Trout and Fly, Work and Play, in Medieval Europe

Richard C. Hoffmann

Schîonatulander mit einem vederangel vienc äschen und vörchen, die wîl sie las ... Schîonatulander ... vische mit dem angel vienc, dâ er stuont ûf blôzen blanken beinen durh die küele in lûtersnellem bache.

[Schîonatulander caught grayling and trout with a "feathered hook," while she read ... Schîonatulander ... caught fish with the hook, standing there bare-legged in the cool of the clear, quick brook. (Author's translation)]

About 1217–20 CE, Middle High German epic poet Wolfram von Eschenbach depicted a fictive noble youth, Schîonatulander, a scion of the Grail dynasty, on an outing with his girlfriend, Sigune, cousin to King Arthur. While she sat on the bank reading and playing with a dog, he waded barelegged in a cool, clear stream to catch trout and grayling with a vederangel, medieval German for an artificial fly. This may be the oldest depiction of a leisured fly fisher catching trout.

The scene of Schîonatulander angling poses a curious historical problem of understanding not in present-day terms, which is deceptively easy, but in terms of medieval culture, the evolving behaviors and ideas of Europeans between the sixth and sixteenth centuries. What is going on here? In shaping an answer I start from three essential components — fly, play, and trout — and then move out to the broader histories of medieval fisheries and the idea of outdoor "sport." There, I want to observe two historic phenomena: (1) how the knowledge of the natural world embodied in Schîonatulander's fishing drew on the now nearly effaced traditional experience of nature by people who fished for a living, as work; and (2) how in the last medieval centuries some select parts of this knowledge began to be moved from storage in memories and transmission by voice to texts, written and soon printed, meant to define uplifting play in the natural world. My overall thesis is that cultures of medieval Europe knew fly fishing, trout, "sport," and "conservation," but not in their close present-day relationship. Only at the end of the Middle Ages did some new connections emerge.

A Long Tradition of Fishing with a Fly

Nothing is said of the artificial fly in the thousand years after Roman essayist Ælian (ca. 170–230 CE), who provided a now well-known hearsay description of Macedonians binding red wool and wax-colored feathers to a hook to catch speckled fish that were eating a certain insect. Wolfram's sudden portrayal of the sporting young fly fisher Schîonatulander (and his earlier allusion to the deceitful vederangel) initiated a slow rise in late medieval references to fly fishing. The artificial fly became a well-documented practice for catching trout and grayling in upland central Europe, England, northern Italy, and Spain.

Fly fishing in central Europe is so far traceable through passing references in legal and political records, such as the right confirmed in 1360 to a householding couple at Lambach on the Traun in upper Austria to fish with the fly even outside their regular license on the local abbey's waters. A political tract falsely attributed to the late Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund circulated in 1439 at the reformist church council of Basel; it called for free access to small waters for passage and fishing with the vederangel. Legal historian Hermann Heimpel cogently argues that fly fishing was understood as the common man's ultimate right of access for subsistence fishing in private waters owned by a lord.

Since the 1490s, moreover, several surviving German collections of fish-catching advice include recipes for making vedern. Within a century a hundred different fly patterns were documented. Pioneering Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner reported in his 1558 Latin volume on fishes that "Certain skillful fishers fabricate diverse kinds of worms and winged insects from feathers of birds in various seasons of the year, and place such bait on the hook: for grayling ... and for trout...." These, however, "change for the various seasons of the year...." He then offers six flies of the month covering April through September for each species.

The next oldest run of evidence for medieval fly fishing has its start in English manuscript and printed texts from the mid-fifteenth century. An anonymous tract called "Medicina piscium" in Oxford's Bodleian Library anticipates the thinking of Gessner's booklet:

And iff ye fisch for hym in the lepyng tyme ye must dubbe your hoke with the federys of a pecock or with the federys of a pertriche or with the federysse of a whyld doke and ye must lok what colowr þat the fley is þat þe trowght lepythe aftir and ye same colowre must the federisse be and the same colour must the sylke be of for to bynde the federysse to your hoke.

Similar views are differently expressed in a roughly contemporary tract in British...