FENLAND FISHING RIGHTS

Throughout the Middle Ages fishing rights were an important economic asset throughout the Fens and were d by a complex structure of grants of fisheries, common rights, and licenses. This resulted in many grants of fisheries, or half-fisheries, or quarter-fisheries; many were divisions of fisheries into nights and half-nights, and even into eights of a night. There were  many negotiations which insisted upon the separation of the common fisheries from those held by individuals. Many more disputes were caused by an array of complicated rights and interlocking interests.

The problem was made worse by the fact that fish were money – quite literally so in the case of eels. Eels fulfilled many of the uses of currency in the Fens. Debts wre settled by payments of eels; rentals and tithes were defined in terms of thousands of eels or in “sticks” or “stickes” of eels, every stick having twenty-five eels.

The time of the year when these transactions were most frequent was Lent. In the middle of the 11th Century the Abbot at Ramsey agreed to pay 4000 eels a year to the Abbey of Peterborough in return for building stone from their quarry at Barnack, it was during Lent that this payment fell due.

Often the service of presenting the Lord of the Manor with fish for a Lenten feast was commuted into a customary rent with which he might buy fish. Over time this commuted into money payments. At Ramsey it can be seen to be referred to as fish-silver, fissilver, fisssylver, phisshesilver, haringsilver, denarii ad pisces euendos, or denarius ad piscem. Such sums were paid at the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday and the Ramsey Abbots seemed to fare quite well out of the Lenten fast, as did the abbots of other Fenland monasteries.

eel