There is direct evidence that, as early as the third century, A.D., fish were caught in considerable quantities round the coast of Britain by the natives and used as food. Little is known about the early development of a fishing industry in this country. We know that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, fish was in demand throughout the country, partly because of the religious observance of fast days, and partly, no doubt, because it afforded a welcome change in the regular winter diet of salted meat. In those days there was no winter root crop, so that cattle were killed in autumn and salted down for consumption during the winter.
In disposing of their catch, the fishermen were handicapped by the almost complete lack of transport facilities from the coast inland. Their produce would be distributed by pack-horse, so that fresh fish would be practically unknown beyond a distance of a few miles from the coast. Consequently, all fish for inland markets were salted. The fish were pickled in brine, as the art of dry-salting was then unknown in this country.
To develop a successful fishing industry, it was necessary, then, as it is to-day, either to dispose of the catch quickly on the spot, or to preserve the fish so that it could be transported to distant markets. In 1347, a Dutchman, William Beukels, of Biervelt, invented an improved means of curing and pickling herring, which was essentially the modern process of gutting the fish and packing them in dry salt. At this time the Baltic herring fishery, carried on by the Hanseatic League, dominated the markets of Europe. But the new method of curing, exploited by the Dutch, improved the quality and keeping powers of the fish to such an extent that, by the end of the fifteenth century, the Dutch fishing industry was supreme, and had become a powerful and valuable national enterprise. In the sixteenth century, as many as two thousand Dutch herring “busses” (as the boats were called) would gather on St. John’s day at Brassa Sound, in the Shetlands, to begin the summer herring fishery. The fish were caught with drift nets, were salted and packed in barrels, and carried home by the fast-sailing, attendant “yaggers.” Ashore they were repacked in fresh salt in new barrels. Over a million barrels were packed in a year. When caught, the fish would be worth about a million pounds, and when retailed about two million pounds. Contemporary illustrations of the methods of curing and salting then in use reveal the astonishing fact that even to the smallest detail the methods that were employed in Holland in Elizabeth’s day are identical with those that are employed at Yarmouth to-day.