As far back as the third century the inhabitants of the Hebrides were living on fish and milk, but ignorant of the cultivation of grain, and even in the ninth century the Dutch came to Scotland to buy salted fish. In the tenth century the Norwegians were fishing with their herring-nets near Christiania, and off the East Anglian coast our own fishermen were pursuing the industry on a large scale. Before William the Conqueror arrived, Beccles, then a fishing town (but now inland on the banks of a river), paid as rent to St. Edmund’s Abbey as much as 30,000 herrings. In France by 1030 the herring-fishing was a well-established occupation, and there were salt works near Dieppe for preserving the catches. During the twelfth century our fishermen found herrings very plentiful off the Tyne. Further north the English, Scotch and Belgic fishermen were getting the herring near May Island off the Firth of Forth, and in this same period the herring was being first fished for in the Meuse. The Dutch were sending out small vessels to use their nets in the North Sea, then later on packing the fish into barrels, preserving them by cleaning their insides and thus beginning to acquire wealth from the harvest of the sea. Thus the North Sea fisheries were to build up the Mercantile Marines of the North. We were exporting herrings, wool, butter, cheese and cattle to the continent via the Rhine, and already during the thirteenth century a big Lorraine fleet, carrying cargoes of wine, used to arrive annually in England; but it was the impetus given by the herring that caused the north European countries to develop the sea instinct. The fishing industry developed shipbuilding, created a great seamanhood, spread the fascination of the sea as a career, and thus handed down from century to century a great and wonderful school, from which in Tudor times were to be obtained the crews who ventured forth with Drake and others. You cannot suddenly bring into being this seafaring body, as you can collect armies. And had it not been that for hundreds of years the Englishmen had been out fishing, there would have been no expansion of England either commercially or politically. The history of the world would, indeed, have to be rewritten.