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

dried cod and haddock from the Jutland west coast was reserved for the
navy as cheap and durable food, the herring fisheries were granted a
general export licence during the war to provide the Kingdom with
much-needed foreign currency. 328
The Fresh-Water Fisheries
Traditionally, historians have neglected evidence for a widespread
medieval Danish fresh-water fishery associated with monastic and
manorial demand for a sophisticated supply of protein. There is no
Danish analysis to match Christopher Dyer’s study of medieval English
fresh-water fisheries, 329 but it seems likely that similar conditions
prevailed. In the sixteenth century there is recurrent evidence of the
building of fresh-water ponds, and indeed they seem to have been in use
certainly around Copenhagen until the early nineteenth century. The
ponds provided fresh, but expensive, fish for the dinner-tables of the
wealthy.
Summary
Danish medieval sources bring out the overwhelming importance of the
Sound fisheries, which were undoubtedly the largest fishing operation in
Europe during the late middle ages. Future research, however, should
throw more light on the fresh-water fisheries. As regards the salt-water
fisheries the sources do not permit us to assess the extent of the fisheries
outside the Sound. By the early sixteenth century the evidence for the
Jutland fisheries improves while the Sound fisheries become obscure in
the latter half of the century.
The Sound fishery culminated around 1400 with as much as 300,000
barrels and declined severely through the fifteenth century. By 1500 total
Danish herring exports, including the Limfiord, were only 100,000
barrels. The Sound fishery seems to have reached another high level in
the 1520s and 1530s and then to have contracted. Crude calculations
indicate that the total exports from the three fisheries off Båhuslen, West
Jutland and in the Limfiord together accounted for perhaps 60,000
barrels each in the 1580s, or a total of 180,000 barrels; in addition, the
328 Kancelliets Brevbøger 1563 5/4, 9/8, 16/10; 1564 3/9.
329 ‘The consumption of fresh-water fish in medieval England’. Medieval Fish,
Fisheries and Fishponds in England, ed. M. Aston, I (BAR British Series 182) (Oxford,
1988) 27-38). The only Danish treatment of the subject is Kjærsgaard’s Mad og øl.
186