France and the U.K. are feuding over fish. What is this war of words really about?

It's war!

Well, it's a fish war.

And like past fish wars, the words are ferocious, the stakes are tiny, gunboats make an appearance, but the shots fired are almost always verbal. 

This conflict pits France against Britain — and not for the first time. Think of the Napoleonic wars in the 1800s, the Seven Years' War in the 1700s (when Canada was a prize) and, of course, the big one: the Hundred Years' War. That was some time ago. It ended in 1453. 

At stake in the current conflict are — wait for it — a couple hundred fishing licences for small French boats. These were introduced after the Brexit vote in 2016, when Britain took back control of its coastal waters. They allow the French boats, as agreed in the Brexit accord, to fish off the English coast and the coasts of the Channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey — as they have for decades.

But the French say the British are deliberately refusing many licences to their boats. In retaliation, the French seized one English trawler and took it to the port of Le Havre and fined a second skipper on Oct. 27.

The rhetoric is fierce, and coming from the top. "Now we need to speak the language of force," France's Europe Minister Clément Beaune told French television. "Unfortunately, it's the only language the British government understands."

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson replied in kind, saying France's actions may mean it's "already in breach" of the trade agreement on Brexit. "That's a matter we have to pursue."

And this is Round 2. In April, the British dispatched two Navy gunboats off the coast of the island of Jersey to face down a French fishing boat protest. One French boat was reported to have tried to ram a Jersey fishing vessel. No shots were fired.

What is it about fish?

In 1995, the Canadian fisheries minister, Brian Tobin, ordered the seizure of a large Spanish trawler for overfishing in waters off the Canadian coast. The Coast Guard fired across the fleeing trawler's bow. Tobin later displayed the nets on a barge in the East River, just outside the United Nations headquarters, to show that they infringed international fishing rules. 

The Spanish retaliated by sending a military patrol boat to protect its vessels.

The European commissioner for fisheries, Emma Bonino, called the seizure "an act of organized piracy." Threatened European Union sanctions were vetoed by Britain, after intense lobbying by Canada's high commissioner to London, Royce Frith.

Tobin then travelled to the Cornwall fishing port of Newlyn, where he was greeted as a hero in a sea of Canadian flags by English fishers who loathed the Spanish fishing fleets in their waters as well.