THE FISHERIES 61 



July 1296 above a thousand men of Flanders, and others of 

 France, disguised as fishermen, were preparing to attack and 

 burn Yarmouth and neighbouring places, and the bailiffs and 

 men of the port were ordered to collect their ships to oppose 

 them. These proceedings show the lawless state of the sea in 

 those times. In the thirteenth century an extensive herring 

 fishing was also carried on by the Scots on the east coast, 

 especially in the Firth of Forth and the Moray Firth, and 

 particularly by the men of Fife, and cargoes of herrings, cod, 

 and haddocks, as well as salmon, were exported to England and 

 chiefly to London, but also to Bordeaux, Rouen, Dieppe, and 

 other ports in France. 



From the foregoing it is clear that centuries before the 

 question of mare clausum was raised, important fisheries were 

 established along the east coast of England and Scotland, and 

 that foreign fishermen took part in them. The number of 

 French and Flemish fishermen attending the fishery must have 

 been always great, because they had to furnish a large part of 

 Catholic Europe with fish. But the number was increased 

 after the fourteenth century, and especially in the fifteenth, 

 from two causes. One was the decline of the great herring 

 fishery at Scania, in the Baltic, upon which the Hanseatic 

 League had risen to power and opulence, and which provided 

 perhaps the greater part of continental Europe with salted and 

 smoked herrings Germany, Poland, Russia, part of France, and 

 even to some extent Flanders and England. The Scanian her- 

 rings were esteemed the best, and the Hanse controlled the trade. 1 

 The other circumstance was the invention in the latter part of 

 the fourteenth century by Beuckelsz, a native of Biervliet, in 

 Zealand, of a greatly improved mode of curing herrings, an 

 invention which most materially aided the Dutch in taking the 

 place of the Hansards in the herring industry, and in the 

 commerce which it brought in its train. Some of the towns 

 in the Low Countries early belonged to the Hanseatic League, 

 and their fishermen were in the habit of going to the Scanian 

 fishery ; 2 but from the fifteenth century at least the herring 

 fishery on the British coasts became by far the most import- 



1 Lundberg, Del Stora sillfisket i Skane under mcddtiden oeh nyare tidens btirjan. 

 Worms, Hist, commercialc de la Ligue Hansfatique. 



2 Fruin, Tien Jar en nit den Tachtigjarigen Oorlog, 181. 



