Everything Affects Everything Else: Fish at the Time of the Reformation in England

Years ago, a show on television and then on VHS (and then on DVD!) called Connections and narrated by James Burke (who has a cousinly resemblance to John Cleese) made a splash. The point of each episode was to start with one thing--bananas, for instance--and show how historical and technological and personality threads connected bananas to, say, airplanes and the French Revolution and stamps. 

The connections were not the daft "trivia" connections that people make on Amazon videos: This actor once made a movie in which there was an uncle named Fred, and the actor has an uncle named Fred! The connections were actual connections, reverberations, a butterfly flapping its winds and creating a hurricane, networks across time and space. 

I came across one such connection in Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking by Kate Colquohoun. The book's history chapters are fascinating, and I say that as someone whose eyes tend to glaze over during writerly descriptions of recipes. 

In a chapter on the Tudors, Colquohoun points out that Henry VIII not only disposed of monasteries and such, moving a tremendous amount of property into the crown's coffers, he changed feast days plus the requirement to eat fish on Fridays. 

I knew about the feast days but not about the fish since Henry VIII was more Catholic, in many ways, than the Protestant revolutionaries in his own country. But yep, he did change demands on fish. Consequently, fish suffered economically--in large part because people thankfully gave up eating fish. One citizen admitted "to finding salt fish nauseating and river fish muddy." As the author explains, "Lamprey were falling rapidly out of fashion and fish was becoming political." Hey, we're Protestant now! was the perfect excuse. 

I was reminded of Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You, Ghost Map, How We Got to Now, and Wonderland. I was reminded in part because Johnson, like Burke, argues a more nuanced view of cause and effect than often allowed for in sledgehammer academic theories. I was also reminded because Johnson argues on more than one occasion that changes, adaptations, and new ideas may be influenced by want, DESIRE, as much as by necessity. 

Human beings are very good at arguing profound, intellectual, important reasons for why they do what they do--doesn't mean something far more atavistic and ego-id-like isn't at work.

One tourist in the 18th century suggested, "[Not one Englishman] has ever eaten a dinner without meat." Despite being an island nation, apparently many Englishers would rather have their roast beef than their fish.