The Danish fisheries c.1450-1800. Medieval and early modern ...

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arrels in 1494. 11 To conclude, the Sound fishery seems to have experienced two extraordinary peaks around 1400 and again in the 1520s. The value of the catches did not compare, however, because of the long-term price inflation of agricultural products as compared to marine products. From 1450 to 1550 the price of herring was halved relative to grain. 12 Nevertheless, the value of the fishery attracted the Danish nobility to invest considerably in the fisheries in the first half of the sixteenth century. 13 They contributed capital and labour from their estates, and the Sound fishery atttracted crews from all of south Sealand and even from Jutland. 14 In the herring period the most active towns were reported to have been almost deserted by contemporary accounts. 15 No wonder then if the decline of the Sound fishery sometime in the middle of the century will have caused many fishermen to migrate 11 Schäfer, Das Buch... 126-7. On repression of the Germans see Danske Kancelliregistranter 1535-1550, udg. Kr. Erslev & W. Mollerup (København, 1881-82) 1536 Malmøs reces 6. april. 12 W. Bauernfeind, Materielle Grundstrukturen im Spätmittelalter und der Frühen Neuzeit: Preisentwicklung und Agrarkonjunktur am Nürnberger Getreidemarkt von 1339 bis 1670 (Neustadt / Aisch, BRD, 1993). 13 Erik Arup, Danmarks Historie II (København, 1932) 417. 14 Bjarne Stoklund, ‘Bonde og fisker. Lidt om det middelalderlige sildefiskeri og dets udøvere’. Handels- og Søfartsmuseets Årbog 1959, 101-22. 15 Stoklund, ‘Bonde og fisker’.
in order to take up new fisheries, as indeed happened when fishermen of Elsinore regularly sailed to Bohuslen from around 1560. Others took up new fisheries which had hitherto not been utilised. Unfortunately, the estate records of the Sound area survive only from the last decades of the sixteenth century and have not yet been fully investigated. One estate account, Kronborg Len, was investigated by Søren Frandsen and Erik A. Jarrum, and their findings are summarised in Figure 9. The tax was paid on the oar, and the returns calculated in times of 80 herring (the ‘ol’) which probably was the amount paid per man. The graph therefore reflects the number of active fishermen per year. Activity was at a peak in 1585, and one is left wondering if this reflected fishermen participating in the Bohuslen fishery rather than the Sound fishery which by all qualitative evidence was already very bad at this time. The number of fishermen was halved from 1585 to 1620, when from qualitative evidence we do know that the Sound fishery had a brief period of recovery. Numbers were cut again to one- third in the next twenty years. After this dramatic decline, the number of fishermen stabilised with some active years around 1700, and again in the 1740s, probably reflecting a periodicity of the herring stock. The tax list from Malmøhus county, which have been preliminarily examined for this paper, unfortunately do not include the fishing settlements along the coast of Skåne. The records, which are the household account of the vassal of Malmøhus castle, nevertheless give an insight into the diversity of fishery. Tax of herring, cod, garfish, large cod, ling, whiting, ray, eel, salmon, haddock, and flounder was paid on the lands belonging to the estate in the years 1565, 1572, 1575, 1582. This diversity is not found in the seventeenth century. In the accounts of Malmøhus from the years 1624, 1625 and 1626 the list of paid fish has been shortened to only include herring, cod and eel. A study of the estate records of the island of Møn confirmed the picture of a dramatic
Page 1 and 2: The Danish fisheries c1450-1800 Med
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Page 26 and 27: towns like Copenhagen, Malmø and H
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