Fish for the City: urbanisation and expanding frontiers of marine resource use in medieval England (original) (raw)

Fish for the City: urbanisation and expanding frontiers of marine resource use in medieval England

Growing urban populations place ever heavier and more concentrated demands on hinterlands, which must be met by intensified production and/or geographical expansion of resource bases. As transport costs and land availability limit expansion in supply of terrestrial bulk goods, marine ecosystems come to represent an increasingly important alternative food source. This paper explores the relationship between the expansion of fisheries and historical processes of urbanisation in 9th-16th century England, using zooarchaeological and stable isotope data. An explosion in sea fishing around 1000AD was associated with the emergence of England's first medieval towns, with precursors at 9th-10th century proto-urban trading centres. We use stable isotope analysis for cod - one of the most important medieval species - to demonstrate that this explosion in consumption initially involved locally caught fish. Demand from growing urban populations, particularly in London, eventually seems to have outstripped local supply, however: from the 13th-14th centuries long-distance imports from northern waters played an increasingly significant role, and by the 15th-16th centuries most analysed bones from London were imported. As the frontiers of resource exploitation were pushed beyond local ecosystems, urban consumers became increasingly detached from producers, reliant on distant resources about which they can have had little knowledge.