by Brian Fagan
The Thames barge has a relatively efficient rig, ideal for easy handling in narrow creeks and shallow channels. Medieval cargo ships were not in the same league. They flew square sails before the wind and used oars to go to windward. Heavy cogs and hulcs carried bulk cargoes between Hanseatic ports in the Baltic and linked British ports to the Continent. Solidly built to carry heavy loads, mostly in shallow waters, they labored when faced with gale-force winds and high Atlantic swells. The clinkerbuilt Norse knarrs and long ships were more seaworthy but were not intended for winter voyaging or fishing. The stormier seas of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the need to range far offshore each winter in search of cod, demanded more seaworthy craft.
As so often happens, new economic realities brought striking innovations in ship design. Herring abounded in the southern North Sea, but the fishermen could only stay at sea a short time until the Dutch invented the buss, a much larger ship that combined fishing with the gutting and salting of the catch on board. These remarkable vessels transformed the herring fishery into big business. By the mid-sixteenth century, as many as four hundred busses operated out of Dutch ports, each carrying from eighteen to thirty men who remained at sea for between five and eight weeks at a time.11 Strict regulations controlled the quality of the product, with the ships often traveling in convoy to minimize the risk of piracy. For centuries, English merchants and fisherfolk had used open boats and larger decked vessels built in the Norse fashion-light and buoyant, but not designed to handle the large ocean swells and fierce winds of winter. These boats were built shell first, then strengthened with frames. Most of their strength, as a result, lay in their outer skin. Some enterprising boatbuilders eyed ships built by the Dutch and the Basques, who had adopted the practice of erecting the skeleton of a boat's hull before planking it. These ships proved much stronger, more durable, and easier to maintain. The new methods led to the English "dogger," an oceangoing vessel with two or three masts and high pointed bows that enabled it to breast steep head seas. A low stern made a good platform for fishing with lines and nets.12
The dogger was originally a small boat used on the Dogger Bank in the southern North Sea and for cod fishing. The rig had a square sail on the main mast set well forward and a three-cornered lateen-style sail on the after spar, enabling it to sail closer to the wind, an important consideration when sailing to and from Iceland in prevailing southwesterly winds. For the first time, fishermenTiad access to vessels that were strong enough and seaworthy enough to sail almost anywhere. Simply constructed and easily repaired in the remotest convenient bay, the dogger expanded the cod fishery far beyond the narrow confines of the North Sea. Casualty rates at sea were enormous, but in an era of brief life expectancy and brutal conditions on the farm, people accepted the risk without question. So many doggers and other fishing craft vanished at sea that boatbuilders prospered at home, especially along the northern Spanish coast, where entire Basque villages did nothing but build replacement fishing boats.
The English were quick to make use of their doggers. In 1412, just a year after they were excluded from Bergen, "fishermen out from England" appeared off southern Iceland in defiance of Norwegian and Hansa monopolies. "Thirty or more" fishing boats arrived in 1413 and exchanged merchandise for cattle. The sailors endured hard conditions. In 1419, a gale on Maundy Thursday wrecked twenty-five English fishing boats. "All the men were lost, but the goods and splinters of the ships were cast up everywhere."13 Before long, the English were so well established in the Icelandic cod trade that Bergen's restrictions were relaxed out of necessity.
The English dogger fleets were so efficient that Iceland's leaders soon complained to their Danish masters that the foreigners were decimating the fish population. Denmark protested in turn to English King Henry V, who promptly prohibited the voyages by proclamation in every port, despite protests from the House of Commons that "as is well known" the cod had forsaken their former haunts off Norway. Neither English fisherfolk nor Icelanders living close to the fishing grounds took any notice of the prohibition, for the trade was extremely lucrative to both sides. One dogger could carry ten men with the summer's provisions and salt for the catch and return with about 30 tons of fish. The fleet left England in February or March and with favorable winds and a bit of luck would reach Iceland in about a week. If they were unlucky, winter gales would swamp several of their boats and wash many crewmen overboard. Once off Iceland, the doggers fished some distance from shore all summer, with only occasional passages home to unload their catch and reprovision. They were fearless seamen, who suffered incredible hardships from ice-cold spray and cutting winds, with almost no protection whatsoever. Imagine lying to a March gale far from land in the open Atlantic, no means of keeping warm for fear of fire, drifting at the mercy of huge waves, pumping constantly to keep afloat, in nearzero temperatures, in soaking clothes. The fishermen routinely endured conditions that are unimaginable today. But the Lenten market had to be satisfied.
The fish themselves were sold in October and November for the following Lent. If stored carefully between layers of straw, the dried fillets would keep for up to two years. Quite simply, Icelandic cod was money. Its value endured far longer than the gold of the Indies.
For decades, English fishermen were unchallenged by competitors. But inevitably, the ubiquitous Hanse began arriving on the fishing grounds in the 1430s, even transporting cod direct to London. Fighting broke out, cargoes were plundered, diplomatic notes exchanged. Icelandic waters were too crowded and cod stocks were becoming depleted, partly because of occasional severe cycles of colder sea temperatures. The more enterprising Basque and English skippers sought new fishing grounds farther out in the Atlantic.
Cod abounded on the continental shelves off Europe, Iceland, and North America. Norse exploration north and west in warmer times had coincided with the range of the vast cod schools. As pack ice increased and water temperatures fell off Greenland, the schools shifted southward and westward away from Iceland, where stocks seem to have been erratic, although the fluctuations are poorly documented. With inexorable skill, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century skippers followed the cod far over the western horizon.
Fisherfolk are reticent people who know that their living depends on carefully guarded knowledge, passed from one generation to the next and never committed to paper or shared with officials. The Basque were already formidable coastal voyagers, unafraid of passages of 2,000 kilometers or more across the Bay of Biscay to the North Sea and beyond. They pursued whales into subarctic waters and followed them west to Greenland along ancient sailing routes. They visited the Norse Eastern Settlement as early as 1450, where their artifacts have been found, then probably dropped southward along the Labrador coast not soon afterward. There they found not only whales but cod in abundance. Inevitably, rumors of new fishing grounds and mysterious lands far to the west spread from taverns and fishing villages to merchants' ears.
Bristol, on southwestern England's Severn River, had by 1300 become a major trading port. Its well-protected harbor occupied a strategic location midway between the cod of Iceland and the vineyards of southwestern France and Spain. Bristol prospered off this trade until 1475, when the Hanseatic League abruptly cut off the city's merchants from buying Icelandic cod. By this time the worthy burghers of Bristol were well aware of Basque fishermen's activities in the Atlantic Ocean. They had also heard persistent rumors of lands far over the western horizon, among them a place called Hy-Brazil. In 1480, a wealthy customs official, Thomas Croft, and a merchant named John Jay sent a ship in search of Hy-Brazil as a potential base for cod fishing. The following year, Jay dispatched a further two ships, the Trinity and the George. History does not record whether they ever landed anywhere, but the ships returned with so much cod that the city told the Hanseatic League it was not interested in negotiations to reopen the Icelandic fishery.
Croft and Jay kept quiet as to where the cod came from, but inevitably the word got out. In 1497, five years after Chri
stopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas, the Genovese merchant Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) sailed westward from Bristol searching not for cod but for a northern route to the spice fields of Asia. Thirty-five days later, he sighted a long, rocky coastline washed by a sea teeming with cod, where Basque fishing vessels abounded. A letter written by an Italian visiting London, who heard tales of Cabot's voyage, recounts how "the sea is covered with fishes, which are caught not only with the net but with baskets, a stone being tied to them in order that the baskets may sink in the water." For their part, the Bristol men aboard the Mathew returned in great satisfaction for their ships "will bring so many fishes that this kingdom will no longer have further need of Iceland."14
By 1500, huge fishing and whaling fleets sailed every year for the Grand Banks. Half a century later, more than 2,000 Basques visited Labrador each summer, where they processed their catches before sailing home on the fall westerlies. Bristol fleets sailed first to Portugal for salt, braving the stormy Bay of Biscay in winter, then crossed to Newfoundland for cod. They returned to Portugal with their catch, then filled their holds with wine, olive oil, and more salt for Bristol. English vessels beat southward along the rugged Nova Scotia and Maine coasts following a bonanza of cod. On May 15, 1602, the ship Concord rounded a "mighty headland," Cape Cod, and "anchored in 15 fathoms, where we took great store of codfish." The Concord's skipper, Bartholomew Gosnold, noted that in spring "there is upon this coast, better fishing, and in as great plentie, as in Newfoundland ... and, besides, the places ... were but in seven faddome water and within less than a league of the shore; where in new-found-land they fish in fortie or fiftie faddome water and farre off." 15 He had left on his voyage just after his wife Martha had given birth and named a tree-covered island after her: "Martha's Vineyard." For two decades, fishermen were content to catch and dry their cod close offshore during the favorable months, but no one stayed through the stormy and harsh winters in a time of increasing severe cold. Then, in 1620, the Mayflower brought the Pilgrims to settle New England, to "serve their God and to Fish." 16 Thus it was that cooler conditions in the Arctic after the eleventh century, stormier, more unpredictable weather at sea, and the search for better fishing grounds helped Europeans settle in North America.
The world between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries consisted of one vast peasantry, where between 80% and 90% of people lived from the land and from nothing else. The rhythm, quality and deficiency of harvests ordered all material life.
-Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life
emur-en-Auxois is an ancient mining community near Dijon, in France's Cote-d'Or. A stained glass window in the sixteenth-century church depicts Saint Medard, who always interceded for rain, and Saint Barbara, patroness of miners and protector against thunder and lightning. Saint Barbara appears as a martyr with bare breasts, her body lashed with stripes, her flesh torn by red-hot pincers and spitted on hooks. She is finally burnt at the stake. Her martyrdom immunizes humanity against the vagaries of weather and guides miners' picks safely into the bosom of the earth.
The image of saint as protector and martyr appeared in stained glass, in wood, and on canvas. Dozens of saints' days commemorated the spiritual benefactors who protected farmers and townspeople against drought or rain. In 1350, when Europe was at the mercy of increasingly unpredictable weather, forecasting was confined to what one could see from atop a hill or church tower, to immediate spikes of cold, extreme heat, or torrential downpours that at best could be foretold a day ahead in the coming. Even those cultivating the most fertile soils kept a constant eye on the skies, on telltale signs of the passing seasons, on early flowerings of apple trees, vivid sunsets that portended heavy rain, unseasonable frosts that killed ripening grapes. No rural community ever kept systematic records of the weather that brought prosperity one year and desperate hunger the next. Human memory, cumulative experience and folklore, and a belief in the power of saints were their only protection. Vulnerability was a reality of daily life: however adaptable farmers were, Europe still lacked an effective infrastructure for moving large quantities of grain and other commodities at short notice.
Tree rings and ice cores chronicle the ever changing climate after 1320-through the terrible years of the Black Death, through the Hundred Years War, fought mainly on French soil, the reign of Elizabeth I of England, and the ascendancy and defeat of the Spanish Armada. The rings and cores record irregular cycles of warmer and colder summers, of wet springs and extreme heat waves, seemingly with no long-term pattern until the late sixteenth century, when cooler conditions became more prevalent. Those who suffered through good and poor years left few records behind them, except for occasional references to exceptionally good or poor harvests, or unusually wet or dry weather. They accepted unpredictable cycles of good or bad years as happenstance, or the result of Divine Will, but, in fact, they were living in a climatically somewhat different world.
The Medieval Warm Period had seen few of the pronounced extremes that marked the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. The years of the Great Famine, 1315 to 1319, were the wettest between 1298 and 1353. According to the Bishop of Winchester's archives, 1321 to 1336 were dry or unusually dry. Decades of unexceptional weather then followed. The next wet years of significance came between 1399 and 1403, but they never approached the extremes of the famine rains. With no food shortages to contend with on more than a local level, Europe quickly recovered from the great hunger.
After the famine, the quality of nutrition in town and village seems to have improved somewhat or at least held steady. Populations declined in some districts, making farming land more plentiful. Slightly more efficient agriculture came from a slow trend toward larger farms, a precursor of the large scale enclosures of common land in later centuries.
Northern Europe never again endured a hunger as catastrophic as that of 1315. Later famines, however local, served as reminders of the great fragility of society. Not until the late seventeenth century in England, and more than a century later in France, did new agricultural methods and crops, much improved commercial infrastructures, and large-scale food imports significantly reduce the threat of famine.
Village life in France was typical of that over much of Europe. In 1328, agents of the King of France counted households and parishes across the land and found between 15 and 18 million people living within the geographical extent of what was, three centuries later, the sovereign nation known as France.2 Ninety percent of Frenchmen were peasants, an enormous number relative to the available food supply. Despite areas of high agricultural productivity, like the great estates around Paris and the winegrowing region near Bordeaux, nine-tenths of the nation's labor was dedicated simply to feeding itself. As the population quickly recovered after the 1315-22 famine at a time of relatively low crop yields and finite cultivable land, grain production reached an inevitable ceiling, making the rural population all the more vulnerable to poor harvests. At the same time, the peasants suffered under high rents, low wages, and excessive subdivision of the land, most of which belonged to the nobility. Nevertheless, the early fourteenth century was relatively prosperous. Some French historians refer to this period as the monde plein, the full world."
The "full world" did not last long. By the thirteenth century, the Mongol empire extended from the Yunan region of southern China across Eurasia to the Black Sea. Mongol networks of highly mobile horsemen linked Asia to Europe and India to Manchuria. During the fourteenth century, Mongol supply trains picked up rats carrying fleas infected with a complex series of bacterial strains known as Yersinia pestis, which cause bubonic (glandular) plague.3 Where they did so is a matter of debate, but it was probably in the Gobi Desert. Bubonic plague broke out in Central Asia in 1338/39 and reached China and In dia in 1346. Harsh climatic change may have hastened the spread of the disease. As Europe went through a wetter cycle, hotter, drier conditions affected Central Asia, triggering constant movements of Mongol populations searching for fresh grazing grass. Plague
fleas and their hosts accompanied them. The epidemic reached the Black Sea port of Caffa by 1347 when besieging Mongols are said, implausibly, to have hurled plague-infested corpses over the walls with catapults. It is more likely that the disease entered the town on the back of infiltrating rodents. Fleeing Genoese ships then carried the fleas and their hosts to Constantinople, Italy, and Marseilles. At least 35 percent of Genoa's population perished in the first onslaught.
From the prosperous Italian cities, the Black Death spread in waves over western Europe. In the Paris region, the population fell by at least two-thirds between 1328 and 1470. The district of Caux in Normandy lost at least two-thirds of its villagers. One estimate places the population loss for France as a whole at no less than 42 percent, much of the mortality among people who had suffered from malnutrition during the great famine a generation earlier. The plague entered Britain through several ports, among them Bristol, where the plague swept ashore in August 1348, "where almost the whole strength of the town perished, as it was surprised by sudden death; for few kept their beds more than two or three days, or even half a day."4 By July 1349, the Black Death had reached Scotland, where "nearly a third of mankind were thereby made to pay the debt of nature. . . . The flesh of the sick was sometimes puffed out and swollen and they dragged out their earthly life for barely two days."5 This first onslaught did not run its course until 1351.