16 - The Fishy Tale of Willem Beukelszoon

In the latter half of the 14th century, a series of technological developments as well as ripe social and economic conditions saw the foundations being laid for the future Dutch takeover of the northern European herring industry. Up until then, the herring trade had been dominated by the Danes, Swedes and the Hanseatic towns of northern Germany and the Baltic Sea, with Dutch and other European consumers happily importing salted herring from those places. Within two hundred years this situation would be completely reversed; the fishing and exporting of salted herring would be one of the cornerstones of the Dutch economy and Dutch cured herring would come to reach dinner tables all across Europe. This remarkable reversal of fortunes was so integral to the emergence of Dutch national identity, that it required its own position within the narrative of the emerging Dutch state. From the 17th century onwards a myth was perpetuated which credited it all to a man called Willem Beukelszoon of Biervliet. He was a humble herring fisherman who, at some point in the 14th century apparently discovered the process of gibbing, which made this whole turn around possible. Although this legend has been debunked by modern historians, its perpetuation demonstrates the importance which the so-called “royal herring” enjoyed in the creation of a Dutch national identity. So in this episode of the History of the Netherlands, we are once again going to depart from the power games of the nobility, and the wranglings of urban elite and worker’s guilds, and focus on something even more slippery, the herring.
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