This is interesting, does anyone know why eels were chosen as a form of currency for paying rent? It would be easier to sell at the market and use the money to pay any rent/debts owed.
Not every community has easy access to money, and not everybody has time to sell stuff at the market. Why eels? My guess is they're common enough and easy to store.
Eels appeared to be an alternative currency, the kind that can be "minted" by a lot more individuals compared to precious metal coins or bank notes, and can circulate in excess of legal tender authorized or issued.
Most of the rents call for even numbers of eels, but the mentioned levy of "1/2 of all the fish and eels caught there" is more like a percentage tax. It does bring to mind the possibility that fully grown eels were probably all supposed to be about the same size so they were the standard of exchange, with the remaining catch being converted locally at a variable fish-per-eel rate depending on what those other fish were like.
The data's so sketchy it could have been anything, but something looks fishy about the 13th century. How did the number of eels due skyrocket so dramatically and then pipe down to a more representative trend the very next century? Especially considering that eel-based rents were a directly declining arrangement over the centuries.
Somebody needs to audit this, there might be some kind of currency exchange manipulation or insidious devaluation responsible.
Historically eels were ubiquitous in the British isles, but not totally trivial to procure. Showing up with a stick of eels to your local market was basically proof-of-work. Since everyone else was also catching eels in similar conditions, there was immediate shared understanding of their value without having to trust any outside authority.
Not any more. They are a critically endangered species.
I grew up in the 80s, mid-way along the length of the Severn, and have very strong memories of night "fishing" for eels with my father. IIRC, the preferred method was a tangled mass of wire and standard fishing line and as many worms as we could dig up, placed in a weighted hessian sack, with holes therein. Then it was just a question of waiting. Eels went in; they could not come out.
I suppose in some small way I've contributed to their catastrophic decline. I honestly feel some guilt for that.
I wonder if any part of that was related to the fact that nobody knows how to raise eels. Or even at that time they might not have known where baby eels came from.
From a cursory search, I think the largest cluster of eels corresponds to the Fens, a now mostly-drained marshland [0]. And the "Bishop of Ely" who's overrepresented in that eel cluster, apparently that seat of power is named for the eels [1,2].
- "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."
I think this link would be a better submission. It seems to be the landing page for this project, which links to the submitted map (but the map doesn't link to anything else).
Nice to see articles on this kind of thing surface every now and again. My dad and I published the first electronic Domesday Book, and that's the source of the eel data here.
He pioneered using computers for historical research at Hull University back in the 70s. I remember being taken as a kid into the computer room, which was a sci-fi air conditioned room full of machines with flashing lights and spinning tape reels.
My first experience of using a computer was playing colossal cave on a teletype terminal (no screens then)! It was what launched my career in computing :)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 48.6 ms ] threadMost of the rents call for even numbers of eels, but the mentioned levy of "1/2 of all the fish and eels caught there" is more like a percentage tax. It does bring to mind the possibility that fully grown eels were probably all supposed to be about the same size so they were the standard of exchange, with the remaining catch being converted locally at a variable fish-per-eel rate depending on what those other fish were like.
The data's so sketchy it could have been anything, but something looks fishy about the 13th century. How did the number of eels due skyrocket so dramatically and then pipe down to a more representative trend the very next century? Especially considering that eel-based rents were a directly declining arrangement over the centuries.
Somebody needs to audit this, there might be some kind of currency exchange manipulation or insidious devaluation responsible.
I grew up in the 80s, mid-way along the length of the Severn, and have very strong memories of night "fishing" for eels with my father. IIRC, the preferred method was a tangled mass of wire and standard fishing line and as many worms as we could dig up, placed in a weighted hessian sack, with holes therein. Then it was just a question of waiting. Eels went in; they could not come out.
I suppose in some small way I've contributed to their catastrophic decline. I honestly feel some guilt for that.
Farmers rents were typically 2 x legs of ham/bacon or a number (5??) x wool fleeces or a number of hogshead of beer etc.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fens
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_6600000/newsid_6605...
- "Once a year, people from all over the country come to Ely, Cambridgeshire, to celebrate the city's namesake - the eel - at Ely's Eel Day."
[2] 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."
https://historiacartarum.org/eel-rents-project/ ("Eel-Rents Project")
He pioneered using computers for historical research at Hull University back in the 70s. I remember being taken as a kid into the computer room, which was a sci-fi air conditioned room full of machines with flashing lights and spinning tape reels.
My first experience of using a computer was playing colossal cave on a teletype terminal (no screens then)! It was what launched my career in computing :)