The Codbangers
by Hervey Benham in 1979
This book was one of
a series written by Hervey Benham associated with sailing and the East Coast.
Hervey Benham lived at Colchester, was editor of the Essex County Standard, and
brother of Goldhanger author Maura Benham. Although
primary about Icelandic cod fishing in the middle ages, the book also refers to
cod fishing on Dogger Bank, and has at least one reference to Maldon. Hence
some of the information in the book contributes significantly to our knowledge
of this activity based on the Blackwater during that period.
|
This lithographic drawing by G H Andrews
was used as the Codbangers book jacket and is taken from the Illustrated
Times of 1858 |
here are some short extracts from the book...
Encouraged
perhaps by the results of his Danish Treaty, which had reopened the Iceland
trade in 1490, and of the Newfoundland fishery to the west, and concerned still
more by the threat of Dutch domination of the North Sea, in 1542 Henry VIII had
made a new enactment which encouraged fishing. This statute forbade the buying
of fresh fish at sea or abroad, except in Ireland, Iceland, Scotland, the
Orkneys and Newfoundland. Such protection against the Dutch gave a fillip to
English enterprise. A Trinity House return of 1581
shows that over the previous five years the fishing fleets at Harwich and
Manningtree had increased by three boats of twenty-five tons, at Colchester by
eleven boats of 20-30 tons, to a total of thirty, and at Maldon
by two boats of twenty-five tons...
One of the
factors which discouraged the old centres was the salt
tax, This bore particularly hard on the fisheries, which needed
large quantities. In the seventeenth century it was reckoned that every barrel
of cod required a bushel of 'salt-upon-salt', that is salt dissolved in
salt water and with it boiled to produce white salt. it was raised to no less
than 1,200 per cent — that is £12 tax on a cost of per ton for home-produced
salt, with an even higher rate for foreign...
Duty had to be
paid on unused salt unless it was destroyed, and though there was provision for
remission for fishermen the procedure was too complicated to be workable. The
old centres which were not deterred by the salt tax — or more significantly did
not find sufficiently attractive alternative occupations they established a cod
fishery which was to maintain many of the traditions of its medieval and Tudor
predecessors, but to introduce new features. Chief of these were the
development of the Dogger Bank
and the introduction of the 'live' cod
which replaced stockfish...
[Dogger Bank is a shallow area of the North Sea about 60
miles off the east coast]
Once the fish
were aboard they had to be gutted and salted, or else kept alive in the well.
'Clearing' fish for salting was a iob for all hands. Then the fish were stacked
in salt and left for twenty-four hours, after which the whole stack would be
pulled down and the On the shorter fourteen-day
Dogger voyages ice was used in later days instead of salt for fish
not kept alive in the well. Then the fish were killed by knocking them on the
head and only the first day's catch was gutted' Iced fish were stowed on shelves
in the fishroom, but the salted stack was not shelved...
If fish were
damaged getting them off the hook or perished in the well, they would die with
their mouths open and have to be sold at a knock-down price as dead cod. These
would be put in a basket tied to the bowsprit end, and as the smack came into
port a boat would put out and take them. The well
was used at the end of the voyage when the smack was about to sail straight
home. Fish were transferred to it with can, and would be got on deck with a net
rather than the hawk. Fish would live in the smacks well
almost indefinitely; if one was overlooked at the end of a season it would
still be found swimming about months later. They were not fed for the first
five days, after which a few whelks would be thrown in the well...
For a thousand
years fishermen from the east coast sailed to the strange and inhospitable
waters around Iceland in quest of cod. Their method of fishing, using two hooks
on a line, changed little from the times when Viking invaders brought news of
the riches to the north right through to the early years of the twentieth
century when the steam trawler finally made the ancient technique obsolete. It
was a romantic and adventurous calling, in which little interest was taken at
the time and none when it ended. Yet for ten centuries simple East Anglian mariners, who otherwise
probably never saw any county bar their own, or explored fifty miles from home,
made the thousand-mile voyage each year to another world. Nearer home the North Sea fisheries in coastal waters and
on the Dogger Bank made a less
dramatic but even more important contribution to the national diet and the
national economy...
Throughout the
Middle Ages, when England depended on wool
from its pastures and fish from its seas, and when that fish was the first
necessity of life after bread, the North Sea fed its people from banks richer
than any farmer's fields, The principal gifts of its bounty have been herring and cod,
which for ten centuries have sustained the populations of Britain, France,
Germany, the Low Countries and Scandinavia. Which of these has been the more
important in terms of value and employment and its effects on the policies of
nations it is difficult to determine. From the Dutch and Scottish viewpoints it
would be the herring, Yet the less
publicised cod fisheries have probably
been no less important to England as a whole, from the Middle Ages, when the stockfish was a universal standby, to the
eighteenth century when the fresh 'live' cod was
in such demand for the tables of gentlemen...
In centuries
not blessed with rating and taxation systems, public services were recognised
and public revenues raised by gifts and levies of fish. In addition to the
Royal perquisite of 'composition fish' Church and State were entitled to one
share, divided equally between the parson and the maintenance of the port. The
parson's portion, known as 'Christ's dole', was the cause of trouble in 1591,
for it was the custom to 'bring home the same in fish or in money and pay it to
the Parson'...
Whereas the
hand line was usually the favourite tackle in the deep and richly stocked
waters of Iceland, the inshore fisheries of the North Sea were also worked by
long lines measured in miles and carrying thousands of baited books. The two
methods, it is safe to assume, date back to pre-history, even if primitive
man's set lines were no longer in yards than his nineteenth-century
descendants' were in miles...
The
introduction of wells in smacks at the
beginning of the eighteenth century made possible the 'live' or fresh cod,
which was such an improvement on salted fish and still more on the medieval
stockfish. It also introduced the Codbangers,
men whose task was to kill the cod by knocking them on the head. This term came
to be used for cod fishermen in general and
to some extent for the cod smacks.
The development of long lining on the Dogger Bank half a century later, seventy
years before the trawlers made their discovery of the Silver
Pits, introduced a third fishery even more important than the long
established Icelandic seasons. This enabled an all-the-year-round trade to be
established...
[The Silver Pits are
a deep depression lying close to Dogger Bank, so called because when they were
discovered in 1843 with a bonanza of fish]
Much noise and
commotion were caused by a few score of fine cod just out of the water, as one
man grabbed a fish by the tail and another grasped it behind the head with his
left hand and struck it on the nose with a bludgeon called a cod knocker,
generally the end of an old oar. These men, the Codbangers,
gave their name to cod fishermen in general, and to the smacks, - Sometimes the
Codbangers despatched the fish outright,
crushing the skull; sometimes they merely stunned them, Despite the emphatic
nature of their despatch, cod freshly killed for market were rushed to London in vans labelled 'Live Cod', and
this remained their trade name to distinguish them from salted or iced fish,
trawl-caught cod, or indeed any which had met their end aboard the smacks...
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