11/30/2023 0 Comments High class medieval foodsNew regulations, such as King Philip’s, were put into place to manage fish populations. Species that came into fresh water to spawn, such as salmon and sturgeon, began declining. to the 11th, the number of grain mills built along rivers in England exploded from about 200 to 5,624. That’s partially due to the roughly 130 days a year when the faithful were exhorted not to eat meat, because fish didn’t count in that category.Īt the same time, expanding agrarian populations were cutting down forests to create fields and diverting rivers to fill defensive moats around castles and towns, Hoffmann writes in one paper. But it was during the early Middle Ages, with the arrival of widespread Christianity, that the animals became a popular source of protein. In Europe, aquatic animals have been traded at least since the days of the Roman Empire. “You also get the opposite myths of hyper-abundance.” One false tale that originated in the 17th century alleged that salmon and sturgeon were so abundant during the Middle Ages that servants had contracts stipulating they wouldn’t be served those fish more than a few times a week. “Some people think everyone in the past was rapacious,” Hoffmann says. All these details help him reconstruct which fish were on the menu for different social classes, how big those fish grew, and when they disappeared.Īsking those questions often means confronting myths. He’s read a medico-dietary analysis of the Catholic saint Hildegard that names 37 fish taxa he’s found tax records for the price of fish and he’s reviewed zooarchaeological analyses on the rise and fall of fish populations across Europe. Richard Hoffmann, an environmental historian, has been studying the complex interplay between humans and the aquatic environment for most of his career. But the more clues archaeologists uncover from the European past, the more they understand how dramatically these same influences have been shaping fish populations for hundreds of years. Human appetites and needs are indisputably transforming ecosystems and wildlife in the modern world. Read: Wait, so how much of the ocean is actually fished? The population pressures created by humans may have even changed the size of fish. Overfishing resulted in local extinctions, and popular food fish had to be domesticated through aquaculture. Today, fish populations around the world are rapidly declining a millennium ago, Europeans faced similar challenges. People of all social classes, though, ate freshwater fish-trout, whitefish, pike, eel, lamprey, and shads. Sturgeon was so rare in England and France that it was reserved for the monarchs, and the Cistercians, a Catholic religious order that used sign language to communicate, referred to it using the sign for fish and then the sign for pride. Chefs experimented with ways to disguise beef as fish: At least half a dozen cookbooks of the era include recipes for turning veal into imitation sturgeon for wealthy lords and ladies. 500 to 1500, fish was a prestigious food. In medieval Europe, an era stretching from about A.D. The king promulgated the country’s first fisheries ordinance. Because they were scarce, the fish, King Philip noted, “are much more costly than they used to be, which results in no moderate loss to the rich and poor of our realm.” This state of affairs could not stand. “Each and every watershed of our realm,” he proclaimed, “large and small, yields nothing due to the evil of fishers.” Environmental change, expanding cities, and overfishing had sent aquatic populations into a tailspin. In the year 1289, King Philip IV of France was worried about fish.
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