“Sor et blanc harene fres pouldre (couvert de sel)!”

  ("Herrings smoked, fresh, and salted!”)

was the cry of the retailers in the streets of Paris, where this fish became a permanent article of consumption to an extent which can be appreciated from the fact that Saint Louis gave annually nearly seventy thousand herrings to the hospitals, plague-houses, and monasteries.

[Illustration:  Fig. 103.—­A Votive Altar of the Nantes Parisiens, or the Company for the Commercial Navigation of the Seine, erected in Lutelia during the reign of Tiberius.—­Fragments of this Altar, which were discovered in 1711 under the Choir of the Church of Notre-Dame, are preserved in the Museums of Cluny and the Palais des Thermes.]

The profit derived from the sale of herrings at that time was so great that it soon became a special trade; it was, in fact, the regular practice of the Middle Ages for persons engaged in any branch of industry to unite together and form themselves into a corporation.  Other speculators conceived the idea of bringing fresh fish to Paris by means of relays of posting conveyances placed along the road, and they called themselves forains.  Laws were made to distinguish the rights of each of these trades, and to prevent any quarrel in the competition.  In these laws, all sea-fish were comprised under three names, the fresh, the salted, and the smoked (sor).  Louis IX. in an edict divides the dealers into two classes, namely, the sellers of fresh fish, and the sellers of salt or smoked fish.  Besides salt and fresh herrings, an enormous amount of salted mackerel, which was almost as much used, was brought from the sea-coast, in addition to flat-fish, gurnets, skate, fresh and salted whiting and codfish.

In an old document of the thirteenth century about fifty kinds of fish are enumerated which were retailed in the markets of the kingdom; and a century later the “Menagier” gives receipts for cooking forty kinds, amongst which appears, under the name of craspois, the salted flesh of the whale, which was also called le lard de careme.  This coarse food, which was sent from the northern seas in enormous slices, was only eaten by the lower orders, for, according to a writer of the sixteenth century, “were it cooked even for twenty-four hours it would still be very hard and indigestible.”

The “Proverbes” of the thirteenth century, which mention the freshwater fish then in vogue, also names the sea-fish most preferred, and whence they came, namely, the shad from Bordeaux, the congers from La Rochelle, the sturgeon from Blaye, the fresh herrings from Fecamp, and the cuttle-fish from Coutances.  At a later period the conger was not eaten from its being supposed to produce the plague.  The turbot, John-dory, skate and sole, which were very dear, were reserved for the rich.  The fishermen fed on the sea-dragon.  A great quantity of the small sea crayfish were brought into market; and in certain countries