FILLE DU COMTE DE PONTHIEU
. The first short story in Old French prose, composed in the early 13th century, the Fille
du comte de Ponthieu relates the adventures of a noblewoman raped before her bound
husband; she then tries to kill her witness. To punish the lady, her father, the count of
Ponthieu, condemns her to abandonment at sea, where she is rescued, only to be married
to a sultan. Later, she saves her first husband and father-in-law from death and escapes
with them to France. The story is retold in the 13th-century chronicle by Ernoul, Histoire
d’outremer et du roi Saladin and in the 15th-century romance Jean d’Avesnes.
Wendy E.Pfeffer
Brunel, Clovis, ed. La fille du comte de Ponthieu, conte en prose, versions du XIIIe et du XVe
siècle. Paris: Champion, 1923.
Régnier-Bohler, Danielle, trans. “La fille du comte de Ponthieu.” In Le cœur mangé—récits
érotiques et courtois, XIIe et XIIIe siècles. Paris: Stock, 1979, pp. 253–279.
Vitz, E.Birge. “Narrative Analysis of Medieval Texts: La fille du comte de Ponthieu.” Modern
Language Notes 92(1977): 645–75.
FISHING
. Fish were an important source of dietary protein and fishing a significant economic
activity in France throughout the Middle Ages. Miraculous drafts of fishes met the
prayers of Merovingian saints. Charlemagne ordered estate managers to improve fish
stocks, while contemporary monasteries employed their own fishers. By then, most
observing Christians were emulating the monks in abstaining from meat more than one
day in three. Technological inability to fish offshore, to preserve, and to transport fish
made the saltwater fishery less important than local freshwater stocks, which came under
intense exploitation.
Depending on the size of the watercourse, rights over freshwater fisheries belonged to
the king, territorial lord, or local landowner, who managed them as part of his domainal
economy. Use of the fishery for substance by ordinary peasants was limited, tacit, and, in
the later Middle Ages, ever more restricted. Lords allocated fishing zones (piscaturae) to
specialized craftsmen in return for payments in kind. The varieties and seasons of local
fishes called for various capture techniques: at bridges, mill dams, and sluices, permanent
palisaded traps and wicker enclosures took migratory salmon and eels; bow nets, seines,
hoop nets, and dip nets, as well as a number of angling methods are commonly recorded.
By the 12th century, Norman coastal fishers were sending herring, cod, and various flat-
fishes to Paris from the English Channel and the North Sea. Their inland counterparts
caught trout, pike, bream, and, by the early 1200s, the exotic carp.
People carried eastern European carp westward, for this fish’s ability to thrive in the
artificial fishponds slowly developed from the impoundments made since the 9th century
to power mills. By the mid-13th century, complexes of ponds were being constructed
purposely for fish culture in, for instance, Burgundy, Sologne, and Forez. After the fish
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