To Pay Rent in Medieval England, Catch Some Eels | Hacker News Reader

To Pay Rent in Medieval England, Catch Some Eels

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77 pointsdiodorus41 comments

My dad is Professor J.J.N. Palmer, and I worked with him on the Domesday Book data used and cited in this work.

These days we are used to having all kinds of data at our fingertips, but at the time it was a lot of work to take medieval Latin and turn it into computer readable data. We had to invent our own markup language, parsers and search engines.

Very cool! I see there are biographical sketches of you, your father, and others involved with the project at https://www.domesdaybook.net/home/contact

Yes... Somewhat out of date. I wish I still looked the same!

The amount of technology we had to invent was crazy. It would be much easier these days.

Congratulations! This personally identifying information has been immortalized in https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights

> "Most of the eel rents were paid in East Anglia"

Incidentally "eel" in Spanish is "anguila" (pronounced very similar), which leads me to strongly believe these two are related.

However a quick search finds out that those are actually unrelated! Spanish "anguila" comes from latin's "anguilla", and this from "anguis" (snake). While the name East Anglia comes from the German region named "Anglia", which comes from the German word "Angeln".

Note: the Caribbean island Anguilla's name does come from "eel" for its shape, but that's a more clear later phenomena.

If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend Paul Kingsnorth's 2014 novel The Wake. It's written in a sort of de-latinized English and tells the story of an Anglo-Saxon freeman living through the Norman conquest in the Lincolnshire Fens, where much of the local economy was about catching eels. The initially far-off events of 1066 eventually make their effects felt at home, and he organizes a guerilla-like insurgency against the Normans. It's entertaining historical fiction, but more than that, the writing is truly high art, which left an impression me, not unlike Gene Wolfe.

He recently converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and writes a brilliant newsletter:

https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/

"One enormous transaction shows that Ely Abbey, now known as Ely Cathedral, paid Thorney Abbey 26,275 eels to rent a fen" -- Ely Abbey/Cathedral are probably named after eels: see section 8 of https://www.historyhit.com/paid-in-fish-strange-uses-for-eel...

It was unclear to me the amount of difficulty in catching an eel and the value propositions 26,000 eels represents. From a full day of eel trapping, would I expect to bring home 10? 100? 1000? How many meals can I expect to make from a single eel?

Only as a reference, an eel (the European species, Anguilla Anguilla) is around 80-100 cm long and weights 2 to 3 kg.

So, I would say probably like 10-20 eels per day, and 6-8 meals per eel.

Episode 4 from this series has a couple of eel catching related scenes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudor_Monastery_Farm

I’d guess somewhere between 0 and 100, if you had some tenants working for you I could image 1000 although idk what you’d do with them immediately afterward salt/smoke them?

I think you can keep them alive after capture for a little while at least in water -- I think I remember seeing this in the delta of the Neretva river (and I think they used old washing machine drums for this purpose!)

Also

https://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/browse/id/5328736fb47fc40c4f00... ("Survey of English Place-Names")

- "OE ǣl -gē , ēl -gē , 'eel-district,' as already suggested by Skeat and Ekwall... Rents of eels were a fruitful source of income for the abbots and bishops of Ely."

There’s an awesome BBC historical farm series where they catch eels and make the pots in one episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_historic_farm_series

Just a very enjoyable series to watch

Well, I'm convinced. On June 1, I'll be paying my rent in the form of $2,500 worth of raw fish left on my landlord's doorstep.

I've been making a post-apoc survival adventure game lately [1], so this bit of "eels for cash" history reminds me of it. The game's world has an economy that's been forced to regress to medieval times in many ways. Folks barter, and spend much more personal time doing hunting or gathering for their food. Its a comedy too, so I get to have fun with which particular animal species I cite and make important for their new, more rugged way of life. Some "old" (real) species, some made-up, or their mutant descendants.

Thankfully the eel itself already has a funny name, and looks kinda funny too! Yet no matter how weird, dangerous or hard to catch a creature is, when a society loses modern manufacturing infrastructure and chemical/pharmaceutical techniques and know-how, suddenly an otherwise previously "unimportant" species can become incredibly important for many applications.

That bite, though.

----

(1. see my bio: Slartboz)

Look, it's not really on point for the article, but I just want to say that you probably have NO IDEA how fucking WEIRD European eels are. Because of their insanely convoluted life cycle, really smart people thought they spontaneously generated for FAR FAR LONGER than you'd think is reasonable.

There's really great and fairly short book about eels and eel-fishing mixed in with a memoir called THE BOOK OF EELS by Patrik Svensson that I cannot recommend highly enough.

Due to that convoluted life cycle, we are not sure why the population is declining drastically. The numbers of young eels arriving in Europe in recent years is only 10% what it was in the 80s.

We don't know how long wild eels live (again, the life cycle) but this is much shorter than a single lifetime of captive fish.

Isn’t impassable dams/hydro stations a huge issue for them?

One of many issues. The European eel gets hit by just about every possible thing due to its many and varied life cycles. Larval stage is subject to disrupted ocean currents due to climate change, juveniles are subject to an enormous illegal fishing trade (as the most prolific remaining Anguilidae, they are used to supply eel demand in many areas where local species aren’t doing as hot) as they reach European coast, young adults struggle to navigate up waterways due to dams and whatnot, adults spend their lives being fat in the mud and absorb lots of pollutants, then when ready to breed they face the dams again going back out to sea. They’re also under immense pressure from an invasive swim bladder parasite brought over when Japanese eels were introduced to Europe sometime in the 20th century.

And these are just the headline threats for each stage, there’s myriad smaller ones. The reason for their decline is almost certainly a case of lots of small threats overcoming their ability to adapt, rather than one discrete cause.

Smuggling also. In the last decade some cargo of alive eels had been found inside lugagges in airports flying to Asia.

There is an american Nematode parasite also that castrate the European eels.

Plus, overfishing, contamination, invasive species of fishes, drough, engineering of rivers, by-caught, propellers in dam pipes that cut them in chunks while swimming... And can't be breed in captivity.

The animal will go extinct in this century by greed, as usual.

They can now be induced to mate in captivity, after a long course of hormone treatments and a 2000km trip on a “water treadmill” to mimic their migration. The current problem is that the larvae don’t survive past the first week. If I recall correctly, the current hypothesis is nutritional, and there’s work being done on understanding the phytoplankton makeup of the Sargasso Sea to determine how the larvae should be fed.

Similar (though not quite as extreme) case: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose_myth

New Zealand short and long fin eels are also quite interesting. They live in rivers and go far inland, able to climb even 20m waterfalls, but breed only once right at the end of their life cycle somewhere in the sub-tropic Pacific, probably in deep trenches, but it is not known where.

The longfin eels are 2m in length, can weight up to 25kg and live 40-70 years.

https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/freshwater-fis...

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ourchangingworld/a...

I ended up studying European Eels a lot recently and my mind was blown by how prolific they are, and how culturally and historically important they are, and yet how little we know about them. My favourite one is that we’ve known they reproduce in the Sargasso Sea since the early 20th century, due to finding larvae there, but their breeding has never been observed in the wild, and up until February THIS YEAR, an adult European Eel had never been observed to be arriving at the sea. This has now been achieved with satellite tagging https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-19248-8

Seems like the kind of thing that has perhaps been witnessed, but no one has yet lived to tell the tale.

Stay away from the eels. They keep their secrets.

I spoke to Patrik not too long ago about a newly formed stream where eels have started showing up. I dint know how they get up there from the sea, but spontaneous generation would seem more likely than swimming there :D.

Was out looking at them earlier today and this year must be a population record in this small stream.

YOU KNOW SVENSSON? Oh, that's cool.

"Do you hear those, your highness? Those are the shrieking things I'm going to pay rent with!"

How they found one of the manuscripts:

A Remarkable Tale of Manuscript Sleuthing: the Ely Farming Memoranda

https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/07/a-remarkabl...

Where I grew up eel fishing was still a very lucrative activity.

The best locations were a closely guarded secret, apparently placing the mesh cages was a real skill and something passed down between generations, always kept in the family.

on a good night they were making hundreds if not thousands. Bear in mind this was 30 years ago so serious money for one nights work.

I don't know if it was true, but the eels were said to all be bought up by Asian buyers

> I don't know if it was true, but the eels were said to all be bought up by Asian buyers

Anecdotally I recall watching a documentary about an eel fisher who catches, smokes, and sells eel. There are a few scenes where they show him executing large deals, and yes the buyers were all Asian.

I should have known this was about JW Greenlee; his twitter is a lot of eely fun. The economy of eels in England was surprisingly large.

One fun fact: European eels are endangered and one of the most highly trafficked endangered species.

Sounds like a fun time to live. People do it on vacations. Heck I'd love to pay rent that way.

Anything can be fun when you get to stop whenever you want. I'm sure it's a lot less app-eel-ing when it's obligatory.

eels eels eels

The Mighty Boosh - Eels sing

https://youtu.be/0AckvdGbk4w

… and bring them with your hovercraft?

I see you.

Read the comments looking for this reference.

Was not disappointed.

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