==Eating Fish in a religious context==
St. Benedict’s Rule was written by Benedict of Nursia (480-547AD) as a guide for his own monastic foundation at Monte Cassino, Italy. At the time it was one of many of these rules. During the reign of Charlemagne it was adopted as the rule for all unified monasteries in the Carolingian empire. From there it spread, as the Benedictine Reformation, through France, Italy, Spain and England in the 10th century. [BARREY 2003:p.61]
{{Quote|50|` Everyone should abstain completely from eating the flesh of four-footed animals except, of course, the sick whose strength needs building up`<br>|The Benedictine rule regarding the consumption of meat[BARRY 2003:p.61]}}
This implies that members of the clergy would consume only fish and poultry, while the lay people would have been prohibited meat during lent and on fast days. Although, as Hagen [HAGEN 2006:p.397] points out, a fasting diet would not have differed much from the everyday diet for the poor people.In the later medieval period tail of beaver, frogs, puffins and barnacle geese were classified as fish to get around the no-meat rule. However there are no indications this took place during the Anglo-Saxon period [HAGEN 2006: p.405].