One of the greatest ‘marvels’ ever to set Cambridge by the ears was the incident of the ‘Book-Fish’. The story is told in Vox Piscis: or, The Book-Fish (1627):
“On Midsummer Eve last past 1626, a Codfish being brought to the Fish-market of Cambridge and there cut up… in the depth of the maw of the fish was found wrapped in a piece of Canvas, a book… much soiled, and defaced, and covered over with a kind of slime & congealed matter. This Book was then and there beheld by many with admiration and by Benjamin Prim the Batchelors Beadle (who also was present at the opening of the fish) was presently carried to the Vice-chancellor of the University, who… examined the truth of the particulars before mentioned.”
The book’s leaves were brittle from being ‘parboiled’ by the heat of the cod-fish’s maw. The text speculates: “And therefore it seemeth most probable, that upon some wrack this book lying (perhaps many years) in the pocket of some man, that was cast away, was swallowed by the Cod, and that it lay for a good space of time in the fishes belly.”
The Contents
On being cleaned up, the book was found to contain three religious pieces written in prison by the Protestant Reformer John Frith (c.1503–33):
- The Preparation to the Cross and to Death
- A Mirrour, or, Glasse to know thy selfe
- A Briefe Instruction, to teach a person willingly to die, and not to feare death (sometimes attributed to Richard Tracy).
In 1533, Frith was burnt at the stake for denying that the doctrines of Purgatory and Transubstantiation were necessary articles of faith. He was important in the history of the English Reformation as having been the first to maintain the Protestant view of the sacrament of Communion, that “Christ’s natural blood and body are in Heaven, not here.”
The writer of the introduction to Vox Piscis says that the finding of the book-fish is “to be accounted rather marvellous than miraculous”—in other words, this was not the supernatural intervening in human affairs in order (belatedly) to make manifest divine approval of the Reformist views of Frith. But no doubt many saw special significance in the contents and that was why the university authorities swiftly brought out a reprint, Vox Piscis itself, enlivening the text with a woodcut showing the fish-woman’s stall, the fish, the book, and the knife.
Skepticism and “Suspicious Circumstances”
That is always supposing that the story is true. Although Vox Piscis represents the events it describes as of recent occurrence, several suspicious circumstances surround the finding of the book, not least the coincidental presence of authority in the shape not only of Benjamin Prim but also of various scholars of the university who immediately wrote to their friends about it, “relating the particulars of this accident whereof themselves were eye-witnesses.”
And how many of these “eye-witnesses” saw the same events as Mr. Mead, the Fellow of Christchurch College, who afterwards wrote: “I saw all with mine own eyes; only I saw not the opening of the fish, which not many did, being upon the fish-woman’s stall in the market…”? It is all very well for Mr. Mead to say “He that had his nose as near as I yester morning, would have been persuaded there was no imposture,” but of course there was opportunity for it.
“Strange to say,” comments Robert Chambers in his Book of Days (1863-4), before being confined in the Tower of London, Frith had been held in an Oxford fish cellar, where fellow prisoners had died from fumes given off by decaying salted fish—a coincidence to strain credulity. Perhaps Vox Piscis was a donnish joke. But whoever wrote it knew that stories of strange things found in fish were perennially popular.
Other Strange Finds in Fish
Some of the earliest stories concern rings lost and found again in fish (see Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Northumberland). The subject is still regarded as newsworthy.
- 1886: Jack Rose, in Tales and Tall Stories (1992), reports that a small pocketbook found in a pint bottle cut from the stomach of a ling landed from the Lowestoft trawler Sybil at Aberdeen contained a farewell to his wife, written on 24 January 1886 by William Jenson of the schooner Anna of Bangor.
- 1887: In the Lowestoft Weekly Press on 1 October 1887 appeared a letter reporting that “on Monday last” (20 September) a Lowestoft fishing vessel landed a cod of an unusual size. Upon opening the fish, “to the utter astonishment of the Master and part of the crew, a new born infant, in a perfect state, presented itself to their almost unbelieving eyes.”
- Modern Finds: The Times (24 June 1995) printed the story of a fisherman who caught a bass in Southampton Water and found a lady’s ring from about 1850 inside it; and a still-ticking watch found inside a cod was reported in the Eastern Daily Press on 2 March 1993.
However, whether any or all of the above are truthful accounts or tall tales is another matter, particularly when they are viewed in the light of a story told by Fletcher Bassett in Legends and Superstitions of the Sea and Sailors (1885), who writes: “A shark cut open at Marseilles is said to have contained a man, clad in armor, in its stomach, and another, a horse.”