Freshwater Fish in England

A Social and Cultural History of Coarse Fish from Prehistory to the Present Day

Alison Locker

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781789251135
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Much has been written on marine fishing and the migratory eel and salmon. Less attention has focused on the obligate freshwater species, primarily the native pike, perch, cyprinids and introduced species of which the most significant is carp. Their exploitation by man has changed from food to sport more dramatically in England and the British Isles than in Europe. They have also been used as elite statements, symbols of lineage, in religion and art. Much of the early evidence is confined to fish bones from archaeological sites and indicators of diet from isotopic analyses of human bones. From the Medieval period these data sources are increasingly complemented and ultimately superseded by documentary sources and material culture. The bones are relatively few from prehistoric contexts and mostly food waste. In the Mesolithic the bones are largely marine from middens on Scottish coasts, while early farmers apparently ate few fish of any type. Examples from European prehistoric sites demonstrate other cultural attitudes to fish. Both marine and freshwater fish bones are more numerous from Roman sites. There are regional and site type differences, but Roman influence appears to have increased fish consumption, though obligate freshwater species remain relatively few. The first evidence is seen for fishponds, probably ornamental. Angling was a noted sport elsewhere in the Empire, but there is no evidence in Britain. In Saxon England the exploitation and management of waterways and the beginnings of the privatization of the landscape, included enclosure of waters as fish stores. This previewed an elite practice of the Medieval period in which landscape features and documentary evidence demonstrate the importance of pond systems among a small section of elite medieval society and for whom these fish were an important part of feast and fast food and gift exchange. However quantitatively marine fish had dominated the fish supply from the late 10th century. The first documentary evidence for freshwater angling in England appears in the Medieval period, revealing an established sport through an oral tradition. The arrival of the common carp, in the 14th century, marks a change in pond culture, it soon became the favorite fish. By the early modern period freshwater fish are in slow decline on the table, though landscape water features evolve in style. The popularity of angling is reflected in the growing commercialization of tackle and angling books initially marketed at gentlemen of means. The industrialization and urbanization of the 18th and 19th centuries created a new landless, 'working class' with whom coarse fishing became synonymous and came to represent a social divide with fly fishing viewed as more elite. Freshwater fish were never to revive as a table fish, but were ever popular as sport. Record carp have become the quest for many specimen anglers practicing catch-and-release, more prevalent in Britain than Europe. The development of coarse angling reflects social and cultural changes in society in England at many levels.

Chapter 1

Prehistoric mists

Hunter-gatherers – the first anglers?

Although the emphasis is on the historic period, prehistory provides a backdrop to the exploitation of freshwater fish. The British evidence is scant which may in part be the result of poor preservation. There are more European examples, which have been used to illustrate evidence for fishing. Many of the European sites are located near lakes and rivers or in rock shelters and Graham Clark’s seminal work (1948; 1952) on Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic societies in Europe emphasised the key role of fishing for hunter-gatherers.

Currently the earliest evidence of hominin occupation in Britain is from two sites dated to approximately 700,000 years ago, the Lower Palaeolithic, from the sites of Pakenfield, Suffolk and further up the coast at Happisburgh, Norfolk, revealed by erosion on the beach from the Cromer Forest Beds. The base is known as the ‘Cromerian Complex’ and lasted about 150,000 years, a period of ‘Mediterranean type climate’. The earliest stone tools are relatively crude, but by the end of the period there is evidence from both British and European sites for the use of spears indicating hunting, rather than scavenging dead animals. A later site of this period is Boxgrove in Sussex where fish bones from marine lagoon silts were dated to c. 500,000 BP (Locker 1997a; 2000). Eel, salmonids, gadids (cod family) and many bones of three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) were present. The latter is a very adaptable species found in freshwater through to marine conditions. Stickleback, roach, rudd, tench and pike were among the fish identified from Hoxne, Suffolk, dated 350–300,000 BP and associated with ‘Lower Industry’ stone tools (Stuart et al. 1993, 163). There are few other finds of fish bones from Britain in this early period when hominin colonisation was sporadic during warm periods, ‘interglacials’, until the beginning of the Holocene approximately 10,000 years ago.

The scarcity of Palaeolithic fish remains in Britain may in part be due to a lack of sieving in earlier excavations, before the 1970s, after which it increasingly became standard practice. Ideally all deposits would be sieved but with budget constraints a compromise is to sample key deposits, wet sieving a measured subsample through a series of decreasing mesh sizes (to at least 1 mm), either on site or post-excavation (Pls 1 and 2). This is time consuming both in the sieving and subsequent sorting to recover material, but vital to retrieve the smallest remains from plants, insects and other organic material including fish and bones from other small species as well as the smallest flint tools. Such is the rarity of Palaeolithic sites that all deposits, especially in caves, may be sieved to at least a coarse mesh size, and subsamples through a fine mesh.

The evidence for freshwater fish in the diet of early hunter-gatherers increases in the Upper Palaeolithic, spanning approximately 45,000–10,000 BP following the French cultural divisions. Fish also feature in early art, notably from south-west France on cave walls and ceilings (parietal art) and as mobile pieces on bone and antler. The importance of fish both in the diet and culturally in this area is clear in Cleyet-Merle’s study (1990) of prehistoric fishing and includes a depiction of a salmon impaled on two projectiles of Magdalenian date from Gourdan Cave in south-west France (ibid., 63), an area noted for Palaeolithic archaeology. Salmonids (salmon and/or trout) were the most commonly featured fish species, with 47 examples of mobile art from 37 sites, pike are second with six, and eel third with two (ibid., 173). More recently examples of Magdalenian date have been found, possibly depicting cyprinids.

In Liguria on the Italian coast, near the border with France, the Grimaldi caves, just above the shoreline, contained a series of burials of Gravettian date (23,000 BP), discovered in the nineteenth century. The bodies had been decorated with shells (Cyclope neritea, a sea snail found in the Mediterranean sub-littoral zone) deer incisors and one necklace with a number of perforated salmonid vertebrae (Formicola and Holt 2015, 77). The nearest source of salmon would be the Atlantic coast of southwest France and this was first thought to be an example of long distance trade and exchange, but more recent x-ray examination revealed these were large trout. Their size suggested they were a possible Pleistocene relict sea trout from inland refugia (Wilkens 1995). Neither sea trout nor salmon are found in the Mediterranean today, it is too salty. In north-east Germany a deposit dating to 12,300 BP included five fishhooks of bone and one of subfossil mammoth ivory (Gramsch et al. 2013). The latter was dated to 19,000 BP, the Last Glacial Maximum, and mammoth were extinct by 14,000 BP. Freshwater fish faunas from Central Europe are dominated by salmonids during the late Upper Palaeolithic, suggestive of seasonal fisheries. This changes to pike, chub and perch in the Final Palaeolithic, with pike the most common species recovered in the Early and Late Mesolithic (ibid., 2461). Fishhooks may have been first developed at the end of the Palaeolithic, evolving into a Mesolithic fishhook tradition. The importance of fish in art, culture and food in the Palaeolithic is evident across Europe: angling with lines of fibre or hair and improvised hooks or gorges made from bone, antler, thorn and wood, though the lines and latter two materials rarely survive. Gorges may have been the first method to ensure prey could not escape after swallowing the bait, pre-dating the hook and also used for birds and larger animals (von Brandt 1984, 70). Angling may have a source of both pleasure and plenty in months of abundance.

Crafted hooks were the first tools specifically designed for fishing (Morales Muniz 2010, 41). They continued to be made from traditional materials of flint, shell, wood and antler before metal (in the Bronze Age) was in use or common enough to be used on utilitarian items that were easily lost. Up until the mass production and standardisation of metal hooks in the nineteenth century, hooks were adapted from wire or a pin, or bespoke, made at a forge. A line was tied to a simple rod, often a naturally straight pole of hazel, favoured for its flexibility. The survival of these and tools for ‘passive’ fishing, such as traps and nets and other organic material, is usually dependent on waterlogged or peaty conditions and some have been revealed at low tide as on the Thames foreshore. Carbon dating of the wood from the latter has revealed dates ranging from the Bronze Age continuously through to the post-medieval periods (Cohen 2011). Stone traps are difficult to date as they have a long history of simple and unchanging design.

Through the Palaeolithic period stone tools became more refined and smaller; tiny bladelets and small flint tools termed ‘microliths’, were used in series, hafted into wood to make a serrated edge, secured with tree sap. Target species also changed, smaller animals and birds were hunted in the Upper Palaeolithic, large prey were more common in earlier periods. Midden deposits of marine fish bones and shells have been found in coastal areas of Britain and northern Europe from the later periods. During the Mesolithic in Britain (around 10,000–5000 BP) middens, most common in Scotland, reflect the seasonal importance of marine fish to hunter-gatherers. On the island of Oronsay, off the west coast of Scotland, the main fish present were saithe (Pollachius virens) a gadid and analysis of growth rings in their otoliths (a calcareous body in the inner ‘ear’) confirmed seasonal occupation (Mellars 1978). However these represent episodes of food gathering along coastlines. There is scant evidence for catching freshwater fish inland in Britain either from fish bones or traps or lines in this period. Has no evidence has survived or does it reflect a true absence? There are plenty of Mesolithic ‘sites’ identified from scatters of stone tools but little other evidence.

The site of Star Carr, North Yorkshire, a Mesolithic lakeside settlement, is an interesting case in point. Excavated 1949–51, no fish bones were found, but there were many barbed points and a harpoon of red deer antler, that could be associated with fishing or fowling. Other evidence from Northern Europe suggests seine nets and hooks were in use and floats made of bark (Clark 1948). Clark concluded that there were no fish, in particular pike (though found in quantity at contemporary European sites), because the lake was not fished in summer. However, he later describes pike as being caught all year round in the Baltic region (1952, 45). Wheeler (1978a) rejected this seasonal interpretation, suggesting it was difficult for fish to colonise the Lake Flixton Basin due to rapid water flow. However recent excavations have recovered a small number of fish bones from core samples of lake deposits and peat samples from three newly excavated areas. The 15 fish bones all showed evidence of burning, apart from a perch scale. Pike, perch, cyprinid and a possible salmonid were identified. In addition two flint tools showed microwear traces associated with fish processing. The conclusions from this ongoing research were threefold. Clark did not find fish remains because he did not sieve. Fish bones may only have survived because they were calcined (possibly the remains of fish processing outside a building on dry land). Thirdly the acidity of the sediments has increased since 1950 and is detrimental to bone survival. In addition only 5% of the site has been excavated (Robson et al. 2018). Thus modern excavation techniques have started to solve the decades long debate ‘why were there no fish at Star Carr’ and the reason is not cultural.

Another important Mesolithic site at Blick Mead near Stonehenge in Wiltshire, recently excavated, is very rich in stone tools, some very small, but has to date only produced one fish bone. Also calcined, this was tentatively identified as a salmonid vertebra, burning may have aided its survival (Parfitt 2014, 21). In this case the absence of fish bone is not attributable to a lack of sieving, but preservation conditions may play some part.

Fishing was clearly part of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer lifestyle, despite some questions over the paucity of evidence in Britain in a freshwater context or specialised coastal deposits. Supportive proxy data in a pre-literate society includes art, isotopic analyses of human bones, grave goods and evidence from contemporary sites. Although the British evidence is poor, European examples include freshwater fish bones in settlement contexts, isotopic analyses of human bone collagen and from burials where freshwater fish have been found as either stomach contents or possible gift offerings as a stew, for example at the Mesolithic cemetery at Skateholm, Sweden (Jonsson 1986). In other Mesolithic burials freshwater fish bones have been found used as jewellery; pike vertebrae as beads and cyprinid pharyngeal teeth used as ornaments on belts and headdresses. Many of the latter are from the areas around the Upper Danube and some pharyngeal bones were notched or perforated (Grunberg 2013). In Serbia, by the Lower Danube Gorges, Late Mesolithic graves contained individual cyprinid teeth, some of which had been perforated or notched at the root. The teeth were large and the authors propose two roach species (Rutilus meidingeri and R. frisii), the latter can reach over 60 cm total length and weigh over 8 kg. Rutilus rutilus, the most common and widespread roach species and the only roach native to Britain, averages 35 cm and 250 g. Analysis of residues on the teeth indicated the presence of ochre and tendon tissue that may have been used to attach the teeth to clothing. The teeth were found mostly in the area of the pelvis or the skull. The dominant use of these teeth as decoration compares with contemporary sites in the Upper Danube, where both cyprinid teeth and those of mammal species are used, they evidently all have symbolic meaning (Cristiani et al. 2014). Grunberg (2013) noted that where subsequent Neolithic practices retained a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, animal bones continued to play a role in burial practices. However, there is little evidence of this from mainland early British Farmers, supportive of immigration rather than a continuum evolving into settled farming.

Early farmers – archaeological evidence for fish, from bones, residues and isotopes

The onset of a more settled pastoral and agricultural lifestyle in the Neolithic brought cultural change. The pace and nature of the transition has been and continues to be the subject of debate as to the degree of immigration and acculturation. Mesolithic peoples were already adept at using boats, at least round coastlines, and Neolithic migration would have also been facilitated by skin covered boats or hollowed logs used across larger stretches of water in order to reach Britain. The change to agriculture was not sudden and the transitional process from hunter to farmer is now estimated to have taken place over some 350 years starting around 4000 BC. Pottery, domesticated animals and plants were brought from Europe, with migration by large and or small groups of early farmers to and within Britain. They maintained continental contacts and trade, seen, for example, in the origin of some stone axes. The degree and transition to adoption to this sedentary lifestyle by the ‘indigenous’ population is still unclear, but by the later Mesolithic hunting/foraging groups are thought to be have become increasingly sedentary. Settlements were not uniform and regional differences are seen in building styles both domestic and funerary (Catling 2017a, 23). Unresolved questions remain over the rate of change – was it very gradual with staples of Mesolithic life only gradually replaced, in a cycle of semi-nomadic clearances? Was early crop cultivation a failure, or minimal, as has been suggested from the typology of querns of the early period, with an increasing reliance on animal husbandry (Catling 2014, 24).

Whatever the background to the Neolithic the scant fish bone evidence suggests neither freshwater nor marine fish were a valued resource in Britain. A review of animal remains from the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age of southern Britain found very few fish bones despite sieving deposits at more recently excavated sites (Serjeantson 2011). Fish were recovered from only eight of 205 sites, with few species; eel, pike, trout and a cyprinid bone: in all 34 bones, of which 11 came from a single trout. Excluding the latter, pike was the most numerous species (ibid., 47). Bones from large pike were found from excavations at Runnymede, Surrey (Serjeantson et al. 1994). Of Neolithic date, in addition to two pike skull bones and a salmonid vertebra, carbonised residues of marine oils were found on the inside of two potsherds, though it cannot be determined if these were from marine fish, fish-eating birds or marine mammals. Three salmonid vertebrae were found in Late Bronze Age levels, one of which was perforated, perhaps for ornamental use, together with nine pike bones and a single cyprinid vertebra. Pike were also found in a Middle Neolithic human burial at the Eton/Dorney Lake excavations, Berkshire (Serjeantson 2011, 78). A rare find of fish in prehistoric burials in Britain, it suggests large pike may have been of cultural significance and targeted, perhaps representing strength from its predatory nature and possibly has some connection with the practices of the European evidence cited above. Large pike were also found at two sites near the River Witham in Lincolnshire, of Late Bronze Age date at Washingborough and Iron Age by a trackway at Fiskerton, these were rich areas for fisheries. However, at both sites (studied by the author) these deposits may have been a natural accumulation so while they are evidence for the presence of large pike, they do not necessarily have any cultural significance.

The scant evidence for fish in this period in southern Britain led Serjeantson to conclude that freshwater fish were largely ignored. Freshwater mussels, which ought to have been common in the unpolluted freshwaters of that period, were also absent (ibid., 49). The avoidance of water as part of an ancestor taboo is something that has also been posited for the Iron Age. The relative prominence of large pike could signify some status as a top predator among freshwater fishes. Evidence from the animal bone assemblages from the early and Early/Middle Neolithic support the presence of new people rather than a transition to pastoralism and agriculture in southern Britain by existing hunter-gatherer Mesolithic populations (Serjeantson 2014). The animal bones show no evidence for continuity from the Mesolithic and non-domestic animals were generally few. A small number of wild mammal bones did occur in the majority of sites, most commonly red deer with adult males preferred for their antler and skins, raw materials being prized over meat (Serjeantson 2011, 91, 93, 41). While acknowledging that wild mammal bones could have been consumed and disposed of elsewhere, it is suggested hunting had become primarily a specialised event to prove skills. This previews medieval hunting on horseback with dogs through to fox hunting in the nineteenth century as a way for the elite to practice horsemanship for war.

The use of isotopes extracted from human bones to provide evidence of diet has been used to help resolve questions on the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition. Recent analyses of human remains of Mesolithic and Neolithic date in Britain and Ireland at the point of transition supports a general move away from marine foods in the Early Neolithic (Schulting and Bovic 2017). Individuals buried by the coast or on Scottish islands show little evidence for marine foods in their diet and a reliance on terrestrial foods, with animal bones assemblages suggesting these are domesticates. There is also little support for freshwater resources playing any significant role. This is not to say there were no fish eaten, or any regional differences but overall they were of little significance. A re-analysis of a bone sample from the west coast of Scotland previously assessed as representative of a wholly terrestrial diet, but using a new method, did indicate a marine component. This Bayesian mixing model (Food Reconstruction Using Isotopic Transferred Signals, acronym FRUITS) separates marine signals from shellfish and fish, which in this case indicated perhaps a 20% contribution, mostly from shellfish (Bownes et al. 2017). This does not invalidate a change to terrestrial diet in the Neolithic, but presents a more nuanced picture, which will evolve as the methodology develops. There is some genome sequencing evidence to support the immigration theory, with one individual from Ireland being of Near Eastern origin. Other recent work in this field supports an Iberian origin for Neolithic peoples in Britain, while people associated with Bell Beakers, were of a Central European origin (summarised in Krakowka 2018). The advances in these techniques have and continue to refine the history of the peopling of Britain, which for prehistory in particular was once reliant on comparing material culture from other areas.

European examples of a change away from fishing in the Neolithic include the site of Vela Spila on the Adriatic coast of Croatia. Fishing had been an important part of subsistence in the Mesolithic, but in the Neolithic it was reduced to an opportunistic activity and, with the introduction of sheep and goats, fish became a minor resource (Rainsford et al. 2014). Another continental parallel comes from the Balkans, from the site Lepenski Vir (modern Serbia) by the Danube Iron Gorge. In an area where in the Late Mesolithic fish had been important both as food and as decoration, in the Early Neolithic (c. 6300 BC), isotope analyses showed a reduction in fish consumption for at least some people. Of the same date, carved boulders with human/fish like faces are placed in burials and in buildings and it is suggested this may represent human metamorphosis into fish and part of a fish taboo (Boric 2007).

Hunting as a ritualised activity in later prehistory in Britain has also been explored by Lewis (2009) who views the Neolithic landscape in continuity, heavily influenced by past hunting practices, following on from the ‘sedentary hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the late Mesolithic’. He suggests a continuance of ancestral ties to hunting grounds for millennia as a way for the elite to appropriate land from the Neolithic onwards (ibid., 97, 98, 108). This lays more emphasis on evolution rather than immigration of farmers in the Neolithic and is problematic in explaining the abrupt change in animal bone assemblages to domestic species. The two may not be irreconcilable, with aspects of continuity absorbed into a developing agrarian landscape. However a progressive ‘privatisation’ of land ownership in the Neolithic would have been part of the process of establishing land boundaries for sedentary agriculture and pastoralism, perhaps restricting access for both hunting and fishin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of plates
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Prehistoric Mists
• 2. AD 43–400+. ‘What did the Romans ever do for us’?
• 3. AD 400–1066. Pagans and Christians
• 4. AD 1066–1538. Catholics to Protestants
• 5. AD 1535–1740s. Reformation to revolution
• 6. AD 1740s–1860s. The first Industrial Revolution
• 7. AD 1860–1952. Fair play
• Afterword. Linking the past and the present where carp is king
• References
• Plate section