The booming medieval salt fish market was low end—lenten food for poor people. Upper-class people had their fish sped to them fresh, or if they lived too far from the water, had their royal fish ponds and holding tanks, or farmed fish such as carp. But from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries an estimated 60 percent of all fish eaten by Europeans was cod, and a significant portion of the remaining 40 percent was herring.
