BRIAN FAGAN, former Rugby schoolboy and professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, reckons it was the ravenous appetite of Christians for fish on Fridays, not the market for spices, that led sailors from Bristol to undertake the hazardous but potentially fabulously lucrative voyages to north America in the 1490s. In his rollicking Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting and the Discovery of the New World Fagan – himself a keen amateur sailor – describes how, as early as the Middle Ages, a transatlantic fishing industry was developing salting and smoking to preserve fish during the return trip bearing heavy cargoes of herring and cod for the tables of the the pious Catholics of western Europe.
25 March 2020, The Tablet
Word from the Cloisters: No fish on Fridays
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