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

The wealth of monasteries around the Limfiord was based on a
combination of rich pastures and good fishing. Likewise the town of
Ribe on the west coast prospered from the trades in livestock and fish.
Whereas the Jutland bullock trade has been keenly studied, very little is
known of the fisheries. Kjærsgaard believed that for the supply of fish to
the Danish population the Jutland fisheries were perhaps of as much
importance as the Sound fisheries, as the latter were controlled by
Hanseatic merchants who salted the herring to the best standards and
thus got very high prices on export markets. In contrast, the Jutland
fisheries were largely controlled by Danish merchants, and if quality was
lower so were the prices, thus making their fish affordable to the
domestic consumer. 315
We know that the exports of salted herring from the main commercial
town in the Limfiord, Aalborg, ranged between 5,000 and 50,000 barrels
per year in the eighteenth century (table 2 below). We have no
information on sixteenth-century production, but we do know that the
basic fishing technology was the same, and therefore output may well
have been at a similar or higher level. The Aalborg merchants succeeded
in securing the herring trade for themselves during the sixteenth century.
Membership lists of the parrot guild in Aalborg show an important
German contingent by 1500, but by the middle of the century the local
merchants were almost totally dominant. Royal privileges further
enhanced the role of local interests at the expense of foreign merchants
who were only allowed to trade on certain days and might not own
fishing gear themselves. If, by 1550, the Sound fisheries had declined,
the fiord fishery compensated part of the loss, certainly as far as domestic
consumption was concerned. 316
In southwest Jutland, fish merchants exported herring to King’s Lynn
in England by the early fourteenth century, but we do not know if this
was local produce or if the merchants were selling Sound products. 317
When the skippers of Ribe organised their guild in 1478, their fisheries
were conducted both locally and off the island of Heligoland. The
Heligoland fishery was for herring, and the island attracted many
315 Kjærsgaard, 61.
316 Rasmussen, Limfjordsfiskeriet før 1825, 33-45.
317 See papers by Per Kristian Madsen and Wendy Childs forthcoming in Ellen
Damgaard et al. (ed.), Facing the North Sea, II. West Jutland and the World. Lemvig,
April 1995 (Esbjerg, 1996).
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