Domesday Herrings

Summary

FOR MANY HUNDREDS of years myriads of herring gathered in the southern North Sea, every autumn, to spawn. Their number was prodigious. The most productive herring-fishing season was that of 1913. Six hundred thousand tons of herring were caught, mainly by vessels fishing out of Yarmouth and Lowestoft. This was some 6,500,000,000 fish, almost half of which were exported, principally to eastern Europe. Large-scale fishing continued after the Second World War. Familiar to someone brought up in Lowestoft was the autumnal sight of drifters crowding into harbour, heavy with herring, of hundreds of Scottish ‘fisher girls’ gutting herring on the Denes, of so many herring lying in the gutters that the very cats hardly bothered. It seemed that such things were a normal and permanent part of the year. Not so. Before long the North Sea herring stock was almost fished out. There are still some there to be caught, bought and eaten. But the watery protein mine in the North Sea was lost; a mine so rich that the eminently nutritious herring was for many centuries exceedingly important in the diet of the poor, though not scorned by the rich.

It was steam propulsion that made possible the immense catches of the twentieth century; and large, though lesser, catches in the nineteenth. In earlier times herring fishing was confined to coastal waters. Its scale was, nevertheless, notable. In 1336 Philip VI of France was advised to attack the Yarmouth herring industry at the time of the autumn fishing. He was informed that there would be 6,000 small fishing vessels there; over a thousand of these would be English; each might have a crew of fifteen. Spies exaggerate; but the Valois agents were not too wildly off the mark. Dr Saul's research, largely based on the Yarmouth customs accounts, provides our earliest definite information on the scale of the Yarmouth herring fishing. In the second generation of the fourteenth century up to 400 foreign vessels can be shown to have visited Yarmouth annually. At a conservative estimate some 600 English vessels were involved. The most productive fishing season (so far as these accounts tell) was that of 1336–37 when over 5,000 tons of herring are recorded. In seven other years between 1331 and 1368 the recorded catch exceeded 2,000 tons.