6 ms·

To Pay Rent in Medieval England, Catch Some Eels

77 points by diodorus 3y ago

api 3y ago
… and bring them with your hovercraft?
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  I see you.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Read the comments looking for this reference. Was not disappointed.
zdw 3y ago
"Do you hear those, your highness? Those are the shrieking things I'm going to pay rent with!"
ElfinTrousers 3y ago
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.
MattPalmer1086 3y ago
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.
- ftxbro 3y ago
  Congratulations! This personally identifying information has been immortalized in https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
- andrewem 3y ago
  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 https://www.domesdaybook.net/home/contact
  - MattPalmer1086 3y ago
    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 Somewhat out of date.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.
zzbn00 3y ago
"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-eels-in-medieval-england/ https://www.historyhit.com/paid-in-fish-strange-uses-for-eel...
- fbdab103 3y ago
  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?
  - jaclaz 3y ago
    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.
  - NegativeLatency 3y ago
    Episode 4 from this series has a couple of eel catching related scenes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudor_Monastery_Farm 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?
    - zzbn00 3y ago
      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!)
- perihelions 3y ago
  Also https://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/browse/id/5328736fb47fc40c4f00 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."
6502nerdface 3y ago
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.
- b800h 3y ago
  He recently converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and writes a brilliant newsletter: https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/ https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/
ubermonkey 3y ago
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.
- epmos 3y ago
  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.
  - bl0rg 3y ago
    Isn’t impassable dams/hydro stations a huge issue for them?
    - jna_sh 3y ago
      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.
NegativeLatency 3y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_historic_farm_series Just a very enjoyable series to watch
maptime 3y ago
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
- Our_Benefactors 3y ago
  > 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.
syngrog66 3y ago
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)
redeyedtreefrog 3y ago
eels eels eels
- zeristor 3y ago
  The Mighty Boosh - Eels sing https://youtu.be/0AckvdGbk4w https://youtu.be/0AckvdGbk4w
f0ld 3y ago
Sounds like a fun time to live. People do it on vacations. Heck I'd love to pay rent that way.
- crooked-v 3y ago
  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.
franciscop 3y ago
> "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.
mcguire 3y ago
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.
okeuro49 3y ago
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-remarkable-tale-of-manuscript-sleuthing-the-ely-farming-memoranda.html https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/07/a-remarkabl...

77 points by diodorus 3y ago

api 3y ago

… and bring them with your hovercraft?

ubermonkey 3y ago
I see you.
pfdietz 3y ago
Read the comments looking for this reference. Was not disappointed.

zdw 3y ago

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

ElfinTrousers 3y ago

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.

MattPalmer1086 3y ago

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.

ftxbro 3y ago
Congratulations! This personally identifying information has been immortalized in https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
andrewem 3y ago
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 https://www.domesdaybook.net/home/contact
- MattPalmer1086 3y ago
  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.

zzbn00 3y ago

"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-eels-in-medieval-england/ https://www.historyhit.com/paid-in-fish-strange-uses-for-eel...

fbdab103 3y ago
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?
- jaclaz 3y ago
  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.
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  Episode 4 from this series has a couple of eel catching related scenes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudor_Monastery_Farm 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?
  - zzbn00 3y ago
    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!)
perihelions 3y ago
Also https://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/browse/id/5328736fb47fc40c4f00 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."

6502nerdface 3y ago

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.

b800h 3y ago
He recently converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and writes a brilliant newsletter: https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/ https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/

ubermonkey 3y ago

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.

epmos 3y ago
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.
- bl0rg 3y ago
  Isn’t impassable dams/hydro stations a huge issue for them?
  - jna_sh 3y ago
    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.

NegativeLatency 3y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_historic_farm_series Just a very enjoyable series to watch

maptime 3y ago

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

Our_Benefactors 3y ago
> 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.

syngrog66 3y ago

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)

redeyedtreefrog 3y ago

eels eels eels

zeristor 3y ago
The Mighty Boosh - Eels sing https://youtu.be/0AckvdGbk4w https://youtu.be/0AckvdGbk4w

f0ld 3y ago

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

crooked-v 3y ago
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.

franciscop 3y ago

> "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.

mcguire 3y ago

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.

okeuro49 3y ago

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-remarkable-tale-of-manuscript-sleuthing-the-ely-farming-memoranda.html https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/07/a-remarkabl...