlier practices. Zooarchaeological evidence shows that the clearest changes in marine fishing in England between AD 600 and 1600 occurred rapidly around AD 1000 and involved large increases in catches of herring and cod. Surprisingly, this revolution predated the documented post-medieval expansion of England's sea fisheries and coincided with the Medieval Warm Period—when natural herring and cod productivity was probably low in the North Sea. This counterintuitive discovery can be explained by the concurrent rise of urbanism and human impacts on freshwater ecosystems. The search for 'pristine' baselines regarding marine ecosystems will thus need to employ medieval palaeoecological proxies in addition to recent fisheries data and early modern historical records.

When did the market economy come to Europe? Fish might seem an unlikely commodity to throw light on the matter, but the authors use fish bones from English sites to offer a vivid account of the rise and rise of the market as a factor in European development from the late tenth century.