Meare, Somerset

Phone for the fish knives, Dunstan

At Meare, a few miles from Glastonbury, this plain but striking medieval building stands in the middle of a field. It was the fish house of the great abbey at Glastonbury, and, as well as accommodating the abbey’s water bailiff, provided somewhere where the salting and drying of the monastery’s fish could take place. When it was built, in the 14th century, it stood right next to the fish-filled lake that gave Meare its name.

Medieval domestic and industrial buildings are rare enough, but this is the only surviving building relating to the fishery activities of an English monastery. Fishing and monasticism might seem odd bedfellows, but in fact fish formed an important part of the monastic diet, and the earthworks of many former abbey fishponds survive all over the country. A lot of them are marked on Ordnance Survey maps, which are invaluable tools for anyone looking for interesting lumps and bumps in the landscape, and monasteries often had several pons, to help in management of the supply of fish.

Fish were eaten widely in medieval monasteries, but it’s not known for sure how much fish the monks ate or when. Studies of monastic accounts suggest that when monks could get them, sea fish such as cod were eaten on feast days. But because freshwater fish (such as carp, tench, and bream) were farmed by the monks themselves, they don’t necessarily appear in the records which mostly account for foods brought in from outside.

Amounts consumed would also have varied according to the wealth of the monastery. While the inhabitants of smaller, poorer abbeys might have put up with a mainly vegetarian diet, those of larger, richer monastic houses probably ate meat and fish regularly. There's also evidence that, while meat was often looked upon as a luxury food, fit for worldly lay people but not for monks, fish was sometimes seen as lower-status food. So more than one reforming abbot weaned his well fed carnivorous monks off meat by increasing their fish intake.

Another issue was the size of the available ponds. According to one estimate, to produce a regular supply of fish, a monastery needed some 2 acres of pond per monk. So not every monastic house could provide all the necessary fish on site – some had to come in from local rivers, and monasteries guarded their river-fishing rights jealously.

Glastonbury was a large monastery and at Meare they had a huge pond – a mile and half across, apparently. A medieval account says that the Meare pond contained 'an abundance of pike, tench, roach and ells and of divers other kinds of fishes'. It sounds as if the monks of Glastonbury were very well provided with fish for the table.