German Fishing History...

[hsifeng]

"Dude, the Germans have been sports fishing for a looooong time!"

 

 Fishing for Sport in Medieval Europe: New Evidence

Author(s): Richard C. Hoffmann

Source: Speculum, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Oct., 1985), pp. 877-902

Published by: Medieval Academy of America

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2853728

 

If you don’t have JSTOR access and would like me to send you this article, just let me know and I will e-mail it to you. The text is a refutation of the belief that the first tracts on sports fishing came about in late 16^th C England (there are references in Germany from at least 1200-1210).

 

“A wealth of legal evidence for nonprofessional sighing by peasants and townsmen in later medieval south Germany came to light through Hermann Heimpel’s efforts to explicate a reference to the “Federschnur” in the Reformatio Sigismundi, an important revolutionary tract produced in northern Switzerland about 1438. From texts recording local custom in a broad band of territories from the Swiss lowlands to Styria and dating fro the 1360’s through the late sixteenth centuries, Heimpel establishes the Federschnur or Federangel as the classic technique for commoners to fish for their own purposes (not for trade) in the lord’s private but natural waters, and he identifies this devise as the artificial fly.”

 

Take *that* Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle!

 

BTW – The Germans’ also have bait recipes in their tracts…sadly they were not printed in this item because the paper is more about ‘How Sports Fishing Started’ than ‘How Sports Fishing Was Done’

"Dude, the Germans have been sports fishing for a looooong time!"