Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 2 (2020), p. 311

Alison Locker, a highly respected expert in fish remains archaeology, has assembled a valuable pioneering overview uniquely combining zooarchaeological and historical approaches to the changing place of freshwater fish varieties in human cultures of what is now England. For investigators hitherto focused on matters terrestrial or marine the book identifies multiple freshwater issues in agrarian, landscape, dietary, socio-cultural, and general environmental and economic history. But students of historical fishing and fisheries in England will wish to follow arguments and discussions more complex than can here be summarized. The book’s indubitable strengths and occasional problems may inhere in the very breadth of its subject – how have the English interacted with coarse fish?

After brief mention of the fish species, native and introduced, now inhabiting England’s fresh waters, the book concentrates on ‘obligate’ freshwater varieties, those unable to live in salt water. This relegates to secondary attention such migratory or broadly tolerant species as Atlantic salmon, eel, sea trout, sturgeon, and various estuarine flatfishes. What follows is structured chronologically from prehistory to the early twenty-first century. The result is first a narrative of human diet and land use based primarily on archaeology and then another mainly drawn from the written record about leisure, sport, and human social behaviour. Though Locker does not emphasize the point, the transition occurred in generations centred on 1500.

From prehistory through the early Tudors, if inhabitants of southern Britain looked at all upon freshwater fish, they saw food. Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers ate much freshwater fish; their agrarian Neolithic through Iron Age successors virtually none, perhaps because the latter granted to watery places a sacral status incompatible with economic exploitation. Roman conquest and culture restored some taste for fish, both the pungent briny sauces (garum, salsamentum) fermented for everyday use and the large specimens that colonists and aspiring indigenes used to show off elite status. Post-Roman pagan Anglo-Saxon immigrants reverted to an Iron Age model, while surviving and introduced Christian dietary practices encouraged eating fish when meat was forbidden. Even before arrival of piscivorous Norse settlers, some sites and human skeletal material suggest that elites consumed a modicum of freshwater and marine fishes, notably the larger and more impressive species such as pike. Then, even before the Norman Conquest, signs of fish consumption increase, especially at urban sites. The new trend featured the growing dietary importance of marine fishes, first eel, then herring, eventually also cod, and both a relative and absolute reduction of freshwater species, which became ever more expensive objects of prestigious display. Those fish came from natural waters understood, like artificial ponds, to be private property. Up to the mid-1400s English ponds held native species and not the exotic carp. Towards the end of this period, recreational fishing also emerges in the English written record, notably in the anonymous Treatyse of fysshynge wyth an angle printed by Wynkyn de Worde in the second edition (1496) of the Boke of Seynt Albans. Locker treads wisely through the oldest surviving tracts on fishing, correctly observing that, while textual instructions in capture techniques – all in fresh waters – are now known from some earlier generations in England and elsewhere and some individuals did plainly fish for fun, before 1496 books on sport had ignored this activity.

Remaining chapters (5–8 and an ‘afterword’) trace out the further evolution of conditions adumbrated by 1500, namely the transformation of freshwater fish from dietary and economic elements to objects of cultural display and performance. The zooarchaeological record gives way to written traces of a new English engagement with recreational angling and fishes of the carp family, first natives and eventually common carp Waters under landowner control offered opportunities to fish with rods, lines, and nets. A new genre of angling books culminating in Izaak Walton’s Compleat angler (1653) depicted an established gentlemanly pursuit of all freshwater fishes, supported by its own commercial infrastructure. With the first Industrial Revolution (1740s–1860s) came a new English social structure and an emergent division between ‘game’ angling (salmon, trout, grayling, often also pike) on privately owned waters and ‘coarse’ fishing mainly for indigenous cyprinids. The business of angling, shops with specialized tackle, tradesmen, angling clubs in several social strata, and a variety of angling literature, grew apace. Coarse fishing developed most actively in and around Victorian cities, where working class fishers formed their own clubs. Fishermen (and this was a mainly male activity) of higher class often, but not exclusively, fished fly for game species.

Since the late 19th century all sorts of anglers came gradually to endorse a more ‘sporting’ ethos, whether defined by eschewing certain capture techniques or limiting the killing of fish. Newly emergent angling celebrities and specialized publications promoted both technical and social innovations, including a fashion of taxidermy to preserve trophy catches. The long-prized pike yielded angling priority to carp as the largest coarse fish and most difficult to master, reaching cult status by 1950. Nowadays the hegemony of carp among angled coarse fishes meets a general desire to capture big fish by basic methods, while at the same time intensively managed reservoirs provide recently stocked exotic American rainbow trout for another type of angler. Competitive angling, once the preserve of local coarse clubs in pursuit of roach, gained international status in contests to take carp on one hand and trout on the other.

Freshwater fish successfully portrays the remarkable 500-year English metamorphosis in the cultural role allocated to freshwater fish from a dietary to a recreational object. In part because readers familiar with archaeozoology and medieval diets may know less angling history and angling antiquaries have reciprocal blind spots, some broader observations are in order.

The shift from food to play at least roughly coincided with predominantly verbal sources replacing material evidence in present-day knowledge of past freshwater fish and fisheries. Both recovered fish bones and written instructional or literary texts offer skewed perspectives on how people dealt with fish. Readers would benefit from some instruction on the epistemological value and limits of each type of evidence, not least the limited ability of fish bones to reveal human purposes and the unstable relation between angling literature and angling practice.

Locker’s restricted attention to obligate freshwater species has reasonable biological grounds, but still fits uncomfortably with how people took food from fresh waters in the Middle Ages and their descendants take recreational values from the same. In writing a history, why not explore the entirety of freshwater fishing? But at the same time the book tends to deprive the fish and their aquatic environment from any active role in its story. Given Britain’s relatively depauperate natural fauna, how did the more diverse fish populations in those eastern waters once part of the Pleistocene ancestral Rhine, play out in fisheries? Subsequently, what may be said of responses by English fish species to the successive changes in English agricultural systems, then in urban, industrial, and post-industrial landscapes, quite apart from fishing pressure itself? What role might the warming trend that began in the mid-nineteenth century have played in the availability to English anglers of grayling, trout, roach, and carp, each with its own temperature preferences?

Stereotypes of ‘game’ and ‘coarse’ fish and angling may be thought nineteenth-century constructs peculiar to England. They need to be historicized as such. Their use as analytical terms obscures historic commonalities and differences, including the importance of the ‘all-round anglers’ whom Locker identifies among leading lights from the seventeenth through even the early twentieth century. Nor did practitioners or writers of freshwater fishing in the Middle Ages or even the sixteenth century in England or elsewhere identify ‘play’ exclusively with angling as opposed to other forms of fishing. Ambiguities in contemporary approaches to those activities might better be acknowledged. Sport is as participants conceive it. The post-medieval evolution in England may have differed from that on the continent, but the grounds and process for this divergence remain unexplained. Quite possibly it is the unimportance of freshwater contributions to the English diet by the later Middle Ages that is central to that story.

Such questions, however, arise from the very breadth and success of Locker’s innovative interdisciplinary survey. They rightly pertain to a future agenda that can test and build upon the sweeping story her book sustains. Freshwater fish deserves the attention of archaeologists, historians, and angling antiquaries alike.