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Salmo salar in late medieval Scotland: competition and conservation for a riverine resource

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Abstract

Across the western and northern European range of diadromous Salmo salar (Atlantic salmon) during the Middle Ages (ca.500–ca.1500 CE), this fish was a highly prized object of elite human consumption, of intense seasonal fishing, of human competition, and, by the 1200s, a victim of evident depletion. What, then, enabled long traditional riverine fisheries in Scotland to become a major export producer in late medieval centuries? Provisional survey of published written records, some archival collections, and archaeological evidence establishes the great value Scottish kings and landowners placed on salmon fishing sites and their product. Knowledgeable workers for the holders of fishing rights caught salmon especially with beach seines and fixed weirs. Their catch went to elite households and urban markets for domestic consumption and was especially from the late 1300s packed in barrels for export to regions around the North Sea where diminished native runs failed to meet rising demand. Medieval Scots competed for the right to catch their salmon but did not complain that those catches were shrinking. From about 1200 royal judgments and by the early 1300s parliamentary legislation placed Scottish salmon fisheries under public regulation, prohibiting fishing at certain times and seasons and requiring all gear to permit passage of pre-migrant juveniles. Early imposition in Scotland of these limits to private fishing rights as well as an agrarian regime that (unintentionally) minimized barriers to migrants and preserved headwater spawning habitats may help explain the apparently greater sustainability of salmon stocks in Scotland than elsewhere in late medieval Europe.

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Notes

  1. Only two partial exceptions to this generalization come readily to mind: a broken run of herring landed (tonnes) in Dieppe, with 32 annual entries between 1405/6 and 1491/2 (Mollat 1952, Annex 3); and an account book kept by the fisheries manager for the Teutonic Order (warrior monks) in Prussia, 1440–1445, which details weekly shipments of fish (several taxa) from the Order’s fishery in Lake Drużno (German Drausensee) to Order headquarters at Marienburg (Malbork) (Nowak and Tandecki 1997). The latter may represent actual catches. Even the published fourteenth century accounts from the trap on the Loire and seine on the Thames mentioned above (p. nn) do not enumerate the salmon taken and sold or those caught by lessees (Fournial 1967; Rogers 1866). Of course statistics for stocking and/or harvest from artificial fish culture enterprises in France, the German Empire, Bohemia, and England are reasonably common from and after the early-mid fourteenth century (for examples and discussion see Hoffmann 1995, 2000, pp. 376–393, 2008a; Hoffmann and Winiwarter 2010, and works there cited). The direct quantitative interest of medieval record-keepers was economic yield (expenditures and receipts), not natural science.

  2. Assise Willelmi Regis, art. 10: “in tantum quo unus porcus trium annorum bene pastus est longus ita quod neque grunnus porci appropinquet sepi nec cauda…”.

  3. “secundum leges et assisas regni nostri…”.

  4. “…ne aliquis presumat piscari ad salmones vel salmunculos temporibus prohibitis super antiquam penam”. [always assuming the latter curious entry in the Coupar chartulary was not created by the monks to solve a later problem—but see below for the slow legislative process to eliminate all such privileges].

  5. “quod omnes illi qui habent croas vel piscarias vel stagna aut molendina in aquis ubi ascendit mare et se retrahit et ubi salmunculi vel smolti seu fria alterius generis piscium maris vel aque dulcis descendunt et ascendunt, tales croe et machine infra posite sint ad minus de mensura duorum pollicium in longitudine et trium pollicium in latitudine ita quod nulla fria piscium impediatur ascendendo vel descendendo secundum quod libere possunt ascendere et descendere ubique”.

  6. Fifteenth century parliamentary statutes no longer used Latin.

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  1. Department of History, York University, 2140 Vari Hall, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3, Canada

    Richard C. Hoffmann

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This article is part of the special issue ‘Historical ecology of riverine fish in Europe’.

Richard C. Hoffmann, an environmental historian and medievalist, is Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar in the Department of History, York University, Toronto, Canada. The research for this paper was carried out during tenure in Autumn, 2011, as Leverhulme Trust Visiting Research Professor (Reference Number: VP2-2010-032) in the Research Centre for Environmental History and Policy at the University of Stirling. The purpose of this appointment was to test the feasibility of Scottish inland fisheries for long-term historical and palaeoenvironmental investigation by the Research Centre. This paper presents results from pilot study of published and archival written sources, published archaeozoology, and observations on the ground of sites bearing upon Atlantic salmon in Scotland up to the (politically and archivally significant) Scottish Reformation of the sixteenth century. Thanks are due to the Leverhulme Trust for providing resources and to Alasdair Ross, now Senior Lecturer in Medieval Scottish History at Stirling, for being an unfailing mentor, minder, and manager throughout the sojourn in Scotland.

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Hoffmann, R.C. Salmo salar in late medieval Scotland: competition and conservation for a riverine resource. Aquat Sci 77, 355–366 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00027-015-0397-4

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