The North Atlantic Fisheries, 1100-1976 - University of Hull

was merely ‘a mean thing as an inhabitation for fishers.’ 209 The
seasonality of this business is emphasised by contemporary observers
such as Risdon, who noted in 1630 that off Lynmouth in north Devon
herring in shoals of great numbers ‘from September until Christide offer
themselves to the fishermen’s nets, to the no little benefit of this land’. 210
Defoe, in 1724, also noticed this pattern, remarking that ‘the herrings
about October, were driving up the Severn Sea ... and are caught in great
quantities by the fishermen’, a suggestion supported by a reference in the
Bideford Port Books to the export of 825 barrels (c200 tonnes) of cured
herring between November and March 1722/3. 211
The seasonal character of the herring fishery reflected natural factors.
Herring is a cold-water species, hence its shoaling off the north coast of
Devon and Cornwall in the autumn and winter months. This is virtually
the southern limit for herring, a similar surface-swimming, shoaling,
pelagic species, the pilchard, being generally found in some abundance
to the south of the peninsula where it has long since been exploited by
Westcountry fishermen. As this region lies athwart the boundary
between seas that are ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ in character, it has
witnessed some marked fluctuations in fish landings according to
long-term climatic changes. Thus, in a comparatively warm era such as
the late sixteenth century, pilchard were cured and exported from
Plymouth and Dartmouth in great quantities, so much so that legislation
was necessary to control the trade. A century later, during the ‘Little Ice
Age’, pilchard were no longer present off south Devon, their apparent
westward retreat coinciding with a marked increase in herring catches off
the English, as well as the Bristol, Channel shores of the peninsula. 212
In the colder waters around the Scottish coasts and in the North Sea,
herring fishing was generally much more important than in the south and
the west. This was particularly so in Scotland where fishing almost
certainly constituted a greater component of the economy than it did in
England. One estimate has it that in the early seventeenth century, fish
products, chiefly cured herring, represented approximately 20 per cent of
the value of Scottish exports, and in the 1630s and again after the 1690s
209 Southward & Boalch, ‘Marine Resources’, 54.
210 T Gray, ‘Devon’s Fisheries’, 140.
211 Southward & Boalch, ‘Marine Resources’, 55.
212 Southward & Boalch, ‘Marine Resources’, 58-60.
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