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

evidence suggests the early development of the fishery. 301 Arnold of
Lübeck (c1200) ascribed Denmark’s wealth to the herring. 302 By the
thirteenth century the fish market was an international fair, serving as an
exchange link for Baltic and West European commodities. Fish
continued to play an important role even as the significance of the
general fair diminished by the latter half of the fourteenth century. The
fishermen came not only from Scania and Zealand but from all the towns
‘inside the Scaw’, i.e. the Danish Baltic waters as distinct from the North
Sea coast of Jutland, ‘past the Scaw’. But there is evidence that German,
Dutch and English fishermen participated as well, certainly in the
fourteenth century. 303 A small resident population carried out fishing
through the year, but the season for the great herring shoals was more or
less consistent with the official Scanian market from 15 August to 9
October.
The fish trade was in the hands of Hanseatic merchants whose power
rested on their control of the essential salt supplies from the Lüneburg
salt mines. The importance of the Scanian fisheries to Lübeck is evident
from the fact that this trade counted for more than the rest of the town’s
trade to Scandinavia, and was six times the trade of the town with Bergen
(which supplied the town with cod). The Lübeck evidence makes it clear
that the herring fisheries were not only taking place in the Sound, but
were spread over the whole West Baltic area from the Sound to the island
of Bornholm. In 1368 Lübeck imported around 85,000 barrels from these
fisheries (one barrel containing approximately 900 herrings in salt brine),
and in 1398-1400 the town imported almost 70,000 barrels a year. 304
Curt Weibull linked the 1368 figure to another source, the pound toll,
which the Baltic Hanse towns paid towards their common defence. The
pound toll indicates that the total imports of herring to the Baltic towns
from the Scanian market was three times the amount of the Lübeck
imports, or perhaps around 250,000 barrels. To this amount should be
added the unknown exports to the North Sea Hanse towns, probably not
less than 50,000 barrels. 305 Total exports may therefore have been
301 Ersgård, Vår marknad i Skåne.
302 Arnold af Lybeks Slavekrønike, transl. P. Kierkegaard (Copenhagen, 1885) 92.
303 Hørby, ‘Øresundstolden’, 245-72. Ibid., ‘Skånemarkedet’, 68-77. Tuck, ‘Some
Evidence...’, 75-88.
304 Weibull, Lübeck och Skånemarknaden; Lechner, Die hansischen Pfundzollisten...
305 The Flemish port of Sluis handled an annual average of 20,280 barrels from 1374 to
178