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TORONTO MEDIEVAL TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS, 12
FISHERS’ CRAFT AND LETTERED ART: TRACTS ON FISHING FROM THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES
Fishers’ Craft and Lettered Art contains editions, English translations, and analysis from social, cultural, and environmental perspectives of the three oldest European extended tracts on fishing. Richard C. Hoffmann discusses the history of fishing in popular culture and outlines the economic and ecologic considerations necessary for an examination and understanding of the fishing manuals. Hoffmann further explores how Continental fishing traditions were conveyed from oral craft practice into printed culture, and proposes that these manuals demonstrate a lively and complex interaction between written texts and popular culture. The tracts are presented in their original languages — Spanish and German ~ with facing-page translations. Close attention is paid to their original setting and functions, and to the possible range of readings, with detailed explanatory notes to help modern fishers and historians deal with these unusual objects.
Fishers’ Craft and Lettered Art is a fascinating look at one vital aspect of everyday life at the end of the Middle Ages.
RICHARD C. HOFFMANN, a professor of history at York University, has a long-standing interest in fisheries and the history of fishing. His previous book, Land, Liberties, and Lordship in a Late Medieval Countryside (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), won the Herbert Baxter Adams prize of the American Historical Association, and honourable mention for the Wallace K. Ferguson prize of the Canadian Historical Association.
Preface
Fishers’ Craft and Lettered Art makes available three large works of instruction on how to catch fish, produced in Europe around 1500, and tries to reconstruct the material, ecological, social, and cultural settings in which they must be read. The first full-scale publication of the texts allows scholars and others interested in the history of fishing to confront the oldest known extended primary sources for this side of everyday life at the end of the Middle Ages.
What is an economic, social, and environmental historian doing editing and translating texts? The answer is that when I tried to come to grips with the evidence for the practice of fishing in late medieval Europe I found it either unknown or thoroughly misconstrued. Were | to use this material to do history — to reimagine the past from its surviving remnants — I would have to gain control of the primary sources and then show them to others to check my work. Fishers’ Craft and Lettered Art is, therefore, a necessary foundation for further research and publication on encounters between human beings and aquatic ecosystems in medieval and early modern Europe.
Historical information about fishing is gathered, summarized, or even listed absolutely nowhere. This I was surprised to learn when the late Joseph R. Strayer, general editor of the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, asked me to contribute an article on fishponds. I owe much to him and his co-editors for turning my professional bemusement with one side of a deeply absorbing pastime into the excitement of opening a new field for scholarly enquiry. Equal credit is due Paul Schullery, the former executive director of the American Museum of Fly Fishing and pioneering author of American Fly Fishing: A History (New York and Manchester, Vt, 1987), for his encouragement of my first ventures into early fishing history. The recognition my work received from the American Museum of Fly Fishing and from the Izaak Walton Fly Fishers’ Club, and the subsequent enthusiasm of Don Johnson, a later executive director of the Museum, continued the positive reinforcement. The notion that all this might become a book of texts and translations was given a first welcome by the late Prudence Tracy, of the University of Toronto Press. I wish all these instigators and promoters could know my thanks.
Ihave relied on no single library collection or set of reference tools to provide the peculiar range of materials and information needed for this book. I was able to attempt the project only with the indispensable and always more than friendly help of the Resource Sharing Department, York University Libraries, where Mary Lehane heads a proverbially able staff. Extensive or unusual access to collections elsewhere was provided by Dr Hermann Haucke of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; Drs J. Wild and Hoppl of the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv; Dr Lotte Kurras of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum; Herr Pyka, librarian at the Bischofliche Priesterseminar in Mainz; Robert Babcock of the Beinecke Library at Yale; and Stephen Ferguson of the Princeton University Library. I was able to visit those and other collections thanks, at first, to research travel funds from the Faculty of Arts, York University, and from the American Philosophical Society, and, eventually, to a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The base maps for my research and final maps for publication were produced by Carolyn King and Carol Randall at the Cartographic Drafting Office, Department of Geography, York University. J remain grateful for all of this support.
Friends and colleagues at York and elsewhere have endured interminable questions on topics from palaeography to language to scriptural passages to plants, insects, and fisheries management. Patient and indispensable answers came from Richard Schneider, Mark Webber, Elinor Melville, William Crossgrove, Ken Golby, Sara Nalle, Maynard Maidman, Jonathan Edmondson, Paul Swarney, James Carley, Stuart Jenks, Pierre Reynard, Bruno Roy, L.M. Eldredge, Johannes Lepiksaar, Ed Crossman, Jack Imhof, Helmut Irle, and Jochen Schtick. My co-translators of Basurto’s Aragonese, Adrian Shubert and Tom Cohen, showed me even greater indulgence and contributed much hard work. Some of these same people helped push and probe at my thinking in preliminary versions offered to the ever-challenging Historical Research Group at York, in sessions of the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, and in hours of conversation on the banks of the Credit, Beaver, Maitland, Ram, Bow, Eder, Wisent, and Lauterach. Bill Wheatstone, Bruce Dancik, Kate, and Ellen endured it all at one time or another, and likely more than once. They have my warmest appreciation.
Thanks also to Scott G. Bruce for preparing the index.
I have begged, borrowed, and perhaps unwittingly stolen a lot, coming to poach in the waters of many and even to try their special techniques. But the approach and cast here — whether into a good lie or foul ground — are my own, and mine, too, the holes and tangles. Fishers’ Craft and Lettered Art is made to draw the academic and the thoughtful angler, the scientist and the humanist, the expert in literary and in material culture. Can historically inquisitive fishers on both sides of the Atlantic grasp the real richness of their past? Can biologists and ecologists gain the critical awareness needed for convincing historical analysis? Can scholars studying medieval and early modern Europe recognize the active engagement of ordinary people in their environments, economies, and cultures?
Petri Heil!
King City, Ontario 1 August 1996
Introduction
A familiar proverb, perhaps originally Chinese, observes: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.’
How do you teach a man to fish? Or make a garden? Operate a computer? Drive a car? Conversely, how does one learn a practical skill or craft? At this end of the second millennium there are interactive videos and compact disks, formal courses, certified coaches, instruction books, and various arrangements whereby one can observe and question an expert before trying on one’s own. A hundred years ago an interested individual could probably read, watch, ask, and try, perhaps even in an instructional setting. But a thousand years ago the one way was to watch, ask, and try. Medieval Western culture was without written descriptions and, likely, without organized instruction of any kind for passing on the everyday working (or playing) skills of ordinary people. Alone or with a master, individuals could learn only from experience. And unless their work created very durable (but still wordless) objects, no writing then means that we have no historical knowledge now of those same mundane skills.
About five hundred years ago conditions began to change. Before and after the fifteenth-century invention and spread of printing, written records, descriptions, and instructions proliferated. Among them are the three works treated in this book. Fishers’ Craft and Lettered Art is about fishing and about writing and about writing about fishing at the close of the Middle Ages. It makes available for public scrutiny some of the oldest surviving extensive instructions on fishing in Western culture, and explores broader settings in which these artefacts may be understood.
The issue is not the first fishing or even the first European fishing known from written sources.” All sorts of Europeans fished in all sorts of ways throughout the Middle Ages. A handful of illustrative examples is enough.’ A slightly later Life tells how the wandering seventhcentury Irish ascetic Gall and his Allemannic deacon Hiltibod caught fish in the Bodensee and then up the Steinach, where Gall established his hermitage.* In the 790s Charlemagne instructed his estate managers to keep skilled fishers on staff.5 Sigebert of Gembloux, a monk and teacher who in around 1060 wrote a poem on Metz, mentions fishing the Moselle there with hook and line, basket traps, and nets.° In 1204 the duke of Silesia ordered Hrapek, and Carnos son of Pozdek, and nineteen more named fishers who lived at Kotowice, a village on the Odra river, each to give nuns at Trzebnica convent three baskets of fish a week;’ a century later four men from Alverthorpe in the Yorkshire manor of Wakefield, Thomas Martin, John, son of Robert Slenges, Robert Nelotes, and Robert, son of John Roller by name, were fined for poaching fish from private waters.’ Giovanni Boccaccio thought fishing one of several diversions available to men of business and leisure in mid-fourteenth-century Florence.? Just about that same time two fishers from Auxonne took a three-year lease of the fishery on a reach of the Saéne; they paid cash dues and six festive meals of fish each year to the abbey that owned the water.’ In the mid-1400s, administrative correspondence in Prussia describes peasants, landholders, and townsfolk going after pike in local lakes with spears and nets and also hiring professionals with heavier gear,** while notarial records from Burgos in Old Castile show local people taking trout, barbel, and eel with nets and angling rods in the Rio Arlanzon.*
All this we now know from references in literary and record sources. Few texts set out to tell that Europeans fished; none aims to describe what they were doing when they fished. Until the end of the Middle Ages Europeans did fish and hence presumably did think about fishing, but that fishing might be treated extensively in writing they did not think.
The situation changed at the end of the Middle Ages. Substantial works devoted to fishing, indeed, to instruction on how to fish, appeared almost simultaneously in several European vernaculars. This first Western fishing ‘literature’ must interest anyone who wants to know the history of fishing. The texts are benchmarks for documenting past human use of aquatic ecosystems. But what the texts have to say of what medievals knew about environments and techniques did not itself create the texts. The oldest fishing manuals resulted from a cultural process which was then moving what had been oral traditions into written form. Pundits now imagine reverberations of an information and media revolution, Europeans at the end of the Middle Ages experienced one. Shifts of media are supposed to change the ways a culture functions. Did they then? The texts examined here testify directly to relationships between popular oral culture and literate high culture which now concern historians of early Europe. What can these texts show?
Hence, this book addresses at least two audiences, angling antiquaries and historical scholars, neither of whom can wisely ignore what the other knows. All readers are encouraged to see the book as having several functions, which include the reproduction and translation of three distinctive works on fishing and an exploration of the witness they bear to the very creation of textual artefacts, to the shape of relations between technology and environment, and to the processes of cultural change at the end of the Middle Ages. In preparation, this introduction sets out present interpretations of fishing and of popular culture at that time and identifies issues the book will engage. It then provides economic and ecologic background any reader will find useful for examining and understanding the fishing manuals which follow.
The origins of angling?
Modern authors and readers of the history of fishing are well aware that the first book on the subject came long before the Englishman Izaak Walton (1593-1683) published The Compleat Angler in 1653 and undertook four later revisions.’ But it is hard to gain a convincing understanding of fishing in the medieval and early modern West. Seemingly comprehensive treatments propagate a defective version of the times before Walton, with large gaps and deadly flaws of historical method. Works in the English language tend to focus on the narrowly English, to equate fishing with sport angling, and to confuse literature about fishing with the fishing itself. Nor are these defects mended in Continental treatments.
An English version English histories of fishing commonly dismiss occasional descriptions
by ancient Greeks and Romans and quickly focus attention on The Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle. The printer Wynkyn de Worde added this anonymous essay of twenty-one printed pages to his 1496 second edition of the untitled ‘Boke of St Albans,’ a compendium of gentle pastimes. An older fragment from a mid-century manuscript is also well known.** Addressing the reader in the first person, the writer of the Treatyse compares angling to other field sports; describes the making of the rod, line, hooks, and other gear; suggests methods, places, and seasonal weather for angling; prescribes baits for seventeen freshwater fishes and others in general, including a dozen artificial flies; and closes with moral injunctions to the recreational fisher. Modern authors conflate this discursive writing with the activity itself and claim for the Treatyse seminal authority and influence. The most careful modern student of the text, John McDonald, asserts: ‘For most of two centuries, the fifteenth and sixteenth, it was alone the standard work on the sport and put its stamp on all subsequent history. In the ages before the treatise almost nothing is known about the sport.’ In accord with that position, angling historians before and after McDonald cover the Middle Ages and sixteenth century alike by simple paraphrase of the 1496 Treatyse and occasional minute exegesis of, for instance, the precise arrangement of feathers on the artificial flies it prescribes.’
Use of the Treatyse to depict medieval fishing has continued without any testing of its assertions and assumptions against the record of actual practice, or recognition of advances in historical knowledge and criticism.
Respecting the latter danger, one telling issue is authorship. No original text of the Treatyse or its parts identifies any author, but most library catalogues and many angling writers attribute the work to one ‘Dame Juliana Berners,’ supposedly an aristocratic nun of the fifteenth century. McDonald showed (with due credit to nineteenth-century literary scholars) how late sixteenth-century English antiquaries made up a personal identity from no more than a name, ‘Julyans Barnes,’ in some passages of the hunting treatise in the ‘Boke of St Albans,’ and attached that identity to the fishing treatise as well.’” Rachel Hands subsequently (also acknowledging predecessors) denied and disproved any greater role or identity for that person."® Put bluntly, the alleged Dame Juliana is a fabrication, a figment, a myth, confirmed and supported by no known historical records. Yet McDonald himself proposed that ‘until evidence for a new author is discovered, our legendary nun and sportswoman, Juliana Berners, will continue to serve.’??
Serve as what? To what purpose? For whatever reason, McDonald was a true prophet, in that seemingly authoritative writers on fishing do persist in discussing the Treatyse as the product of this romantic fiction.”
If a myth is desired, little is wrong with that. The ‘truth’ of King Arthur bears little on the shimmering tales medieval and modern tellers have spun around his name. But as the perspicacious English monk and historian William of Malmesbury warned close to nine hundred years ago regarding Arthur, ‘misleading fables’ (fallaces fabulae) are not to be confused with ‘truthful histories’ (veraces historiae). So too now, as distant in time from the Treatyse as William was from Arthur, historical understanding requires the reinsertion of a surviving piece of the past into its correct and verifiable context, and there a critically tested anonymous text will serve where anachronistic myth cannot.”
To flawed historical method, English-language writers on early fishing often add limited awareness of other European works and traditions. Even exceptions can become greater ironies, when Continental materials are treated as if only English discussions of them mattered. For instance, in 1979 the Honey Dun Press reprinted a century-old work called Dit Boecxken. Back in the 1860s an English businessman and bibliophile, Alfred Denison, acquired an old Flemish booklet about fishing. Denison decided its puzzling colophon and printer’s mark meant that it was produced in Antwerp in 1492, so he arranged for publication of a (faulty) English translation as ‘the earliest known book on fowling and fishing.’ Although by 1979, Belgian and German bibliographers in publications going back to 1916 had repeatedly disproven most of what Denison had said, the reprint ignored their research and reiterated Denison’s long-obsolete errors of fact, translation, and interpretation.”
Histories of early fishing apart from angling are few. In those not wholly cursory, a focus on marine fishing all but ignores the fresh waters. A.R. Michell noted in his essay on late medieval and early modern fisheries for The Cambridge Economic History of Europe that ‘enormous quantities of freshwater fish’ were sold, for instance, in sixteenthcentury Norwich, but he alleged that subsistence fisheries and fisheries for the sale of fresh fish were too little documented to study. His unique survey thus describes only the growth of large-scale commercial efforts to catch and process certain marine species. Likewise, Alison Littler’s 1979 thesis, ‘The Fisheries Industry in Medieval England, admitted the equal human consumption of fresh- and saltwater fish, but gave the former ten pages — which stress the role of local supplies - and the latter the rest of her six chapters.7> Michael Aston more recently, in Medieval Fish, Fisheries, and Fishponds in England, has collected precisely the kind of detailed archaeological and documentary studies on which a future historical synthesis will need to be built.
Continental fragments
Among writings in languages other than English, actual evidence-based interpretive histories are rare and idiosyncratic. The larger efforts are by fisheries administrators, not historians. The thirty-page chapter on medieval freshwater fisheries which $.B.J. Noél de la Moriniére, a retired inspector of navigation, put in his Histoire générale des péches anciennes et modernes and published at Paris in 1815 is still something of a standard survey, especially for France. Less a history of fishers and fishing than a summary of public legislation (always to be verified in modern editions), it is organized by species and techniques.”” Wilhelm Koch wrote history before and after a career as a fisheries biologist in southern Germany. His 1925 essay on the inland fishery, with twenty pages on the Middle Ages, remains an unequalled sampling of laws, guilds, and managerial approaches. Its largest part describes manuscript texts, among them several which will be of interest in this book. Koch’s information is valuable but unintegrated, occasionally incorrect and now often superseded.” Still less informed by critical awareness, system, or broader historical knowledge is the one undocumented chapter on medieval fishing in A. Thomazi’s 1947 Histoire de la péche des fges de la pierre a nos jours.” These are pioneering histories by untrained writers. Their defects stem in part from critical naivety, and in part from lack of underlying research by those with expertise.
Other European works on early fisheries combine the aforementioned weaknesses with the same substantively narrow or textually selective but uncritical qualities seen in English. Regional administrative studies dominated the chiefly German Archiv fiir Fischereigeschichte, which appeared semi-annually from 1913 to 1917 and revived in slimmer format during the late 1920s and the 1930s. Most articles there cling to the well-documented seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, and trouble little to check whether what then looked old-fashioned really reflected an earlier past.*° The managerial viewpoint — fishing seen through fisheries regulations — was taken by Giuseppi Mira’s La Pesca nel medioevo nelle acque interne italiane (1937), the only survey of that topic, which names scarcely a fish or a fisher.** Legislation, guild ordinances, and incidental references also underlie a careful, informative, but slim treatment of fishing as economic activity in medieval rural France, part of Roger Grand and Raymond Delatouche’s once authoritative L’ Agriculture au moyen dge.>* Delatouche later, and after him Jean Verdon, compiled useful little summaries of references to inland fisheries in early medieval France; they have especial value for demonstrating the ubiquity, complexity, and dietary importance of fishing.*? A promising iconographic approach to medieval freshwater fishing lately begun by Perrine Mane groups illustrations by technique and situation. So far tacitly confined to French and Italian illuminations, it takes little account of written sources and studies of fishing or of its environmental context.**
The late Rudolf Zaunick was perhaps the one trained historian to give medieval fishing serious extended attention. His unpublished 1919 Konigsberg thesis,?? his monographs on a tract printed at Erfurt in 1498 and on recipes for fishing with narcotics, and several lesser studies®° reveal a huge knowledge of discursive texts from the later Middle Ages. Yet Zaunick’s career in this field was a tragedy of missed connections. He worked without notice or appreciation, especially from Englishlanguage writers on the history of fishing.*” He worked without a fruitful intellectual context: never imagining a socio-economic perspective, he could only seek links to the history of medicine and natural science, which he took to mean tracing references back to older, often classical, written texts. Eventually he worked without visible effect: he stopped publishing on this topic during the 1930s, and lost nearly all his research materials in the 1945 bombing of Dresden. No large or interpretive understanding of medieval fisheries ever came from Zaunick’s pen. Chapters 1 and 2 below build on his edition of the Erfurt booklet, and the work on herbal narcotics remains valuable, but close to a century of subsequent scholarship makes much of his commentary obsolete.
The Continent, too, has amateurs as focused on their own traditions as the English on theirs. A historical introduction in the first modern German book on fly fishing, the 1931 work of the Austrians Adolf Stolzle and Karl Salomon, in twelve pages springs from the Greeks to Alfred Ronalds’s 1836 anglers’ entomology. It pauses only to correct the contemporary belief that fly fishing was created in Britain and brought to the Continent during the 1800s. A more recent popular appreciation of early ‘fishing books’ from Tegernsee and Salzburg derives (where accurate) wholly from the half-century-old writings of Koch and Stdlzle.*”
The foggy state of knowledge about fishing in medieval Europe is fostered by the inaccessibility, even in original languages, of Continental sources. Very few have been published. Yet, if only because of the proliferation of error and misconception, a correct understanding of early historical fishing must begin with the discursive texts. They seem to stand between two ages, an earlier one with a fishery known only from accidental traces, and a later one in which literary realities can over- whelm economic or biological ones. Unlike legislative enactments, judicial or financial records, or literary allusions, handbooks on how to fish at least purport to focus on the activity and to describe it to others. If only as a starting-point for hypotheses and further research strategies, the early didactic works demand attention that is direct, critical, and historically aware.”
For readers who bring to this book an acquaintance with fish, fishing, and aquatic ecology but less historical experience, then, the book has three aims: to make available (in the original language and in English translation with explicatory notes) three of the little-known earliest Continental manuals on fishing; to establish the recoverable context of these texts and an understanding of how each came to be; and to indicate valid ways of using the manuals for statements about fishing practice at the end of the Middle Ages. On the single side of didactic literature the book takes one necessary step into the many-sided history of fishing in pre-industrial Western culture. It is not that history.
Listening for ordinary voices
Readers of socio-cultural history will recognize in fourteenth- through sixteenth-century texts on a mundane subject earlier left to the spoken word an unusual angle of approach to a cultural change then affecting Europeans, namely, the rise of vernacular literacy and of a culture based on the printed book. Most students of medieval and early modern Europe now distinguish between the popular culture of an illiterate social majority, who communicated orally and preserved their traditions in memory, and the ‘high’ culture of a literate elite, whose learning subsisted through time in written form. The handbooks on fishing fit along a cultural margin.”
Popular oral culture
Most medieval Europeans lived in small local societies where nearly everyone eked sustenance from natural organic processes and materials. They conducted their lives in a local vernacular dialect - medieval Europe had many such dialects, of Romance, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and other origin — and always face to face. People who rely on voice and memory tend to communicate and think in ways now collectively called ‘primary orality.’ Their conversations and other verbal acts reflect the personal immediacy and the instantaneity of each utterance, no sooner spoken than heard and gone. Skills are passed on as much by physical observation and manual imitation as by speech, which can be as laconic and allusive as serves the concrete situation. Life is focused on the hereand-now, without worry over how it might be otherwise. Hence social memory often absorbs past events into present circumstances, though people may argue over the ‘correct’ correspondence.
The rare information which people in primary oral cultures do need to keep for a long time they shape into forms apt for memory, often narratives. Precise words are less critical than continuity of substance, which is maintained through typically formulaic (clichés), additive: (non-relational), repetitive (redundant), and, often, poetic qualities. Indeed, today’s understanding of oral cultures came from study of ancient Homeric poetry, of illiterate modern Balkan and African storytellers, and of surviving medieval epics like the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf or Old French Song of Roland. But as now known, the ancient and medieval texts already transgress that boundary of oral culture which most affects the work of historians: apart from mute material remains, people from oral cultures are now accessible only through words written by others. Distortions are inevitable.
Its orality was just one main feature of medieval and early modern popular culture, a collective label for the beliefs, customs, and practices of the European majority. Equally important was the local and regional focus of their lives, which restricted most human experience to a few dozen villages within a day’s return walk to the nearest town or market. Social subordination and economic insecurity fostered fear and caution. While people valued the support of family, kin, and community, they also relied on rites and taboos of both Christian and non-Christian origin in order to deal with a world they saw as teeming with occult powers. Theirs was not the diabolism which then vexed learned minds, but an animist vision of ubiquitous spirits of the dead, of saints, and of demons, and of potencies naturally concealed in everyday things.” Yet, in what only seems a paradox, these ordinary people eschewed speculation and confronted material life and social intercourse with an elemental empiricism.
Literacy in medieval Europe Medieval Europe was, however, no illiterate society. The skills of read-
ing and writing long belonged almost exclusively to a small group of male professionals, mostly churchmen, who thereby sustained a differ- ent culture, one that was literate, learned, and elite. Their literacy was unusual, too, for its vehicle, learned Latin, was no one’s mother tongue and everyone’s second language. Every literate person used a language he had learned as a written language and from written texts.
Neither law nor privilege restricted medieval literacy, but narrow social need for literacy’s functions did. Those functions brushed only the surface of most lives. In a society publicly dedicated to a religion of the book, writing served sacred ends, so literacy was a professional prerequisite for those with cult responsibilities. They could also put their letters to other uses. School texts let them pass on learning and literacy itself, and literate men wrote more texts for their own interest and enjoyment — religious treatises, memoranda of their property rights, even Latin literary texts. Princes who won prestige by promoting the learned group could also exploit its special skills when they, too, wanted to fix words of law, of privilege, or of power. No one had reason to put on parchment words to describe or teach routines of material life.
Ina literate culture words acquire durable physical form. Words preserved in writing can reach across space and through time. The habit of literacy engrains symptomatic patterns of language and thought called ‘textuality,’ and a ‘literate mentality.’ At the purely verbal level, written languages have more words than spoken languages, and literate people employ words in more elaborate ways than do members of oral cultures. Discourse becomes more distant, formal, and abstract. A reader can go back over written texts to analyse, compare, and eventually reorder the data for another purpose. The unembellished and wholly abstract list - of peasant tenants, holy relics, or retail stock on hand — is a form peculiar to literate culture. So is a philosophical essay. In sum, literate medieval people, like us, could use words to fix ideas, move words and ideas around, control them, and set them between themselves and the blur of everyday life. Their verbal artefacts commonly bear the marks of this intellectual process.
But medieval literate culture and its early modern descendant had a feature little present today. A strong residual orality derived from the historical role played by rhetoric, the art of right speaking, in shaping Western school work and canons of written style from post-classical Greece to the nineteenth century. Rhetorical training imbued Latin learning with sets of reasoning patterns (definition, causality, ironic opposition, etc.), formulaic commonplaces (proverbs, plays on words, themes like love or loyalty), and the flavours of debate and superfluity already noted. So, as even some fish-catching manuals will show, cer-tain attributes of written texts from medieval Europe can indicate, ambiguously, influence either from vernacular oral culture or from selfconscious literary learning.
Vernacular literacy
Towards the end of the Middle Ages two successive, overlapping developments modified European culture, especially relationships between its popular and learned, oral and literate, vernacular and Latin forms. Growing vernacular literacy let elements of popular culture be commu- . nicated other than orally and preserved other than in memory. Before this change was anywhere near fully worked out, printing spread across Europe the printed book, which was a cultural object with a new potential for diversity, in unprecedented numbers. The fish-catching manuals come directly out of this cultural ferment.
The old, almost exclusive links between literacy, Latin, and the clergy were weakened in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and largely had been broken in most of Europe by around 1500. Growing needs of papal and princely administrations for bureaucratic record-keeping soon exceeded the resources and interests of more self-conscious religious specialists. In the hands of professional lay officials and merchants, by 1300 literacy had expanded into a range of pragmatic functions, manifest in charters, commercial records, law codes, medical and veterinary texts, handbooks of estate administration, even municipal chronicles. In Italy, France, and Germany all were in the vernacular; in England, where the political elite spoke French, the linguistic change lagged by a century.*4 The wider diffusion of written materials in turn inspired a self-reinforcing spread of reading ability among the general populace, which everywhere became visible in the proliferation of primary schools.
Overall literacy rates reached about twenty per cent in Italy before 1500, in Germany, England, and Spain before 1600, and in France by about 1700.47 Composite totals obscure large social differences, for late medieval and early modern literacy was predominantly male, elite, and urban. Among late fifteenth-century Florentines and English, all noble, professional, and merchant men could read, and so could nearly all their kinswomen. About two of three townsmen, though fewer than one of five townswomen, were literate in early seventeenth-century Spain. But scholars agree that by around 1500 some readers were to be found even among artisans and peasants almost everywhere. Virtually no one remained unaware of written texts or lacked contact with a person able to read one to him or her.
The late medieval expansion of literacy into the vernacular and into wider social groups changed what and how Europeans wrote and read. Like other new cultural skills, vernacular literacy first reinforced old habits, with books of religion, transcribed epic poems, and the like, and then prompted new ones. Among the forms that had no Latin or oral precedent but evolved independently, in at least English, French, and German, were household books, private compilations of whatever seemed worth passing on for family use. Individual exemplars contain many hands and many topics, from literary creations to plague tracts, family histories to proverbs, and recipes for everything from hair colouring to stuffings for a roast pheasant or a fish trap.**
As private writings meant to be read, the household books epitomize full vernacular literacy but reveal in their additive, empirical, and seemingly random qualities their share in popular culture. What was put down in vernacular script kept many oral aspects. Pseudo-epics, household books, and accounts of mystical visions use local and regional dialects. They revel in intertextuality, the process of making new texts by combining and adapting elements, allusions, and formulas from old ones in a scribal replica of oral composition. Readers glossed and adjusted their manuscripts to their needs. Social practice also drew these texts into orality. Early readers read aloud, and even after silent reading became the norm, collective public reading remained common, especially among marginally literate groups. This, too, blurred old boundaries between cultures. At some point, the division between popular and learned became less one between illiterate and literate and more a difference in what was being read.*”
Cultural effects of print
Printing with movable type was invented in mid-fifteenth-century Mainz. The explosive spread of this technology coincided with the late medieval growth of literacy. What began as a response to demand for written texts soon itself stimulated demand and set off spiralling growth in literate communication.®
Like vernacular script, the printers’ output passed from the same old medieval writings to new sorts of texts. Most early books were in Latin and met sacred, learned, and administrative needs. But even before 1500 the share of works aimed at a lay and vernacular audience was every- where rising. Old literary romances sold well; so did freshly crafted books of self-improvement and everyday ethics.#? But most of what is now known about early publishing comes only from the one book in a thousand which has chanced to survive; it is hard to trust the data on cheap and fragile pamphlets about things like making ink or gunpowder or fishing gear.
How much of a cultural revolution did printing bring to early modern Europe? ‘Print culture’ is credited with freeing for creative thought the time once used to memorize and copy, with making texts more durable, and with allowing the accumulation and cross-referencing of knowledge. Seen from the later Middle Ages all these contributions accelerated and widened currents already set in motion by rising literacy.
But certain concrete and novel attributes of print do approach differences in kind from scribal culture. Some change resulted from the sheer numbers of copies printers could produce. A day’s press run from even the smallest full-time late fifteenth-century print shop turned out seven hundred to a thousand identical booklets (or quires for a larger book), a quantity beyond the wildest fancy of any scriptorium.” Far more readers could get a text at the same time. The effect was compounded when other printers saw a demand for the text in their own market area and simply reprinted it. In responding to and in shaping consumer preferences these businessmen powered the remarkable spread of print culture, not just in their hundreds of publishing houses, but by means of the hundreds of thousands of books which flowed from the major cities into Europe’s furthest corners. Information acquired a new mercantile edge. Typographic innovations that became conventions pushed textual and mental patterning beyond scribal precedents. The technical term here is ‘closure,’ the sense that the text is a final and complete reality distinct from a confusingly immediate oral encounter — with obvious intellectual consequences. Print accentuates closure by various means, from the simple visual introduction of a title page with fixed title and author’s name, a table of contents, and an ultimate finis to the more abstract notion of a whole ‘edition’ of a book.
Printing thus capped the proliferation of overlapping cultural dichotomies at the close of the Middle Ages. To the continuing but no longer coterminous distinctions between oral and literate, vernacular and Latin, popular and learned or elite, it added that between script and print. What might from one point of view be thought an issue of interaction between two cultures is from another a matter of how people shared in these various cultural attributes. One key problem is to trace routes back through the written record compiled by the literate to the voices and minds of participants in popular culture. The exploration must begin with texts — as here some on fishing — but recognize them as products of the cultural interface.”
Writing along cultural margins
Research thus has identified some distinguishing elements of cultural forms in late medieval and early modern Europe and generated hypotheses to probe their changing relationships. But what historians have so far achieved rests on a curiously skewed sample of late medieval European cultural activities and products. More than they are fully aware, scholars look at that popular behaviour and those aspects of cultural change which interest the very learned, as much now as they did then, or which intruded on the very powerful. That has meant looking especially at aspects of symbolic culture (ideology) such as religion (including witchcraft), verbal and performing art forms (literature, stories, festivals), and, eventually, ‘high science,’ all activities still cultivated by the professionally learned.** Daily life and material culture — equally ‘popular’ but not the business of professional thinkers — have too often been dismissed as ‘obvious,’ ‘banal,’ or ‘requiring too much specialized knowledge’ — as if that set them beyond the historian’s pale.*?
Where cultural interests of ordinary people have caught the scholarly eye, inspection reveals odd protagonists: the last village of Cathar heretics in France; a sixteenth-century peasant woman who lived for years unaware that her husband was an impostor; a miller from Friuli who made the strangest meanings from ferociously intense reading of a few fairly ordinary religious books.*4 Indeed, Montaillou, Bertrande de Rols, and Menocchio can be academic commonplaces now because their very deviance in their own day drew the amazed attention of learned men of power. But surely an understanding of ordinary lives among the popular masses is deficient if based only on figures like them.
An approach to the specific problem of writings meant to record and disseminate information about the practical matter of catching fish can be guided by research on early handbooks of technology, popular science, and agriculture.
Between about 1400 and 1600, craft skills, which medieval experts had preserved in memory and passed on through oral and manual training, went over to written descriptions and sketches, and then to the print medium.*® The first authors were active Italian and German tech- nicians, who wrote for their fellow professionals in forms still very close to the oral exchange of the workshop. The unfinished shift to literate communication was then overtaken by printed distribution of technical information to a broader public.*° As early as 1480 but chiefly after 1530, printers commissioned professional writers to compose for educated and interested but non-specialized readers. While works in a vernacular Kunstbtichlein tradition emphasized practical skills like dyeing and soldering, others derived from more learned medieval ‘Books of Secrets,’ which promised access to Nature’s hidden powers. Both appealed directly to lay people eager to acquire technical skills and occult secrets. But from another perspective, these books were taking information from popular culture and for the first time making it available to adepts of high learned culture.
The scores of publications on agriculture which appeared in sixteenthcentury Europe differed from those on mechanical and other technologies by including works of classical as well as modern authors. Ancient Greek and Roman writers lent the subject a cachet among the learned, and doubtless few if any working peasants learned their means of livelihood froma book, but the newer texts commonly appeared in the vernacular and emphasized the importance of practical local experience. Printers spread these books and the information they held widely across Europe. For the first time regional practices confronted techniques and cultures elsewhere.*”
Research on didactic manuals thus alerts us to look for the sources of specialized knowledge and the ways authors treated it. Fifteenthand sixteenth-century audiences turned to written instructions with intentions to which both writers and printers had to be attuned. Printers played a key role in the design and dissemination of this information, but less is so far understood about how readers received and handled it.
For readers interested in socio-cultural history, then, Fishers’ Craft and Lettered Art aims to fill a deficiency in research on popular culture by examining a practical activity long pursued by ordinary illiterate Europeans. In this different setting are manifest concrete relationships among the several cultural polarities of vernacular and Latin, oral and literate, popular and learned, scribal and print. Fishing manuals from the end of the Middle Ages exhibit some typical features of each dichotomy. Knowledge from oral culture there entered literate culture and was visibly transformed. However, the kaleidoscopic variety and fluidity with which this happened reveals the tenacity, creativity, and pragmatic autonomy of the popular and vernacular primary oral culture vis-a-vis script and, especially, print.
Economies and ecologies
But not all symbolic culture is self-referential and thus constrained only by human imagination and fiat; some signs carry content directly related to human activity in a world of stubborn external realities. Economics and non-human nature belong to that world.
Eating Fish
Writing about fishing treats behaviour ostensibly aimed at meeting the biological need for food. Demand for fish in medieval Europe rested in part on the requirement of human organisms for calories and protein to sustain life. Fish offered a culturally approved way of satisfying that need. Cultural imperatives further shaped European demand for fish by limiting consumption of flesh from birds or terrestrial quadrupeds during at least one day in each week and periods of several weeks in each year. A pious Christian had to take his or her animal protein from fish 140-160 days each year.** Hence, during the nine consecutive months of 1397/8 when the dowager duchess of Braunschweig lived at Miinden castle, one-fifth of the food expenditures went for fish, half of them not preserved but freshly taken from local waters. Among certain ascetic religious communities a taboo was always in force. In 1458, monks at Salem ate more than 18,500 whitefish bought from Bodensee fishers.°? Moreover, quite apart from the food value of fish, the notion that catching them could be a pleasant pastime was known to medieval Europeans — and the activity was practised in that spirit by individuals like Gui de Bazoches, a twelfth-century noble French prelate, and Maximilian I von Habsburg, the Holy Roman Emperor from 1493 to 1519.
Net social demand ‘caused’ medieval fishing of three recognized types: subsistence, commercial, and recreational. This classification rests on the relationship between fishers and the surrounding socio-economic order. A subsistence fishery is defined as one in which most of the catch is meant for consumption by the fisher’s household (direct subsistence) or that of a superior or employer (indirect subsistence). In a commercial fishery most of the catch reaches the consumer through market sale, whether carried out by the fisher or by another. A recreational fishery is one in which fish are caught for pleasure. Of course a person who fishes for the fun of the activity may consume, give away, or even sell the catch. And fishing done for a marketable surplus may also feed the family of the fisher. Still, the purposes of a fishery will shape both its methods and its effects.
Ultimately, an environmental perspective is essential for understanding and integrating the history of fish-catching and of its written artefacts. Human behaviour always takes place in that non-human setting people once called ‘Nature.’ In a landmark essay on a very different fishery Arthur McEvoy refers to ‘the mutually constitutive nature of ecology, production, and cognition.”** More simply, an environmental history confronts the unavoidable interaction among human minds, human hands, and natural forces.
Fishing in general may exploit Nature in the abstract, but real fishers must come to know an aquatic ecosystem with features as particular and as cogent as those a farmer sees in the land or a policeman in a human community. The freshwater aquatic environments of Europe frame the biology of their fish populations and set the parameters wherein fishers fished and writers wrote. Here, very simply, is how.
Regional fish communities
Water from rain or snow falling on the western part of the European continent eventually reaches the sea through one of Europe’s watersheds, which are the fundamental territorial units of freshwater habitats. Those of the north European plain are long and broad, gathering waters from part of the Alps and from many lesser interior mountains and draining northward to the Baltic and the North Sea or, west of the Rhine-Maas delta, to the English Channel and Bay of Biscay. Most of the Iberian peninsula also consists of large, west-flowing river basins. The watersheds of the Mediterranean are characteristically shorter and so more numerous. Only the Ebro, Rhone, and Po drain extensive areas. From almost at the Rhine and then eastward through the centre of the continent runs the Danube basin, the largest in the West and the only major system to flow from western Europe into the Black Sea.
In genera], freshwater fishes cannot leave the water for meaningful periods of time, nor can they reverse their kidney function to survive exposure to salt water (except a few varieties with migratory life cycles). Hence, until humans built the first major inter-basin canals in around 1700, European fishes could of their own accord move from one watershed to another only when geological processes slowly changed the land itself. For instance, the barbel, a cyprinid of moderately flowing rivers on the continent, occurs naturally in Britain only in those eastern watersheds which once joined the prehistoric Rhine in its route across the then-dry floor of what has become the North Sea.
Once a fish species has reached a watershed, its persistence and distribution there depend on its adaptability to certain environmental factors. Water temperature and dissolved oxygen are critical for coldblooded, oxygen-respiring animals. Each species has a range of tolerance for both variables. Current speed is important in the lives of fishes, too, for a current makes them expend energy and, through erosion, modifies beds, banks, and water clarity. Suitable food supplies and spawning sites further determine the presence and abundance of a species in a watershed. When any of these factors violates threshold values, the species will be extirpated.
Water temperature is thought to be the primary determinant of the gross distribution of fishes among European watersheds. Cool-water varieties like salmon, trout, whitefishes, and pike are naturally absent from most Mediterranean watersheds, or are there confined to highaltitude headwaters. Especially in Spain and the Balkans their niches are filled by more tolerant local fishes.
The number of resident fish species drops steeply from southeast to northwest in Europe. This remains an effect of continental glaciation thousands of years ago, when an ice cap covered most of northern and western Europe and destroyed nearly all the freshwater fish fauna. Only cold- and salt-tolerant varieties like salmon, trout, and their kin (collectively called salmonids) could survive in the oceanic coastal waters and frigid ice-front lakes. Fishes needing warm water, notably Eurasia’s many representatives of the carp family (cyprinids), were pushed into a refuge zone around the Black Sea and the Caspian.
The ice-front lakes for a time united what would become distinct watersheds. As the ice retreated, fishes from the lakes spread downstream to the northwest while migratory species moved along the coasts. (Both groups left relict populations in habitats like the cold Alpine lakes.) At the same time warm water varieties were able to work their way up the Danube system and, using occasional ice lake or swampland inter-basin connections in poorly drained post-glacial Europe, gradually re-enter the Atlantic drainage from east to west. The roach made it all the way to central Scotland and to rivers running into the Gulf of Bothnia, and the barbel to the Thames and north Germany. The European catfish or wels spread only as far as the upper Rhine Elbe, and a small beachhead in southern Sweden. Carp, under wild conditions, by the early Middle Ages had reached only the middle Danube.
Finally, and quite apart from the issue of water temperature, Europe’s peninsular character has held up the westward spread of fishes with extensive ranges to the east. The migratory Atlantic salmon enters neither the Mediterranean nor the Black Sea. Its niche is filled in the Danube system by the huchen or ‘Danubian salmon, a nonmigratory form with congeners in central Asia. Likewise, neither cold nor heat barred from the Rhine, the Rhone, and other western watersheds the pikeperch or zander, cousin of the North American walleye and occupant of a broad Pontic, Russian, Scandinavian, and east-central European range.
A historian, then, like a fisher or a biologist, and on the the grounds just explained, can take certain fishes (mentioned in a text, for example) as clear indicators of certain European regions. Just as surely, the historian can rule out other regions.
Aquatic habitats
Few fishes live everywhere in a watershed. Current speed especially divides watersheds into different habitat zones, to which various species are more or less adapted. The basic division is between still and moving waters; the latter contain what ecologists call ‘lotic’ habitats. European biologists commonly classify flowing waters into four zones, of decreasing current speed. The trout zone is in mountainous headwaters, where steep gradients cause very fast currents. These make for much dissolved oxygen but so erode the banks and bottom as to leave them mostly rock and gravel. Trout and young salmon are the most common fish species. As the bed flattens and currents slow slightly, the stream enters the grayling zone. Oxygen levels remain high, but more gravel is found, and sheltered places hold enough sand or silt for rooted aquatic plants. Trout or grayling are the most abundant fish, but cyprinids like barbel, dace, and chub are also present. The barbel zone, the third, is found where the gradient becomes gentle and the current moderate. The bottom is predominantly soft and rooted plants are common. In a mixed fish fauna the cyprinids dominate; if water temperatures remain low, trout and grayling may still occur, but predatory pike and perch are also important. Finally, the bream zone is named for the slow-water cyprinid native to western Europe. In quiet, warm, and weedy waters they are accompanied by carp, roach, rudd, tench, and predatory fishes.
Still waters (lakes, ponds) provide ‘lentic’ habitats, which biologists commonly group by depth and light penetration into three major zones. The littoral zone extends from the shore to the depth limit of locally prevalent rooted aquatic plants. It contains many nutrients, the warmest water of the lake, and the greatest variety of fish species. The limnetic or pelagic zone is the lakeward extension of the littoral, characterized by high light penetration and thus by large populations of drifting microscopic plants, or plankton, on which certain fishes can feed. Beneath the limnetic zone the dark benthic (profundal) zone reaches to the bottom of the lake. It receives nutrients from above but is commonly cold and often deficient in oxygen. The profundal zone is chiefly inhabited by bottom-feeding fishes and their predators. The relative importance of each zone depends on the predominant physical features of each lake or lake region.
Unlike rivers, lakes are ephemeral features of geologically ‘young’ landscapes. As the land erodes, all lakes accumulate nutrients, become more fertile, and slowly fill in. This natural process, called eutrophication, moves lakes through three stages. In Europe different stages of entrophication and thus particular kinds of lake are characteristic of different physiographic regions. Mountain lakes are commonly deep and narrow, and hence typically cold habitats with low levels of dissolved nutrients and rooted plants. Biologists call these infertile habitats oligotrophic. They are suited for salmonids, plankton-eating whitefishes, and associated predators. Where the land is more rolling and fertile, as around the post-glacial lakes of northern Germany and Poland, the still waters hold more nutrients and more shoreline vegetation. This middle group, of what are called mesotrophic lakes, supports a mix of salmonids and cyprinids. Finally, there are the highly fertile eutrophic lakes, relatively shallow, soft-bottomed, and full of plant life. In Europe they are naturally associated with the slow-moving reaches of rivers (the bream zone) and are inhabited by the same fishes as those.
At a scale smaller than whole watersheds, then, European regions and localities contain characteristic habitat zones and characteristically abundant or rare fish species.
Food webs Like all of the earth’s ecosystems, those of fresh water are based on
energy from sunlight, which green plants, large and small, convert to organic material. Animal consumption and transformation of plant materials follow, first by herbivores (primary consumers), then by succeeding levels of predators (secondary, tertiary, etc. consumers). Most fish species occupy an identifiable niche or level in this food chain. Besides the invertebrate animals responsible for much of the primary consumption in many aquatic ecosystems, European fishes filling the role of primary consumer include the minnow in the trout zone, whitefishes in the limnetic zone of oligotrophic lakes, and the roach in warm and fertile waters. Top-level predators in the same habitats include large trout in cold streams and lakes, pike, and catfish. Cyprinids of large adult size such as barbel, carp, and bream commonly function as herbivores (and important prey for predators) when small, and when larger, as low-level predators consuming many invertebrates along with their diet of plant materials. Because living things can convert only about ten per cent of the energy from one level to the next, the organisms nearest the base of the food web (the primary producers or consumers) have necessarily the greatest total biomass and number of individuals; those at the greatest remove from the base are reciprocally low in biomass and number. Predators are characteristically larger in individual size but fewer in number and less in total mass than their prey.
Humans who insert themselves into aquatic ecosystems by taking fish for food become a new top-level predator. Their choice of prey species may be set by biological (prey numbers, habits, accessibility) or cultural variables (taste, prestige, technical knowledge). Different methods of capture may be more or less selective of species, habitat, fish size, or habits in a given aquatic community. The baits used may strongly affect which species are taken with hook and line, but the season and habitat fished have more influence on the catch made with basket traps or a trawl. Size of mesh in a net determines the share of small individuals taken, but fish of all sizes are there for the gathering after being stunned with a submarine explosion or a poison. Hence, different fisheries can have highly variable effects on an aquatic ecosystem. Relationships among socio-technical choices, economic results, and the aquatic environment necessarily underlay the fishing manuals here studied.
Each of the essays presented as chapters 1, 3, and 5 offers an analytical introduction and interpretive guide to the early fishing manual which follows, in chapters 2, 4, and 6 respectively. A close archaeological approach to each artefact aims to identify its original setting and functions and a possible range of readings. Each essay is intended to be open-ended, not closed, and cogent but not coercive. Modern readers are given the wherewithal to read and interpret the texts for themselves.
The tract of twenty-seven bait recipes and associated texts printed at Heidelberg in 1493 and reprinted again and again in the next two or three generations coats with a veneer of literate learning popular experience in subsistence and small-scale commercial river fisheries of the middle Rhine basin. The acute marketing sense of early printers let Europeans elsewhere acquire, manipulate, and absorb this information.
In about 1500 a tellingly modified form of the Tract was copied into a compilation of fishing advice included in a manuscript managerial handbook by a clerk in the cellarer’s office at Tegernsee monastery in Bavaria. The advice from Tegernsee otherwise transmits in the dialect of local peasant fishers the recommended uses of traps, natural hook baits, and ‘feathered hooks’ to take fish from cold oligotrophic lakes and local trout and grayling streams.
The 1539 Dialogo of the Aragonese Fernando Basurto also tells of feathered lures, now explicit imitations of what fish were eating. But this oldest known example of practical instruction in Spanish angling methods is dwarfed by an engaging initial debate over fishing and hunting as sports, waged with literary, political, and cultural allusions possible only in the Spain of Don Carlos I.
Each handbook is presented in its first complete modern edition and parallel English translation. Explanatory notes have been supplied to help modern fishers and historians, whether European or North American, reach their own understanding of texts rooted in worlds very far from a late twentieth-century library.
Two concluding essays reintegrate the three manuals in the larger setting this introduction has sketched. Chapter 7 uses the handbooks and related sources to establish how Continental fishing traditions were conveyed from oral craft practice into printed culture. An important evolution from naively concrete formlessness to self-conscious didactic art surprisingly neither suppressed nor stultified scribal, much less oral, culture. Several incidents even demonstrate a creative reception by the older tradition of materials flowing ‘backward’ from the new medium. Nor did the techniques lose their close connection to local environments and fish populations. An epilogue then proposes this finding of a vigorous and complex interaction between written texts and popular culture as a working hypothesis with which to approach the extant English evidence. Close examination of both well-known and less familiar texts will, it is suggested, reveal an equally lively interplay there, and thus free modern understanding of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century angling thought and practice from the mythical hegemony of the Treatyse.
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