The Northern Crusades Read Online Free PDF Page A

subjects by threatening to take away their fishing rights in the sound, even before 1086. They submitted because they could not live without the herring; and by c. 1250, when the saga was written, that was a credible story. However, archaeology reveals a comparatively low fish consumption in Viking Age sites round the Baltic (compared with Norway), as well as rather sparse coastal settlement, and no sign of ‘fishing communities’,despite many hooks and traps. In the twelfth century and later, there was a change: stretches of coast in the western Baltic were transformed every summer by the setting up of bothies and tents in the temporary camps known as fiskelejer , where fishermen, driers, merchants and king’s men came together and held markets. The most famous of these were situated on the south-western tip of Scania, at Skanör and Falsterbo, and in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries they formed a virtually independent commonwealth, ruled by their own customs and laws and attracting buyers from all over Europe. The king of Denmark and his archbishop took their cut, and left the fishermen and merchants to run their own business; and meanwhile, every spring, the herring migrated south through the Sound in masses so dense that at times a man had only to scoop them out of the water in a pail.
    Other fishing methods had changed the look of river mouths and shallow coastal waters. Off Scandinavian shores there were ‘eel-yards’, lines of stakes supporting platforms from which the eel-catcher could set and manage his traps, and herring-weirs, or enclosures of stakes which could be made secure by sealing them with nets or wickerwork (there is a surviving example at Kappeln). In the running water of the great Slav river mouths there were fish-fences and weirs ( jazy ) so numerous that the Danish raiding fleets of the 1160s and 1170s were continually obstructed by them, and destroyed them as they advanced; in Danish and Swedish rivers there were V-shaped salmon-traps ( laxakar ).
    The organization and development of fisheries was a matter of politics. It meant competitive exploitation of water resources and manpower, and here the princes and the landowners stepped in; already in the twelfth century the piscatura was a form of lordship along the coast, on rivers and lakes, jealously guarded against encroachments by poachers, and protected from overfishing by bans on certain kinds of net. The fish itself was an acceptable token of power, and could be paid in tribute or tithe; the islanders of öland, off south-east Sweden, made their sole acknowledgement of loyalty to the king at Uppsala by sending him an annual present of herring, and in the 1170s Bishop Absalon of Roskilde let the Slavs of Rügen present him with a single fish in recognition of his sea-patrols, which enabled them to bring in their catch unmolested. When the warriors of the king of Poland reached the Pomeranian coast in 1107 they sang of their conquest in these terms:
    Salted fish and stinking, once they brought us from afar,
Now the boys have caught ’em fresh, and all alive they are! 4
     
    Thus the introduction of new fishing and preserving methods, and the rise and fall of demand on the international market, were matters of life and death to the Northern peoples – for Lapps, Finns, Balts and, later on, Germans were as concerned in the business as Scandinavians and Slavs.
    The last point worth stressing in this survey of the natural peculiarities of the North concerns transport and communication; and for the most part that meant boats.
    It was possible to move over North-East Europe by land, even at this date, but the fewness and badness of the trackways made it slow going and left large tracts of country out of reach. In the 1070s Adam of Bremen reckoned that the overland journey from Hamburg to Wollin took a week; it was something over 200 miles. The sea-voyage from Oldenburg to Novgorod was five times as far, and was expected to take only twice as