The Seabird's Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers

by Adam Nicolson

Seafood of any kind – and seabirds were thought to be seafood even by churchmen requiring fish for Lent – remained tainted as the resort of the desperate well into modern memory. There was an expression in Scottish Gaelic, Beò air maorach a’chladaich, ‘living off the shellfish of the shore’, used as shorthand for the pitiable condition of the landless.